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Amras is in a foul mood. Celegorm can hear it in his stumping gait, and feel it in his unseen glare, like a thundercloud rolling down to blacken the earth with shadow. Celegorm knows that thunder well; often enough it pounds in his own head like a second heart. Hard to put a name to where it comes from; he only knows what it does.
Makes him want a knife in his hand, or an arrow drawn to his ear, or a bullet in the chamber and his finger drawing the trigger home—
That’s what it does.
He doesn’t look over his shoulder, as he makes his way to the main hall. He’d have to see more than Amras, if he did. He’d see Maitimo standing there with Maglor and Fingolfin, Gwindor and Estrela, and he’d have to accept—for the thousandth time—that there is a whole world of people who have their claws sunk deep in Maedhros. Who ensure that he will never be wholly Maitimo again.
Bauglir in Doriath…
Bauglir…
Celegorm had not been present at Maedhros’ leave-taking a month ago. Although he claimed almost the first greeting earlier this morning, ahead of every other brother and even Estrela by half a moment, he is now thinking more of the departure than of the return.
“That’s his,” he says to Amras, gesturing to one of the knapsacks, and reaching for a saddlebag himself. These things—Maitimo’s things—shouldn’t have been left by the entrance of the hall for people to trip over. Or pry through.
“I didn’t say I’d help,” Amras mutters, somehow intelligible above the cheerful din.
Sometimes Amras is such a baby still. Celegorm can’t give him what-for here, where there are watchful eyes and listening ears. For one thing, shame isn’t what Amras needs. For another, every last one of Doriath’s men seems to be crowded around the tables, eating Mithrim’s food. Oh, they’d brought some cornbread and jerked meat of their own, along with squashes and dried tomatoes that Caranthir had claimed were tolerable in quality, but none of it was enough to feed an army.
Nothing to make amends for all that they were taking, by their smug attempt at forming an alliance here.
(There had been an army, Maedhros said, outside of Doriath. In the north, Celegorm had only seen its absence.)
“Then leave me to do it,” is Celegorm’s answer, more matter-of-fact than snappish. “Only take your moping face elsewhere if you do.” He’s lost the path to his anger, though he knows it’s waiting for him. Mostly he’s just dog-tired now, and where in seven hells—oh, there’s Huan.
Good boy.
Celegorm doesn’t like to live in memory. That is Maglor’s business, and poor enough work he makes of it. You can gather up bullet-broken shards of recollection, but you must despair of putting them back together. If you tell yourself it’s all a fucking poem, made better off by all that breaking, you’ll be the worst kind of liar.
Here are fragments, nevertheless:
A month ago, Maedhros had tried to explain what he’d intended, and the whole thing had seemed a failure before it was begun. Not because Celegorm didn’t believe in Maedhros’ powers to do… well, anything he put his mind to (once it had been anything he put his hand to, but of course he couldn’t promise that now). Celegorm knew Maedhros had strength left in him, for all that Maedhros was afraid to draw it out. It was only—the scheme of begging Thingol of Doriath, a proud and unfeeling stranger, to offer any sort of aid, was doomed from the start. It was plain as day to anybody with Irish blood in their veins. Maedhros had known as much, even if he hadn’t known Bauglir was coming.
How could any of them have guessed—
Proud, stupid men will find each other, and make war, Celegorm decides, and just like that, he is thinking of Athair.
Two summers past at Ulmo’s Bridge, when Athair’s fist crashed into Maedhros’ jaw, Celegorm felt time halt. The violence was so careless, so quick, that it was somehow worse than the bloody crater a single shot would make of a man’s chest soon afterwards.
That man would be trying to steal Huan, when Celegorm killed him. That man was a threat, and Celegorm had still grieved him.
Maedhros was just trying to keep a promise, and he wasn’t a threat, he was a son. Celegorm’s never begrudged Maedhros for his allegiances that day, though the promise broken was to Fingolfin (to Fingon) and Celegorm doesn’t care three straws for their half-family.
(But what about—
—Aredhel?)
Shards, shards, shards. Blood on your hands, if you’re not careful. Celegorm felt nothing at all, then, when Maedhros’ body crumpled to the ground—or he felt so much that it was like a white fire, searing the flesh off him before he knew he was burned to the bone.
(The burning of the bridge? It was an act of finality to whom nobody was party but Feanor. And Feanor is dead.)
What happened to Maedhros in Doriath? What’s left of Maitimo now?
Huan is snuffling at the packs. No doubt there are a myriad interesting scents, discernible still after so many miles of traveling. Huan is happy if no one else will be.
