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Chapter Text

The dwarves had once lived in the Grey Mountains, and though they were long gone, their mines remained. Usually there were other things in them now; orcs, or goblins, or dragon-spells, but if someone didn’t fear orcs and goblins and wasn’t affected by dragon’s influence, everything that remained there was free for the taking.

Curufin viewed the inevitable nests of goblins in the old dwarf-mines as nuisances, rather like finding wasp nests in the eaves of your house in the spring, and while dragon-spells made his teeth ache, they slid right off his mind. He had faced worse than what the young dragons born in the Withered Heath could dream up, in any case. And after the Battle of the Five Armies the previous year, there were hardly any goblins or orcs left in all the northern lands.

It was the perfect time to do some deep exploring.

Ambarussa and Tindeóna had made their home between the springs of the Greylin and the Forest Rivers, and it was to there he traveled after spending the winter in the newly retaken kingdom of Erebor. He went alone, for Narvi and Tyelpë, his usual traveling companions, still wanted to stay with the dwarves, and most of his brothers had left before the winter to go back to their home.

It was a pleasant journey, with the mountains to the north and Mirkwood to the south and the gleeful memory of the Elvenking’s face when Fingon had finally lost her temper with him – it still made him laugh even months later, though it was best for all of them to avoid passing through the Woodland Realm for a few decades if they could help it.

Apparently Thorin had thought so as well, for Curufin met the caravans coming from the Blue Mountains on his way west. The King’s sister Dis was leading them, and while there were a few somber faces among them, for the most part they were joyful as they returned to their homeland, and he parted from them on good terms.

He was abruptly reminded of them nearly three weeks later, after he had all but forgotten his encounter with them, when a small shape in an abandoned mine entrance turned out to not be a goblin like he had assumed, but instead was a frightened but defiant young dwarf.

Curufin stepped back and lowered his sword, frowning.

The dwarf very slowly lowered his small axe, and they stared at each other.

“I thought you were a goblin,” he said in explanation. “Sorry. Are you here to explore the mines too?”

“I might have been,” said the dwarf. “Have you seen any other dwarves around here?”

“I met the caravan from the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago, but other than that, no.”

“Oh,” he said, and slumped back against the wall. “I woke up on the side of the road about a month ago, and I’ve been looking for my family ever since.”

“I’ve just come from Erebor,” said Curufin. “I might know who they are, if you tell me their name.”

“I can’t. I don’t remember. I think I was attacked, or something. I had an awful bump on my head for weeks and I don’t remember which way I was going or why I’m out here or who I am or what –” he broke off with a gasp as Curufin sat down beside him.

“Calm down,” he said, and patted his knee. “You aren’t lost anymore, for I know exactly where I am, and I can point you to anywhere you wish to go.”

The dwarf stared at him. “I don’t know where I want to go,” he said eventually in a small voice. “I think I don’t have any parents, or at least no father? There’s something about a battle. I don’t think I have any siblings either.”

“What about going to Erebor?”

He considered this for a while and then shook his head decidedly. “No. I – no. That feels entirely wrong.”

“All right, but someone there may recognize you,” Curufin argued. “The dragon is dead, and there is a King there again, and many of your people are going to live there from all over Middle-earth.”

“I want to go back to the Blue Mountains,” said the dwarf, and rubbed his eyes with his fists. Curufin squinted at him, looking more closely. He barely had a beard, and the braids in his hair were still child-patterns. He was a lot younger than he had thought at first.

“How old are you?”

The dwarf stared at him suspiciously. “Why?”

“You’re still wearing child-braids. If you want to go to the Blue Mountains, I will take you there.”

“Why? You’re not even a dwarf.”

He shrugged. “I can’t just leave you out here in the Wild, and I have no pressing matters to deal with for at least the next decade barring emergencies. Why can’t I go to the Blue Mountains? I could do some shopping while I’m there.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m sixty-three,” said the dwarf after a long silence. Curufin’s mouth fell open.

“No, yeah, you’re still a baby. Get your things, we’re going to the Blue Mountains.”

“I am not a baby!” the barely adolescent dwarf said angrily.

“You’re still a baby to me, I’m like five thousand years old. Get your stuff together, it’s getting dark.”

“You’re what,” said the dwarf, picking up a small bag and hanging his axe on his belt and following him away from the mine out of sheer befuddlement.

“Well, I don’t know, it might be more. It might be less. Time flows differently here, and actual numbers haven’t really been that important for a long time compared to relevant measurements to the rest of my family.”

“There’s more of you?”

Curufin sighed. “Sadly, yes. I’ve got six siblings and eight cousins and a son and his One and all my cousins’ spouses, though thankfully some of them doubled up with my brothers so that’s less to remember, and  –”

“I didn’t think Elves had Ones,” said the dwarf, interrupting.

“Actually, we don’t have them like you experience it,” he said, distracted. “We have at least three different widely accepted degrees of compatibility in bonding, though some people argue that’s too narrow and those degrees have subsets entirely their own, but then you get into having to define what attraction is, and the difference between romantic and sexual attraction, and the disconnect some people can experience between –“ He noticed that the young dwarf’s eyes had started to glaze over. “Yes, we do, but it’s different,” he summarized. “But that’s not actually important, because Tyelpë’s One is a dwarf.”

The dwarf in front of him looked shocked. “But you’re an Elf!”

“Yes? My brother’s equivalent-to-a-One is a Man, well, actually, she’s female, but she’s of the race of Men, and so is my cousin’s daughter’s husband, and one of my other cousin’s wife.”

“You have too many relatives.”

“I know. We already tried killing each other off, it didn’t take.”

He received a confused stare.

