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The two riders who enter the camp of the Valarin army are no more than fifteen. They do not have the light of the Trees in their eyes, but a strange light of their own. The Elves of Valinor bear the best of weapons and armour, still shining, and display great skill in their drills, but many lack the manner of warriors who had seen battle. These strangers, for all their youth, have eyes sharp and wary and carry their battered weapons with the ease of long use.
Sentries stop them a little ways into the camp. “Identify yourselves.”
One rides forward a little and dismounts. “We are the heirs of the houses of Bëor and Hador, and of the line of King Elu Thingol. We would have you tell King Gil-galad and the commanders that we have come to fight in the war.”
*****
Gil-galad stares in wonder at the two boys.
“It is joy beyond any of our hopes to welcome you. We had all believed you slain. Where have you lived so long, and how were you housed?”
The youth’s smile is faint and hard. “The wild wargs took us and harboured us in their dens, perhaps. Have you not heard of such fables?”
Had they been indeed fostered by wolves, caught between care and cruelty, devotion and danger, he could imagine it producing the same fierce, guarded aspect. He would be glad to embrace them, to tell them they are safe, to make whatever recompense he can for failing to save them; but it is more than clear that they would not desire it. They want to be acknowledged as men - or as elves - as adults, at any rate. And they have lived through more conflict than many an elf who has dwelt centuries in Valinor.
Gentleness must wait until it can be accepted. He accedes to their demands, and sends them to the weapons-trainers to show their skills.
*****
One of the soldiers is assigned to assess Elrond’s abilities before assigning him to a role in the army. He first bids Elrond lay aside his sword and dodge various strikes unarmed, to test his agility and defense. His eyes widen as Elrond evades his strikes with an ease and skill that suggests longer training than could be expected of so young a warrior.
Elrond refrains from mentioning that of necessity he had learned this skill before he was eight.
*****
He shows talent with the sword, and modest proficiency with the bow, and is given a place with a company where he can be trained in fighting in larger groups; in time, he joins in some of the early skirmishes of the war. None of the first few involve great danger to him; the main changes are the novelty of not being grossly outnumbered, and sometimes even outnumbering the enemy. After the fourth, there are some serious injuries, and he goes to the healers’ tents to offer his assistance.
He prefers to take on simple tasks there, bringing water, replacing bandages, things he can do with little thought; great works and songs of healing he would leave to others. But one of the Vanyar has a poison of Morgoth in his blood, and wanders in delirium, and the other healers are occupied. The elf is in no immediate danger, but his eyes are wide and white with terror, seeing some phantom of evil.
With reluctance, Elrond lifts a harp and lets his hands find the familiar strings, playing peace and ease and rest, driving away the memories of the dark, leaving his own locked behind a steel wall. The patient soon breathes easier, falling into a dreamless sleep. Elrond has known how to do this since he was ten.
When Elrond emerges from the near-trancelike state of a musical working, he finds all the healers staring at him. The groans of pain in the tent have faded; not his patient alone, but all the patients, rest peacefully and without pain.
If they ask him How did you do that? he will scream, he will run, he will throw something or hit someone. Stop looking, stop looking, don’t think, don’t think. He feels a gentle hand on his shoulder and lets it guide him outside the tent.
In the sunlight again, he looks up into King Gil-galad’s eyes. Don’t ask me, don’t ask me. Gil-galad lets out a long breath. “Tinúvielion”, he says in quiet wonder.
Elrond can only shake his head in guilty silence.
“Tinúvielion,” Gil-galad repeats. “This is yours; it is a part of you, and it is right.”
Something in Elrond’s chest eases. Gil-galad begins to sing something under his breath; decidedly not a song of power or an epic lament, something with bright, rough rhythm to it. It sounds like the sea, but the sea joyful, not mournful. Gil-galad smiles at Elrond’s expression. “That’s one of the songs of your father and his crew, a ship-song, for building and mending and sailing. I’ve heard it from him many a time. Music’s in your blood, from both sides; don’t let anyone claim it or take it from you.”