Celegorm kicks open the door of his room, the one he shares with Curufin since Caranthir and Amras and Maglor have crowded into the room Maedhros sleeps in.
“They’re gone.” Amras sounds lost. “Everyone’s disappeared. Again.”
There are voices rising and falling behind the closed door of the other bedchamber. Celegorm can make one out as Maitimo. There is no sight of the whole party, though—some, at least, must have gone on their way. (Where is Curufin?)
As for the party in the room, Celegorm fancies Maglor sitting beside Maedhros with one scrawny arm thrown around Maedhros’ shoulders in a pitiful show of protection. He imagines Fingolfin, sitting in a chair like a priest whose confessional was magicked away with the same quick absurdity of a lifted tea-cozy. He imagines what they’ll be saying—Maedhros admitting more than he wants to, in that quiet, punished voice Celegorm hates to hear most. Maglor will be making nonsensical asides of comfort. Fingolfin will be prying, always prying. And someone, maybe Gwindor, will fulfill the role that Celegorm should have. The watchman. The sentry.
Old fool, Celegorm thinks. He waits while Amras arranges the knapsack beside the saddlebag. Then they step back. Huan sits on his haunches, waiting for the next movement.
“Come along,” Celegorm says, to both his brother and his dog. “Let’s get some air.”
Amras glances backwards, in the direction of the other room—in the direction of the bend in the corridor, beyond which they all stood so recently, ranged as if for a battle nobody should have wanted to fight in the first place.
Amras’ face is white and drawn and less like a twin’s face by the day. He’s growing up; he looks like Celegorm used to, examining himself in Moth—in a small hand-mirror with a shadowy silver plate.
Quite a man, aren’t you?
Maitimo, gay and cheerful and too thin, come home for Christmas five years’ past. (Is it only five years?) A Christmas for which Grandfather Finwe still lived, though he had not traveled north since the ceili a year before. A Christmas without Fingon, thanks be. But it was soon spoilt, when that same over-bright Maitimo disappeared with Athair, locked in a battle nobody else had even guessed was coming.
Celegorm, returning from a frost-stung stint of ice-fishing, had been cold and content. Then—
Another voice of Maitimo—of Maedhros—that Celegorm felt (and feels) like a life-wound. He heard it for the first time then.
I wonder if he has it yet in his chest. So much of his knocks were taken there that he speaks quiet-like.
I wonder what they took from him this time.
(The clatter of that hideous ring. The whiplash stinging in Maedhros’ unleashed fury. The viciousness that Curufin had chosen instead of a show of loyalty, of family pride if nothing else—)
Passing the kitchen and crossing the yard is difficult to accomplish undetected, but Celegorm has long since learned a secret of Mithrim: most of its inhabitants only pretend to care about one another. He is used to the glazed-over stares, the questions that form unspoken on the lips of those who don’t care to speak to him. Not wanted here can be a heavy burden to bear, or it can be the lifting of a yoke. Run free, on the fields of your own imagining!
Amras is still following him.
Amras is better than Maglor in all respects, and better than Curufin—damn Curufin—in that he knows how to keep his mouth shut. He broods, but that’s all right. Better a brooding hen like Carrie than a conniving serpent with a mouth full of blades.
They have cut across the western edge of the field, where the land rises upwards to meet the outstretched hands of the forest again. Huan is very happy, at least, with the warm breeze on his summer-lean body.
Celegorm taught Maedhros to ride again over uneven ground there, in and out of these sky-touched evergreens.
Faster now, Maitimo. Don’t hold back—
And Maedhros, nerved by the exercise to the point of forgetting his shame in favor of bluntness, had snapped, I can’t hold—fucking—anything anymore, Celegorm.
Amras slumps down on the red-needled earth beneath the trees. A body, not small enough for death. Not cold enough for death. Celegorm pretends that he does not care, and offers a scrap of Doriath’s jerky to Huan.
Silence—almost. The wind speaks, then quiets.
From their shadowed station, Amras gazes back towards the fort. The sunlight is still beating down upon it. The desert, all the way west, had made Celegorm harbor less love for the sun. Less love for everything, in truth. He swore he wouldn’t waste his time remembering, but even now, there are… sensations. The tackiness of Maitimo’s blood, the tremors of his wounded throat, aflutter with fear and confusion. That was after Thuringwethil—
(Her blood. Celegorm’s knife. Deny my master any of his desires, and you shall never see your Maitimo again.)
