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To ride a strange horse is a difficult business, and never more than when one’s blood leaks steadily from fresh wounds. Celegorm does not know how bad his hurts are—not bad enough to kill him quickly, to be sure, but his head is still ringing with a hundred bright, unflinching bells. His hands are neither steady nor strong, gripping the reins of his stolen mare. He is glad, if he can be glad, that his strength was still with him when he bore down with his blade upon throat after throat.
He left every man dead; he will not die at their hands. Or at least, they are dead before him, whether he succumbs to his injuries or not.
He knows too little, and can now think less, wrenched to and fro by the uneasy beast beneath him. He digs his heels into her sides and keeps his bleary eyes fixed on the grey line of the town ahead, where several dozen cursed chimneys issue the same friendly smoke that lured him in at first. He was wrong, to venture forth with Aredhel. To trust—to trust anybody. If he dies, it will be on account of that trust.
The mare throws him, perhaps half a mile out, and bounds off. Facedown in the dirt, he is quiet as death for a long, winded moment. Then he drags himself up.
His world is waiting for him. Though he owes no trust, he has a debt a to his cousin. If Celegorm still prayed, he would pray that the vengeance of these men was levied only against the house of Feanor.
He would pray that Aredhel is safe.
The traders, who are now a heap of gory failure, had both knives and guns with which to subdue him. Until he fought free of his bonds, they’d used neither, as if they were waiting for someone.
Waiting had been their downfall. They’d taken his gun, but they hadn’t found his boot knife, and it was with that knife that he cut the rope about his wrists and ankles, trussed lazily together.
It was with that knife that he killed them.
They were bad shots, thank—well. Heaven hasn’t much to do with him, these days, but they were bad shots, and so he took no bullets. Still, one of them managed a deep gash to his thigh. Another plunged a blade into his shoulder. They didn’t kill him, but they made him weak-legged and weak-headed. It might come to the same thing, in the end.
Half a mile is a difficult business, losing blood.
Damn you, Maitimo, I wish I’d put a bullet in your head and then my own. It was a fine day out. The wind was fresh and almost like spring…
He must be careful, in town. He knows this, even though the bells have blurred to a bee-swarm, and his vision is double. Goddamn, but he wants Huan. Needs Huan, more than he needs human aid. He crawls on his hands and knees along the lip of scrubby earth that oversees the settlement to the east, then works his way down behind the tanner’s vats, which are kept on the very fringe of the town because of their foul smell.
His hides will be brought here, no doubt, by men who did not pay for them.
Crouched between the great, filthy tubs, Celegorm devises his plan. Aredhel was visiting at the house of a woman whose child she saved from some mishap in the street.
A gentle heart, has Aredhel, for all her bluster. A trusting heart.
He does not want to meet with this woman, but she is his best chance. He cannot reach Azaghal without crossing the whole damn length of Hithlum. And what if Azaghal is the traitor? At least a woman, he can subdue.
He counts the cabins (a trouble in itself, with his eyes playing tricks) and slips to the backdoor of the one Aredhel told him to call at. There is a regiment’s worth of clean washing hanging in the yard.
It is a credit to the woman, perhaps, that she does not scream when she sees him.
It is no credit to Celegorm that he faints at her feet.
When he wakes, a small voice is chirping, “He’s cooked, Mama. He’s cooked.”
“Hattie, come away!” says a voice, and then a woman—a woman he remembers, as if from a dream—looms over him.
“You’re awake, then?” she asks, gentler than he would expect a stranger to speak to him.
He tries to answer, but his mouth is as dry as sand.
A moment later, a little water is helped to it. “Who…” He blinks, trying to sit up. His whole body is wretchedly stiff. Is that what it is to be Maitimo, confined to pain and nightmare in himself, surrounded by women and children fussing over him?
A miserable existence. Even more than Celegorm knew.
“You spoke of Aredhel,” the woman says. “You are Celegorm, are you not? She was told that you were hurt.”
The swarm of bees is a little quieter now, but still at work in his head. He closes his eyes; the light hurts them.
“You lost a good deal of blood,” she says. “I have taken the liberty of washing and staunching the wounds. But they should be stitched, and I am not a doctor.”
“I will manage,” he answers, borrowing a little of his dead father’s sharpness. I shall manage, with my wife gone. With my sons dead. From the grave… “You said… you said Aredhel was told…”
“A man came to the door,” the woman tells him. “He is—he was the reason Aredhel and I met, I suppose. His horse spooked, and nearly—nearly hurt my Hattie.”
“Horses is naughty,” pipes Hattie from somewhere outside Celegorm’s line of vision. “Naughty as Liza. Hear that, Liza? Hear that?”
“This man,” Celegorm says. “Describe him?” He runs his fingers through his hair, examining his head for bruises. There is a tender spot above his left ear. When he presses against it, the bees buzz louder. They must have struck him there, too. He scarcely remembers the fight. When he kills, only the final images remain with him; the final sensations. It is as if nothing else exists, but him and the hot blood.