He walks with Elrond to a beach near the camp, the water stretching out a clear, brilliant blue. Elrond cannot recall seeing it so, in the last years; he had then seen it rarely, and always a turbulent, angry grey. There by the shore, Gil-galad tells and sings Elrond everything he can remember of his parents’ songs - Elwing’s songs of woods and rivers and stars, stored up in memory of Doriath; the sea-songs of Sirion; a long litany of joyous songs aboard ship, songs for leaving port and for sailing home, to greet fair weather and defy ill - and Elrond begins to sing quietly along.
He suddenly dares to ask Gil-galad a question he hadn’t been able to dare asking anyone. “Do you have a copy of the Leithian? The real, complete one, I mean.”
Of all the things for him not to know - but he has only ever had broken shards of it. An idea of the broad strokes of the tale, overheard by eavesdropping, or asked in moments of angry courage or rash defiance. Fragments he remembered his mother singing when he was young, pieced with other fragments from Elros’ memory. When Elros was thirteen he had plastered together the broken pieces with words of his own and sung it at the top of his voice, particularly the parts about Nargothrond, in defiance of monsters far and near. It had not been good poetry - very much the reverse - but no critique had been offered.
A smile brightens across Gil-galad’s face. “One? There’s far more than one.”
*****
The Leithian is a Great Tale, in the minds of many of the Elves of Middle-earth the greatest of them; but it is not one tale. The story is known, but in dozens of versions - those that grieve Lúthien’s mortality as irreparable loss, and those that celebrate it as escape; those that lionize Finrod Felagund to the near eclipse of Beren and Lúthien, with the Quest of the Silmaril and the Song before Mandos a mere epilogue to his sacrifice; those that begin with the meeting in the woods of Neldoreth, and those that dwell for long stanzas on Beren as the Hero of Dorthonion.
Over the long years of the war, Elrond will memorize and sing every one of them.
*****
As the sun sets, the talk turns from the Leithian to other songs that Elrond has never known, like the Tale of the Children of Húrin, and to songs that have been made in Valinor since the departure of the Noldor. From this comes an obvious question that Elrond, somehow, has not yet asked. “What brought the Valar and the Elves here from Valinor after so many years? Why now?”
Gil-galad looks at him strangely. “You do not know?”
Elrond never knows what things he is supposed to already know.
“Your parents brought them. Eärendil and Elwing came to Valinor to seek the aid of the Valar and the Eldar for the relief of ruined Beleriand, and beyond hope and imagining succeeded.”
Elrond’s mind had stopped functioning halfway through the answer; his breath sounds strange in his ears. “My mother, my father…they are alive?”
Gil-galad’s expression turns wrathful, but his wrath is not with Elrond. He puts a hand gently on Elrond’s shoulder. “Yes, they are alive, and the reason any of us have hope of life. They are in Valinor; from such a journey, they are not permitted to return, but they will be glad to see you when you arrive.” He tells him quietly the tale that wellnigh all other elves of Beleriand know, of Elwing’s flight and Eärendil’s voyage and of the new star that has risen and now rides low on the horizon.
Amma. Atta. His grief for them has been part of him for so long he scarcely knows how to respond to its absence.
“How dare they. How dare they,” Gil-galad says in a low, grim voice, and he does not mean Elrond’s parents.
Elrond tries to hold his voice steady. “In strict fairness - in strict fairness - I do believe they told us what they thought to be true.”
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t true that his enemies were the only home, the only family, he had left. His parents were alive.
He needs to be alone - or rather, he needs to see Elros, who is so much a part of him that there is no difference. He returns to his own tent. Before he goes inside, he looks up, again, at the evening star. Atta. I miss you. I miss amma. I love you both. Thank you. I have to stay, for now - I have to finish what you started - but I will see you again. People do say that words said to the evening star are heard.
*****
The war goes on for years. Elros departs to fight alongside the Edain in Hithlum; it is the first time they have been parted, but they can still speak mind-to-mind.
Elrond seeks out the Sindar, his kin. They are the ones he most hoped to meet here; they are the ones he remembers from childhood play and laughter and song. His father is the faintest of memories, blond, bearded, laughing, tossing him in the air, but his mother and her kin were always around him, guarding, teaching, loving. They should be his home in Middle-earth.