“Never mind, it was a very long time ago. Let’s go before it gets too dark to find the road easily.”

~~~*~~~

Curufin honestly expected that the young dwarf would run away from him, but he stayed. He stayed as they left the shadow of Mirkwood behind, as they crossed the treacherous road at the foot of Gundabad, as they turned south and cut through the Ettenmoors to meet the East-West Road and follow it to Ered Luin. He stayed as Curufin talked to him about everything and anything that crossed his mind, as he taught him how to fight with a sword and a bow as well as an axe, as he began to speak more and more in Quenya instead of Westron or Khuzdul, as he taught him to read tengwar off broken monuments and inscriptions on blades.

Somehow, he just . . . never left.

Curufin had learned his name, once, but he’d forgotten it after a while. The boy had confessed that though he knew it was his, he felt somewhat detached from it because he could not clearly remember the parents who had given it to him, so he gave him the epessë of Maitalmë, which seemed to please him; especially after he learned the meaning behind it – both that it meant Curufin viewed him as a ‘skilled blessing’, and that he was named in echo of his beloved eldest brother.

Tyelpë had been mildly startled to learn that he had suddenly acquired a little brother when they eventually met on the road back from Ered Luin, but he took to being an older sibling with enthusiasm, and Narvi took the boy under her wing for the parts of his education that Curufin could not give him no matter how hard he tried. Despite the inevitable culture clash once in a while, they all got along very well indeed.

It caused some consternation when he turned up with Maitalmë tagging at his heels when they went up to the fortress in Forodwaith; he’d gone straight to his rooms, set up a place for his new son, and then they’d gone down to the forge so he could show him how they were set up as he had promised, and that was where Aegnor found them both when he came to drag Curufin out to eat dinner with the rest of them.

“Look, Curvo’s made another kid!” he shouted as he entered the main hall, which made everyone stop and stare at them.

Maitalmë had promptly hidden behind Tyelpë, who was the only other person he knew that was big enough to hide behind.

“You what,” said Celegorm, alarmed. “Curvo. I told you, wait for me before you –”

“I adopted him, idiot,” said Curufin to Aegnor. “I found him lost in the Grey Mountains and he’s only sixty-three –”

“Atar, I’m sixty-four,” his younger son complained, and turned red when he realized he’d said it out loud and they weren’t alone at a campfire.

“—sixty-four, so it wasn’t like I was just going to walk off and leave him there.”

At that point, his siblings’ unstoppable instinct to parent the nearest unattached child kicked in, and Maitalmë found himself actually having fun, surrounded by five attentive uncles and an aunt who didn’t appear to care that he was ethnically a Dwarf and were very eager to learn about him. Curufin had to suffer through Maedhros hugging him and crying on his shoulder when he learned that he’d chosen that epessë mostly after him, but that was a temporary trial, and he passed him off to Fingon as quickly as he could, because she actually liked hugging his brother.

“I’m so proud of you,” he said as Fingon pried him off Curufin. “Nobody’s had any kids since Telvo had Tauriel, it’s so nice that you’ve found another son.”

“Thank you,” he said, and sidled away, trying not to show how pleased he was. As Maedhros watched him go, he thought (affectionately) that he looked a little like a skink.

He said as much to Fingon, who sighed. “Please don’t call your brother a lizard in front of his new son,” she said wearily.

“Why?”

“It might upset him.”

“Elrond thought it was hilarious when I said both Finrod and Moryo looked like him when he was a – what is that thing he likes to turn into?”

“A swan?”

“No, the rodent – capybara!”

“Yes, but that was entirely different, and anyway he’d known them for longer.”

At that point Curufin got out of earshot, and resolved to go look up what a skink was at the earliest possible opportunity.

In their home in the Lonely Mountain, Gloin, renowned member of the Company of Thorin Oakenshield, and his wife received the news that the searchers who had gone out to try to recover the bodies of the dwarves lost in an orc attack as they crossed the Greylin had found one of the hand-axes of their son Gimli in the tumbled rocks up the slopes of the Grey Mountains near the ford where he had been lost, and they prepared to lay it to rest in his tomb as the only part of him they had left.

In the elven-fortress, with the windows looking out over the frozen bay of Forochel, Maitalmë Curufinwion curled up between his father and his older brother and slept in front of the fire, dreaming of the stories they had told him of dwarves from long ago.

Chapter Text

Camping in the rain was a miserable experience, Maglor thought. Not as miserable as a lot of experiences he had had, but it was a small petty annoyance that was liable to pop up anytime, and so held a special place in his heart.

He grumpily snuggled closer to his husband, who looked down at him, grinned, and wrapped a long arm around him, his warm hand spreading out over his waist. They were sitting in the front of their little tent, a makeshift cover stretched out to shield their campfire from the remnants of the storm that had swept through the night before, and Maglor was cold and snappish and still soaked through.

They hadn’t set up the tent when they stopped for the night, for the storm had been very sudden and unexpected, and even though they had grabbed their things and dove for the meager shelter of the nearby trees at the first sound of thunder, they had both been dripping wet by the time they found a place that would not flood and got the tent up. Everything had gotten wet, since they had unpacked most of their things intending to reorganize their supplies before the rain came, and attempting to sleep the hour or two before dawn on wet blankets had not been fun. Then they had gotten soaked all over again by the water dripping from the trees as they spread out their things to dry.

He scowled at their clothes hung around the little fire to dry, and at their bedrolls and blankets draped over nearby tree branches. They were sitting on his cloak and sharing Argon’s wrapped around both of them, and everything else was drying. He wanted to be moving, but they were stuck until they at least had trousers again.

Argon pressed a kiss to the top of his head and grinned when Maglor looked up, blinking as some more water rolled out of his hair and down his face. “If you’re that bored, we could always –” he wiggled his eyebrows playfully, ears perking up. From leagues and leagues away, in Lothlórien where it was warm and dry, they could both feel the echo of their wife’s exasperated amusement.

“Not now,” Maglor said irritably, even as Argon’s hand drifted lower. “Not in the mood.”

“All right,” Argon said, surprised but gentle, moving his hand back up. “Apologies.”

He pressed his forehead hard into the warm and slightly clammy hollow of his husband’s shoulder and tried to swallow his misery. “I’m sorry too,” he whispered. “I know you don’t feel like it very often, and I wish I could.”

“Hey, no,” he answered. “I know you don’t like being soaked like this, I just thought the distraction might help.”

Maglor shook his head, acutely aware of his damp braids and the loose hair around them as they moved against his back. “Not like this. I want to associate the times you want to have me with – with happy things, not with –” He broke off on a shudder. Argon pulled him even closer, becoming more alert.

“It’s not saltwater, it’s only rain,” he crooned, and Maglor closed his eyes. “If you ever fall in, I’ll catch you, my heart. I’ll always catch you.”

“I know.”

“Want to sit on my lap?”

Maglor shivered, and then gave in; part of him wanted to go fall apart somewhere private and put himself back together so as not to bother Argon, but a bigger part wanted to be warm and safe and feel skin and breath and heartbeat all around him to chase away the sensation of sinking helplessly into the cold depths of the ocean. He moved as soon as Argon rearranged his legs and patted his thigh invitingly, going up on his knees and then awkwardly flailing for a moment as he slid over him and settled down into the cradle of Argon’s crossed legs, wrapping both of his own around his hips, hooking his chin over his shoulder and nuzzling into his wet braids.

Argon made a breathy noise of surprise. “Thought you were going to sit sideways,” he said, moving to be more comfortable. “Not that I mind,” he added, and Maglor could feel that he clearly did not mind at all.

“Don’t want to look at the river,” he mumbled, hiding his face in Argon’s neck. “Sorry. Don’t mean anything else by it.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” said Argon, and drew his cloak closed around both of them, drawing circles on Maglor’s back with a hand he kept beneath it. “Shut your eyes, breathe for me, hmm? We’re safe, the river is below us. Feel the fire on your back? It was only a rainstorm. We weren’t in any danger.”

“I know,” Maglor hiccupped angrily.

‘Your mind knows, yes, but does your body?’ said Galadriel, sending him the image of what she was looking at; the view from the windows of their bedroom in their home, the golden treetops moving gently in the wind like wheat-fields.

He focused on seeing through her eyes and on feeling the heat from Argon’s body beneath him and the fire at his back, and slowly he started feeling more like a person and less like a bundle of panic and twitchiness. “It’s the c-clothes,” he said. “And cold water. I’m fine with swimming if I can take them off first, and hot water, but when my clothes and my hair are soaked through and it’s cold water I can’t. I can’t.”

Argon pushed the cloak back, and Maglor relaxed a fraction more, even though it was colder. “Is that better?” he asked, carefully arranging it so that it only touched him in the front, and didn’t press against Maglor’s legs wrapped tight against his back.

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe we never realized that that’s what upsets you.”

“I didn’t know until last night. I thought it was just, I knew I’m fine with warm water, but I thought it was being actually in water, or cold water in general, but I fell asleep with my blanket over me and then I woke up and I thought I was. Back.”

“Is that when you got up and started the fire?”

He nodded. “Then I realized I was still going in and out even though I was by the fire under the cover, so I started taking off my clothes and I realized that they were what was wrong.”

Argon rested his chin on the top of his husband’s head. “It was, hm, an unexpected sight to wake to, but not unwelcome,” he teased, and Galadriel sent a soft laugh and ripple of agreement.

Maglor could feel himself blushing; he’d been married to them for literal Ages of the world, had given Galadriel an entire child, and he still felt vaguely vulnerable and unsure during moments like those.

‘He’s turning dark all across his shoulders,’ Argon said to Galadriel, and Maglor clung tighter to him and squeezed his eyes shut and flattened his ears down in embarrassment as he also caught the sight of himself that Argon was sending her.

“Stop trying to seduce me, I’m trying to have a nice flashback here,” he said into Argon’s braids.

“I thought you were beautiful the first time we ever did soggy no-clothes snuggling,” Argon said in return, picking up on the reason rather than the words. “And you were half-starved and I’d just revived you from drowning and you didn’t think I was real for most of it.” He swept both hands up and down his back, pressing harder than he had been, grounding him with the pain of a firm touch on tense muscles. “How much more magnificent you are now, healthy and no longer hunted.”

“You had trousers on,” he disagreed. “You and Finrod had me so wrapped up in blankets I could barely move.”

“This is definitely better, then,” he said, and Maglor twitched as his hands wandered lower to curl warm around the inside of his thighs for a moment before returning to his hips and kneading along the bone there, making his leg muscles spasm as they unwound.

“Why are you so touchy this morning,” he said, though not with any heat.

“I’ll stop if it truly bothers you. I just – I don’t like seeing you in pain, and I know that you always try to hide when you are hurting, but then you punish yourself for wanting to seek comfort from us by not letting us hold you, even though it’s all you want.”

‘Go for the jugular, why don’t you, Argon,’ said Galadriel, feeling exasperated. ‘We were going to bring this up tactfully.’

“It’s all right,” said Maglor around the sudden tightness in his throat. “It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, though it’s been a long time. Please d-don’t stop touching m-me.”

‘You haven’t been this unsure of your worth to us for a long time,’ she answered, and he felt Argon freeze for a moment at the warmth of the tears he couldn’t hold back landing on his shoulder before resuming his intent strokes along his back.

“You’ve been pushing us away, sweetheart, even though we don’t think you realize you’re doing it,” Argon murmured. “We’re with you, until the very end. We know you’re worried about the battle with Sauron that is to come; we know you’re scared of losing us. But what’s the worst that will happen? Death is nothing to fear, and no one can cast us from the world but ourselves.”

“Mmmfph,” said Maglor incoherently, annoyed that he somehow seemed to know what the problem was before he had even articulated it to himself.

‘Your brother does the same thing,’ Galadriel said helpfully, but he could feel the mischief in her thoughts. ‘It used to annoy us so much before we realized we could trade advice.’

Maglor rolled his eyes, and then froze. “You talk about me to Finrod?” he shrieked.

Argon, the bastard, didn’t even flinch at the sudden sound right by his ear, and laughed instead. “And Fingon,” he said. “It takes all four of us to handle the two of you sometimes.” ‘Hey Artanis, he’s blushing all the way down his chest now,’ he added, and Maglor nearly choked as he caught the edge of their shared amusement combined with the memory of Fingon and Finrod telling them how they dealt with his brother’s trauma.

She was laughing in his head, and he squirmed in Argon’s lap and put his hands over his ears, trying to block them out.

“Kill me now,” he whined, slumping against Argon in defeat. “Does Maedhros know? No, wait, I don’t want to talk about this at all.”

Argon shrugged. “No idea. I’d guess he does, though, since he and Fingon are pretty much one person at this point and Finrod’s always like three steps from them. I’m surprised they haven’t brought him along yet, to be honest.”

“He’d probably like it,” Maglor said disapprovingly, and ‘accidentally’ shared several flashes of memories he had of finding his brother and Argon’s sibling . . . preoccupied with each other in quite public settings and inappropriate times.

“Ew,” said Argon, but he still laughed. “You’re the performer, but he’s the exhibitionist? That’s not what I’d expect. Shame on Finno for abusing their kingly privileges like that though; father would die if he knew what they got up to in places like that.”

‘I feel like there’s something ethically wrong with an advantage like that,’ said Galadriel, to their mutual confusion, until she added, ‘Well, nobody knew they were married, so from the outside it looked like Maedhros bribing the High King to agree to anything he wanted, probably including promotions and tax breaks. Damn, if I’d known they were into that, I’d probably have tried it.’

“What the hell,” said Maglor, horrified.

‘I’ve got eyes, and I wasn’t with you yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘And Finno was still a nér, not that I wouldn’t have gone for it if she’d always been a nís. Russo would probably have killed me though, in the grand family tradition.’

“Uh,” said Argon. “I’d like to flatter myself and think you’d only think Finno was attractive because you were missing me so much, and please don’t disillusion me. Also, I don’t really think they’d have let you sleep your way into tax breaks if you weren’t Maedhros; at least, I hope not? I’m just kind of surprised that they let him do that even if they were married. I’d like to think my sibling wasn’t that bad of a leader.”

“I don’t think Nelyo was doing it to get any favors from them, and anyway, if you think Fingon hasn’t always been the one in charge there literally since they were old enough to have an opinion, you’re blind, and they never treated him any differently in an official capacity, I should know, I was actually there,” said Maglor, and then groaned. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

‘So what’s the weather like in Eriador?’ Galadriel said conversationally, and he blinked at the abrupt transition.

“Cloudy?” he ventured.

“The storm has passed, but everything is very wet still,” said Argon helpfully. “The Baranduin is flooding, and there’s a lot of debris going past.”

‘Oh, you’re near the river?’

“It’s easier than dealing with all the questions and looks we get when we follow the Greenway. Anyway, we’re almost at the point where it turns too far west for it to be practical for us to follow it.”

‘True. You’re near that place that Estel spends most of his time protecting now, aren’t you? Have you run into him?’

“The Shire? We’re five days south of it. And no, we didn’t see him this time, sadly.”

“There are a lot of unpleasant-looking Men in the towns on its border,” said Maglor, abruptly remembering that he had wanted to tell her that before. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that some of them were part orc, but that’s impossible.”

‘There are always those who seek to ruin the happiness of innocent people,’ she said, sad but angry. ‘Do you think we should start guarding their borders as well as the Rangers?’

“I think it’s a good idea,” said Argon. “Even if there is only such a person as Mr. Baggins who comes from the Shire every thousand years, they are more than worth the time and effort it would take to guard them.”

‘I’ll ask Fingon about it,’ she said, and they felt her attention caught by something. ‘I need to go, my attendants are getting nervous and the sun has risen properly by now. I love you both, yes, shorter-Káno, you too, my nightingale, you are more than worthy.'

Maglor shivered and huddled closer to Argon as they felt their awareness of her recede into the low-level weight in the back of their minds that it always was.

“I don’t regret taking the chance to travel with you instead of staying there like I usually do, but I miss her so much,” he confided against his husband’s skin. “I don’t know how you do it every year.”

“I miss both of you dearly,” Argon admitted, resting a warm hand on the back of his neck and sweeping his thumb back and forth, his other arm tightening where it curved about Maglor’s waist and holding him close so that there was not even a breath between their bodies. “And I am enjoying your company on my journey very much, my heart. Yet at the same time I could not bear to be trapped in one land for years at a time, even in the haven she has built for us in the golden trees of Lórien. I wasn’t made for a life in a city, I’m afraid, and I crave the horizon and the open road.”

“I –” Maglor hesitated. “I too grow restless in Lórien,” he admitted. “Even though I know she is content there, and she likes knowing I am safe within her wards. I think sometimes she worries that I long for a home to come back to more than I actually do wish for one. I – the years when we were hunted through Beleriand have left their scars on her, deeper than the ones on Russo and I, I think, or on our children.”

“When I first met you upon these shores, all you wanted was to give her and our daughter a home,” Argon said neutrally. “Did you not picture making your home along with them?”

“You know that would have made the whole thing impossible.”

Argon twisted his fingers into the sensitive hair at the nape of his neck and tugged, and Maglor shivered, ears flattening to the sides of his head. “Even without my presence, without us being sent back from the Halls, if you had turned your mind to it fully, you would have made it possible,” he murmured. “Do not think so little of yourself, please, little-Káno.”

“I’m older than you are,” he complained.

“Yet you are the perfect size to fit into my arms. What else should I call you?”

“Only because you are almost as unnaturally giant as my brother. I am a perfectly average size.”

“You are the perfect size to fit into Artanis’ arms as well.”

“She is also unnaturally tall. I find myself sympathizing more and more with Elenwë and Fingon. You may be able to pick us up easily, but we are not portable.”

