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Amon Darthir without Gil-galad was a place with its heart torn out. It had been foolish of Fingon to begin building his days around him. Or was that only his old way of thinking, that flinched away from feeling as if from hot coals? Perhaps he had been right to do it, to make the best of his time with Gil-galad. Where he had gone wrong was in failing — again — to prepare for the loss before it came. He should have known that the truth would have to be told – all of the truth – and that he was living only on stolen time.
He had done it too often before, snatching handfuls of joy in defiance of the oncoming night, and waited for the reckoning to find him later. Now he tried to return to the former pattern of his days. He spent less time alone in the solar, and more hunting, and he fought knight after knight to yielding in the great practice-ground; but the exercise, which had long helped him avoid painful thought, had stopped working.
He continued to practice with the spear. It was less fun without a partner, but he had no desire to ask anyone else to spar with him. Alone, it was almost a dance; he kept his drills linear.
Attack, parry, counter. It was a heavy thing, the style of spear Gil-galad favoured, nothing like the throwing spears with which Fingon’s cousins had once hunted boar. There was a balance to it: High guard. Low guard. Move the hands wider and shift into half-staff.
The little world of the spear drill was a world mapped into eight directions, eight radiant beams of light. That made the drill, perhaps, less of a tool to banish memory than to summon it.
-
Finrod sent a copy of his monograph on Gil-galad’s conception winging northwest for Fingon’s benefit.
I don’t know that I mean to publish any of this abroad quite yet, the letter said. But I’ve had it written out for centuries, and I do think there are practical applications of the theory that would make it worth sharing. Not without your permission, of course, nor his – but it might make it all easier for you to explain. We are going to have to say something – I don’t mean to keep up the old lies any longer, as I said – and I know that the how of it all was not your strong suit…
There was a polite note from Gil-galad attached also, offering greetings and good wishes and little else. Fingon thought about preserving it in his study, next to the horse-shoe – Gil’s first letter – and then thought better of it.
-
Fingon had only lingered in Tirion for the first year or so of his second life, and he had spent much of that year in his parents’ house before the thought had come to him to build his tower. He had been back a handful of times since, and at times over the years members of his family had come north; but the visits were never quite successful, and their searching looks and questions something he could do without, and more and, as the centuries slipped by, more years began to pass between the visits. He had forgotten how loud the city was, how close together the houses were, how many of them there were: how busy it all was.
Or had Tirion been quite as busy, centuries ago, when he had ridden north a second time in his life and not planned to come back? In the years since, had the city had slowly filled itself back to the capacity it had held in the years before the Exile, and grown greater still?
It was still Finwë’s city of white stone and golden tile, of crystal stairs and pointed spires, tall towers and busy streets – and, above them all, the great, great spire of the Mindon Eldaliéva with its golden lamp like a second sun.
Fingon could close his eyes and summon up Barad Eithel behind them, grey and brown and practical, built in a rush of great haste and need, nestled among the mountains to guard the mouth of the Sirion. It had been not unlovely, though almost as far removed from Tirion-upon-Túna in full glorious flower as a city might be. He could see Dor-lómin, where he had built his first bachelor’s tower in the days before Hador the Golden had been born and proved worthy to hold it.
That had freed him to leave Dor-lómin and to go to his father, to fill the void left by Turgon and Aredhel when they vanished; to fill the void left in Fingon himself by Maedhros’s obdurate watch in the East. Had he been waiting for Maedhros even then?
Not quite; but he had hoped that they might snatch more time, even between the great grinding mills of their separate duties. Some time they had had, but not enough to live on, and not enough for him to keep waiting in Dor-lómin alone all through the Long Siege.
How little he had known of loneliness then.
-
He rode into Tirion through the Great Gate. It was enough to slip the hood from his head and reveal his Finwion features to the guards, who were less guards than heralds or informants. Aman was a land without watch-words or interrogation, and they waved him past after a glance. He rode on through half-remembered streets to the Great Square, knowing that Finarfin the King would hear, soon, that one of his wayward nephews had come home.
The Great Square: there once torches had flamed in the dark, and Fëanor had spoken of the lands to the West, of freedom, of vengeance, of wildness and adventure! There Maedhros had joined hands with his brothers and sworn the Oath, and Fingon had been too far away to do anything but watch. They had laughed as they did it, vertiginous with the great daring of defying the Valar. How strange that that was what hurt now: that they had known so very little of what was to come that they had laughed, his seven cousins, who had not been murderers then, who had not then been damned beyond Return.
Ruined Formenos was not haunted or haunting, only sad. Tirion was the place which was haunted for him: every corner of it, every glowing lamp-post and bell-filled tower, every well-swept street and arched doorway. It had changed, but not so very greatly. It was still the city where the lies of Morgoth had passed from ear to ear in the years before the Exile, where Noldor had gone armed in the street.
It was still the city where he had laughed and played and fought with his siblings and cousins. He’d been sick in that fountain, hadn’t he? He had nearly come to blows with Celegorm at that tavern, or one very like it; he and Aredhel had practiced archery together in the gaming-fields past that arch, or one very similar, placing improbable bets on each shot. He had certainly walked with Maedhros down that path into those gardens.