It does not go as he hopes. Not that they are hostile. They are at first as glad to see him as he is to see them. But countless small things make him a stranger - the way he fights, his instincts, his movements; an alien accent in Sindarin, different words, phrases, cadences. Assumptions they would never make; things they take for granted that he would not have guessed. He can learn their history, their stories, their customs - and does, with fervent determination - but he cannot become them, however he tries. Once, in infancy, he was their child-king to be, heir of Elu Thingol and Lúthien Tinúviel and Dior Elúchil. Now, he is an open wound. They love him, they welcome him, they are as kind as they can be, but a thousand little things about him make them flinch. Inheritors of a culture lost and burned and fragmented, they can never take a king who constantly reminds them of their enemies.
The immediate foes outside him, the servants of Angband, are easy to fight. His other enemies are inside him, have made him one of them, and he cannot escape.
He envies Elros the simplicity of the Mannish heritage, half-wishes he had gone with him. It is easier, he says moodily through osanwë, you can get away from it all. The Edain had little contact with the Fëanoreans; their enemies are Angband and its orcs and the Men who serve it.
It is not so simple as all that, Elros returns thoughtfully. The greater part of the Edain are those who remained in Hithlum. Children who heard tales in a forbidden tongue from their mothers, out of sight of their fathers; slaves holding onto memories and learning to live in the world of their enemies. We are freeing them now; but their culture cannot return untouched to that of the House of Hador before the Nirnaeth. The men of the East are part of them, in their ways, in their language, in their families, in their blood. If they would live together as a people, they must accept it, and themselves. He pauses. It does help, to be here.
Elrond feels like a temperamental toddler next to his brother’s thoughts. When did you become so wise?
I didn’t. You weren’t entirely wrong - it helps to be away. Some things need to start healing before you can look at them more closely.
*****
The war continues. Elrond spends more and more time with Gil-galad, who is neither Sindar nor Noldor but something in-between, and never expects him to be something he is not, or to fit into a set pattern. Gil-galad, who does not even have memories of his parents as Elrond does, only what he has been told, and whose father in every way that matters is Círdan of the Falathrim; who has the build of a Noldo, the silver hair of a Sinda, the songs and sea-love of the Falmari, and the wisdom of a king.
Slowly, the scabs begin to fall off the wounds in Elrond’s spirit, and he becomes willing to speak of the years of his upbringing, if only he knew how. Anything he tries to put into words feels wrong, either twisted or incomprehensible or incomplete.
Gil-galad does not press him, but neither does he shy away from the topic when some chance or not-so-chance remark of Elrond’s raises it. One evening, when they are sitting in Gil-galad’s tent, this happens again and leaves a lacuna in the conversation. As the pause becomes strange, Elrond admits, “I do not know what I ought to say. I do not know how to explain, or to feel as I ought.”
“Set aside ought. What do you want to say?”
“I hate him, and I do not hate him. Or, I do not hate him for cruelties. I hate him for kindnesses.”
They do not speak more of it that night, but the words seem to have broken a dam within him, and over time he thinks more often of his past, and speaks more of it with Gil-galad.
Maedhros was the deadlier of the two, but is the less painful to think of. Darkness and flame; long, muted despair suddenly flaring up into perilous wrath. He’d drawn sword on Elrond and Elros more than once, crossed swords with his brother over it, and it wasn’t always clear at such times if he knew who they were or thought them ghosts. More often he threw things, when an unwanted noise or intrusion pulled him out of one of his black melancholies. Sometimes the past seemed to grip him like a vise, and he saw and fought things that were not there; then he was at his most dangerous. Elrond had learned, from watching, that song and music could at times calm and ease him, and tried to use it, half in self-defense and half in pity; before he reached his teens he was more often successful in this than Maglor was.
Maglor.
Maglor had spoken softly to them, and comforted them, and told them that their parents were dead and there was no one else left to take care of them, and that he would protect them and never hurt them. Maglor had taught them song, and harp, and self-defence, and ridden with them on the same horse when they moved camp. They had learned from Maglor language and patterns of speech and history and the lens through which they saw the world, and it had wormed through Elrond as a foreign thing and displaced the distant memories of his mother’s and father’s people, had made him kin to his enemies and an alien to his kin.