“Ah, have the Galadhrim been talking again?” Argon teased, still working his fingers through Maglor’s hair, scratching gently in all the right places. “They mean no disrespect, and they love you as their Lord no less for the fact that their Lady can and will bear you on her back like a child when you are, hm, being dramatic.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Maglor hissed, swearing as he blushed again after finally getting it under control. “Wait, did Fingon teach her how to do that?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“Unlike my brother, I did not invent being a twink, she can’t just pick me up and carry me around to make me happy – stop laughing!”

Argon was wheezing, falling backwards and catching himself on his elbows at the last second. Maglor shifted backwards and yanked him up again, grumbling about feeling cold.

They sat entwined for some time as Argon laughed into Maglor’s hair and Maglor closed his eyes and hid in his shoulder and tried to pretend he hadn’t just learned that his older brother’s spouses semi-regularly got together with his own to gossip about them, and even worse, the advice they traded worked.

“I hope the people of the Shire who live on the banks of this river were not too badly affected by the storm,” Argon said eventually when they had both been silent for a while, his tone somber. “There is a lot of wreckage coming down that looks as if it was part of houses and farms.”

“Maybe it’s from settlements of Men as well,” Maglor said, now feeling much drier and more settled but not wanting to leave the comfort of Argon’s lap.

“There may be a few scattered farms, but nothing on this scale so far north,” he disagreed. “If it were not for the urgency of the message we have promised to deliver, I would ask if you felt like turning around and going to see what we could do for them.”

“We should,” Maglor said, guilt rising; Argon pinched the back of his neck and he yelped.

“We did not cause the storm, and our errand is important,” he said sternly. “I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.”

“I know.”

“I also wish I could remember what they are called.”

“Who?”

“The – the tiny hairy people who are like Bilbo – Mr. Baggins.”

“Thorin always called him a halfling,” Maglor said dubiously. “Though he always shouted at him for doing so, so I don’t think that is their name for their people.”

“It is a little insulting,” Argon agreed. “Though it must not be supremely insulting, since he has been spending alternate years in Erebor and the Shire since it was reclaimed.”

“Didn’t Finrod call Men ‘tiny hairy people’ when he first found them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, yeah. I think he did. I wonder what he would have made of Mr. Baggins? Most Men were only a few heads shorter than he was; Mr. Baggins hardly comes up to even Fingon’s knee.”

“He was probably more focused on the fact that he would leave and come back not fifty years later and all of the ones he knew had died and their children were grown and had children of their own than their height, I should think,” Argon mused. “It must have been a terrible shock the first time it happened, and I think it probably contributed a lot to his protectiveness of young Beren.”

“His suicidal protectiveness,” Maglor muttered, and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that. What’s, um. What’s coming down the river right now?”

“What looks like the wreck of a cart has just gone past, and there were some dead sheep a while ago,” said Argon quietly. “Now there are a few barrels, and some things I assume are for farming. Much earlier I saw a door, a round one, like they have on their burrows.”

“Eru,” Maglor said. “I forgot they like to dig. With a flood –”

“I’m sure they know the river well, living beside it,” Argon said, trying to soothe him. “They will have evacuated; I have seen no bodies of anything but animals.”

“I hope so.”

“There are some timbers, maybe part of a fence,” he said a few minutes later. “Or perhaps railing from a bridge, or planks from a small boat? There is something stuck to them, a –” Maglor felt him shift beneath him. “A kitten? It is dark and waterlogged, but I think it has fur.”

“Poor thing,” Maglor said, still refusing to look around.

Argon went stiff. “It moved,” he breathed. “Maglor, it moved, it’s alive, it’s –” He broke off on a gasp, and Maglor sat up. “It’s a child,” he said, horrified, and almost before he knew it, Argon was tumbling him gently off his lap and sprinting towards the swollen river, heading upstream.

Maglor threw out a hand, biting off his alarmed cry; he knew that Argon was by far the strongest swimmer of all their family, even of the strangely water-attuned Ñolofinwions, and that if anyone could successfully rescue anything from a flooding fast-flowing river, it would be him, but it still made his heart jump into his throat to watch his husband leap into the muddy water, changing mid-jump into his enormous night-black wolf form and paddle confidently towards the tangle of planks.

He had to search them a few times to see what Argon had spotted, but when he did, he found himself running towards the water’s edge. It was indeed a child, nearly blue with cold, dark hair flattened to his head to show a tiny pointed ear, clothes in shreds with raw-looking scratches visible even from the bank.

Argon reached the planks and hooked his front paws over them, adjusting as they sank under his weight, and then nosed at the child’s back until he found fabric that would hold enough to bear his weight in the water and grabbed it in his teeth. He tugged it into the water and, holding his head up to keep its head clear, let the current take them as he struck out with determination back to the eastern bank.

Maglor ran downriver and met them as Argon finally climbed out, legs shaking with adrenaline and weariness but putting the child down as gently as he could on the muddy grass before turning back into an elf and kneeling to help it cough out far more water than such a tiny thing should have been able to inhale.

And the child was tiny; one of Argon’s hands could span its entire back from neck to legs. One of the Shire-children, Maglor thought distantly as he slid to a stop and knelt beside them. The size, the curly fluff of hair on its head and feet, and the little pointed ears made it all but certain.

It finally stopped spitting out water what felt like lifetimes later and sagged back against Argon’s supporting hand, wide blue-green eyes looking hazily between them.

“We need to get it warm,” Maglor said, prompting Argon, who was still shaking slightly.

“Oh. Yes,” he agreed, and held the child close against his heart as he stood up. It didn’t make a sound, but kept staring at them.

Once back at their camp, Maglor put more wood on the fire and stirred it up while Argon found the driest of their clothes and sacrificed one of his tunics to dry both of them off, then put one on, tossing another to Maglor.

Once they were dressed, they looked in consternation at the child, whom Argon had wrapped temporarily in a corner of the driest blanket and sat down at the fireside. It was shivering now, eyes fluttering shut only to jerk open again, and clutching the edge of the blanket with tiny fingers.

It was smaller even than Celebrían when she had been born, and Maglor wondered how something so small could have survived the long rough journey downriver in the dark and the storm – for they were far outside the borders of the Shire, and even if it had been taken by the water at the southernmost edge of it, that was still at least four days’ travel on foot crossed in one night.

Argon very gently pried the fingers from the blanket and took off the ruined clothes; Maglor found their medicine kit and cleaned the scrapes and scratches that were all over the boy’s arms and legs and the long ragged cut on the back of his head, though he could do nothing for the livid bruises that were showing up as the tint of blue from cold receded.

“We don’t have anything he could wear,” Maglor said. “Not even Celebrían’s newborn clothes would fit him, not that we have them with us,” he added absently. “This is the absolute tiniest child I have ever seen in my life.”

The boy stared at them, hugging the corner of the blanket to himself.

“We should feed him,” said Argon, going into the tent for their supplies. “Bilbo was always hungry while he was travelling, and children in general need to eat more often than adults.”

“I suppose we could try to make him some clothes,” Maglor said. “And he won’t need shoes.”

“They’ll only have to last until we get him back to the Shire,” Argon agreed, coming out with some waybread and one of their waterskins. He broke off a corner of the bread and held it out to the boy, finally remembering to speak in the common tongue as he offered it to him.

The boy took it, sniffed it suspiciously, and then somehow managed to make the chunk that was the size of his head disappear in about three seconds. Argon laughed, and handed him another.

Maglor pulled out some of the dried things they had to make hot food and began setting that up as Argon coaxed the boy into drinking some water after he began to slow down his eating.

“What is your name, little one?” Argon asked, when the boy shyly pushed the waterskin back towards him.

The boy opened his mouth, made a little alarmed noise, and closed it again. He stared up at Argon, eyes filling with tears. “I don’t remember,” he said, and started to cry.

As the sun rose and the day warmed they made a list of what the boy did know about himself: he was not an infant, though he was not by any means close to puberty, so Maglor internally put him at about the equivalent of a twenty or thirty-year-old elfling; he already knew his letters, and the basic geography of the area of the Shire around the water, though he had no idea specifically where his home had been, only that it had been near the river; the last thing he remembered was being in a little boat in the dark with his parents and looking at the stars before the water had suddenly risen around him; and most interestingly, he knew some scattered Sindarin vocabulary, though not quite the same as what traders used.

He had no idea why he had been in a boat, who his parents were beyond a vague impression of color and scent, who his extended family was, why he knew Sindarin, or where in the Shire to go to reunite him with his relatives.

Maglor and Argon didn’t say it out loud, but they doubted he had parents to be returned to. He described being in the boat on a calm river, the boat sinking for a reason he didn’t know, and then clinging to the wreck for hours as it drifted down the river and no one heard him screaming for help until the rain started and the flood took him down and out of the Shire entirely. He also said that neither he nor his parents nor anyone he knew could swim.

He fell asleep in the blanket in Maglor’s arms after eating a remarkable amount of breakfast, and they stared at him for some minutes before looking doubtfully at each other.

“The Rangers are depending on us to get their message to Gondor faster than anyone else they know,” Maglor said, hating each word. “And we don’t know where or how to take him back to his family.”

“If he has family,” Argon said somberly, and they both remembered the bits of houses that had come down the river.

“He could come with us to Gondor, and then we can bring him back. It’ll only be a few months.”

“He needs clothes, and I think we’ll need a lot more food than we planned,” Argon said thoughtfully. “But going back to one of the Man-villages would only take a day or so if one of us went alone and traveled wolf-shaped. There are hobbits living in those villages, so there must be things that fit him for sale there.”

One of the things that the boy had known was his peoples’ name for themselves – hobbits.

“And we could leave a message with them that we found him,” Maglor added, agreeing without words to Argon’s plan. “Shall I go or will you?”

“You’ve handled more children his age than I have,” said Argon, not exactly balking at the idea of being alone with the little boy, but definitely unsure of himself.

Maglor smiled at him, and acquiesced.

“Luimëar,” he said some time later, when the boy was awake and sleepily playing with his hair. The big blue-green eyes blinked up at him curiously. “Since you do not remember your name, would you mind if we called you that?”

“ . . . no,” he said quietly. “It’s pretty.”

“I’m glad you like it,” he said, and stroked the mass of fluffy curls on the boy’s head with a cautious finger. “It means flood-child, since the flood brought you to us.”

Argon returned two days later with food and clothes for the newly-named Luimëar, who had spent much of the time either fast asleep or eating. Maglor had already shown him the skin-change, so he was not terribly frightened when a big black wolf loped up to the campfire and suddenly turned into an elf, though he was startled.

They left for Gondor with the sunrise, Luimëar perched on Maglor’s shoulders as he and Argon turned their backs to the Brandywine and the Shire and headed east to catch the Greenway.

The next summer, Bilbo Baggins arrived back in the Shire and heard of the terrible night the Brandywine had flooded without warning, destroying or damaging thirty-some homes and holes, including Brandy Hall itself. Worse, it had killed nearly a dozen hobbits, including his young cousins Drogo and Primula and their son Frodo, who had been only twelve at the time.

Far away in Lothlórien, on the green lawn of Cerin Amroth under the watchful gaze of a great black wolf, Luimëar Kanafinwion was sitting on his father’s lap, his silver hair falling around him like a cloak, learning how to weave a flower crown into his mother’s golden braids.

Maglor always had been terrible at returning children on time.

Chapter Text

The Anduin swirled cold around Finrod’s arms as he dragged the fish trap from the water, gathering up the two big trout inside and killing them with one quick blow. He laid them beside him on the pebbles and began to disassemble the trap, gathering the rope to take with him and letting the sticks fall back into the water to float away.

He could feel eyes on his back, but they felt familiar; both Maedhros and Fingon had sensed them too over the last few days. They had all been on alert, but nothing had attacked them and no patrol from the new Steward had accosted them, so they were fairly certain it was a reclusive woodsman or perhaps an intelligent bear or fox, wanting to see them safely away from its home.

Fingon slid out of the underbrush and dropped down the riverbank to land lightly in a crouch beside him. Finrod looked up at her, quirking up the corner of his mouth.

“Russo still complaining about the pigheadedness of the new Steward?”

Fingon groaned and leaned forward to bury her face in his back. “Yes,” she said, muffled. “And yes, the man is a twit, but I don’t want to rehash it forty times.”

“I’d call him a dick, myself,” Finrod said thoughtfully, beginning to gut the fish. “It’s such a useful word, bless Haleth for introducing us to it.”

“Why are you cleaning those now?”

“Might as well, while the river can carry the mess away and I can wash my hands. We’re going to eat it today anyway, and it will keep just as well clean as it will otherwise.”

“Good idea.”

“Also, it’s more time I can spend down here not listening to Russo.”

“Excellent idea.”

“Don’t get me wrong, he should never have spoken to you like that – he should not speak to anyone like that, be they an emissary of his allies or his most humble servant,” Finrod said, scraping perhaps slightly too angrily at the fish-skin. “And I am just as furious on your behalf as Maitimo, but I don’t see the point in dwelling on it. Some people are just dicks, as Haleth says.”

“Some Men are just dicks,” Fingon corrected, not being one.

Finrod acquiesced, gesturing with the knife. “I do try to avoid it, although I feel a certain joy at knowing I have truly joined the ranks of the néri when you inform me I am being so.”

Fingon snorted. “I don’t really think it’s confined to any one gender, dearest. But yes, males of the race of Men seem to be particularly prone to it these days.” She relaxed, moving away from him to dip her hands in the river and watch the light waver as it rippled. ‘Do you feel the eyes? I do.’

‘They were here already when I reached the water,’ he answered. ‘I still sense no malice from them. I think that maybe you are right, and it is a beast of some kind, an intelligent one like Huan.’

‘I hope Russo’s noticed I’ve gone. He was ranting at a tree when I left.’

‘Too bad we can’t send him back to Minas Tirith and have him bitch at the actual source of the problem without causing one of those diplomatic incidents everyone hates.’

‘I think young Denethor is going to find himself in a fair number of them without our help if he continues on his current course. Though his wife did just die last year – grief does strange things to the mind.’

‘That’s true,’ Finrod agreed reluctantly. ‘He was very rude, though. Not a good example for his children.’

‘Not at all,” said Fingon, selectively forgetting the fact that her son Elrond could swear quite fluently in three dialects of Elvish, four tongues of Men, and Khuzdul before he was old enough to ride a horse unsupervised. Not that he chose to very often, but the knowledge was certainly there.

“Here, wash this,” said Finrod aloud, handing her a skinned and cleaned fish. She dunked it in the water, picking off stray scales.

“Aunt Írimë won’t like him at all, I’ll bet you anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything within reason, and nothing to do with Russo.”

He considered this for a while. “I’m not taking it,” he said at last. “I’m tired of losing. Anyway, it’s been ages since we saw her, and I don’t want to waste breath talking about the Steward’s unpleasant demeanor during the time we will have with her.”

“True.”

Finrod suddenly burst into laughter. Fingon frowned at him. “What’s so funny?”

“If – if he knew,” Finrod gasped. “If he knew who he was talking to, the Steward, what would he have done – his grandfather was named after your brother, he’s got to know his history –”

“He probably wouldn’t have shouted at Russo for correcting him when he tried to address him instead of me,” said Fingon, and also burst into laughter. “He’d probably have fainted or something equally stupid.”

“No, wait, he’d probably have accused us of lying because you’re a nís. He looks like that kind of person. He probably thinks the old Númenórean laws about marriage and gender are taken right from Valinor, like those idiots from the archives when they founded the kingdom. Remember them?”

“They were idiots,” she agreed, handing back the clean fish. “ ‘Laws and Customs of the Eldar’, whatever. I should I know my own laws and customs better than some weird little Man whose ancestors last met one of the Eldar when they saw Elros in the distance.”

“I liked the part where they said we believed that loving more than one person ever in our lifetimes was physically impossible.”

“I can personally attest that that is not true,” said Fingon, and hooked a finger under Finrod’s chin to pull him into a kiss. “My favorite part is where they said I had a wife, because clearly I could not have adopted Ereinion and loved him as my own.”

Finrod laughed again. “The day you tell me you are attracted to any random nís is the day I knock you out and discover you’re a Maia in disguise.”

“Indeed; the only nís I have ever found attractive was you. The part where they talk about how wholesome and endearing my friendship with Nelyo was always makes me laugh too. It’s like hearing grandfather all over again.”

“Endearing, yes, wholesome, decidedly not, and I’m your husband. Yes, you went to save him because you love him, but it was not for the memory of your innocent happy youth in Valinor or whatever they said.”

“Did I ever tell you that Argon said Maglor called him a –”

“Yes,” said Finrod, with patience. “I was there, quencalimanya. He was correct.”

“Hm,” said Fingon happily. “My dearest Nelyo. I would not have him any different for the world.”

“It’d be weird.”

“Weirder than the part where they said that marriage between any quendi who were related was illegal?”

“ . . . yes. Thought I still have to wonder if they actually thought about that at all. How did they think we were born? It’s not like a lot of the Awakened and their children actually made it to Valinor. Everyone we knew was married to someone they were related to when we were young.”

“Technically the Awakened weren’t exactly related to each other biologically, probably,” Fingon pointed out. “But socially, yes, they were. I think a lot of their weird little ideas are because Men can’t hear the mind-speech and they forgot about it, and misunderstood what it is when they remembered it.”