How carefully, a younger Fingon had thought, he had concealed the strange promptings of his heart.
-
“Fingon,” said his mother, perfectly shocked, then opened her arms to him.
Fingon allowed himself to embrace her; to squeeze her with all the pent-up longing of the long years in Beleriand and the regret of never looking back once he had followed the torches north. She was laughing when he finally set her down, dark hair coming down from its severe arrangement and her silver combs falling out.
“What was that for?”
“I missed you!”
“And I you,” she said, and the laughter began to leave her eyes, “for a long time now.”
-
Mother meant home, and safety, and the scent of ink to him; it always had.
His father’s house had also meant home for him in his first life, before the flight north. The familiar halls were still frescoed with faded scenes from the Noontide of Valinor, ancient images lit by painted Trees that no one had the heart to cover over, grown so faint now that little could be made out but a figure here, a figure there, limned in gold or silver. The floors were still inset with a mix of precious and merely pretty stones, the diamonds only growing brighter as they were trod underfoot century after century.
His father was working in the great study, as he always had, and Fingon felt himself stiffening like the boy of long-ago being led to punishment as Anairë his mother led him ineluctably thither, joy on her face.
“He’ll be so pleased to see you,” she said, and then the heavy bronze double-doors that blotted out all household noise were being pushed open, and Fingon’s father was looking up from behind his massive desk.
Past and present clicked dissonantly together when Fingon saw him, as they always did now: Beleriand and Aman, father and High King.
Fingolfin still looked absurdly youthful, his long dark hair held back from his face by a silver band. The fret-lines on his brow smoothed out in shock at the sight of his eldest son hesitating on his threshold.
“Father.”
“This is a surprise,” his father said, pulling formality around himself like a robe, and stood to greet him.
Fingon had thought perhaps he wouldn’t be angry this time, as though the painful work of opening himself to Gil-galad would allow him to let go of the past; but all the old love was there, springing up in him, and the old anger, too. It choked him.
“It’s very good to see you,” Fingolfin said. His eyebrows were anxious. “Is everything all right?”
“Well enough.”
His mother looked between them.
“It is, Mother,” Fingon told her.
Like the earlier thought had called Gil-galad’s presence into the room, his mother said, “Are you— Is this—? Oh, Fingon! We heard that Ereinion has Returned at last!”
-
Fingolfin had shut himself up in silence after the Flame, and then he had given Fingon orders to secure the borders of the Ered Wethrin, orders that Fingon and his knights had obeyed in good faith. And while they were gone, his father had ridden off alone on his great horse Rochallor, all the lonely way to Angband.
Fingon had not known until it was too late to go after him. He had not known until the moment Fingolfin died: the moment when all the birds in Hithlum had risen, screaming, into the sky.
He had been left to take up the place which Fingolfin had abandoned in the certainty that there was no hope now of success, that all that was left for a High King of the Noldor was a terrible stewardship over their people as one by one they all fell to the darkness, a grim duty which would hollow out the self and the heart. He had left that bitter work to Fingon, and Fingon had left it in turn to Gil-galad; and Gil-galad, against all expectation, had made a glory of it.
-
“You’ve gotten taller since I last saw you,” Fingon said, badly stretched for conversation.
“I don’t think I have,” said Argon, unhelpfully.
He’d been taller than Fingon before he died. Fingon remembered that, his outrage as first one younger brother and then the other overshot him. But this tall? Surely not!
“Of course, you haven’t seen me very much,” Argon added.
“You died so quickly.”
“Fingon,” said their mother.
Argon said, “I meant since.”
There was another silence.
Perhaps it wasn’t appropriate, but it was true. His youngest brother had been of an age to be known as an equal only briefly before he had died. They were familiar strangers now, ones who shared only a resemblance of bone and colouring and long-ago memories of youth and ice.
“Anyway,” Fingon said, “I hear you’re getting married?”
That was a safe conversational gambit, surely. Weddings! People loved weddings. Everyone loved new starts and fresh beginnings, particularly after so many endings.
“Yes,” said Argon. “You sent your regrets about missing the betrothal ceremony. Do you mean to come to the wedding?”
“Certainly I shall!”
The faces of his brother and parents suggested that there was no certainly I shall about it. Fingon had sent too many regrets south over the centuries, answering empty courtesy with empty courtesy.
“We’ll understand if you can’t manage,” said his mother, and something about the way she said it was so careful – so certain, that he might find it hard to attend a wedding – that he flinched.
Fingon had spent centuries carefully crafting his defences, hiding despair and anguish deeply enough behind layers of distance that even he couldn’t touch them; but he’d lowered his gates for Gil-galad, he’d opened the doors and the windows and allowed him into the keep, and now the walls were in ruin around him.
They all noticed. He could feel them noticing. But they let it lie, as they had let so many things lie since Fingon had come back from Mandos: as though he was a wild bird they were afraid to startle into flight.
