Chapter Text
When the chisel slipped, gashing the soft part of his palm between thumb and forefinger, Curufin cursed himself for working with wood.
It was too much her art, anyway: Nerdanel, visiting him in dreams that had flattened, lately, to brutal realism. In them, Athair was unreachable—but there she was, passing off an egg-basket into the hands of her least favorite son, or sending him on an errand to the farm up the road. Because it was a dream, the terms changed fluidly, but there was always an insurmountable obstacle between Curufin and his appointed task. His boots were filled with black water, perhaps, or the road ahead was barred by fallen trees. Whatever it was, he tried to defend himself; first rationally, then with rising spirits, until violence rolled across his vision like a thunderstorm and he woke, scrabbling for the knife under his pillow.
He was no carpenter, nor a sculptor of natural materials. He was a smith. But he had also been stymied by forces greater and less tangible than any working craft, and the summer’s occupation had bled away from him as surely as his own lifeblood, singing sharp with pain, was now spilling through cleft skin.
How like Maedhros, to go away and leave Mithrim to a dull death of boredom.
How like Curufin, to let that boredom trick him into mangling himself the same way that—
He cursed again, and hunted for a clean rag. But of course he didn’t keep clean rags in the smithy; he’d never really had to. For one thing, his hands were sure with his hammers and tongs. For another, if one burned oneself at forge-work, the wound was instantly sealed.
Just then, the white light of day slashed across the close, lamp-lit shadows. The door opened, shut, and Maeglin, returning with more fuel, gasped at what he saw.
“Oh, dear,” he cried, though Curufin hadn’t made so much as a sound (since the cursing) and wasn’t seeking sympathy. Hastily, Maeglin put aside his bundle of kindling (he had been working with metal—damn him for being the cleverer of the two of them). “What do you need?” he asked.
“I don’t need anything in particular,” Curufin snapped. “Any rag that isn’t black with soot will do.” The wound would need to be sewn up. He knew that, looking at its pulsing depths, and he hated it.
“Of course,” Maeglin mumbled, turning round and round, until finally, seeming to despair of any other choice, he began to tear at the hem of his shirt. Curufin watched, glad for the distraction, and didn’t try to stop him. The boy was stupid to destroy it, as no doubt that shirt was one of the only ones he had. A cast-off of Turgon’s, maybe, or Fingon’s. Yes, it would be like Aredhel to steal her brothers’ clothes for her pet cause.
Curufin took the scraps offered him and wound them around his hand. His left was the one injured; he was fiddling with a design for the butt of a gun. His thoughts strayed, his hand slipped—it was all over so quickly. The pain was what lasted.
“Shall I fetch anything else?” Maeglin asked, looking rather foolish in his tatters.
Curufin squinted at him. “Some poison, perhaps?” he asked sharply, which wasn’t fair, since the boy had been nothing but meek and helpful all summer, whenever Curufin let him hang around. He was skilled, too. More skilled than anyone Curufin had ever worked beside, save Athair.
(Maedhros was always too nervous. You could feel him thinking, standing beside you. It was vexing.)
Maeglin didn’t say another word. When baited, he always folded in on himself, as if he expected blows to follow taunts. It was somewhat disconcerting, like having a dog trained to fight that would not so much as nip.
His resemblance to his dead mother, the woman whose knowing smile left its mark eternal on Maedhros’ throat, was rather…scarce, all told. True, Maeglin had the same sharp features and suspicious black eyes, but he did not have her malice.
Even when Curufin had had every intention of killing him, he had known that.
“You must learn to take a joke,” he muttered now, keeping his eyes on the bandages. Red blossomed against white, slow yet persistent. He needed the wound cleaned and sewn shut.
He needed Celegorm.
(Curufin did not have much stomach for his own blood.)
He considered an instant longer, but the pain was making his head sickly light.
“Finish whatever you’d like,” was the olive branch he offered to the strange, sad creature whom Aredhel had thought worth rescuing. The boy was content to tinker harmlessly for hours on end—the boy, who might have been older than Amras, though Curufin had never asked.