“The look on that one Man’s face when you pinned Nelyo to the wall and started taking his trousers off is a favorite memory of mine,” said Finrod, lost in gleeful recollection. “He did believe that it was truly us, which is something hardly anyone has been able to do since we were sent back, but he was so convinced that you didn’t mean you were married to us ‘in the carnal sense’, whatever that means – I think of that Man when I need a laugh sometimes.”

Fingon giggled. “I don’t know if he was more scandalized at what I was doing in his precious archives, that I was doing it to Nelyo, or that I was leading.”

“Oh please, like Nelyo isn’t –”

“Why are you talking about me?” said Maedhros suspiciously, dropping out of the trees at the same place Fingon had come from.

Finrod and Fingon exchanged looks. “We like talking about you, dearest,” said Finrod.

“You’re one of our favorite subjects,” said Fingon, High King of the Ñoldor In What Was Technically Exile But Not Really Anymore, and also someone who was fond of terrible puns, straight-faced.

Maedhros bodily picked up his King and threw her into the Anduin.

“My fish!” Finrod yelped, grabbing for them. “Argh. If you’re going to be like that, you can clean the other one.” He shoved the knife into Maedhros’ hand and climbed back up the bank into the trees.

Fingon swam back to shore, laughing, stopped to pull Maedhros down into a kiss and make sure to gently drip all over him in the process, and followed Finrod.

Maedhros tried to flick some of the water off himself, sighed, and sat down to clean the other fish.

A nearby bush rustled suspiciously.

“We’re still going down the river,” he said quietly, apparently to the fish. “When we reach the Sea we will follow the shore until we come to Dol Amroth, and from there we will turn inland and travel north through the mountains to find the Great West Road.”

The bush shook slightly; in the corner of his eye he could just see a small pale face watching him intently.

If he made any move towards him, or even turned to face him fully, the boy would run; he knew that from making that mistake the second time they had met, at the edge of civilization on the Great West Road as they entered Gondor. He hadn’t thought the boy would wait for them to visit Minas Tirith and leave, or even manage to find them again, yet the first night they spent on the riverbank, he had felt him come creeping up on their camp.

He knew nothing about the boy, or why he was following them in particular. He was very young, and very thin, and had some kind of bag he carried around with him, and a horse-blanket clumsily tied up like a bedroll with an old rope, and that was all that Maedhros had been able to find out. He had taken to casually leaving bits of food at the edges of their camps, or by the water when he knew the child was watching, once a spare waterskin, and just the day before he had left a spare tinderbox he had dug out of Fingon’s pack.

Neither of his spouses had noticed the boy at all until they had been and gone to Minas Tirith, and they didn’t know it was a child following them; the boy was good at staying unseen, Maedhros had to admit. He probably would not have noticed him either if not for chance, his relentless hypervigilance whenever they were in an unfamiliar land, and a cloudless night as the boy tried to sneak away with some food they had left out by their fire.

Thinking back to that night, when he had dropped out of the shadows to confront the threat that had been no threat at all, he was surprised he hadn’t scared him away for good, but he was very twitchy whenever he came remotely within grabbing distance or even was looked at directly. Maedhros knew the time was coming when he would have to tell Fingon and Finrod what was going on to keep them moving slowly enough they could be followed, but he also didn’t want to alert them and thus scare the boy away with all the attention. There was no way to fake true unconsciousness of being watched.

He laid the fish down, rinsed off his hands, and unbuckled a small knife-sheath from around his forearm. “This holds a small hunting knife and three throwing knives, and it is meant to be strapped to an arm or a leg,” he said vaguely to the water. “The blades will not slip out if they are secured properly, and there is Song woven into it that should keep them sharp and in good repair for many years yet.”

It had been a gift from Tyelpë centuries before, and it was precious to him, but he had nothing else remotely small enough for the boy’s hands or sized to fit him, and he needed it far more. Even if he already had a weapon, the sheath was a valuable asset to such a small child, and it looked very plain, so it would not be stolen from him.

He laid it down in the grass near the water’s edge, knowing that Tyelpë would understand, and carried the fish back to their camp.

When he came back that night, there were marks of small bare feet in the mud, and it was gone. In its place sat a little pile of pebbles.

He managed to keep their pace down to something the boy could follow with effort for the next week, distracting his spouses with fishing and hunting and on a few occasions with relentless teasing until Fingon had had enough and pounced on him, thereby spending a pleasant hour or three in a convenient patch of soft grass under her hands and mouth and body. Finrod was starting to look oddly at him, though, and he couldn’t keep telling them he wasn’t tired at night so he could sit up and wait until the boy took whatever he had left out for him, for it was wearing on him.

It was autumn, and even though Gondor had a temperate climate, the wind that came up the river from the Sea was brisk and smelled of salt, and the nights were getting colder. He didn’t know if the boy knew how to make a proper campfire, or even if he knew how to use the tinderbox he had given him (he definitely had it, for leaving a pile of pebbles or moss or something else seemed to be his way of thanking him for the things, and there had been one left for it), and never saw a sign of him attempting one. The one glimpse of the boy’s traveling supplies he had gotten had been in the dim light of the stars and the coals of their campfire, but he guessed from the ill-fitting clothes, the missing shoes, and the fact that he had what was clearly a battered old horse-blanket from some stable instead of a bedroll or even a traveling cloak that he was not properly equipped to spend the winter outside.

He had gotten his spouses to set up their bed in the roots of a great old tree that night, and as they fell asleep pressed together back-to-back like they had done since the three of them had started sharing a bed while crossing the Helcaraxë, he resisted the urge to lay down fully and pull them into his arms, cover them with his body so that any threat would strike him first, and drift off to the comforting rhythm of their heartbeat. Instead he propped his back against the tree and watched the low flames of their campfire with heavy eyes, his Silmaril-hand uncovered and buried in the combined fall of their hair, the faint light he never could get it to stop emitting bringing out the blue undertones in Fingon’s black and the silver undertones in Finrod’s gold.

The child never set off their wards, and he knew they were setting them properly, so he must never hold any ill intent towards any of them and he must be asking for shelter every time he crept into them. There were very specific conditions as to who could freely cross the wards Galadriel had taught them, each time they set them up creating a tiny facsimile of Melian’s Girdle at its most isolationist, and somehow the boy was tripping none of the many alerts.

Maedhros watched as the moon rose to its height and began to sink, and a little shadow limped from under the trees into the open space on the riverbank they had chosen to spend the night. He didn’t think the boy had realized where they were sleeping yet, which was unusual; normally he didn’t come out of the undergrowth until he knew exactly where they all were and where he was going.

The boy circled the camp twice before finding the bit of food Maedhros had wrapped up and left for him, and instead of grabbing it and taking off into the night he grabbed it, looked around, and edged cautiously towards the fire, sitting on the side closest to the trees. He knew where Maedhros was now, kept shooting wary sideways glances at him, but in the firelight it was obvious he was shivering, and he sat down and hugged his knees as he leaned into the warmth.

“You could put your blanket by the fire,” Maedhros murmured, and the boy shied. “I will not come closer. My wife and husband are asleep. I will wake you before they stir.”

The boy was hovering, frozen as he pushed himself from the ground, looking in his direction openly for the first time. “Why?” he whispered.

“You are a child, yet you are alone and frightened of adults. The nights are getting colder, and soon you will have to seek shelter in a town.”

The boy shook his head violently. “I’m not going back. Never ever.”

“It doesn’t have to be the town you came from.”

“Someone will recognize me. My father –” he broke off on a whimper. “He will have sent word, he will be angry.”

“Did he hurt you?”

A long moment, and then a little dip of the boy’s head. “I killed my mother,” he said, and hugged his knees again. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I believe you.”

“Father says I should have died instead.”

“What happened to your mother?” Maedhros held his breath.

“She got sick when I was born, and she never got better. Last year she died, and Father was angry.”

“I am sorry you lost her.”

That made the boy’s head come up, tear-filled eyes looking right into his. “You are?” he said, not skeptically, but with wonder.

“I know a little of how you must feel. I miss my mother very much. She is not dead, but she dwells in Valinor, across the Sea, and I have not seen her for many thousands of years.”

“She – is she an Elf?”

“She is,” Maedhros said, unable to hold back his faint amusement. “Since I am one, she must be as well.”

“O-oh,” said the boy, stammering a little as he relaxed. “I wondered. You all have such long hair, and at night the stars reflect in your eyes. The books said that only Quendi who have seen the Treelight have the light in their eyes.”

Maedhros blinked; the boy had shifted mid-sentence to fluent Sindarin. “That’s true,” he answered in the same language. “I remember when the Trees were destroyed, and before, when they spread their light over Valinor.”

“I – the books – they said no Elf would ever harm a child,” he said tentatively.

“I would not, and neither would my spouses. I have known a few of my kind who were evil, and would harm anyone they wished to, but yes. We value little ones like you very deeply, for you are rare and precious.”

“I’m trying to find the – I ran away to go to Imladris,” the boy said, forgoing a whisper for a normal voice, though it was still very soft. “I read about it, and Lord Elrond sounded so kind. I thought I could offer to – I don’t know. I’ll learn anything, I can work for my keep.”

“Elrond is very kind,” Maedhros said, quiet pride shining through as it always did when he spoke of his son. “He always has been, since he was younger than you.”

The boy’s mouth fell open. “Do you know him?”

“He is our son,” he answered, raising his hand from Fingon and Finrod’s hair to gesture at both of them; too late, he realized that he was not wearing any covering over it.

The boy’s eyes went from his hand to his face and back again. “I – who are you? Are you – the, the woman, she has the ribbons in her braids, and I’ve heard you calling her – but I thought – the books said –”

“Her name is Fingon,” Maedhros said quietly, also no longer whispering. “Yes, the one who fought in the Nirnaeth. She was sent back from the Halls to serve the Valar, as was Finrod. If you know the tale of Beren and Lúthien, you have heard of him as well. The histories that had been recorded do not tell the whole story, for there are few who know it.”

“The king of Nargothrond?” said the boy, who was looking far more interested than any child usually did about very ancient history.

“He built Nargothrond, and ruled it for a time, yes.”

“Wow. But are you – if they’re them, and Lord Elrond is your son, I thought that he was raised by – by, um –”

“Maglor Fëanorion and Maedhros Nerdanellion? Yes, that’s true. I’m Maedhros.”

A tiny wrinkle appeared between the boy’s brows.

“Oh!” he said, understanding. “I dyed my hair, because we had to go into Minas Tirith, and red rather stands out. I also have this –” he waved his faintly glowing hand “ – but I usually wear a glove, and so nobody looks at me twice. Also, everyone thinks I’m dead.”

“If you’re Maedhros,” the boy said, stumbling a little over the name, “and you saved Eluréd and Elurín from the forest and Elrond and Elros from their mother, could you – would – please, please, would you save me too?”

“Of course, onwë,” he answered. “What do you need to be protected from?”

“My f-father. He says I am not fit to be his son, he says I killed my mother, he says I’ll never do anything but disappoint him, I don’t want to see him again ever, I want to go far away from here –”

“May I come closer?” Maedhros asked as the boy fought back tears.

“If you want to,” was the listless answer, which worried him, and he carefully got up without disturbing Fingon and Finrod and sat an arms’-length away from the boy, letting his hand lie palm up in the space between them.

“Who is your father?”

The boy closed his eyes and violently shook his head, sending his matted dark hair flying. “No! If you know who he is you’ll know who I am and then you’ll say I have to go back no matter what.”

“I would not send you back to a home that is dangerous to you,” Maedhros tried to reassure him, but he would not budge.

“All right,” he said, sighing. “But if you won’t tell me your name, I’ll have to name you.” He gave the boy a small smile. “I can’t just keep calling you ‘child’, after all.”

“That’s fine, I don’t care what you call me.” The boy hesitated. “Except. Not. Nothing about jewels, please.”

An odd request, but Maedhros assumed that his mother’s name had been something similar. “That’s fine. What about, hm.” He grinned. “Annaduinë, since I have found you on the river, and the river is called the Anduin.”

“What does it mean?”

“River-gift.”

The boy whipped his head around, eyes huge. “I – a gift? You want me?”

“Of course.”

Maedhros abruptly found himself with an armful of clingy, sobbing child, and he lifted him up and rearranged him to be more comfortable, returning to his bed and covering the boy – Annaduinë – with his blanket, still holding him in his lap.

He was prodded awake a few hours after dawn by a very confused and alarmed Fingon, who was staring down at him. He gave her a sheepish smile and gestured at the sleeping boy in his arms. “I got you another child! Surprise,” he tried. “Very late or very early anniversary present?”

“What the fuck,” said Fingon. “Where do you get these kids from? How do you keep doing this?”

“We’ve only had one permanent one before this one,” he argued, rocking him back and forth as he stirred. “Look at him, he needs parents. His mother died from childbirth and his father sounds like an abusive asshole and he’s too scared to tell me his name or his father’s name because I’d think he needs to go back to his family regardless of how they treat him, which makes me think he’s some kind of son of a minor noble, but anyway, he’s been following us since we entered Gondor proper and it’s taken me weeks to get him to not bolt as soon as I look at him, Finno, literal weeks. I can hardly believe he relaxed enough to fall asleep on me, last night he ran away when I accidentally sneezed in his direction. Look at his cute little face, he’s adorable. I’ve named him Annaduinë.”

“What the fuck,” said Finrod, who had woken up in the middle of his impromptu rant, and then he sat up enough to see the boy. “No, never mind, you’re right, he is adorable. Let’s keep him.”

“Well, of course we’re not giving him back,” said Fingon. “If his parents wanted him, they should have kept track of him better. I’m just saying, we could be in the literal Void and you’d somehow still pull a child from somewhere in the time it took me to blink.”

Maedhros shrugged unapologetically.

“Wait, is he fine with being called Annaduinë?” Finrod asked skeptically. “Because that is a terrible pun.”

“I told him it meant river-gift and then he cried himself to sleep because I thought he was a gift, and something of value, so yes, I think he deserves it at least until he says otherwise,” Maedhros said firmly.

“Oh,” said Fingon, visibly softening, and reaching out to run her fingers over Annaduinë’s dirty, matted curls. “Oh, you poor boy,” she murmured, and Maedhros grinned. “He needs a bath, and proper meals, and better clothes – those are a disgrace, what did he do, take them from a rubbish heap? We can get him some in Dol Amroth. Maedhros, he trusts you the most, you take him down to the river and clean him up, and he can borrow some of my tunics until we have better clothes for him, I’m sure he’ll fit in them if we take them up better than he would in any of yours.”

Annaduinë had opened his eyes in the middle of her speech, and was blinking up at her, disconcerted by the rapid Quenya and the way she was patting his head.

“He’s fluent in Sindarin, but I don’t think he knows Quenya,” said Maedhros, and Fingon instantly switched to fussing over him in Sindarin instead. A small hard head pressed against his chest as Annaduinë flinched away from her. ‘Finno, back off, he’s scared of adults,’ he said, and she sat back on her heels. “Can you get me the things ready, and I’ll take him down to the river for a bath while you cook and pack up,” he added.

“Bath?” Annaduinë said a little fearfully.

“You’re all over dirt and your hair needs to be combed out,” said Fingon gently, tweaking his nose. “You’ll feel better after you’re clean. Nelyo will keep you safe.”

“That’s me,” Maedhros clarified. “And her nickname is Finno, and Finrod’s –” he pointed at Finrod, who was going through Fingon’s clothes to find the smallest shirt he could “—is Findo.”

He was still reluctant, but he clung to Maedhros’ hand as he led him down the bank and back up the river a little until he found a little shallow inlet that would suit them. He set down the bundle Finrod had made them and turned to the boy. “Clothes off,” he said cheerfully, demonstrating.

The water wasn’t frigid, but it was cold, and Annaduinë followed him very reluctantly as he sat down in the shallows. The river only barely covered Maedhros’ legs, but it came up to the child’s underarms, and he panicked and splashed as he slipped on a slime-covered rock and slid in a little deeper. Maedhros grabbed him and held him steady.

“You’re fine,” he soothed. “I know it’s cold, but we won’t be in here long.”

“Warm,” he said tightly, leaning into his hands and holding on as though he was drowning rather than sitting safely on the riverbed.

“Here, you can sit between my legs,” said Maedhros, remembering how he had managed this when Celebrían was very young, and turned so that his back was to the current. Compared to the Sirion, the Anduin barely had any current at all. “You won’t float away, for I won’t let you, and it will be warmer.” He could still reach the bank, and he picked up the soap and handed it to the boy. “You wash your body, and I shall help you with your hair, and hold the soap for you.”

Annaduinë was more capable than he had thought, and he only had to help him with a few particularly stubborn patches of pitch or something sticky that were on his back.

“And your face,” he prompted, when he was handed the soap with an air of finality and the boy turned to look back at him pleadingly. He scowled, and very reluctantly brought his wet hands up and ran them over his face before smacking them down again. Maedhros sighed. “Here, I’ll do it. Tip your head back and close your eyes.” He waited until Annaduinë leaned back against him, and then quickly ran the soap over his face, set it back on the bank, scrubbed at the most ingrained patches of dirt with his thumbs, and then pinched his nose shut and poured water over his head with his other hand.

He was not surprised to then have to hold onto a shrieking, flailing child, but he managed it with practiced ease until Annaduinë stopped splashing wildly and realized that he was still sitting up and was in no danger.

“Mean,” he said through chattering teeth, and Maedhros patted his back apologetically.

“It’s best to just get it over with,” he said. “If I had a rag, I would have used that instead, but I don’t, and I don’t think you’d want to stick your whole head in the water.”

Annaduinë shook his head frantically, sending drops flying.

“Now I just have to wash your hair, and then we’ll be done. I can either scoop the water over your head, but I’ll try not to get it on your face, or you can lie back and float for a bit while I keep hold of your hands. Which do you want?”