If Maglor had been a monster, Elrond might have been able to tear him from the fabric of himself.
The world had begun to change one morning when Elrond and Elros were thirteen. At dawn a trumpet-call had rung throughout the land, and Maglor had stood transfixed, by hope or fear or both, but he would not say what it meant. They had not long to wonder, for that noon a clarion voice, matched to the trumpet, had sounded in their minds, the minds of their captors, and the minds of every other creature in Beleriand:
“Hear! The Army of the Valar stands in Middle-earth. The power of Morgoth will be cast down, and all peoples set free of Angband. Let those who resist him come to us, if they may, and let those who serve him lay down their arms and they will not be harmed. The night is ending; the day is come!”
From that time a change came over both Elrond and Elros; for the first time there was someone in Beleriand besides Maedhros, Maglor, and the orcs and monsters of Morgoth. There was the possibility of somewhere else they might go, and somewhere else they might be, and someone they might look to other than their once-foes. They were willing to defy their guardians, or captors, more readily; Maglor never disputed with them when they did, but he insisted that it was too dangerous for them to depart, and they were best off remaining where they were until the war ended.
Somewhat over a year after the landing of the army, Elrond and Elros had succeeded in stealing a pair of horses in the night, and rode off at their greatest speed, riding all night and day and through the next night, listening always for the sound of pursuit.
There had been no pursuit.
As Elrond gradually recounts part of this, Gil-galad is sympathetic, supportive, reassuring; quietly insistent that no, it was not a betrayal for a child to learn so readily all that Maglor had to teach, nor for Elrond to still sometimes worry about him now. He and Elrond spend more time with some of the people of Gondolin; their culture is not the Fëanoreans’, but it is a mix of Noldor and Sindar even as Elrond’s is, and it helps him to feel more comfortable in his skin.
Yet the more he speaks, the more he sees flashes of pain behind Gil-galad’s eyes that the king tries to conceal. Gil-galad tries to brush aside his inquiries. “It is not important. I care about you and I want to help you; to say anything else would be self-indulgence.”
Elrond looks at him steadily. “What do you want to say?”
King Gil-galad’s face crumples a little. “I am sorry. I am sorry that I was not there in time, that I could not save your people, that I could not spare you this. That we did not find you, and rarely looked, because we thought you already dead. You might have been raised on Balar among friends, and in safety. We failed you.” He sighed, and regained some composure. “And I am sorry now, for this; it is hardly your place to need to comfort me over your own hardships.”
Elrond reaches out and grips his hand. “My childhood is no more your fault than it is mine; if I cannot even fully hate those responsible, far less would I ever blame you, who have done me nothing but good.”
*****
The war passes into its third decade. Elrond and Elros grow from defiant youths into confident adults, and take on command roles. The forces of Morgoth are pushed further and further back. Elrond and his forces are frequently in the van, and he finds himself more and more admired among the Noldor.
Men and elves begin to think, more and more, of what the world will look like after war’s end. The Edain are almost guaranteed to take Elros as their king, and he has grown into the role, wise and valiant, both respected and beloved. Slowly, Elrond becomes aware of whisperings among the elves. Gil-galad’s parentage is obscure, some say; Turgon was the previous high king, and his grandson is here, the son of the Evening Star. Gil-galad is too cautious, too averse to high stakes and swift advances; they do not say it, but one can hear, too Teleri . Gil-galad favours no one group above another, but it is not hard to see that his heart is with his foster-father’s culture. Elrond couldn’t stop showing his Noldor side if he tried, and he is no longer trying. He is Sindar and Noldor and Edain, and it is growing easier to accept all parts of himself. Paradoxically, he feels more welcome and at peace when he is among Sindar now, when he is no longer trying so hard, than in his youth when he first tried to prove himself.