-
Turgon was more difficult. He always had been.
He swept into the atrium in a swirl of trailing robes a few hours after Fingon arrived in Tirion, Elenwë in his wake. Her share of Vanyarin beauty was a gentle one: cream instead of honey, butter-blond instead of gold. Yet Fingon couldn’t see her without seeing also her drowned face, sealed away under the ice, hands pressed in white fans against it.
She smiled at him, and he couldn’t see anything but her dead eyes and Turgon, kneeling on the Helcaraxë with the snow gathering in his dark hair, his raw hands spread over his wife’s.
The current Turgon wore white gems in his hair, not snow. They regarded each other, Fingon sprawled with his legs crossed at the ankles, casual in his travelling clothes and his dust, and Turgon standing tall and stern in blue and silver.
Finally: “It’s been some time since we had the honour of your presence.”
“A few years,” said Fingon lightly. Well, a few hundred.
“Orodreth says that you dropped in on him a few months ago.”
“He’s not within the walls.”
Turgon’s expression said what he thought of that sophistry. “Kind of you to visit him, but not us.”
“I was on an urgent errand.”
Turgon tilted his head in such a way that Fingon couldn’t help being reminded he’d once worn a crown. His own crown, after his death. “So I hear! Where’s your son?”
“Visiting with Finrod at the moment, actually,” Fingon said, and recrossed his ankles.
Turgon had always had too keen a sense of his weaknesses. If he knew Argon too little, Turgon knew him too well.
“And why is that?”
-
Fingon had never seen Turgon dead. That was something to be grateful for. He had only seen him weeping and raw, and then grown cold, and finally the shape of his absence after he vanished, taking Aredhel and Idril and a third of the Fingolfinian host with him.
Turgon had not announced he was going. He had simply gone. The lines of communication between Vinyamar, Dor-lómin, and Mithrim had gone silent, severed as if with a knife. They were gone, all the Elves of Nevrast; gone overnight, the scout said.
Fingon had needed to see it for himself.
He had ridden over the Ered Lómin, then to the western coast, looking all the while for signs of war, of battle, of ambush. He had looked for Orc-camps, and scorched earth, and heaps of dead; for barrows raised up over sites of massacre, or the remains of stinking pyres.
He had found nothing.
That Vinyamar was a dead city he had known already before he reached its gates. All the Sindar who had dwelled in the green lands of Nevrast were gone, or else had hidden themselves so well that Fingon would never find them unless they chose. The land was empty, and it felt empty: and all that was there in Vinyamar was the crying of gulls and the distant roar of the tide coming in.
There had been no traces of Orcs.
He had dismounted from his horse and gone walking through Turgon’s city, his guard falling into silent train behind him. He had wanted to call out – to Turgon; to Aredhel; to little Idril; to high-hearted companions of the ice, to Glorfindel and Ecthelion and Egalmoth. And he had feared to, lest he awaken some sleeping evil in the abandoned stone walls.
Turgon’s great hall had been full of echoes. His high seat was still there on its dais, but the cloth of state above it had gone.
There had been no signs of a great panic or a sudden disaster. There was no work left unfinished, no looms with wool still half-woven upon them, no animals left behind to starve. The people of Vinyamar had had time and choice. Some things they had taken with them, wherever they had gone, and others they had left – furniture, tools, some possessions – neatly, tidily. Several houses had draped what was left behind with linen, as though to protect them from dust.
They had gone, and they had known they were going, and they had not expected to return soon.
They had left no word.
-
Fingon blinked memory away and gave Turgon his brightest smile. “That’s his business. He is grown!”
“I’m sure there’s a very good reason that Ereinion is visiting Finrod,” Anairë said, and exchanged a meaningful glance with her steward, who, only a little ahead of schedule, began ushering everyone to their seats.
They were dining with a level of grandeur Fingon didn’t remember them bothering with much unless they had guests. Someone had worked the kitchens into a frenzy after Fingon had turned up, and the table bristled with crystal and gold plate.
He took his accustomed seat at his father’s left hand.
With a stare at him across the table, Turgon took the seat to the right, huffing his breath like he’d been displaced. Elenwë sat beside him, and Argon, raising his pointed eyebrows a little, sat next to their mother, who was still smiling determinedly as she gazed around at them all.
It wasn’t one of the formal rooms: this was a much smaller chamber, used for eating as a family, and even so, the table had had to be reduced to fit the number dining. There was no one seated at Fingon’s other side, in the place from which Aredhel had once inevitably stolen food from his plate after she’d fed too much from her own to the hound leaning against her knee.
“Are we expecting anyone else?”
“Idril and Tuor are on Tol Eressëa, and so is Elwing. We can’t all drop everything on the spot the moment you deign to visit at last,” Turgon said, who had.
Fingon had to remind himself that Turgon had.
Turgon had come to dinner as soon as he received word that Fingon was here; and he had come out of Gondolin to join the Union of Maedhros after his long silence. He had come, longed-for but not truly expected, and Fingon had known the last and greatest burst of joy he had ever felt in that life when he saw his banners.