Small hands tightened around his knee. “You?”

“All right, scoot back towards me,” said Maedhros, and tipped the boy’s head back. “I’ll do my best, but you might get a few drops in your eyes."

Annaduinë sat very still as he got his hair wet and worked the soap through it, gently tilting him forward again and running his fingers through the tangles over and over until they either broke free and floated away down the current or unwound. “Hm, I was right,” he said as he worked. “You shouldn’t brush your hair when it’s dry, it’ll only get more snarled up. Your hair is like mine, it needs to be damp or else it will just go all fuzzy when you run a comb through it.”

“My b-brother would comb it when father sent for us,” he said in a tiny voice. “He would get so worried because it wouldn’t stay flat.”

“Is his hair like yours?”

“No, it was straighter.”

“Ah, then he wouldn’t know. Is he older or younger than you?”

“Older.”

“A lot older, or only a few years?”

“I was born five years after he was. He’s nearly twelve, he was sent away to learn the sword this summer, and I – my father –”

“Does he help you with your father?”

Annaduinë nodded and wiped his nose on his arm. Maedhros stopped working on the ends of his hair and moved back to his head, making sure to wash the back of his neck and the top of his shoulders and around his tiny round ears.

“Thank you,” Annaduinë said very softly. “For helping me with my hair. Nobody ever helps me except b-brother, and he’s gone now like mother. We had a nurse when I was little, but father says only babies need one. He didn’t like her helping me so much with everything anyway.”

“Do you want to find your brother?”

He half expected the boy to jump at the chance, and was surprised at the vehemence of his denial. “No! Father loves him, and now that he doesn’t have to drag me with him he’ll be even better for father and they’ll be happy.”

“Head back again, I’m going to rinse your hair,” he guided, and this time the boy was almost comfortable about leaning back into him, closing his eyes of his own accord. He looked far too blissful at the feeling of the fingers combing through his hair to be anything but starving for attention, and Maedhros added neglect to the list of things he already knew the boy had survived.

Instead of having him walk back out of the river when he was done, he had him stand up, got out of the water himself, and then wrapped a towel around him and sat him on his lap to dry him off. Annaduinë squeaked in surprise when he twisted the end of the towel around his hair and wrung the water from it, but he huddled closer to Maedhros’ warmth, eyes fluttering shut.

Working on automatic, Maedhros finger-combed his damp shoulderblade-length hair and then wove two of the Sindar branch-braids he had always used for Celebrían and Elrond – and later Elros when he would let him touch him – when they were on the road, one on each side of his head. His hair wasn’t long enough to join them properly into a single plait down his back, so he drew them together as best he could into a braid hardly longer than his thumb and tied it off in the middle with the smallest of the hair-clasps Finrod had tossed into the bundle. He grinned at the fluffy little tail at the base of Annaduinë’s neck as the end under the clasp unraveled.

“Very handsome,” he said, and turned to grab the winter undershirt Finrod had decided to pick out and the pins he had added to make it wearable. It wasn’t a bad choice, he thought; it was woolen, so he’d still be warm even if it rained, and it was a short shirt meant to be used as padding under a light chestpiece, so it was probably the most practical thing he could fit into without constantly tripping on the hem. It was a warm shade of brown, and if they made him a little belt from something, he could pass as an elfling from any of the Sindar who lived in the forests around Gondor as long as nobody looked too closely at his ears.

If his brother was twelve, or nearly so, and was five years older than he was, than Annaduinë was about six years old. He frowned thoughtfully as he tried to estimate how grown that was on the timescale he knew. From what he had observed as Estel grew, and from repeated mildly exasperated explanations from Tuor and Haleth, he knew that a fifty-year-old elfling was about the equivalent of a ten-year-old human; but he also knew that Men seemed to grow their abilities intellectually slower and physically quicker than Elves. Celebrían at twenty-five, the rough equivalent of five for a human, had been able to speak, read, and carry a complex conversation quite well, but had still struggled to do things like dressing and moving her body quickly at any skill on her own; Estel at five could mostly take care of himself, and was very adept physically, but could not quite grasp the thought process to use that potential beyond the basics.

He settled on working from a baseline that Annaduinë was some kind of mix of the two, but favoring Estel more, and mentally shrugged. “Arms up,” he said, and dropped the shirt over the boy’s head.

“ ‘m not a baby,” he complained, pale skin flushing pink as his head reappeared. “I can get dressed by myself since I was two.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to,” said Maedhros, trying to see how much he needed to pin the shirt at the back to keep it from sliding right off his shoulders. “Here, stand up, I have to pin this closed for you.” He settled on folding the entire thing into two pleats in the back and securing those. “I hope that’s comfortable. Does it feel like it’s going to slide off your shoulders?”

“No,” Annaduinë said, wobbling a little as he balanced with both of his feet on Maedhros’ ankle. He weighed less than Elrond had at the same size, and vague alarm registered in the back of his mind; all the boy’s ribs were visible as well, and he could circle both wrists together with his thumb and forefinger.

“All right, now, how long would you like it?” he asked, rolling up the bottom of the shirt, which brushed the ground. “I’m not sure how long it will take to get you anything to wear under this, so it might be kind of cold.”

“Knees?”

“Hm, how about just under the knee,” he said, and arranged it accordingly. “Is that all right?”

The boy nodded, wobbled again, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said quickly.

“You can lean on me, little one, it’s fine.”

He sagged a little. “I’m cold,” he whispered.

“Here, all done,” said Maedhros, making sure all the pins were secure and then pushing his own towel off his shoulders and putting his clothes back on, keeping the boy standing on the wet towels instead of the dirt of the riverbank.

“Can I have the knife back?”

“Of course.” He handed him the arm-sheath he’d given him the week before. Annaduinë rolled up his sleeve and managed to get the straps tight enough to hold after pushing it up nearly to his shoulder.

“You could put it on your leg, if that’s too uncomfortable,” Maedhros suggested, but he shook his head.

Maedhros rolled up everything but the towel the boy was standing on and got ready to return to camp; Annaduinë was patting his top of his head with wonder, feeling along the braids.

“If you don’t like them you can take them out,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking. I used to put my little brothers’ hair up after they took a bath, and then those braids for my son and my niece.”

The exploratory fingers found the hair-clasp and wandered lightly over it.

“Is it too tight?”

He knelt down again in alarm as Annaduinë turned wide tear-filled eyes up to him, and reached out to undo the braids.

“No, please, I want them,” he said, grabbing his fingers as they reached for the clasp. “I like it. I just – I don’t remember – I don’t think anyone’s ever cared about making it look nice before.”

“What, nobody’s ever done your hair for you before?” said Maedhros, shocked.

“Sometimes father would tell his servant to cut it, and he’d take off the bottom half.”

“Well, now I shall braid your hair as often as you like, and you won’t have to cut it again unless you want to.” He swept the boy up with an arm snug under his legs, holding him to his chest with one hand and picking up their things in the other.

“I can walk,” he said, but he clutched at the collar of Maedhros’ tunic and leaned into him.

“You have no shoes, and I don’t want you getting your feet dirty until we can bandage those scratches.”

“They don’t even hurt. They’re just from thorns and rocks.”

“It’s not good to walk around with untreated open wounds. You look tired, anyway. I want to carry you.”

Despite his insisting that he could walk, Annaduinë held tightly to Maedhros all day, first on the trip back to the camp, then during the wrapping of his feet, when he was given breakfast, and when Fingon made an improvised child carrier from one of their blankets and he was tucked into it, cradled securely against Maedhros’ chest to free up his hands.

Four days later, he had relaxed enough in their company to lean up against Finrod and fall asleep by the fireside at night when Maedhros was not available, and two days after that Maedhros and Finrod came back from checking the fish-trap they had set out the night before to find Fingon already wearing the carrier, a dark head with bright eyes peering at them over her shoulder, one pale arm about her neck and little fingers playing with the thick braid down her back.

“He was cold,” she said, and wrapped her arms about him for a moment before going back to dousing the fire and packing up the camp.

“I’m sure,” said Maedhros, and tugged at the fluffy end of Annaduinë’s little ponytail. “Do you want to stay with Finno, or do you want me to carry you for the morning?”

“ . . . stay?”

“All right,” he said, and laughed, and kissed Annaduinë on the forehead and Fingon on the mouth and went to shoulder his pack. None of them minded him being more clingy than was usual for a child of his age, for they could move faster if they carried him and he was already far too thin in their opinion to be walking all day every day.

When they met with their aunts Írimë and Findis in Dol Amroth, they were both amused that their nephews and niece had stolen yet another child, and pleased that they were all happy together. Annaduinë left the city he had been afraid to enter with a nice assortment of warm clothes, a little traveling pack like his parents’, two books all for his own – one of history, one of elvish children’s stories – and the warm feeling of being part of a family.

Findis also made Maedhros promise not to let the boy bury himself in a library somewhere and miss a few decades, like he had done when he was young, and Finrod and Fingon both laughed and then looked at each other in consternation when they realized that, like their husband, their youngest son was a bookworm.

Late the next winter, Denethor, Steward of Gondor, found himself in the sad position of informing his firstborn son that his little brother had taken ill and died the previous year, while young Boromir was away training with his uncle in Dol Amroth.

Boromir was distraught, for he loved Faramir dearly, and he went around to ask the stablehands and the librarians who were friends to both of them about his brother’s final days. Strangely, nobody had known about the illness until it was too late, though they admitted he had not looked well for some time before he left them. Surely it was a coincidence that one of the stablemasters had set out a traveling bag for his son, who was about the same age as Faramir, before deciding that he was too young yet to accompany him to Rohan to trade for more horses, and had then forgotten it in the stables, and that the bag had disappeared the same night anyone could remember last seeing the Steward’s second son.

Late that night, Boromir sat in the window of the bedroom that he had used to have to share and looked out at the stars that shone faint beyond the lights of the great city. He hoped that the little boy the stablemaster had described, pale and thin, with the shapes of hands outlined up his arms in green and yellow and purple, was far away, and happy, and watching the stars as well. He curled up more tightly in the silver and blue mantle that had once belonged to his mother, and prayed to the Valar that he would someday meet his brother again.

Far away, in the northern tundra, Annaduinë Nelyafinwion was breathless and laughing as he clung to his mother’s hands, learning how to balance and slide on the blades strapped to his feet as she taught him the skill of skating across the frozen sea; his fathers were running circles around them in wolf-shape – one golden, one copper, both silvered around the edges by the moonlight – nudging him upright whenever he lost his balance or his fingers slipped from her grip. Her coat that matched his was blue, and silver fur framed her face as he looked up at her, and overhead the stars were as bright as fire.

Chapter Text

Everyone always forgot, somehow, that Ambarussa liked to roam.

They had hunted with Oromë in Valinor, and had enjoyed the open sea as they sailed from Alqualondë; Amras’ love for the road had diminished somewhat at Amrod’s untimely death, but when he had met Tindeóna he had taken to it again, and right up until all three of them fell together at the Havens in Sirion they had enjoyed the wandering life they were forced to lead much more than Maedhros or Maglor or Galadriel.

Ambarussa liked to roam, and Tindeóna liked to nest, and they had reached a very happy state of equilibrium wherein the twins who liked stability tended and defended their tiny realm in the foothills of the Grey Mountains and the twins who liked freedom spent the ends of autumns and the winters and the beginnings of springs with their spouses, whom they loved very much, and then went where they pleased (or as they were directed by their King) during the warm months of the year. Ambarussa were migratory by nature, but they always came home.

It was even easier after Narvi had refined upon Fëanor’s original design and created palantiri that were small enough to fit into the palm of their hand, and made enough for everyone in the family to have their own. Now Ambarussa and Tindeóna could see each other across all of Middle-earth, if they so wished, and when that was combined with their marriage-bonds it often felt as if they had never left each other’s company all year round.

Another thing everyone always forgot was that Maedhros and Maglor weren’t the first Fëanorians to collect and nurture small children, though they were arguably the most obvious about it; Amras, Eluréd, and Elurín had taken in any child who crossed their path during the First Age, irrespective of species, and while none of them had stayed with them for more than a year, they never regretted it. Even when Elurín unexpectedly (as much as two beings who had to intend to conceive a child for it to be physically possible could be surprised, anyway) had a son by Amras and they were forced to send him away for his survival, they never once regretted having created the boy, and they never stopped loving him from afar.

The combination of a pair who made a steady base and a pair who traveled the world made it inevitable that they would just keep on collecting children, but rather surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of free kids in the Third Age. Most of them either had relatives or other options that meant they didn’t need much more than directions or an escort to wherever their adult was.

This meant that when Amrod spotted the hobbit-child huddled in the grass on top of one of the rolling hills of the South Downs, she made a beeline for them, trusting that her brother would follow as soon as he noticed she wasn’t behind him anymore.

“Hello, little one,” she said as she approached, so as not to startle . . . hm, she was fairly sure it was a boy, and sat down in the grass about an arms’ length away.

The boy looked up, tears and grime streaking his face, and stared at her. Then he rubbed his nose on his arm and said quite politely for the circumstances, “Excuse me, ma’am, but have you seen a hobbit named Mr. Bilbo Baggins on the road to Erebor?”

Amrod blinked. “Not for some few years, though I am acquainted with him. Were you traveling with him?”

The boy looked guilty. “Er. I wanted to see Erebor, so I ran away from home to follow him, but he went into the Old Forest for some reason and I lost him, and then I found my way out, but the hills were all cold and . . . and weird, and then I finally got out here where I can see the sun, but I don’t know . . . I need to find the, um, the East-West Road, I think it was called.”

She could hear his stomach growling, and recalled how often Mr. Baggins had gone hungry during his Quest, and she shrugged her pack off her shoulders and found a strip of dried meat for him. “How long have you been lost?” she asked. “Here, you must be starving.”

“A while,” the boy said, eating very fast for someone with such small teeth. “I think I left the Shire a week ago today. Uncle Bilbo went into the Old Forest right away and we managed to stay with him for five whole days, though I think he got lost on the first day because we went in circles a lot and he stopped to write in his journal all the time. Anyway I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been long since I left the forest, because there’s nothing to eat out here and I’m not dead yet.”

Amras came jogging up, tilted his head, and sat down beside his sister. The little hobbit looked between them and blinked.

“I’m Amrod, and this is my brother, Amras,” she said. “Might we know your name?”

“Merry Brandybuck,” said the boy. “Actually it’s Meriadoc, but I’d rather just be Merry. You’re very big for Big People.”

Amras’ mouth twitched as he tried to hold back a smile. “We’re just about average in our family.”

“Wow,” said Merry. “I didn’t realize that Men were so tall.”

“Most Men aren’t as tall as us, because we’re not Men,” he said. “We’re Elves.”

Merry’s mouth fell open. “What, real Elves?” he squeaked. “Wow. Oh, that must be why you know Uncle Bilbo.”

“We met him in Imladris,” said Amrod. “Is that where you were trying to go once you find the East-West Road?”

He nodded. “I hope it isn’t very much further,” he said forlornly.

“It’s about two weeks’ travel for us, so I think it would take you about a month, maybe two,” she said gently. “You’d be better off returning to your home. Would you like us to help you find your way?”

A tear rolled down his cheek. “I want to go to Erebor,” he said miserably. “Uncle Bilbo says they have a huge library there, and I want to become a scribe. Nobody in the Shire needs a scribe, so I thought, Erebor.”

“And you ran away from home, instead of asking your Uncle Bilbo to take you with him. Do you feel safe in your home?”

“Huh? Oh, it’s safe. It’s just . . . boring, and nobody listens to me. They don’t think I know what I’m talking about, and they treat me like I’m my baby cousin Pippin.” He winced. “Actually, he somehow learned I was going and he followed me, and one of Uncle Bilbo’s gardener’s sons followed me too because he thought I need to be protected, even though he’s only like two years older than I am, and just because I like to read books doesn’t mean I’m helpless!”

“Where is your baby cousin and your friend?”

“I lost them in the Old Forest the day before I found the way out,” he said, and sniffled. “I didn’t mean to! The trees were moving and we ran different directions. They ran away from me, so they must have made it back to the Shire.”

Amras offered him a handkerchief.

“But I don’t want to go home! They’ll scold me and take away all my books and pens and I’ll have to become a farmer, not that I don’t like green things, but I so want to learn.”

“Would your Uncle Bilbo agree to take you in, if we brought you to him instead?” Amras asked, and Amrod was annoyed that she hadn’t thought of that.

“I hope so? I wanted to follow him to Imladris to show him I can take care of myself before I let him know I was there, so he’d know I’m not a burden.”

“Well then, what if we take you to him?”

“Would you?” Merry breathed. “Thank you. Although. I don’t actually know where he. Is? He might still be lost in the Old Forest . . .”

Amrod looked at Amras.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can go look around the forest, and then if we do not find him, take the road to Imladris. If he isn’t there and hasn’t been, we can wait for him.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind? Your business must be important.”

Amrod laughed. “We’re just wandering for fun,” she said. “We were going to turn towards Imladris in a few weeks in any case, to see our nephew Elrond.”

Merry Brandybuck looked at the tall Elves sitting cross-legged in the grass on the hill, one on each side of him. “I’d like to go with you then, please,” he said, and timidly took the hand Amras offered him to help him up.