Maeglin took the order without argument. That meant Curufin could leave his bench, and his own unfinished work.
It had been busywork, really; that was what galled. There were no secret arts in what had nearly ruined him.
Somehow Maedhros had managed, with half a body, to share their family secrets with the world. He had—if the evidence accrued was to be credited—made enough guns to satisfy Bauglir.
Of course, Maedhros had still had his hands when he made them.
A craftsman’s hands are more valuable than the rest of his body entirely. Athair always said so.
One of the strangest things about Athair was that he didn’t always tell the truth.
Celegorm grunted a greeting from the corner of their shared room, where he was, ironically enough, cleaning one of the weapons Curufin had made for him. The smell of oil and gunpowder was soothing, bracing. Better than the smell of blood, though they often went together.
“Have a moment?” Curufin asked, trying for a light tone.
“No.” But Celegorm looked up as he said it, and his face at once shifted into that hawk-sharp scrutiny that always made Curufin feel properly attended to. “Oh, Christ. What’ve you gone and done?”
“Worked myself to the bone,” Curufin answered dryly, playing his part. “Straight through the flesh, unfortunately.”
“Mine or forge?”
“What?”
Celegorm set aside his rag and the small brown bottle of oil. “Did you do it in the mine, or at the forge?”
The question was an uncomfortable one. Curufin hadn’t been down to the mine much, since Maedhros left for Doriath. No—more than that. He hadn’t been down very often since early in the year.
(What did that mean?)
“Neither,” he said. “I was whittling.”
Celegorm snorted. “Ah. Leave that to Amras. Here, are you in need of a stitch? Is that it?”
“Yes.” The pain was bad. Curufin blinked rapidly.
“Pump,” Celegorm said. “I’ll need to wash my hands. You know, as the good doctor would tell us.” The sneer in his voice, just as much in the words, was enough to show that he was speaking of Fingon.
Curufin trailed him through the corridor, past the kitchen where Caranthir spent most of his time, packed in with the women like sardines in a tin. Funny, since Caranthir had never expressed the slightest interest in womenfolk. He only loved their work. If Caranthir knew what Curufin had seen, and done, he’d turn redder than he ever had before.
Celegorm was quick at the pump, and then he squinted up at the sun overhead as if calculating something. It was afternoon; late September. Maedhros had been gone nearly two weeks, and it seemed that Curufin was the only person who had considered the possibility that he was not coming back.
“Well?” said Celegorm. “Did you bring me any thread?”
“I thought you’d have some.”
“I was cleaning guns, not mending britches.”
“Oh.” Curufin blinked again. He was beginning to feel watery and strange. The bandage was soaked, now, but he was hiding it from Celegorm a bit, crumpling his hand shut.
Pain was like—it was difficult to understand how one could be vexed about a little nick to the hand, but endure a broken bone. Endure what Maedhros had. Was it a certainty that torment of that degree, enough to leave vicious scars, would grind your spirit to nothing? Was that what was wrong with Maedhros?
But of course, he’d been just as weak before he was lost, as after he came back.
In some ways, weaker.
In some ways, pain had put a little steel in him.
Curufin was not sure he liked the change.
They found a needle and thread in Caranthir’s things, making a hasty (and necessary) mess of their rummaging. Celegorm had observed that Curufin was trembling, and said there wasn’t any time to spare.
Curufin didn’t mean to tremble, of course. It wasn’t like one of Maglor’s fits.
And only a little slash of a wound—a deep slash, but nevertheless survivable—
Celegorm dragged him outside again, without regard to the possibility that people might see, and made him sit on one of the abandoned stumps that some lazy person had left in the kitchen yard. Now it was a stage on which the brat-children Maedhros had brought with him from slavery liked to stand and give speeches. They were strange little creatures, Sticks and Frog. Bold and frightened by turns.
Celegorm liked them. He said he didn’t, and that they were always underfoot, but he liked them.
Curufin suspected that they reminded him of the twins.
“Let’s see it,” Celegorm said. He knelt between Curufin’s knees, while the sun shone down upon them in its full golden strength, better than any guttering candle or dim lantern. Leave it to Celegorm, to like his surgery out of doors.