At the sight of Turgon’s banners and the sound of his horn, Fingon had felt the ice between them crack. He had known that despite everything, his brother had come for him. He had died knowing it.
They didn’t talk about it. As the first course was laid, the conversation limped on, politely eliding death, Beleriand, and Fingon’s large adult son, newly Returned.
He could see what Gil-galad meant now.
Talking was how you sorted things out, he’d said; it was painful, and it could cost you things of value, as Fingon had already discovered, but without it there was nothing but the frailest layer of ice over freezing water, and the certainty that at some point even that would fail.
“There’s something I ought to tell you,” he said, putting down his eating knife. “Several things, really. I probably ought to have a long time before this.”
The conversation stopped. Turgon’s glass faltered on the way to his mouth; Fingolfin paused in mid-swallow. Elenwë turned her drowned eyes on him.
“Is it about your son?” Argon asked, cautious but not as cautious as the others. He thumbed the silver ring on his hand. “Your wife? You’ve never said anything at all about her.”
“Indeed. It’s been – noticeable.” Turgon.
“I don’t even know her name,” their father said. “I know it must pain you to speak of it; but if you are ready at last, I would dearly love to hear of her and your life in Beleriand after – Well! And of young Ereinion.”
“We have been waiting so long to hear,” said Anairë. She was smiling, so very hopefully, and Fingon realised anew that his family thought that his long self-exile had been one of mourning for lost wife and son, and that now, at last, it was coming to an end.
“That’s because I never took a wife,” he said. “I’m afraid it was all – rather more complicated than that.”
Incomprehension; rising dismay.
“Ereinion is your son?” his father asked.
“Oh yes,” Fingon said. “He is certainly that!” Then he let the arrow fly. “The thing is – he’s also Maedhros’s. And Finrod’s.”
-
There was a lot of shouting.
-
“I never quite believed you’d wed. I spent centuries wondering what had happened, what the trick was,” Turgon said. “I suppose it’s a relief to know at last.”
His tone suggested that it wasn’t, really.
“I cannot imagine what that was like,” Fingon said. “To be cut out of counsel, and left to wonder–”
“Please,” Fingolfin said tiredly.
He had the same look on his face that he had used to have in the days in Hithlum where his crown was giving him a headache; or in Tirion, when Fëanor was being particularly wearisome.
Had Finwë looked like that when Fëanor and Fingolfin fought? Fingon couldn’t remember. His grandfather had grown weary of the fighting long before his two oldest sons had. He had always dealt with it by either absenting himself or moving to stand with his hand on Fëanor’s shoulder. Perhaps it had been meant to reassure or quieten, but it had read to Fingolfin as a statement of his father’s blind support of Fëanor yet again, each and every time.
His mother and Elenwë had their heads bent over Finrod’s notes, which Fingon had produced when it came to the technical questions. The thing about having cousins with foresight was that most of the time it was insufferable, but, every now and then, it came infinitely in useful.
“The potential applications of the technique seem very interesting,” Elenwë said, brightly determined. “Think of it; children for whomever desires them! So many have wished to have more children than either their spirits or bodily desires support. Think what it might mean, to have no more women fear that they might suffer the fate of Míriel Serindë – it may change everything.”
“Yes,” Anairë said, some colour coming back into her face, and set down Finrod’s papers. “That is a gift; one would need willing and consenting Maiar, of course, in cases of male union, and in traditional unions where the female partner is no longer able to give of their spirit, but in cases of – I believe dear Finrod is calling it gynogenesis – you wouldn’t need even that; only their aid in reworking and reweaving the vital essences to form a new fëa and hröa in the right concentrations, because either female partner could carry. And there could be children for those who have no wish to marry at all, yet still desire them! It could alter the choices of many in the future –”
“I did hope you had found happiness before you died,” Turgon said quietly, under the talk. “Something better for yourself than Maedhros Fëanorion’s barren Doom.”
“Hardly barren,” Fingon said. “And – not always unhappy.”
“Should I be glad of that, then, though it meant Maedhros Fëanorion knew joy also before he died? He drove my grandson’s wife to suicide, burned their home, and kidnapped their children. What joy should I wish him? I have longed to meet your son; I cannot say that I thought to meet his!”
“Also, Finrod’s,” Argon said, listening in, again unhelpfully.
-
The next three courses were no better.
For their mother’s sake they spoke of less controversial things, although Turgon’s eyes stayed icy-blue and sharp across the table. Argon’s forthcoming marriage, and Idril and Tuor on Tol Eressëa, and Anairë’s latest committee-wrangling, and Fingolfin’s administrative headaches.
He wasn’t High King any longer, but Finarfin had delegated several concerns to him once he came home from Mandos, especially after Finrod got married and started living away from Tirion most of the year. He had promised to return and take up some duties once his daughters were all grown, but from what Fingon had seen and heard of the great estate he and Amárië were building at Eldamar, he rather doubted that would ever happen.