~~~*~~~

They did not find Mr. Baggins in Bree, or in the Old Forest, or on the East-West Road, or in Imladris, and by the time they got there Merry wanted to meet Eluréd and Elurín in person, having seen them on the palantir, and then when they took him to their home on the way to Erebor Tindeóna took an instant liking to him, and, well.

He got along well with Ereinion and Tauriel, and loved hearing tales of the First Age. He enjoyed digging in the garden with Eluréd, and walking the trap lines with Elurín, and learning to wood-carve from Amrod, and learning to weave from Amras, and soon it was wintertime and Ambarussa hadn’t spent so long at their home in centuries; yet they were content and felt no wanderlust.

A winter turned into two, and three, and more, and by the time Paránë Telufinwion made it to the great library of Erebor, he had been declared dead in the Shire for some ten years.

(“Whoops?” said Amrod, sheepishly. “I kind of forgot.”)

Chapter Text

The Rangers kept a good guard around the Shire as the evil in the South grew and stretched out across the land, but they were only mortals and there were few of them left; besides, they were kin, no matter how distant, and therefore it was only right that the House of Amanmandë lend them aid.

Or that was the basic reason why Celegorm and Aredhel were living in a tent under the northern eaves of the Old Forest. They were also there because they were curious about the soft land their tiniest ever nephew had come from, and because it was fun to hunt down the occasional ruffian or unscrupulous trader who tried to take advantage of what looked like easy prey (though often they had only to watch from the trees as the infuriated hobbits handled the problem quite well by themselves), and because it made Estel happy to know they were there.

The trees were finally accepting of them after they had spent a few years hanging around, chasing out interlopers and giving them the bones and blood of their hunts, animal or enemy. Aredhel was perched up in one particularly friendly tree, marking out where they could fix supports to build a talan. Celegorm was on the ground, giving her semi-helpful directions about where he thought good places would be.

The weird little man who also lived in the forest hadn’t minded them asking permission to set up a camp there, and had taught them several Songs that the trees enjoyed. It wasn’t their ideal place to build a home, even if it would only be for a few decades, but it would do.

Aredhel saw a shadow move under the bushes nearby and had an arrow aimed at it before her mind caught up with her hands. Celegorm saw her move and sprang forward to put his back to her tree and draw his sword.

“Show yourself,” he demanded after a tense moment, in which an animal did not wander out of the undergrowth, but something scuffled around.

A small sandy mop of curls peeked timidly around the edge of a bush, and Aredhel lowered her bow.

“Are you an elf, sir?” the child asked, eyes full of wonder.

Celegorm stared at him suspiciously. “Yes,” he said. “Who else is with you?”

The boy frowned and then reached down, hauling out a tiny wriggling hobbit-toddler by an ear. They whined and twisted in his grip.

“Hey, careful,” said Celegorm, sheathing his sword and kneeling down. “Don’t hurt him. Where are your parents?”

Both boys froze, staring at him. “Er, well,” said the older one, releasing the younger, who fell over, picked himself up, and waddled over to Celegorm, holding out his hands. “Oh, I’m sorry, let me take him –”

“He’s fine,” Celegorm said, crossing his legs under him and letting the toddler climb into his lap, where he began to poke at the shiny pin holding his tunic closed against the cool spring wind. “Where are your parents?”

“Well, sir, I’ve got five siblings, and dad’s been sick, and then I overheard young master Merry planning to try and follow Mr. Baggins when he left to go back to his dwarves, so I thought I wouldn’t really be missed if I went along to protect him, being as he’s only thirteen, and then young master Pippin followed us somehow, and then we got in a fight and I – I don’t know where Master Merry is now,” he finished, mouth trembling slightly. “I think maybe the trees ate him.”

Aredhel slid down from the tree, and she and Celegorm stared at each other in mutual incomprehension.

The toddler stuffed one of Celegorm’s braids in his mouth; he automatically pulled it out again.

“You . . . ran away from home to follow Mr. Baggins to Erebor?” Aredhel said.

“Master Merry did,” the presumably-older-than-thirteen hobbit child said. “I followed him to look after him, and Master Pippin isn’t supposed to be here at all, he’s supposed to be with his mother.”

The toddler gave Celegorm a bright grin. “I Pippin,” he said. “That Sam.”

“How long have you been lost in the forest?” Aredhel asked, and Celegorm mentally kicked himself; both boys looked far too rumpled and dirty to have just wandered out of the Shire that morning.

“It’s been four days since I lost Master Merry,” Sam said, color rising in his cheeks. “And five days before that we lost Mr. Baggins, and he lost the road before that, and – and we’ve been lost ever since and I don’t know – I saw the smoke from your campfire and I thought it was a house –”

Aredhel moved slowly over to him, as if he were an animal that might spook, and offered him a handkerchief; he was visibly fighting exhausted tears.

“Sam tired,” Pippin confided. “Trees are scary. Big cousin Merry gone.” His lip wobbled. “Please help find Merry?”

“Come sit by the fire, and we’ll get you some food,” said Aredhel, offering the boy a hand. “You need to rest, if you’ve been wandering this forest for nine days.”

“Eleven,” Sam said as he stumbled after her and Celegorm rose to follow, Pippin on his hip. “Mr. Baggins came in here and got lost, then two days later we got lost and then five days later I got loster.”

Celegorm stirred up the fire and got out the cooking pot, and Aredhel gave each of the boys a strip of dried meat while they waited for the food to be ready. Their camp was more permanent than the usual ones they made while on the road, so they had a firepit built with a rock shelf to bake bread, logs arranged into seats, and a windbreak built all around. He watched them out of the corner of his eye as he mixed flour and water together in a bowl; the older child was watching his hands intently, the younger was chewing on his strip of meat with determination and babbling something half-intelligible to Aredhel, who was nodding gravely.

“I’m making quickbread,” he said to Sam as the dough came together.

“But you’ve got no oven, sir.”

“You don’t have to use titles with us, little one. My name is Celegorm, or Tyelko if that’s easier; that’s Aredhel, my wife. And I don’t need an oven for this kind of bread.”

“Tyelko,” he said slowly. “A-are you sure? I mean, you’re an elf-lord, and I’m just a hobbit.”

“I’ve never been a lord,” said Celegorm, blissfully ignoring his past. “I’ve seen what it did to my two older brothers, and no thank you to that. You’re not ‘just’ anything, Sam. That is your name?”

He nodded. “Samwise, in full, but Sam’s fine.”

“You’re not ‘just’ anything. You’ve kept yourself and your . . . brother? alive for over a week in a treacherous forest, and you found our camp when many older and wiser folk have passed right by.”

The boy blushed. “He’s not my brother, he’s one of Master Merry’s little cousins. He’s a Took, that’s why he followed us.”

“Adventure!” said Pippin, throwing out his arms and nearly smacking Aredhel in the leg.

Sam sighed. “He’s been having a grand time even though we’ve been missing meals right and left, but if this is an adventure, I don’t think I like them much.”

Celegorm began to shape the dough into flat circles and toss them onto the rock, noting with amusement that the boy was fascinated. “We can’t carry much with us, since we rarely have horses, so we’ve found some easier ways to make food in our travels,” he explained. “Do you want to try making one?” He held out the bowl.

“My hands are all over pitch and dirt,” he said, looking at them.

“There’s a little stream just up the incline, go wash up. It’ll keep,” he said, pointing in the direction he meant. The boy sprang to his feet and hurried off, reappearing only a few minutes later, pink-cheeked and with very clean hands.

“Good,” said Celegorm, and handed him the bowl. “Ever made anything with clay, like a plate? It’s the same idea. Not too thin, or it’ll fall apart and be hard to get off the fire, but not too thick, or it won’t bake through.”

He was a quick study; even though his first little loaf was misshapen and slightly too thick, by the fourth they were almost as neat as Celegorm’s. Aredhel had gotten out some apples and a large chunk of cheese a farmer had traded to them in return for running off some wolves threatening his sheep, and she flicked out one of her daggers and began to peel and slice the apples. Pippin watched her with round eyes, the end of his jerky forgotten in his hand.

“What have you been eating in the forest?” she asked. “Neither of you have anything but your clothes, do you?”

Sam frowned. “I had a bag, but I lost it the night we lost Master Merry. A tree took it. There’s berries and mushrooms I know from the woods around home in here, so we’ve been gathering those, and a few days ago there was a plum-tree, though the fruit wasn’t quite ripe and anyway I never found it again. Master Pippin found a squirrel’s nest this morning, and I cracked the acorns for him.” He produced a handful of somewhat winter-worn nuts from his pocket. “But it’s not enough, especially with him being so young. I was thinking – was worrying –”

Celegorm poked the bread with a knife and satisfied himself that it wasn’t going to burn too much if he took his eyes off it, then moved over and put an arm loosely around the boy, giving him space to back away or say no. Instead, he leaned shyly towards him, one small hand clutching at the hem of his tunic.

“His parents will be so upset,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes with a fist. “I tried to take him home, I did, but we were already out of the Shire and I didn’t know where I was, I’d never been further east than Bywater before, and never on my own, it was d-dark –”

“Shh, it’s all right now.” Celegorm carefully patted the boy’s back, which was barely larger than the span of his hand. “We can help you find your way home.”

“Oh, just for Master Pippin,” he said, sniffling. “I need to find Master Merry and then help him catch up to Mr. Baggins.”

Celegorm and Aredhel looked at each other questioningly.

“You don’t want to go home?” she asked.

“I do, but I can’t.”

“Won’t your parents miss you?” She started peeling the apple she held again, but there was sudden tension as she gripped the dagger.

“I suppose they will,” said Sam, leaning more heavily into Celegorm’s leg. “But I’m the youngest and everyone’s always having to look after me even though I can take of myself, and m’dad’s been sick ever since the winter cold got into his lungs last year, and he takes care of Mr. Baggins’ house for him but he can’t do so much now so mum’s got to help him and my brothers too but it’s a big place and the Sackville-Bagginses have been coming around a lot and it’s getting harder for him to run them off for Mr. Baggins, and I want to do something to help and not just be in the way, so I’m going to find Mr. Baggins and see if I can’t fetch and carry for him on his travels, I mean, he's not getting any younger and I’m strong for my age and I could help and then maybe he won’t be wanting to find a new caretaker for Bag End when he comes back and then dad won’t have to go back to farming so much, he’s got a bad leg from an accident before I was born, he can’t –” He finally broke off with a sob. Celegorm ran his thumb across his shoulders as Aredhel moved over to pull the bread from the fire.

“And I might have lied a bit to mum and dad, I got Rosie to write a letter for me to leave them but I said Mr. Baggins hired me to help him travel,” he added, only looking up when Aredhel gently pressed some of the bread into his hands. “Thank you,” he said very politely even though he was still crying. “And if I go home now they’ll know and they’ll be so disappointed.”

“Got to find Merry,” said Pippin, tearing into his own bread. “Not going back!”

“We have to take you back to your parents, Pippin,” said Celegorm. “You’re too little to be wandering around the wild lands.”

“I run away again,” he said defiantly. “Know how now. I am going to see airber.”

“See who?”

“The mountain Mr. Baggins lives in when he’s not at Bag End,” Sam clarified.

