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Of the Wanderer Returned · A Tale of Aman in the Fourth Age
The Banners He Did Not Dare to Name
Being an account of Maglor son of Fëanor, and what came to pass in the House of Elrond upon the shores of the Undying Lands
I.
The rumour had come to her as rumours always come to the Eldar who have lived long enough: obliquely, carried on the lips of a minstrel who did not know quite what he sang of, woven into the fabric of a tale told at the foot of Taniquetil by one who had glimpsed something strange at the western road. A wanderer, they said. Dark-haired, sea-worn. In the company of a lord of great years.
Nerdanel had heard such words before — had trained herself, across the long labour of Aman's changeless years, to hear them and let them pass through her like wind through open stone. She was a sculptor. She knew better than most that the shape of a thing and the desire of a thing were not the same.
And yet she had come.
She had taken no horse, no companion, no explanation. She left her forge in the cool of early morning with marble dust still whitening her knuckles, and she had walked the long road east along the banks of the Calacirya until the hills opened and the coastal wind found her and the great house of Elrond Half-elven rose from the green headland like a ship at anchor, patient, built for a long wait.
It was the banners that unmade her.
She had expected Elrond's device — the silver and blue she had heard described, the half-moon cradled in stars, the mark of a lord who had grafted himself across two worlds and called the wound a name. She had expected the banners of Finwë, perhaps — the house flag of the High King, flown still in hereditary courtesy. She had perhaps expected even the standard of Fingolfin, whose line had endured what hers had not.
She had not expected, against a sky of faultless blue, the eight-pointed star of Fëanor.
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It flew highest — not as an insult, she thought, fighting the sharp catch in her breast, but simply because it was planted on the tallest tower. Beneath it, at stations along the parapet, hung the banners she had indeed anticipated: the silver star of Fingolfin, the white tree of the House of Bëor, the winged crown of Turgon of Gondolin, the pale moon of Melian the Maia, the sea-bird of Marach's folk. All of them — all of them together — and above them all, her husband's device.
Her husband, who was ash. Her sons, who had sworn an oath no mortal tongue should ever have framed, and paid for it in kinds of ruin she could not number.
And yet Lord Elrond Half-elven — Lord Elrond, who had every reason in the histories of Arda to tear that star from the sky — had raised it over his own house.
Nerdanel stood a long moment on the road. A horsefly landed on her wrist and departed unbothered. Somewhere beyond the gates, she could already hear the sound of a harp.
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II. In Which Old Wrongs Are Named
They gave her a room that smelled of cedar and salt air, and they gave her wine, and they gave her — she supposed — time. But Nerdanel was not a patient woman when patience served only to delay the inevitable, and so before the hour of the midday bells she had found her way through the colonnade and up the outer stair and she had stood at last in the open doorway of her son's chamber.
He was standing with his back to her at the window, watching something in the garden below. He wore no ornament. His hair — black, and very dark, the darkness that in Fëanor had seemed to drink in the light of the Trees and give back none of it — hung loose past his shoulders, and his hands were pressed flat against the window frame as if he were steadying himself, or as if he did not quite trust the stone to bear his weight.
He did not turn when she entered. But his shoulders moved — a single, barely visible contraction, the way a man moves when he has heard a sound he was not ready to hear — and she knew he had recognised her step. When at last he turned, it struck her again as it always had: the blue of his eyes. Bright, rich, unsettling blue — nothing like the quiet grey of Fëanor's — as if some older light from Ilúvatar's first thought had been set behind them and never entirely extinguished.
"Your father did this to you."
She had not meant to begin there. She had rehearsed, on the long road, something gentler. Some question about his health, his years at sea, whether the harp still answered him as it once had. She had meant to approach the wound the way a healer approaches a burn: with careful hands, from the edge inward.
But she was her father's daughter too, in some things, and she was looking at her son's face — at those blue eyes that had, since his childhood, always given too much away — and the careful words turned to ash in her mouth.
"All of it. Everything that was done in your name, in his name — he made you what you are. He put the fire in your blood and he aimed it and he called it love."
The garden below must have been very still, she thought, because the silence in the room was not a silence of absence but of something held.
Then Maglor turned fully from the window.
He was older, in the way that great suffering makes one old: not in lines or in the dimming of light, for he was Eldar and his light had returned with his return, but in something behind the eyes that was not sorrow exactly — or not only sorrow. He looked at her the way men look at something they once believed they understood and have since learned they never did.
"He made us capable of following him,"
Maglor said, and his voice was still — this, at least, was still — the most controlled instrument she had ever heard a mortal throat attempt to contain. Low, precise, and underneath it the old resonance like a bell heard from across water.