After the marzipan towers that had been hastily assembled in Barad Eithel’s likeness as a delicate attention to Fingon had been reduced to rubble, Turgon drew himself up to his — excessive — full height.
“Fingon, a private word?” he asked, in the high courtly Sindarin of Hithlum.
“Certainly,” Fingon said, in the same language.
Fingolfin looked between them, something drawn in his face.
You are not Finwë, and we are not Fëanor and Fingolfin, Fingon wanted to tell him. Instead he said,
“It’s all right, Father. Turgon?”
-
They went where they had always gone, when they were boys who had thought they were men and had known so very little of what their adulthood would truly hold.
Fingon’s boyhood rooms upstairs had been connected to Turgon’s by a series of antechambers, and one of those had a deep balcony, looking out over Tirion and with a clear line of sight through the gap in the Pelóri. The house had been planned in such a way to catch in every room the full glory of the Mingling, to let its inhabitants bathe in Tree-light like swimmers in water.
In these Later Days, it was full of unexpected shadows, lit by weaker light sources its draughtsmen had never foreseen or planned for.
They weren’t Fëanor and Fingolfin. Neither of them would bring a sword into their mother’s house, so the worst Fingon could expect was a blow.
He was half expecting it, either at once or in a moment, when Turgon would say something too awful and Fingon would have to hit him first. What he didn’t expect and hadn’t prepared for was for Turgon to turn and fold his arms and say,
“How bad is it?”
“What?”
“Ereinion,” Turgon said. “You blanch when I mention him. What’s happened?”
“He went to visit with his other father,” Fingon said. “What’s odd about that?”
“And after that? Should I expect to hear word of your son paying another filial house-call? Granted, the Void itself is a little hard to traverse –”
“Don’t.”
“Then don’t defend that criminal to me!”
“Have I done so?”
“You had a child with him—”
“Be fair!” Fingon cried. “I also had a child with Finrod!”
Turgon’s face did something quite indescribable, and then –
“He was so very persuasive,” Fingon said, trying to catch his breath after the wave of hysteria that had overcome them both and left them gasping. “It seemed like a good idea at the time? I was rather drunk –”
“As though you needed to tell me that!”
Fingon hiccupped.
Turgon recrossed his arms, trying to look as stern as he had before, but couldn’t manage it, quite. The laughter had been too explosive, the tension too thoroughly torn. “‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’,” he said, and rolled his eyes skyward. “How many times have you said that to me?”
“Oh, far too many,” Fingon said; that he had not done so for a very, very long time went unspoken. “But I don’t regret this one. How could I?”
“I’m glad of that, then. For your sake – if not for his.” There was no possibility of being confused about who Turgon was referring to. “It was good to see you laugh. I haven’t seen you laugh this lifetime.”
“What else could I do? Finrod made diagrams. Weep, perhaps!”
“I have long wished you would.”
“Why wish such a thing on me?”
“For the same reason it gladdens me to see you laugh,” said Turgon. “You’ve been moving, and breathing, and eating and drinking – I hope; it’s not as though I have seen you often – but you might as well have been in Mandos all this time. And now: you burst all Fingon-like – what used to be Fingon-like – into Tirion without so much as a warning! You put your feet up on the table and announce that you’ve broken the sacred chains of begetting that Eru Ilúvatar ordained for the Children before the birth of Arda, with not one, but two cousins! I wanted to throttle you! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt that?”
“No,” said Fingon.
“Your last letter. A hawk with a message on its ankle – dear brother, I suppose you won’t ever read this, but just a line to say that I’m gathering up the last of the leaguer – minus Nargothrond, which has gone all wobbly, and Doriath, of course, and sadly the Bëorians have been nothing to speak of since the Flame – did you hear about the Flame? Father’s dead – anyway, one last big push against the Morgoth! Win all or lose all, etc. Would be wonderful to hear from you at last, hope you’re well, here’s the battle plan Maedhros and I have been working on, just in case you care –”
“It wasn’t quite that casual,” he protested. “I had a scribe put in all the polite bits!”
“I found your body,” Turgon said, looking out from the balcony over the tall trees, across the terraces of Tirion in their white and gold beauty, familiar as a cradle-song, and unreal as a dream when set against the memory of Beleriand in its high colour and its horror. “What was left of it. I wrapped it in my cloak. Someone tried to give me your crown, flattened and crushed as it was. Your blood and brains were still on it. I put it on your chest instead. It was buried with you, as far as I know.”
Fingon looked away too. He said nothing. Then he squinted and said, “Is that a new house? I wonder that they were allowed to build so high and so close.”
“You didn’t look like my brother any longer,” Turgon said. “Your face was nearly concave, and the burns – We picked up as many of your teeth as we could find, in the mud.”
“I thought it was sweet that they tried so hard with dessert. Brown sugar for Barad Eithel – that was clever—”
“Do you know how many of my family I buried in Beleriand?”
“—I wonder how they got the shape of it right. Do you think Father drew it for them?”