“Oh, Erebor,” said Aredhel. “Why do you want to go there so badly?”

“Want to see the dwarves, and the dragon, and the treasure . . . and the big lake,” Pippin nodded. “And the big bear man.”

“The dragon is gone now,” she told him. “Not even his bones are left.”

“Uncle Bilbo said there’s a dragon of gold.”

“There is a statue of the dragon,” Aredhel admitted. “But it’s not nearly as big.”

“Do not care. Adventure!”

~~~*~~~

They meant to take the two hobbit-children back to their homes, they really did, and yet, somehow . . .

Spring turned into summer as they searched first the Old Forest and then Bree-land for thirteen-year-old Merry, who had managed to vanish without a trace. It was far too late for Sam to hope to catch up to Mr. Baggins after they finally stopped looking for him, but he still did not really want to go home now that he had made up his mind to see the world outside the Shire, and five-year-old Pippin was dead set on seeing the dwarves of Erebor, so as summer cooled into autumn Celegorm and Aredhel packed up their things, left trail markers to their talan and camp for Estel and some of his friends, who were coming to watch the border for the winter, and set off eastwards, all their belongings on their backs and the two children riding on Huan.

Young Sam grew quite adept at making camp and preparing food on the road, diligently copying Celegorm’s every move when he allowed him to follow him as he hunted. Pippin had the time of his life playing with Huan and tumbling at Aredhel’s heels, and eventually wore her down into teaching him how to fight with a child-size dagger (that was really more of a table knife). Neither of them faltered even as they crossed the cold passes of the Misty Mountains or went under the dark roof of Mirkwood, and they loved the winter they all spent in the Lonely Mountain, despite missing Mr. Baggins, who had gone with the King on a diplomatic trip to Gondor.

When Mr. Baggins next returned to the Shire, he was saddened to learn that the Gamgees’ youngest had disappeared, thought to have fallen into the river while playing and drowned, as an unfortunate hobbit did every few decades. The letter he had left for his parents went undiscovered and unread, for it had fallen from the shelf he had set it on and slipped into a crack in the floorboards. Bilbo also heard that his little cousins Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took had gone missing one night, having snuck out of their holes to play together under the moon as they sometimes did despite their parents telling them not to many times, but that last time neither of them had ever been seen again.

On the banks of the River Running, Astar Turcafinwion sounded out his letters, reading slowly as his father’s finger traced over the page. Across the campsite, Tancanirmë Irission sat between his mother’s legs as she guided his hands through the motions of cleaning and sharpening his first real sword, made in the forges of Erebor.

Well, they’d wanted to stay with them, and Celegorm and Aredhel were happy to raise children together, despite never wanting to bear any of their own.

Chapter Text

When most people wanted to go north from Gondor or Rohan, they followed the Anduin, and traveled close to its banks. There were strange lands on both of its sides in the north; on the east, there was Mirkwood, and on the west, there was Fangorn Forest, and worse, the legendary realm of Lothlórien, said to be ruled by an elven witch-queen.

Caranthir was unimpressed by Mirkwood, for it only held spiders now that Sauron had fled, and spiders were moving target practice and obstacle course combined into one fun package; he felt comfortable under the eaves of Fangorn beneath the protection of the ancient tree-shepherds; perhaps most mundane of all, the rumored witch-queen of Lórien was his cousin Artanis-don’t-call-me-Nerwen-Moryo-I-mean-it, who had thrown up all over his shoes the first time she had had alcohol, and cried whenever she saw a centipede, and also one of her husbands was his older brother, so while going into Lothlórien held the risk of being hugged half to death and asked boring questions about how he was doing, there was nothing that terrible about it.

Haleth might have felt like most of the race of Men about the lands around the Anduin at one point in her life, but centuries of living with possibly the most feral family of the Eldar to ever exist had raised her tolerance for the weird and dangerous to astronomical levels, and she too had come to view giant spiders, sentient trees, and her cousin-by-marriage Galadriel with a jaded eye. Anyway, anything that wanted to harm her had to get through her husband first, and while he liked very few people, he would fight Eru Ilúvatar himself with his bare hands for the ones he did, and he liked her very much indeed.

What this meant was that on their biannual trip through Rohan to see if there were any horses they wanted to buy, they didn’t bother following the Great West Road or the Anduin to go back north, where their home lay far up in the tundra, and instead went more or less straight north from Edoras, though they usually did move eastward to follow the Entwash so they could water the horses they bought.

This year they had only found one that was acceptable, but she was beautiful, and they were proud of her. There were very few horses left that could compare to the elven-steeds of old, and their entire family was still taken by surprise every time one of their mounts barely lasted a decade before becoming too old to travel with them, to their sorrow. This one was a pretty spotted grey creature, and the Man they had bought her from swore up and down that her sire had been the great white horse that belonged to the King and who often escaped his pasture to go where he wished across the plains; though they were skeptical of that, she was worth the price he asked, and so they were taking her home.

They were walking, and Haleth held her lead, planning out how best to add her to the rather intricate breeding program she had developed. Caranthir was walking on the mare’s other side, already beginning to mentally prepare himself for the inevitable family reunion they would receive as they passed Lórien. He’d gotten as far as his new plan for dodging Maglor (hide behind Haleth, then trip him and run away before Argon caught him) when he inevitably forgot he didn’t like to be hugged that much and tried to hug him anyway, when the mare shied badly at a noise from the reeds on the bank of the river, knocking into him and nearly sending him into the water.

It also meant he fell directly towards whatever had made the scary noise in the reeds.

Haleth was swearing in the ancient tongue of her birth as she kept the mare from bolting, and Caranthir was nose-to-nose with a tiny blonde Man-child who was crouched on the bank of the river, mud smeared across her face and a fierce look in her eyes. She was also holding a knife.

She was holding it wrong, and he found himself reaching out and correcting her grip without saying a word.

She stared at him, once again dropping her guard, and he almost corrected her again before his brain caught up with him and realized that this was not one of his nephews or nieces. He gave her an awkward wave of apology and got to his feet, intending to resume their journey.

“Why did she try to bolt?” Haleth asked, and he blinked at her.

“She’s just sitting on the riverbank,” he answered, confused, and then realized that she’d meant the horse. “Oh. There’s a girl on the riverbank.”

Said girl picked that very moment to emerge from the tall grass and stare at them.

“Hello, child,” said Haleth, who was the social butterfly of their partnership. “Where are your parents?”

She shrugged. “Father was killed by orcs last month and mother died last week,” she said in heavily accented Westron. “My Uncle says girls don’t fight and have to wear skirts and my brother is a – a jerk, so I left.”

“Ah,” said Haleth, and shot him a look. He returned it blankly.

‘We’re like four days from the last sign of any village,’ she said at him. ‘How did she get out here? Is she all right? Is she on her own?’

‘She just told us her parents are dead and she ran away from her uncle’s house,’ he pointed out. ‘I’d guess she’s alone, unless the brother is also lurking in the reeds.’

“Are you out here on your own?” he asked, since Haleth didn’t seem to want to.

The girl nodded and then raised her chin defiantly, planting her muddy feet into the trodden grass and once again holding the knife wrong. Again, he reached over and adjusted her grip. She bit him on the wrist.

“Ow,” he said encouragingly, though it had felt like a tickle compared to his brothers’ teeth. “Good job. Next time try for the underside, where the veins are.”

“I’m not going back to Meduseld!” she spat.

“Neither am I?”

“Oh.” They stared at each other, neither quite knowing where to go from there.

Haleth sighed, shoved the mare’s lead into his hands, and moved forward to kneel in front of the girl. “My name is Haleth, and this is my husband Caranthir,” she said, switching to Rohirric, which made some of the frustration disappear from the girl’s body language. “What’s your name?”

“Éowyn.”

“Is your brother named Éomer, by any chance?”

A faint look of outraged disgust made her nose wrinkle; it was rather cute. Caranthir blinked.

“Yeees,” she said reluctantly. “But he’s a jerk. He says war is for men.” Her eyes had found the shape of the sheathed sword hanging across the small of Haleth’s back, and she looked wistful. “But you’re a woman, and you’ve got a sword, and he isn’t taking it away from you,” she complained, pointing at him. “So Éomer is wrong.”

“War is for anyone unfortunate enough to be swept up in its tide,” he said, and she squinted at him.

“What’s that mean?”

“Fighting hurts,” he said bluntly. “You get hurt, you watch everyone you love die in front of you, you die. War isn’t very much fun.”

“Oh,” she said, taken aback. Her fists clenched. “I just want to hunt orcs!”

“Well, I don’t see why you can’t just because you’re a nís,” he said, baffled. “The scariest fighter I know is a nís, and she barely comes up to my chin, but she’d start a fight with Eru himself for half a stale loaf of bread and win. She’s terrifying.” He thought for a moment. “More proof that my brother’s insane, I guess.”

“What’s a nís?”

“It’s the elvish word for girl,” Haleth said, after coughing into her sleeve for a while. “But I think that the problem here isn’t that you’re a girl, it’s that you’re, what, five? You don’t have the training or the arms to hunt orcs yet.”

“I’m seven,” Éowyn said indignantly. “And nobody in Meduseld would listen to me, and Uncle said he forbade everyone from teaching me how to fight even if they would, so I left, and serves him right!”

“Hey, wait, is your uncle the King?” Caranthir asked, finally realizing why she looked vaguely familiar; it was something about her complexion and the set of her brow.

She scowled ferociously. “I’m not going back, I’ll just run away again,” she threatened.

“I didn’t ask about you going back, I just asked what he did.”

“Oh. Yes, Uncle Théoden is the King.” She kept scowling. Caranthir stared at her.

‘Haleth. Haleth. Look at her, she’s perfect. Don’t tell me that if we had a daughter she wouldn’t be exactly like this, and this one’s free. You don’t even have to give birth to her.’

Haleth put her head in her hands. ‘Moryo, she’s the King’s niece. We can’t just walk off with her.’

‘Why not? It’s worked for literally every other one of my brothers.’

‘None of them were kidnapping royalty!’

‘Elrond and Elros, and that worked out just fine,’ he said smugly, ignoring several important details of how that entire chain of events had gone, like the attempted murders and the death of his little brother. ‘Curvo’s younger one is somewhere in the line of succession for the throne of Erebor. And I’m like at least fifty percent sure that Nelyo’s youngest is actually the second son of the Steward of Gondor that everyone in the taverns thinks he murdered.’

‘What,’ said Haleth, jerking her head out of her hands to stare at him. ‘Wait, we’re going to talk about this later.’

“Why are you staring at each other like that?” Éowyn demanded, hopping up and down a little.

“We can talk to each other mind-to-mind,” Caranthir said. “Do you want to come live with us? Because honestly, your education has been awful if you’re seven and still don’t know basic knife-fighting stances, and if you won’t go back to Meduseld, I’m not sure where you were going, but there’s not much around here.”

“I’m going to Dwimordene, and I’m going to ask the sorceress if I can be her apprentice,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then I’m going to ride a big horse and kill orcs with, with lightning or something.” She nodded.

“Oh, no, you don’t want Artanis,” he said, appalled. “She and Maglor will just teach you battle-songs. Argon’s pretty good with a sword, but he also does whatever they want him to. You don’t want to be a poet, do you?”

She was looking confused.

“His cousin is who your people know as the Sorceress of the Golden Wood, and one of his older brothers is married to her,” Haleth explained, and Éowyn’s eyes lit up.

“Really? That’s awesome!” she said, turning a worshipful sky-blue gaze on him. Then she frowned. “I don’t really want to have to be a bard, though.”

“Well, that’s what you’re going to get if you ask them to teach you to fight,” he said. “Maglor’s famous for his battle-songs. He fought a dragon once with them. Anyway, if you want to learn how to use a sword or a bow, you’d be better off sticking with us.”

“Sure!” she said sunnily, and skipped forward to take his hand.

Haleth muttered something obscene in her mother tongue and stood up.

‘Look, we’ll wait six months, and then we’ll send her uncle a letter saying we rescued her from orcs somewhere north of here and we got attached to her and only then learned who she is and now we’d like to foster her as a diplomatic interchange of cultures between Imladris and Rohan with a view to a future alliance,’ he said. ‘Or something like that, Nelyo can figure it out with all the nice words. She’s perfect, Haleth, we can’t just let her go back to the river.’

‘We could take her back to her uncle!’

‘Her mother died a week ago and she immediately ran for the hills to chase orcs despite being seven and only being armed with a table-knife. She’s not going to stay there, and we won’t be here to find her again.’

Haleth looked at him, realizing that he was actually thinking this through. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ she admitted. ‘And I do like her, there’s so much I could teach her – argh. I’ve been assimilated,’ she complained. ‘Fine. If she wants to come with us, she can.’

“Right,” he said out loud, looking down at his new child. “Well, do you have any things?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and darted into the reeds and then back out again with a very full pack. It looked heavy, and like she had been carrying it around by dragging it, which she proceeded to do with a practiced hand. She caught him looking at her and scowled. “I couldn’t find one that fit me! I had to improvise, and anyway, this one could actually hold all my clothes and enough food.”

“Very practical,” he said encouragingly. “But that’s going to slow you down quite a bit. Would you mind if we divided up your things between our packs?”

“As long as it’s still mine,” she agreed, and they did so.

When they resumed their journey, Haleth once again held the lead, and Caranthir held the hand of their daughter, and all four of them were content, including the mare, for Éowyn proved to be very good with horses indeed and her mere presence seemed to calm her.

Her strength did not last forever, in body or in spirit, and when she was tired they carried her, and when she finally began to process and grieve the loss of her parents they held her and reassured her that they would not leave her as well, and after the worst had passed none of them could imagine a future that did not leave them as a family. Artanis and Nelyafinwë led the ceremony that would make her their daughter in fëa as well as in law, even though she had born to the race of Men, and there was a second peredhel added to the line of Finwë.

When they finally remembered to send Théoden King a letter telling him that his niece was not dead, it was the next summer, and when it was read to the assembled court there was much relief, and crying, and an eager acceptance of the offer of Lord Elrond to have one of his most trusted advisors and his wife, who had both taken a liking to little Éowyn, foster her for a time in the safety of a respected Elven kingdom.

Meanwhile, Merilwë Morifinwiel, named for the color of her eyes and the boundless ambition of her spirit, was shrieking in excitement as she stood in the prow of a tiny sailboat accompanying her parents to the hidden elven-fortress on the Isle of Himling, spreading out her arms to the wind and the waves. Her father was steadying her with a hand holding her sword-belt, and her mother was steering; she did not know it, but through chance and the preoccupation of her uncles with their affairs in Middle-earth, she was the first mortal-born to set foot into the last true stronghold of the Ñoldor – woven about with Song and elf-magic so thick that not even seabirds could land there, the only place west of Valinor that had a hope of turning back an assault by Sauron himself at the peak of his strength – since it had been built above drowned Beleriand in the beginning of the Second Age.

Not that she cared at the moment; she was more occupied with trying to catch sea-spray on her tongue, and that, Caranthir thought, was as it should be.

Chapter Text

“Please,” said Pityafinwë – and it was Pityafinwë, young and scared, not stoic Amras or playful Ambarussa – kneeling before him, Eluréd and Elurín huddled together behind his taller form. “I beg you, please take him. I know we brought this on ourselves, but he’s only a baby. He carries no blame in any of this.”

Findekáno was glad he had already sent everyone out of the room as he stood up from his throne and stepped down to kneel beside his cousin. He pulled him into a loose half-hug, and pressed his cheek into the dark red hair. “I don’t hate you, Pityo; I never have. What exactly do you need from me?”

“Our son,” Elurín whispered, and Findekáno turned to look at her. She was shaking a little, and clutching at something wrapped up beneath her cloak; her brother had one arm about her and one hand intertwined with Pityo’s. “We are being hunted for what we did, at the order of our father; if our parents knew he existed they would kill him and make us watch. He had nothing to do with it, he didn’t even exist.” Her breath caught. “Please, my King, I will do anything you ask if you will take him.”

“I will take in all of you,” he said instantly, but both Pityo and Eluréd were shaking their heads.

“No, we can’t,” said Pityo, also trembling beneath his arm. “Nobody but us, and now you, know he exists. We need to keep it that way. I – I was not clear in my petition. Please take our son – my son – and claim him as your own. I know there is no way you could have had a child of your own, but surely you could say he is a refugee, or a foundling from a battlefield. He cannot be associated with our names.”

“What is his name?” he asked as Elurín drew the infant from under her cloak. He had silver hair like her, but even as he watched, it slowly shifted to the deep russet of Amras.

“He can’t control his shifting yet, but so far it’s only been hair and eye color,” said Eluréd, anxiously watching Findekáno’s expression of shock. “It’s because our great-grandmother was a Maia. When he gets older he’ll probably be able to shift into animal forms as well, but he should know what he’s doing by then.”

“When will he be able to control it?”

Eluréd winced. “It took us about ten years.”

Findekáno nodded. “I’ll think of something. After all, there are a lot of Maia in service to Morgoth, and many battlefields . . .” he trailed off. “Though if you do not wish to have him thought a child of rape, I will not use anything close to that as an excuse.”

“Anything, as long as no one even dreams he is mine,” said Elurín.

“Why do you think of that first?” Pityo asked, and then horrified understanding crossed his face. “Oh. Oh. He never said . . .”

“He did not wish anyone to know, but, well, I found him. There was nothing he could hide from me.” Findekáno sighed. “But that’s not important right now. Don’t worry; I’ll obscure his parentage as much as I can, and definitely I can point all guesses away from you. Hardly anyone knows you are married, do they?”

“Not many, just my brothers, and maybe their parents have guessed.”

“He tends to imitate whoever he sees,” said Eluréd. “He’ll probably look just like you in a few days. That won’t give us away.”

Findekáno nodded, and held out his arms as he shifted away a little from Pityo. “His name, or the one you wish me to give him?” he repeated as Elurín passed her son to him; he was light and warm in his arms, and a sudden memory rose up of holding Arakáno when he was an infant.

“I named him Gil-galad,” she said, watching him with longing. “But Amras named him Artanáro, and we think that you should give him a new name, anything you wish.”

“Why Artanáro?” Findekáno asked, curious.

A sad smile flickered across Pityafinwë’s face. “I think that his natural coloring is almost identical to my mother’s,” he whispered. “When he was first born, and when he is very deeply asleep, he looks so very much like Telvo, and like Nelyo.”

Findekáno stood up, holding the infant to his shoulder, soothing him as he opened sleepy eyes. “I will love him as my own,” he vowed, holding each of the trio’s eyes in turn. “And no matter what happens to me, I will make sure he is cared for.”