“Why don’t you say your piece, Amras?” Celegorm asks. Strange, for him. He has never made an enemy of silence, so why is he doing it now?
He doesn’t know.
“Why should I? It doesn’t matter.” Amras’ voice is pitched lower on account of how lightly he holds it in his chest. He hates how much his voice breaks these days; Celegorm knows that. He can remember his own voice betraying him.
“What?”
It comes out of Amras like a gout of blood. “Any of it. All those promises, stretching over the f-fucking miles. The—the oath we made, to Athair, at the beginning. We had so many grand plans and now they’re just—we might have something to protect and look after here, but Maedhros burns through it all, and he doesn’t even ask our leave beforehand. He’d lead us to ruin if he could. You mark my words.”
It’s the same strain of poison that breeds in Curufin. The same lies.
“Don’t be a fool,” Celegorm snaps. The words seem to imprint themselves on Amras’ flushed cheeks, in his suspiciously glassy eyes. Huan whines, and noses sympathetically towards Amras across soft forest floor. Always comforting babies, is Huan. More calmly, Celegorm says, “That oath was madness. And it stopped meaning anything as soon as—as soon as we reached the bridge. Certainly once Athair burned it. I don’t give a fucking fig for the grand plans that he promised us. Why should you?”
“Because I don’t want to die,” Amras says. His gangly limbs twitch. He’s growing so tall, so fast. Even sitting dejectedly at Celegorm’s feet, he can’t be mistaken for the child he was. The past recedes around him like water. “I don’t want any—more—of us to die.”
They stare each other down, the unspoken loss between them.
(Bravest, youngest boy—riding for his home—his mother—his life—)
“You’re not going to die.” Celegorm takes a bite of the jerky himself, and offers a nub to Amras, but Amras wrinkles his nose and shakes his head. “What put that thought into you? If Maedhros can come back from Doriath alive after—after goddamn Bauglir was there, you should rest easy.”
Amras scoffs. “Oh, like you’re resting easy? You were in there with Curufin and Maglor and the rest, trying to pump him for information. You just left me out of it. Me and Caranthir not invited, when half the rest of the fort was!”
Even Celegorm would admit that’s an exaggeration, but there’s no use pointing it out when Amras has a hornet in his ear. So Celegorm says,
“I didn’t invite Fingolfin.”
“Who did?”
Damn. He’s let his mouth get ahead of him again. “Well, Maitimo did. He wanted him there because… I suppose Finrod was already filling him in with a load of claptrap. Now, I wouldn’t make the same choices Maitimo does—I’m not saying I would. What I’m saying is, you ought to trust him. And above all, don’t shame him.”
Amras is stripping a late fern of all its feathers. When he looks up, it’s with an expression that could be Celegorm’s, could be Caranthir’s, as much as it is his own. “What?”
“You think he wants to have our business—his business—out in front of everybody? They swarm him like flies every waking moment. He’s had Finrod and Fingon leaning over his shoulder for a month.” Celegorm chooses not to decide whether they were needed, or wanted, or more than half the reason that Maedhros has returned at all. “He probably invited Fingolfin just so he could pick and choose his audience for once. Least we can do, now and again, is leave him to himself.” He almost said, Haven’t you ever wanted to be alone? but the dreadful ghost memory of that brother-body, that brother-no-longer-brother, save in love, stops the words on his lips.
“He ought to—”
“He ought to go stark raving mad. But he hasn’t.” Not entirely, Celegorm adds silently. There’s some things Amras needn’t know.
(Bauglir and Mairon and Maedhros, all under one roof together, doesn’t bear thinking on. Those two bastards ought to have been torn to pieces—Celegorm could have done it, with a good chance and a long knife. He did as much to Thuringwethil, and Maedhros thanked him for it. Those words, spoken with a sort of piteous gallantry, he shall never forget: It was a deed well done. It saved me a little torment.
A touch, a word, a look from those torturers—Maedhros ought to have been spared it, no matter the cost.)
“Celegorm?”
“Hm?” Celegorm looks up sharply. Amras’ voice, suddenly urgent rather than irritable, isn’t the only sign of a change. Huan has sprung up, alert. Celegorm follows the direction of their attention and sees him, unmistakable even from a distance. Moving slowly, but moving surely—Maedhros, alone.
He doesn’t have his cane. Celegorm hopes that, after the testing and training of the last couple months, he’ll never use it again.
“Where do you think he’s going?” Amras answers his own question. “Athair—Athair’s grave.”
Maedhros must be thinking of Athair too.