“Five,” Turgon said, relentless. “You. Elenwë, on the ice. Argon, on the field – you remember. He was just a boy. Aredhel. Do you even know how she died? Poison’s not a nice way to go, whatever Dark Elf concoction her husband used. She seemed fine at first, though the wound swelled, and the redness began to streak up her arm – our healers still thought they could stop it. Then she started to seize. Her muscles contracted, and her eyes went rolling back, and there was nothing we could do for her. It wasn’t fast. I don’t count her husband as one of my dead, though I’ve had to answer for his execution. So that’s still four.
“The fifth was Father. Did you know they sent Father’s body to me? I’m told it was meant as a kindness – but I can’t tell you how it felt to watch an eagle draw near, burdened; to wonder what it held, who it was bearing, what blessing had come for me; to see it alight, and its feet uncurl, and then watch it let flop what was left of Father after Morgoth’s hammer. He was worse than you. Paste and shattered fragments of bone, held together – more or less – by his skin.”
“Don’t.”
Turgon’s mouth twisted. “I don’t like to think about it either! I’ve spent a great deal of time replacing the images of the dead with the living, where I can. But you’ve hidden away like an injured bear, curled up around your wound and licking it in the dark.”
“You’ll have to forgive me for my absence,” Fingon said.
“Have you forgiven me for mine?”
“How could I hold that against you?”
“Ulmo ordered it.”
“So I have heard!”
“Finrod exercised less discretion in doing the same bidding. Do you blame me, that I used more?”
Fingon said again, “How could I?”
“You do,” Turgon said. “You always have! You came out of Mandos, but you never came home. Father thinks you hate him; Argon that you can’t be bothered; Mother is afraid of saying the wrong thing and making you cut even what little contact you permit and walling yourself up in the wild.”
“It’s not any of that.”
Though of course it was, in part. He had been left alone in Beleriand, the last of Fingolfin’s line to sit in Barad Eithel. He had always thought of himself as the last. He had held Hithlum to the end, alone, and died.
But it wasn’t only Fingon’s abandonment in Hithlum working itself out in reverse in Valinor. He wasn’t such a child, to say you left me? I’ll leave you! and run away alone into the dark. He was curled up around his wound, as Turgon had said; half-protecting it and half-concealing, curving what was left of him about the great flayed part of his soul where Maedhros had been.
“You hoped I had married,” he said, and laughed. It was not the same kind of laughter Turgon had approved of. “I did.”
“I hoped it hadn’t gone that far. That you could still have turned away from him at the end. I wished you joy – and it wasn’t joy he was known for bringing, in Beleriand.”
“Can you tell me that you didn’t suspect, or that you didn’t recoil from what you suspected; that you didn’t hate him and everything he touched? Did all that have no part in the way you went into Gondolin and answered no messages from me but the last?”
“I hated him,” Turgon agreed. They’d been having this conversation with their eyes fixed ahead of them, and now he broke the stasis; he looked with unbearable directness at Fingon, down, his brow creased and his grey eyes slitted. “For crossing the sea with his father, and for burning the ships behind them. For my wife swept under the ice. For everyone who died on his sword before I died, and after. For Alqualondë, and for Menegroth; for Sirion.”
“I’m sorry,” Fingon said at once, and meant it, but knew it was as hollow as he was himself. Apologising wouldn’t undrown Turgon’s wife or unravish the cities that Maedhros had burned and slaughtered in his quest for the Jewels. “I’m sorry for Sirion. Your grandson’s children –”
“I hate him for their sake, certainly,” Turgon said, interrupting him. “I never will know Elros now, and I blame Maedhros for that, and Maglor too! But do you know, I hate him most for what he made of you? You were my older brother, and you irked me with every other breath; I never ran at your heels or looked up to you. You were always far too exasperating for that! To everyone else, you were a hero – prince of Tirion, glory of Finwë’s house, handsome and golden and gifted! Long before Manwë took pity on you, you lived like you had the Valar’s hands on your shoulders.
“And then Maedhros Fëanorion ruined you; or you ruined yourself for him. You killed for him: you went into Thangorodrim for him and came out clutching his severed wrist with the blood spurting through your fingers like blackness. He soiled you and bent you and broke you. He got you killed – don’t tell me that his fingerprints weren’t all over the Union of Maedhros – and then he kept walking his road into the dark like your death didn’t matter.
“And even that is my anger from before, from the other side of Mandos. I should be able to set it aside. My wife is alive, and the dead of the cities he torched come back, one by one. I won’t ever meet Elros or his children, but the other wrongs undo themselves slowly, century after century. I don’t forgive him; but the hate shouldn’t still be this keen.
“I hate Maedhros Fëanorion afresh,” Turgon said, very precisely, “every day, for what he’s doing to you even now. I hate him because you won’t come home until he does. And he never will.”
A wash of acid, bright and sharp, rose in Fingon’s throat. He was going to be sick on Turgon’s robes, or else on his own feet.
“Over the side,” said Turgon, correctly reading his face, and grasped him by the arm and pushed him toward the balcony edge.