Elrond has no desire to be king of the Noldor, and there is something more behind this new favour that he does not like. Gil-galad holds lightly to his kingship; as refugees on Balar, and now in the midst of war, the elves are united, but if some wish to break off under their own rulers once peace comes, he will not oppose it. There are those who feel the elves are stronger, safer, more secure, united under one leader, that they cannot afford the luxury of division. The Sindar may not truly want Elrond as king, but neither will they be willing to cede Thingol’s heir to the Noldor, as if surrendering him to the culture that stole him from them. Elrond is a way to fuse them together with the Noldor, whether they wish to be so fused or not.
He will not allow himself to be made a weapon against them.
When the whispers around him turn to subtle insinuations to him, he goes to Gil-galad and lays the situation before him.
“Then you have no desire to be king?” Gil-galad asks.
“I have no desire to be used against you, or in opposition to you. You are my king, and my friend, and the closest thing I have to family in Middle-earth, and I believe that you are a good king and what our people need. But why do you ask me what I want?”
“If you truly desired to be a king, and the people truly desired you to govern them, then I would have been willing to step aside when the war was done. I came into the role because there was no one else left to do it, not because I sought it; and one king may be better in one time and circumstance and another, or none, in a different time. But what I have been hearing matches what you have told me now; what the dissenters seek is not the right path, unity at the price of constraining others. I do not expect that all the Sindar will remain with me long once peace has been achieved, and I will not stand in their way.”
“And that is why you are the king we need, in peace even more so than in war. I do not wish to be a tool, or a bond, to hold the wills of others. I do not wish to be a symbol of one thing or another when I am still trying to understand who I am.”
Elrond becomes Gil-galad’s herald and standard-bearer and, with his choices and loyalties clear, and the advance on Angband soon becoming more rapid, the whispers die down.
*****
The war is won. Angband is cast down.
Maglor and Maedhros, who have vanished for the whole course of the fighting, reappear.
Elrond - foolishly, childishly - had at times hoped that they might surrender when all was over.
He sees them only for moments before they flee.
*****
News comes to the camp of Maedhros’ death. Elrond cannot feel any grief; more a sense of relief, followed by renewed worry.
If his spirit has gone to the Halls of Waiting - it’s over, and I hope he finds more peace there than I was able to give him.
If it hasn’t -
Elrond offers his aid to the followers of the Fëanturi who are helping to lay to rest the unquiet spirits that have fled from the ruin of Angband, or that linger still in its dungeons.
If it hasn’t, I’m going to need practice.
*****
Some time later, he takes his leave of Gil-galad and rides south and east, following a faint tie that still glimmers in his mind. The journey is wearisome, but not dangerous, and at last he finds what he is looking for.
“Well. You certainly have fucked up everything mightily.”
He speaks the Hadorian language becoming increasingly common among the Edain survivors. There are some ideas that Elven languages are not designed to sufficiently express.
Maglor looks at his burned hand and makes no reply.
“Are you willing to come back and surrender yourself now?”
“Are you going to make me?”
“I do not intend to take you captive at swordpoint. Will you return of your own will?”
Maglor looks pained. Elrond wonders if it would be kinder to take him captive by force; there is plainly some part of Maglor that desires it, to have the choice finally lifted from him. But he has chosen wrongly at every other turn; Elrond will not relieve him of this last responsibility.
Maglor shivers, and stares at the ground. Very quietly, he says, “Do you forgive me?”
One word, Elrond knows, and he will turn around and come back. One word.
A lie.
“I am going to need you to be more specific.”
If Maglor had been willing to go through the litany of all the things for which he needed Elrond’s pardon, he would have heard a mix of Yeses and Nos, not always where he expected them. For the murder of those Elrond had loved? For a childhood filled with doubt and danger rather than love and safety? For a music whose strain would always have its place in Elrond’s, twining with the cleaner heritage of Lúthien, much as he sought to remove it? For an identity stolen, and given, and intermingled, until good and evil, right and wrong, friend and enemy and kin became melded?
Maglor winces and remains silent. The look in his eyes is one of those Elrond had found least sympathetic during his preteens, a look of grief and grievance at the world for persistently failing to yield up what he had never earned.
He turns and walks away.
Elrond watches him go.