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There is nothing for it but to go after Celegorm, who is in one of his black-cloud moods after Maglor’s nervous pecking. Maglor isn’t a bad sort, but he’s not to be trusted. He can’t watch a pot of stew without burning it, and he can’t walk under a tree without breaking some of its branches.
Celegorm burns and breaks easily, whether he’s like to say so or not.
Sticks is still learning about skirts, and has made a trade with Estrela to wear them on days when Estrela finds time to scratch out new stories with her dripping black pen. Sticks learns words, and in exchange, she plays lady.
Today she learned how to write dragon, and Estrela drew one, too, after Sticks promised not to spook Frog with lurid tales about them. The skirts are damned inconvenient, though. When she wants to run—as she must now, to chase down Celegorm’s long legs—they trip her.
By the time she is out in the kitchen yard—having nearly stumbled over a basket of washing—Celegorm has disappeared. Over the rocky hill and gone, most likely. Sticks glares darkly at Nora, who is chopping kindling chips, and turns back as if she never meant to come this way at all.
Nora’s no friend; Sticks would rather ask Galadriel for help with her troubles, and Galadriel’s as cold as a lizard in the shade.
The whole place has been achingly empty with Russandol gone, but it’s only when the air is sizzling after a fight like this that Sticks feels it. How can emptiness be so heavy?
Fingolfin and Gwindor are good sorts, if you don’t mind their fussing. Beren, when he isn’t moping, is good fun. And Celegorm is best of all when he can be free under the bright sun—clever and yet keeping his mouth shut, which Sticks likes pretty well in a man.
Burning. Breaking.
She shakes her head, and turns towards the garden.
Amras is there, walking the rows, burning the back of his freckle-specked neck. The emptiness in Sticks lurches a little, as if her chest is full of water. She wants to hide, and she wants to go to him.
He sees her and decides the matter.
“Lucy!”
She never quite decided whether he could call her Lucy, but now he never calls her anything else.
“What?”
“Where are you off to?”
It’s a question someone would ask a baby. “None of your concern, little Red.”
He doesn’t scorn her or smile at her, just stares at her with that sad-dog vacancy that looks so wrong on his face. A different kind of emptiness.
“What are you off to?” Sticks asks, not unkindly.
He shrugs. “Aredhel is showing Mollie how to shoot,” he says, which isn’t an answer.
“Why aren’t you shooting, then?” Sticks isn’t above asking another question.
Amras’ hair is shorter than Russandol’s is now, though not so short as Russandol’s was when he was just Red. It falls in his eyes when he tips his head down.
“Sometimes,” Amras says, very slow and deliberate-like, “I’m tired of learning how to fight.”
Sticks steps closer, right up to the edge of the sun-warmed garden soil. Skirts ain’t shoes, and Sticks doesn’t wear shoes when she doesn’t have to. That’s another kind of trade; leave the bounds of Mithrim, lace up the boots that Celegorm found for her in Hithlum. They’re less comfortable than Beren’s moccasins, but better on rocks.
Skirts and bare feet, hunts and boots. Everything’s a compromise.
“Why?” she asks. What he said surprised her; she’s been so fiercely glad of having the chance to hold blades and sticks and stones in her hands, to accept what nicks and scuffs and bruises follow if it means that she can hit a spot on a tree ten yards off. She’s spent so long having to fight fear with naught but what’s inside her—it’s a fine thing to fight it with things that can make a man bleed.
“I liked to do other things, before,” he says. “And now nobody cares what anybody likes. So I just do nothing, sometimes. Don’t you?”
He’s being polite but sort of saucy at the same time, saying these odd words in a gloomy tone.
Sticks wriggles her toes in the dirt. “I don’t like nothing,” she says. “Nothing is…it’s slow.” Then, because she’s not one to be shut up by a boy in a foul mood—“You could whittle. Beats whining.”
He huffs indignantly. “I’m not whining.”
“You’re about to.”
Unexpectedly, that makes him smile. He crinkles his nose when he smiles, like happiness is something that slaps him in the face when it comes at all.
“What are you going to do if I whine? Run away?”
“No.” Sticks folds her arms. “I’ve seen enough running away today already.”
“Who’s running?” Amras asks, stooping to dislodge a flat stone.
“Celegorm.”
He turns the stone over and over in his hand. His eyebrows are like Russandol’s eyebrows: darker than his hair, almost dried-blood color. But nice. There are things that are the color of blood that do not hurt.
“What’s eating Celegorm?”
“Maglor,” says Sticks, who has been reduced to just speaking names as answers, like a fool. Maglor eating Celegorm. She imagines Maglor as a dragon, a sort of lazy, black-scaled one who sleeps in a damp cave and chokes on his own fire.
“Oh.” Amras shakes his head and mutters an ugly word under his breath, but Sticks doesn’t seek any pleasure in scolding him. He’s tired, that much is plain. Tired enough to want to do nothing.
“You could skim that rock along the lake,” Sticks proposes, pointing as if Amras can’t see it in his own hand. “But if you stay in the garden much longer, Carrie will come and put you to work.”
Amras slips the stone in his pocket. Ever since the storm, the sky has been angry but bright, sunlight glittering on everything and everyone. It makes his hair very fine, though Sticks won’t tell him that. “You call him Carrie too?”
It’s her turn to shrug. “Easier to say than Car-an-theer. What was your—your Pa thinking, naming you all such strange things?”
It’s easier to talk about their father, who is safely buried under Mithrim’s ground, than it is to talk about all the others who are gone.
Still, Amras’ eyes blink rapidly, his black-and-goldy lashes fluttering. “He didn’t…well, some of our names are Irish, and some of them are Scottish. My—we are Irish and Scottish. Like you are German,” he adds hastily. “Maybe you were named Gretel or something like that, before you were Sticks.”
Gretel is an ugly name. “Ha! You’d like that.”
“No.” Amras shakes his head. “I like Lucy better than Gretel.”
Don’t care what you like, Sticks means to say, but then the words don’t come. She pulls a Gwindor face to save herself the trouble of stuttering.
“If you don’t care to throw that stone, I’ll do it.”
“Why do you always want to go to the lake?” Amras mumbles, though he starts moving in that direction anyway. You can lead him places you can’t lead the rest of them.
“Same reason you like to do nothing. It’s not where everybody else is hanging about, and it isn’t work.” She smiles at him, now, not so much happy as just—encouraging.
Estrela is always reminding her to be encouraging.
(Estrela was encouraging Russandol, all the way until he kissed her hands and ran away, so Sticks doesn’t know quite what she thinks of Estrela’s reminders just now.)
“All right,” Amras says. He’s dragging his big feet. Plod, plod, plod.
“Don’t you like the lake?”
“I don’t like looking in it.”
Russandol and Maglor nearly drowned in the lake, which might explain why Amras doesn’t care to see what lies beneath its blue-green deeps, but they didn’t drown, and Sticks likes how much the silver surface shows her the sky. You have to find good things in the bad, or you won’t have anything left.
“You don’t have to look in it,” she tells him. “We’ll throw so many rocks in it will be all splashy.”
He nods, accepting her replacement for nothing.
She considers taking his hand, but that would be shocking. Instead, she bunches up her skirts and says, “I’ll race you.”