He held Fingon while he retched, one hand firm about his elbow and the other on his lower back, and at some point the heaving turned into weeping. Fingon was coming apart at the edges; at all the places where he had lacquered over the unbearable emptiness with distance and with nonsense, with busy-work and disengagement, and his brother was still rubbing his back, only now he had moved so that Fingon’s face was pressed into his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Turgon said into his hair. “I’m sorry; but it needed to be said. It needs to be faced.”
Fingon made a horrible wet noise, and then another; and his brother’s hand stayed pressed between his shoulder-blades, an anchoring weight.
They had embraced briefly after Mandos. They had all come home before Fingon – first Argon; then Elenwë and Turgon together, and finally Fingolfin not long before Fingon himself – and they had been waiting for him when he walked barefoot out of the dark. Everyone but Aredhel, who had died seizing, and her son, who he had never known except as a whisper from the East. Fingon had accepted everyone who had greeted him in the dazed, half-dreaming confusion of Return, and then he had heard what had happened after his death.
That had been the worst part, in some ways. That there had been nothing left to be done. It was already over. While he had been gone, it had finished. Maedhros and his brothers were all long dead and gone from the world. Fingon couldn’t build a boat with his bare hands or walk back over the ice or go to his knees in the Máhanaxar and beg Manwë for something to do – none of it was unfolding still beyond the Sea of Eldamar. It had happened. It had already ended. It was done.
“This was a nice blue damask velvet,” Turgon said.
“Your fault,” Fingon said, snuffling, and then, “I don’t mean that; it was only–”
“Habit. I know.”
“Gil-galad’s fond of Elrond,” Fingon said. It wasn’t quite another deflection, nor yet a direct answer to what Turgon had said. “He often speaks of him – I get the sense that his Cousin Elrond made a habit of despairing of Gil-galad’s more wild flights. I’m told he would despair still more of mine!”
Turgon laughed. “Someone needs to sit on the scions of your line when they have a bad idea, and it’s only right that it should be a scion of mine. I would have sat on you,” he added more seriously. “If I’d been around when you were coming up with your great plan to take the war to Morgoth. I should have been.”
“You were where Ulmo told you to be. It was the right choice. You kept your part of our host safe longer than I did mine.”
“I could have done it differently,” Turgon said. “I could have answered a letter! I tried to send Aredhel to you, you know. That went so badly that it seemed a divine reminder that the laws Ulmo had given me were not to be broken; but still I came when you asked in the end in any case.”
“And I was glad,” said Fingon. He swallowed. They had never spoken of this. “When I saw your banner – only a sort of silver-blue blur in the distance – I was so very glad.”
“I came to save you,” Turgon said bitterly. “I only buried you.”
They didn’t say anything else for a while. Beyond them the cypresses were green and calm, and the city of their birth shone in pearl and honey and chalk and silver, a dazzle against the eyelids.
“Argon’s betrothed is a nice girl,” Turgon added. “Born in the middle of what we’re calling the Second Age. They’re not too far apart, if you don’t count the years he was dead. I took care to look into her antecedents very carefully, given the notorious taste of my siblings.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Fingon said, wiping his face on Turgon’s sleeve. His brother grimaced, but didn’t shake him entirely off.
“Tell me about your boy.”
“No boy, but very much a High King of the Noldor – and he was High King for longer than I, or you, or even Father.”
“What a family dinner that will make,” said Turgon. “Something out of a farce. We’ll have to have Uncle Finarfin over to complete the set – Finrod too, I suppose.” He took a breath. “Is he like him?”
“Finrod?”
“Maedhros.”
For a long time, Fingon had not let himself think that name. He had said it to Gil-galad, and he had said it at his mother’s dinner table tonight, and heard it said again and again: and still it sat under his skin like an agony, like a second network of nerves that throbbed and jangled at the place where he had in horror tried to burn it out of himself.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s like any of us. We didn’t raise him! He’s – tall.”
“That should make you happy. You’ve always hated being short.”
“You and Argon are monstrously overgrown.”
That was habit, too: a once-familiar exchange that they hadn’t had in an Age or more, a Tirion-time argument, from the days when the only things between them were the sharp elbows of personality.
“Tall, then,” said Turgon. “And?”
“Clever,” said Fingon. Suddenly it came out of him in a great burst. “Practical! He did a very good job, you know. Better than all of us put together, and Finrod too, and – everyone else. He was only a child, it wasn’t fair. But he was a good king. He picked up everyone who was left – from Sirion, from Gondolin, from Hithlum, from Nargothrond – and reforged the Noldor, and helped drive Morgoth from his hole. Led them all into Middle-earth – oh, I wish we’d made it further into the continent! – and started again. You know how hard that is. And then he was a peace-time king. We never had that chance.
“He had time, Turgon. Centuries to do things properly. Thoroughly. To think about things and why they were done, and to think again. It sounds like he threw out half of what we brought over from Tirion and rewrote half the laws again himself. And – he was good. He was a good king.”