He has reflected on this before, to a degree.
He has reflected on the way he killed Thuringwethil.
“Dressed very fashionably,” says the woman, in answer to his question. For yes, there is another villain—an unknown villain, in an endless parade. While she brings Celegorm spirits, and a little bread, she continues: “In truth, I did not like the looks of him. I think he is staying at the inn above the tavern. He told Aredhel that he had you there, in his rooms. He said you had been attacked, and that he was looking after you. But you did not come from there, did you?”
“No,” Celegorm answers briefly. “He was lying.” The alcohol has done him good. With a rush of effort, he pushes himself to his feet, displacing a ragdoll that was tenderly laid at his shoulder. He stoops to pick it up, despite the pain in his leg and shoulder.
“Oh, I am sorry. Hattie, go and fetch your doll.”
“Tanks,” says Hattie, taking it back. She looks, Celegorm thinks, much as he must have as a child. Her hair is pale gold and curling. Her innocent eyes are blue.
“I must find my cousin,” he says, coughing into his sleeve to clear his throat. “Thank you for…” And he waves a hand, too tired and distracted to properly put her good deeds into words.
“You’re in no fit state to go out,” the women warns. “Wait until my husband comes—he will look for her. It is already evening, so you need not wait long. And he will be discreet, my husband, since there seems to be some mischief afoot. But you—”
“I must,” Celegorm says. He has lost so many hours; he cannot delay any longer. He has his gun, which he took back from a dead man, and his knife, its hilt stained and its blade indiscriminately clean.
He breathes deeply, glad to be a little steadier on his feet.
He never even learned the woman’s name.
Outside, no squadron waits to arrest him; no band of cutthroats descends from the roofs. But the sun has long since set, and what frail hopes he might have had descended with it.
It will be harder than ever, to find Aredhel and Huan in the dark.
If they yet live—
Huan was in the tavern, and would at least take several men down with him, before the end. It was Aredhel who was tricked. Who was led away by a stranger, no doubt distracted by thoughts of Celegorm.
Damn him for being weak enough to be taken. Damn everyone else for their treachery.
He has to move slowly, with his stiff leg and his ringing ears, but by and by he comes near the tavern. There is no friendly, familiar howl to greet him. There is no anxious cousin waiting in the shadows.
His horse is still tethered outside, though. So is Aredhel’s.
Whoever the man is that took her paid no mind to their mounts. It isn’t a comfort, because it further suggests what Celegorm has guessed already: these are no common thieves.
He grips his knife in his left hand, his gun in his right, and keeps to the shadows. The sounds issuing from within the tavern are raucous but congenial. There is no fighting, now. His was the only corpse they meant to make today.
He flattens himself against the east wall, beside one of the widest windows, and turns his head at an angle from which he can see what goes on amidst tobacco smoke and flowing whiskey. At first, he sees nothing that aids him. The barkeep carrying drinks; men at the tables; cards.
And then, first blocking his view of the lamplight and then revealed by it, a face from the past.
The long past, on a road so far east it could only face west with ignorance, when this man with a diamond as heavy as a millstone blocked their way—
But the nearer past is what Celegorm sees most clearly, for the nearer past holds death.
Athair’s death, at the end of Gothmog’s gun, and the end of all their lives.
Why is Celegorm never the one warned? Where are his dreams, such as those Maitimo used to talk of? Where are his guides, his guardians?
Holding his breath, he creeps back the way he came, to the southeast corner, and when he turns it with a roll of his good shoulder, his head ducked low, he crashes into a body that gasps with well-known breath.
“Fuck,” says Curufin, at the same moment that Celegorm hisses,
“Curufin?”
Celegorm did not know he feared dying until his brother’s arms are tight around him, his brother’s sharp nose and chin buried in his neck. Then he sees everything clearly: how great the risk, and how near. He must get Curufin away from here.
He must keep Curufin safe.
“How many?” Curufin is asking, already strategizing as is his wont, but also failing to release Celegorm from his grip. They are defenseless, this way, and Curufin should know that. “How many are there after you?”
“None, as yet,” Celegorm says. “But we must go. We must get away from here.”
He does not know how to name the sight of their father’s killer. Gothmog, ambling broad-shouldered, was like a bull pastured at its ease as he paced the tavern floor. Yet the same man is lethally swift when it is a weapon and not a tankard in his hand. Yes, Celegorm is afraid.
“Get away? But we’ve found you. I found you. I’m ready to fight.”
Celegorm shakes his head. “Not here,” he says. “There’s no fight, Curufin. No fight here.”
And his brother, too well-taught by this cruel world to raise his voice in shadows like these, follows him away from the tavern, away from the gun that turned boys to men, and men to corpses.