“Damn that chisel,” Curufin said, trying to conceal how unwilling he was to open his palm. “I shall beat it into a ploughshare.”
“And practice peacemaking, eh?” Celegorm grinned up at him—his quick, Huan-like grin that meant he was trying to distract prey. In this instance, Curufin was the prey. The needle twinkled in Celegorm’s right hand like a tiny arrow. There was a flask of whiskey, uncorked, in the other. “Where’d you get these bandages?”
Curufin tried to stop looking at the needle, the snake-tail of waxed black thread. “The Maeglin-brat tore his shirt to pieces.”
“Saintly.”
“Suppose so.” Curufin shrugged. Nothing mattered. Saints and sinners, mere scratches. Mistakes were nothing but tedium, until they were fatal.
Celegorm tipped the flask up. The sunlight shifted from gold to white, stars exploding.
Maedhros must have screamed. Begged. It must have been ugly. He’ll do it again, if Thingol lifts so much as a finger against him. He’s afraid of pain. That’s what torture does. It makes you more and more afraid, forever. We can’t win out of fear. We can’t—
“Stay with me,” Celegorm muttered. The flask was back at his belt; his left hand was warm on the back of Curufin’s neck. Daylight reclaimed its colors: Mithrim’s dull grey stone, the red-brown dust beneath their feet. Celegorm’s shirt was green, to bring out his eyes.
That was Aredhel had said, narrowing her own in a teasing glare.
“I am,” Curufin mumbled.
We are alone in the world.
The stitches were neat, because all of Celegorm’s work was neat, when it came to marring or mending flesh. Curufin fussed at them anyway, alone in the room he had fought so hard to keep for himself and the only brother he could trust to the end.
The wound would leave a scar.
What does it matter? You have many scars.
And so had Maedhros, before he became nothing more than a walking map of them.
It was after supper. He had barely eaten. Amras had said, Like Maitimo, aren’t you? just to be vexing. Amras was getting troublesome.
Troublesome and tall.
He, not Curufin, had gone hunting with Celegorm some days ago—though of course it was only a trapping expedition, really. Sticks had simply insisted on coming along, and Celegorm wouldn’t risk the dangers of large game with her in tow. Curufin had offered his wire-twisting arts in Celegorm’s service, just as he always did, but he also hadn’t refrained from giving his opinion on children joining in the hunt.
Damned useless, was what he had said, in Maeglin’s hearing, if not in Sticks. Maeglin had eventually joined the hunt too, at Aredhel’s bidding.
Celegorm hadn’t answered that, but Curufin knew that he had heard.
“Leave those alone,” said Celegorm, appearing, as he sometimes did, with surprising stealth. Huan should have given him away by the tap-tap of his claws on the flagstones, but Huan was not with him.
Huan was too enamored with the rest of Mithrim’s dwellers to be always with his master. It had been that way for months. Another change, gradual but uneasy.
“I’m just admiring them,” said Curufin, pretending he wasn’t guilty. Pretending the edges of the wound weren’t become irritated by his exploration.
“No, you’re fussing. Won’t do you a lick of good if you pull ‘em out. Or give yourself blood-sickness.”
“You really should be our doctor,” Curufin mocked. “I daresay, if Fingon dies on the road, we won’t have to lose any sleep over it.”
“Fingon won’t die,” said Celegorm bitterly. “You may be sure of that.”
Curufin let it go, and stopped bothering the stitches. He began to undress—now that Celegorm was here, there was no point in going back out into the wider world.
Sometimes, when the prison of one’s mind closed in tightly enough, the physical distance between wall, roof, and floor no longer mattered.
Celegorm was finishing the weapons-cleaning he had put aside hours earlier. Curufin did not speak again until he was in bed, his good hand behind his head. The he said, as quietly as if someone was trying to eavesdrop,
“We’re wasting our time, sitting by and doing nothing.”
“In Mithrim?” Celegorm was unexpectedly caustic, rolling his spare piece carefully in a scrap of chamois. “And here I thought you’d be the last person angling to leave this place. Leave it to our enemies.”