“So I have heard,” said Turgon. His arm tightened. “And as a person?”
“I think you’d like him. He’s not very impressed by me. I think he had the idea that I was a hero until he came to see what you did: that I was only lucky, that things had always come easily for me, and that for Maedhros I had –”
His voice had gotten stuck. Something devastated had come into it, though he found that he liked to talk about Gil-galad; Gil-galad was an alive thing, a brand thrown into the dry straw of his joyless existence, something which had given great light and left behind ashes.
Fingon had done so many things for Maedhros. If Thangorodrim was the best of them, was the worst the deed that had left the sea recoiling from his touch, or was it the unforgivable thing that had caught in Gil-galad’s throat like a bone?
Or was it Thangorodrim that was the worst? He had gone without a thought into its darkness and brought Maedhros out, and Maedhros, saved, had done what he had done with his life, and finally thrown it away forever into greater darkness still. And even knowing that, Fingon would do it again, and not only because he could have done nothing else.
Gil-galad had come from that flight from Thangorodrim: a brightness out of the black. An unstained thing despite the blood on Fingon’s hands, the blood which was Maedhros’s, always, and which wasn’t. A new thing. A sprig of hope in a dying land; a cutting from a great dead tree, blooming afresh far from its roots.
“I loved him,” Fingon said. He had brought up the foul contents of his stomach, why not his soul? “And he did what he did. And I love him even yet.”
Turgon’s nostrils curled, but his arm stayed where it was. “Of course you do,” he said, sounding only ordinarily revolted. “Did anything ever stop you? Nothing he did ever parted you from him for long! If he showed up tomorrow, you’d go to him.”
“I wouldn’t. After what he did – if he hadn’t cut himself off from me forever by it, I should do it myself. If he stood before me, I would slam the door in his face. I want to strangle him; I would send him away from me with stones!”
“I don’t think you’ll be called upon to prove it,” his brother said drily. “Is that what Ereinion Gil-galad wants of you?”
“I want to,” said Fingon. “Sometimes! I think I could have peace if I could let him go, if I could cut him out of me entirely; I have tried. I am trying.”
“You couldn’t do it any more than you could cut off your head and walk around with it under your arm. You wouldn’t be Fingon if you could. And what I want back is my brother: heedless and headlong, bright and gifted. The Valar’s blessing on one shoulder and the dead hand of Maedhros Fëanorion on the other.”
Another silence. They had never been declarative. This was terrible. Fingon had no idea what to say.
Was this not the grief that had always lain between them? Was it now to be waved aside as though it were nothing?
Somewhere below them, the bells were ringing. Always somewhere in Tirion the bells were ringing.
“Is that your blessing?”
“No!” said Turgon. “That is my lesson. I lived without my wife long years in Beleriand, in isolation: and I did badly. I have lived in the world since my Return, and I have done better. And you have come out of your den at last, and I will not let you go back.”
“How should you stop me?”
“I believe fire was used by Men to smoke bears out,” said his brother. “I should have to speak to Tuor. And if you tell me you mean to go away again — I shall try it! Perhaps nothing less than your son — his — would have drawn you; we have all beaten head and hands in vain against your defences. If you tell me your presence isn’t due to Ereinion, I won’t believe you. I don’t think you mean to leave your work undone. What is it he has asked of you, besides the impossible?”
“Nothing!” Fingon said. “He asked nothing of me — even that. He wanted only to take my measure, and when he had it, he left.”
Turgon gave him a look that was somehow sorry and yet, because he was his brother, also rolled a thought along the lines of did you come up short into it: something far below his dignity and the great seriousness of the conversation, and yet which he still wished Fingon to know he had nobly foregone the saying thereof. “Yet you are in Tirion.”
“You know what I’m like, with a challenge. He didn’t ask me to do better, or to be braver; nor to square my shoulders and speak plainly to my family. And yet it was clear he thought I should.”
“To have a child is always to be challenged to do better. You are learning what all fathers must.”
“It’s awful.”
“Our own father would agree with you.”
Fingon thought about their father, riding off into death with his eyes blazing white flame. It was something he had never seen, only imagined — often — in the short time between Fingolfin’s death and his own. He had been so angry he had gone at all, and so angry to be left behind. Somehow he himself had left behind a worse ruin and a son, though he had not then thought of the child held at the Falas that way, quite.
He thought about Fingolfin’s anxious eyebrows; about his mother’s careful words and the frail flame of her joy, cupped in her hands and shielded from the wind.
Argon, unknown and yet alive now so much longer than he had ever been dead.
Aredhel, seizing.
The family he had never known, the adult Idril and her husband, their son the star of the morning locked into his lonely fate, Elwing his wife in her tower. Their line stretching on over the sea. Aredhel’s child, a shadow at the edge of thought, damned but surely not lost forever.
He said, helplessly, “Do you speak of it? Have you spoken of any of it? How?”
“Come inside,” said Turgon. “Wash your face, and I’ll steal a fresh tunic from Argon. Then we’ll go back downstairs and see them all.”