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We are halfway down the hill, outside the outer wall, and every step he has taken has been his own. This last month has been easier than all the ones before, but I still waver when I am faced with the prospect of success—or happiness.
It makes me tongue-tied, clumsy.
“I know I am not as strong an ox as Fingon,” I say now, in the hopes that it will make him laugh, “But I will be your support if you need me.”
Maitimo laughs so little these days. Still, I have begun to think of him as Maitimo again. That must amount to something. Every incremental victory, in the restoration of our security and bond, must be something.
“The leg doesn’t hurt,” he says, smiling. We have paused so that he can carefully regulate his breathing; Fingon insists that strengthening his lungs is a delicate process; not one to be rushed through. “But Lord, Macalaure. My bones are old now and forever, I think. As many bones as I have left, that is.”
We are, if it can be believed, near the lake. At first, when he set the crutch aside, I avoided that place like the plague. It seemed dangerous—and more than that, ludicrous—to venture so close to the place of our near-ending.
Who will believe me if I tell the truth? Who will believe that the greatest inconvenience, the saddest sop, has reformed himself into something resembling usefulness?
But this is the truth, I swear it: I no longer wish to die, even if sometimes I am lonely for the sort of death that we might share, my brother and I.
What if he dies without me?
I cannot bear that, not again. The Maglor who lived through that was changed by it. Riddled with madness, or so everyone else thinks.
Everyone but Maitimo.
It is early April. Haleth is come and gone; she left almost at once after the council, though I think of that day as little as I can. Curufin was positively wretched following it, and I feared a dark dispiritedness would resurge in Maitimo because of it. He held, on though; he held on. My Maitimo was fully Maedhros, leader and confidant, while Haleth was among us, and though he has been tired, since, it is not with the old invalid weariness.
Every day he is desirous of getting out of doors, of pressing himself onward.
Of revisiting old haunts.
In another week, he shall be twenty-five years old.
“The green returns to us,” I say, looking with vain hope at the bushes, the reeds. “Slowly but surely.”
“Every hour of this year has gone slowly,” Maitimo says, “But that trial, I believe, is over.”
He means that a new chapter is beginning. He intends, I fear, to write it himself.
We talk a great deal, since I spend hours of every day with him, but we have not yet broached the subjects that he raised with eerie calm before the entire assembly of our family and our friends.
“You must not press yourself too hard,” I say, continuing to dance around the subject. In so doing, I hear echoes of a younger self: New York, and how I used to nag him. Drink less, sleep more, let yourself grieve for home if you must.
(He never let himself grieve for home, in truth, and so the grief consumed him. With my ability to see the past quite clearly, and the future not at all, I understand that, now.)
I was born to listen for notes, in my own voice and in others’ voices. I am not nagging him at present. I say only, “Nobody expects you to.”
“Very good,” is his answer. The firm line of his mouth and brow is unmistakably Feanorian. It demonstrates the sound resolve of our family that is, paradoxically, aligned far too closely with our madcap ideals. “I shall do what no one expects, then.”
“Such as?” (I am not nagging.)
“You shall be the first to know, I promise.” Another little smile, breaking through at the corner of his mouth in a way that makes my heart ache. We are past the lake now, coming near the field.
Though we have slowly encircled Mithrim, this springtime, we have never again gone to Athair’s grave.
Indeed, it has been a long while since I heard Maitimo even refer to him as Athair.
The sun is warm; the breeze is cool. Spring has settled on us with certainty. It renews me, more than a council in a close room ever could. I am not like my brothers. I am not like my brothers. I am only just learning how to be myself again.
I turn my face up, and imagine a future.
Maitimo is speaking.
“You are well?”
“You are with me always,” I say, still looking at the sky. “How could I not be well—or if I were, how could you not know it?”
“I have been thinking of…” His voice trails away, then returns. “Of what you’ve lost.” It is the soft old murmur that used to be mine to hear in haylofts, and in our quiet room, and in the generous, empty fields. None of those places belong to the city; it was not his city voice. He goes on—“In my own miseries, I have thought too little of what was stripped from you this past year.”
“What do you mean?” I could supply an answer, if need be. My mother. My father. Two brothers, one of whom came back to me. But maybe I should say three brothers, since Celegorm will never love me as he used to—and the love he once had was scarce even then.
Maitimo could mean any of these losses, and so I am surprised when he says, with a frank, straining glance behind the flutter of his eyelids,
“Your music?”
“My music?” I repeat foolishly, as if to be heard by the great masters of the harp and piano, violin and voice, was not once my whole purpose in life.
(As if I did not once have a future that was mine, and mine alone—but perhaps that is the trouble. I have never liked to be alone.)
“God,” he murmurs. “It’s like climbing out of a smothering heap of earth. Remembering. I must start with you…I must always start with you.”
This is a gentle lie; in some ways, he starts with Fingon. But I let that go. I let everything go, as it turns out, so that I need not let him go.
“You left that all in New York,” he says. “And your harp was ruined—”
“—it has been mended, Maitimo—”
“—and you have very few chances to sing. Nobody has thought to ask what that means to you. Certainly I have been remiss.”
“You were busy surviving!” And for half the year, he was not even here—he was as good as dead, worse than dead, in torture and bondage. But I don’t need to remind him of that.
“Was I?” now he laughs, a little wildly, but it is a laugh. “Oh, we all know my woes. I would feel more human to think of yours.”
“I did have dreams, once,” I own, since he seems bent on reaching such a conclusion, “Of being the greatest musician of our generation. But I quenched those hopes more easily than you might think.”
“Did you?”
“I lived it all already,” I say. For a fleeting moment, I remember the girl I left behind, too. “Perhaps we were destined for—for short lives. No, Maitimo, do not look so alarmed. I have no more intention of leaping into that lake than I do of standing on my head.”
“You never could quite manage the trick of standing on your head,” he agrees.
“No, I could not. But what brought on this mood of yours? Fearing that, while we were—busily engaged in all our villainous doings for one year, then mourning your loss in the next, I might have been maudlin over my vanquished aspirations?”
He paces a few steps ahead of me, his legs working well together.
He is thinking. He is always thinking. Even when the nightmares and the pain and the blood-loss had weakened him to a shadow of any self I ever knew him by, he was clawing himself out of his own mind so that he could understand the world in which he found himself.
“I told you,” he says finally, facing away from me, so that I am left admiring how the wind has made a ruddy riot of his hair. “I must always start with you. With understanding you. And in all this…this vicious time, in all this unmaking, I am well aware of how little I can claim to understand you, or Fingon, or Celegorm, or anybody. If I have convinced you otherwise, it is all pretense; it is all for show. My points of reference are uprooted and flung far afield. My vision is clouded. Whatever metaphor you choose may suit.”
I am silent. He turns, measuring that silence with a straight-browed look.
“Enough of this talk of me,” I say, for perhaps the first time in my life. “You are planning something. Tell me what it is. Let me be the first to know, now.”
We grow a little in this moment. We strain towards manhood, towards the end of life with every passing second, and I can feel it as we stand like this.
“We must do more than fight,” he says.
I see us in the past: in shadow; in torchlight; in the first shock of orphanhood. I will not be the boy Maglor ever again—the boy who failed him.
“I know,” I tell him.
His eyes are not our father’s, or our mother’s, or our brothers’. I know his eyes better than all of these. He tells me,
“We must win.”