~~~*~~~

He went to Nargothrond a week later, with the still unnamed boy. He needed to think up a really confusing and vague explanation for where he had come from, and his cousin Finrod would doubtless be willing to help.

She received him with delight, and didn’t bat an eye when he asked to speak to her privately. When he came into her rooms and uncovered the baby, drowsing in the sling across his chest, something indefinable flickered across her face for a moment, and then she turned away to stir up the fire.

“Where did you get them?” she asked.

“He’s my son,” said Fingon, and wondered why the line of her shoulders suddenly went rigid for a moment. “I mean, I adopted him. He’s not actually mine, obviously. That’s impossible.”

“Oh,” said Finrod, in a small voice. “I didn’t suppose you had been disloyal to Nelyo.”

“I don’t think he’d mind if I actually wanted a child, you know? But I’d definitely talk to him about it first, and then we’d probably try to find a nís we both liked to be the mother – but anyway, what I’m here for is, I know who his parents are, but nobody else can know, and I need to make a lot of fake trails for who they could possibly be.”

Finrod was still facing away from him, gripping a blanket she had picked up rather tightly. “Do you – want a biological child?” she asked.

“No, not now that I have him,” Fingon said. “That’s not important. I came to ask for your help in confusing literally everyone else alive.”

She finally turned back to him, smiling, but there was a bit less enthusiasm than he had thought she would show at the prospect of pranking so many people. “Of course I’ll help you and Nelyo,” she said, handing him the blanket.

“He doesn’t even know I’ve adopted him.” Fingon winced, nodding in thanks and starting to extricate the baby from the sling. “I should probably have written him a letter so that he knows about it before the gossip gets around. Right now the story is that I found him abandoned on the way here, I staged the entire finding very carefully with the help of his real parents. But I want to start implying things about who his parents are, because –” he sighed. “Look, this is a big clue as to who they are, but he’s got Maiar blood and he keeps changing his hair and eye color. His parents said he’ll most likely be able to shapeshift into animals too when he gets older.”

“You came to me, not him? Why?”

“Going to him would be too close to the truth,” said Fingon, who had kept his marriage a secret for hundreds of years and hadn’t realized yet that technically the only person he had to answer to now if he wanted to marry was himself, since his father was dead, he was the High King, and his brother Turgon hadn’t even left a mailing address when he had fucked off into the mountains somewhere to build a hidden city. “In more ways than one,” he added under his breath. “But nobody would think you and I would ever want to have a child together, so I was thinking that we could start alternate rumors that he’s mine with some secret wife or something, and that he’s yours with a secret husband or lover. And leave the possibility open that they were Maia or part-Maia and that’s where he gets that from.”

Finrod had turned away abruptly again, and moved to stare out the window into the river-cave far below. She appeared deep in thought – at least, he assumed she was, and the baby was waking up, so he didn’t have much attention to spare for his cousin.

“Or a rumor that you found him and then gave him to me because you thought he was mine and I brought him back here because I thought he was yours and then we realized we have no idea where this random baby came from and it’s all confusing but not really very interesting,” Fingon theorized, rambling more to keep the baby entertained than anything else. “I suppose it’s a lot harder for you to have secretly had one than me, given that literally anyone who’s seen you around for the last year or so could easily disprove it.”

“I was gone for about seven months out of the last year, all at once,” Finrod said, sounding a little muffled. “I was out fighting, but people could say I was pregnant, and I was with only a small group of some of my most loyal soldiers. Nobody would believe they weren’t covering for me. How old is he?”

“I think about six months?” Fingon guessed. “His mother was a little hazy on dates, since she was preoccupied with surviving. Shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Isn’t everyone, these days? You probably shouldn’t swear in front of him either.”

Fingon considered this. “Probably, but I don’t think it’s very realistic. Me not swearing in front of the baby, I mean.”

A silence fell, and he watched the firelight glimmer off the radiance of Finrod’s hair, and the thought passed through his mind that she was very beautiful, and the only other person in the world who was more dear to him was his husband, and then he blinked hard, wondered why he was thinking that, and looked away from her.

“Orodreth,” said Finrod, finally turning around, and Fingon startled. “I could ask Orodreth if he wants in on it. I trust him.”

“And he actually likes níssi,” said Fingon. “That might lend some weight to a rumor that this is his son.”

“Huh?”

“Doesn’t he? I thought he was married to, what’s-her-name, isn’t she a Sinda?”

“I don’t think they were married,” Finrod said vaguely. “I think she was just a friend who wanted to be a mother.”

“Dammit. Well, if I thought he had a wife, so should a lot of people, and it’ll just be extra rumor.”

“Why is it important that he likes níssi?”

“Well, you know,” said Fingon, waving a hand. “Nobody but you knows that I’ve never looked for a wife because I’m already married to Nelyo, but I’m pretty sure everyone thinks that it’s because I prefer néri, which isn’t a lie anyway, just I’m very specific about which one, and you’ve never married because you don’t like néri and anyway you’re engaged or promised or something to Amarië, which is incredibly good taste on your part, she’s amazing. I forgot where I was going with this.”

Finrod was unhelpfully silent.

“Oh, right. We both like the same gender, so babies are rather hard to come by accidentally.”

“ . . . yes,” she said eventually.

Fingon put the baby down on the blanket on the floor so that he couldn’t fall off the chair and crossed the room to stand by Finrod, who was once again staring into the fire, but he kept his head turned a little to make sure he was all right. “I’m sorry I brought her up,” he apologized. “I know you miss her dearly.”

“Yes,” said Finrod, a definite quaver in her voice. “I miss her every day.”

He put his arms around her, and she turned around and cried into his shoulder, even though she was slightly taller than he was. It was a lot easier than when Maedhros wanted to cry on him, he thought, and then frowned.

“I love her more than I have ever loved anyone in the world, and I will be faithful to her until the end of days,” said Finrod against him. “Yet I know that while I am on these shores, there is no hope for my love to ever be returned.”

“I’m sorry,” Fingon said again, uselessly, and raised a hand to stroke through her unbound fall of golden hair. Her fingers curled tight around the fabric of his tunic, and for a long while, there was no sound in Finrod’s rooms but the crackle of the fire and her quiet sobs.

~~~*~~~

(from a heavily encoded letter sent from Fingon Ñolofinwion, the High King of the Ñoldor, to Maedhros Nerdanellion, the Lord of Himring)

 – but anyway, the reason I’m writing to you early is because Finrod reminded me that I should tell you now that I have received a child, about six months old, and I have adopted him as my own. I don’t want you to hear about it through gossip or something first. He came to me through special circumstances and I cannot ever speak of who his real parents are to anyone, not even you, though I am sorry and I would tell you if it would not place him in so much danger.

I’ve done some planning with Findo and we’re going to start concurrent rumors that he’s my son with a secret wife, her son with a secret lover, and Orodreth’s son with his Sinda friend whom he had a daughter with when she wanted to be a mother without having to find a husband (don’t worry, he’s in on it too, and he thinks it’ll be hilarious). He looks like no one in particular owing to being partially Maia, so any resemblance one way or another will soon be replaced.

Don’t worry, his creation was entirely of both parents’ free will and I know this to be the truth.

We’ve named him Ereinion owing to the absurdly high number of kings of one place or another he’s now related to by adoption, but I know the names his parents originally gave him, and I will trust you with them. Please do not ever tell another soul, unless you know it is safe to do so, or I am gone and he needs to know his birth names.

His mother called him Gil-galad, and yes, she was Sinda, and his father called him Artanáro, for he came with our host from Valinor.

Not even Finrod knows his birth names, and she knows the most about him save anyone but you. While I’m thinking about Findo, I’m a little worried about her. I fear living in such isolation in Nargothrond isn’t making her happy. She was very disconsolate about being separated for so long from Amarië, which is understandable, but she told me that she feels that while she lives, there is no hope of her love ever being returned, which struck me as an odd thing to say.

Wasn’t their engagement or arrangement or whatever it was their idea? I didn’t think it was arranged by Uncle Arfin. Surely Amarië loves her equally in return?

If she doesn’t, and never did, and is going to break her heart when they eventually meet again, I’m going to kick her ass and hopefully you will be right beside me. Finrod deserves all the love and happiness in the world, don’t you think?

I know it’ll be a little difficult to arrange, but surely we could pay her a visit together? Perhaps in half a year or so, and Maglor can take your place in Himring for a month or two. She is seeking out my company quite often, even though I am mostly busy looking after Ereinion, and she is upset that I will be leaving her so soon.

Which reminds me, if you have any ideas for plausible yet slightly scandalous (the better to stick in peoples’ heads) rumors for the origin of Ereinion, do let me know. The more the better, and ask Maglor for inspiration too.

Oh, Nelyo, I am about to send this, but I must add that she was walking about her rooms today, Ereinion in her arms, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever beheld, excepting perhaps when I found you alive upon that mountain. What do you think of us asking her if she would be the mother to a child of ours, should we ever be free of our duties and able to have one as we desire? I think she would be amenable to the idea if we approached her with respect, and certainly she deserves both our respect and our fidelity for the friendship and trust she has borne us since we were young. She may not love us in the way we love each other, but we are her closest friends, and surely we could make the relationship work?

Anyway, I had to tell you, and when we meet again I shall share the memory of her radiance with you, if you like. I hear that people say Galadriel is the most beautiful of Finarfin’s children, though to me it will always be Findaráto, and of course you are the most beautiful of all of us, without question. Yes, you are. Stop making that face.

I mean it, or when I next see you I will –

(the Númenorean scholar who found and eventually managed to decode the letter was bitterly disappointed that it didn’t contain any interesting battle strategies, and completely overlooked the facts that he could have turned most of what his people believed about the history of the Elves on its head, absolutely debunked everything written in the Laws and Customs of the Eldar, and started at least three enormous scandals (or written an interesting and comprehensive guide to Elven marriage-customs in the First Age) – if he had only bothered to tell someone about it; as it was, he tossed it into a box, and it ended up in the great archives of Minas Tirith in Gondor, and was re-found in the Fourth Age by Annaduinë Neylafinwion and Paránë Telufinwion, who said “Ammë, you were an idiot,” and wisely stopped reading before the end in self-defense, and “Ew, why are your parents like that, why did I read all the way to the end, can I wash out my brain, no wait, were they talking about my brother?” respectively, and then gave the letter back to its intended recipient, who then cried all over it, rendering it mostly illegible)