“I never said anything about leaving Mithrim,” Curufin said, insulted by the very insinuation. It sickened him, the thought of Athair’s wealth—Athair’s legacy—Athair’s bones—left to Fingolfin’s dubious care. “I meant sitting on our hands, staking everything on diplomacy.”
On Maedhros’ idea of strategy, he might have said, but of course, one had to tread carefully on the subject of Maedhros, with Celegorm.
More silence. Celegorm was thinking it over.
Curufin’s skin prickled. Panic and fear weren’t demons that dwelt within him, but that didn’t mean they weren’t gnawing at him from without, trying to possess his every waking moment. Battles that other people could not see were a blessing and a curse. It was in his power to conceal—but it was also his burden, to carry the weariness alone.
“You want a fight, then?”
As long as Celegorm was asking questions, there was a chance of winning him over. And Curufin already had a plan. He’d had just as many months as Maedhros had, to imagine the future.
He had done his duty during those months: contributed his irreplaceable talent and swift skill. But it hadn’t been in Maedhros’ service—not completely. Their goals were entirely distinct: Maedhros had wanted to prove to Thingol, and Hithlum, and Mithrim, and most of all himself, that he was still capable.
Curufin knew from the beginning that no effort in that vein would convince him.
So there you were. There he was, making weapons for his brother, pretending to put aside the insult that that same brother had levied against the dead father they had both professed to love.
“Maedhros has gone to Doriath,” Curufin said, with what he thought was impressive calm. “Yet even as he went, he acknowledged that our enemies are weaving their stratagems in the north. And even as he sought counsel hither and yon, he did not rely on perhaps the most interesting source of intelligence we have in our grasp.” A pause. Then: “Maeglin was with them, Celegorm. With those fucking devils, who are turning San Francisco into their own personal empire. Why, we had the closest shave we’ve risked since Christmas, when you nearly came to—to a bad end, with Aredhel. I know there was a hubbub about all that, and I know I needn’t remind you of the details—but I think I do need to remind you what everybody has forgotten: Maeglin has inside information, and aside from a chance conversation here or there, have we sought to obtain it from him? Leaving him alone under Maedhros’ orders…well, I will call it a show of nobility and mercy for now, but really—”
Celegorm interrupted sharply, “You aren’t making any sense.”
“Yes, I am,” Curufin retorted. Confidence was half the battle, especially with Celegorm. “I’ll make no bones about it: I am far more interested in taking the measure of our enemy, than pleading our cause with allies we may not even need.”
Celegorm shucked off his outer shirt. His silence was impatient, now. Restless.
“I have been watching the little foundling.” Curufin softened his tone, not wanting to seem like a grating scold. Not wanting to domineer, since Celegorm had to be led with an easy hand, firm but not too firm. “Nearly every day, since he’s the only one with the head and hands for smithing in this place. He may be the spawn of a vicious bitch, but he’s meeker than a lamb himself. He’ll help us out of a sense of indebtedness, and he’ll hold his tongue if we tell him to.”
“Hold his tongue about what?”
“Don’t be a blockhead. Do you think I have spent the summer stumbling blindly along with our so-called cousins, praying for a happy harvest and then gawping at Maedhros’ surprise venture, as if the passage of time is a matter of liturgy rather than life?”
“Fuck off. You sound like Maglor.”
“Maedhros chose a good time for leaving,” Curufin countered, ignoring the insult. “I’ll give him that. We’ve recovered from the worst shocks. The…melding of companies. We’ve replenished our foodstock, thanks in large part to Carrie. And we’ve made numerous connections as to craft and industry. Probably more than we need. But there’s the rub—by laying them all at Thingol’s feet, we squander them.” He could not relinquish his advantage now. “I know you thought Doriath was a bad plan, Celegorm. I know it’s eating at you.”
One last beat of silence. Then:
“Aye,” Celegorm muttered. “It is.”
The pain in Curufin’s hand was almost numbed by the certainty of his victory. The roar in his ears, the fear dancing on his skin: these were stilled.
“Very well then,” he said. “Maedhros went south. You and I ought to go north.”