"That is not the same thing as compulsion, Mother. We were not children led astray by a torch held too close. We were of age. We had years, and knowledge, and choice — and we looked at what Father laid before us and we chose. Every one of us, in the moment before the words left our lips, knew."
"You do not know what you are defending,"
she said, more quietly now, because she could see from his face — from those unbearable blue eyes — that he had not forgiven Fëanor either — that this defence was not born of peace but of something far more complex and harder to name. He is defending his own right to have chosen, she understood suddenly. He cannot let Father bear it all, because if Father bears it all, then what remains of his own will? His own self?
"You followed a great man into the dark,"
she said, more gently, "and the dark did not return all of you whole."
"No,"
Maglor agreed. He turned back to the window. "But neither did it swallow us entirely." A pause. "He would be glad to know that the Half-elven's house still stands. He would be insufferably proud of the banner."
Despite everything — despite all of it — Nerdanel almost smiled. There were many things Fëanor had been. He had been, among them, insufferably proud, and the accuracy of the observation was so precise that it could only have been made by someone who had loved him without illusion.
Come home with me, Maglor.
There is still stone to be worked. There is still music I have not yet heard you play.
"Come home with me,"
she said. "I am not asking you to answer for what was done. I am not the Valar, and I have made my peace with what I can and cannot carry. Come home. There is still stone to be worked. There is still music I have not yet heard you play."
He did not answer at once. He looked at the garden, where the morning light was doing something slow and pale-golden to the grass, and she could see the war of it on his face — the genuine pull of her, of home, of a world in which he was a son and not a catastrophe — against something equally genuine that she did not yet have a name for.
And then the door opened.
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III. The Lord of the House Speaks
Elrond had clearly not intended to interrupt. This was apparent from the fact that he stopped in the doorway with the look of a man who has walked into a room expecting to find one thing and has found instead the whole of the Silmarillion in miniature, and requires a moment to recompose.
He was very tall, for a half-elven lord who had been given the choice of his kindred. He wore no circlet, and he had about him the quality — which Nerdanel had noticed in very few others she had met in her long life — of a person who has stood in enough disasters that he is no longer in a hurry. He looked at Nerdanel with courtesy and at Maglor with something that was not courtesy at all, or not only: it was a more complicated thing, threaded through with old grief and old love and the sort of pride that a person takes in another's survival when they were not entirely sure, once, that the survival was possible.
He cleared his throat.
"Forgive me. I thought — that is — I heard raised voices, and I was concerned, and I confess that is not my only reason for coming. I have been managing myself very poorly on this matter."
He said the last with a self-deprecating air that sat oddly on the dignity of his bearing, and Nerdanel noted that Maglor had gone entirely still — the particular stillness of a person being observed in their private difficulty by someone whose opinion matters to them more than they are comfortable admitting.
"Lady Nerdanel,"
Elrond said, inclining his head with formal grace, "you are most welcome in this house, and I hope you will let me say — when the moment is right, which I perceive is perhaps not precisely now — that I am grateful for whatever you made him, in the beginning, before the fire took hold of things. He was kind to Elros and to me. When there was no reason left for kindness, he found reasons."
He turned then to Maglor, and there was a quality in the look that Nerdanel could not have wholly translated, being on the outside of it — something between a son's longing and a lord's dignity, both of them held simultaneously and imperfectly.
"I love you,"
said Elrond, with the directness of a man who has lived long enough to have shed the habit of ellipsis in the matters that count. "I know I have not managed to say that plainly, since you came. I was afraid, I think, of making it into a — a demand, or an accusation in reverse. But I missed you. I missed you for the whole of a very long life, and more years than that besides, and if you are willing to call this house your own in any measure — even in the smallest measure — it would be among the greater gifts I have received in a life that has not, truthfully, been short of gifts."
A silence settled over the room — not an empty silence, but the full, weighted kind, the kind that arrives after something important has been said aloud for the first time and the air is still adjusting to the shape of it.
Maglor looked at Elrond for a long time. He looked at his mother. He looked out the window at the banner of his father's house lifting against the coastal sky, and something in his face — some long-held tension that Nerdanel had mistaken for sorrow and now recognised as a species of disbelief, the disbelief of a man who has not been sure, for a very long time, that he was owed anything at all — that tension shifted.
"Then I will stay,"
he said, quietly. "For now. For — yes. I will stay."
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IV. The Lady Departs, and Two Young Lords Grow Curious
Nerdanel left before supper. She made no announcement of it and offered no explanation beyond a brief word to the steward, and she did not say farewell to Maglor — or if she did, no witness remained to describe what was said. One of the stable-hands reported afterward that a woman with marble dust on her travelling cloak had taken her horse from the west paddock at the going down of the sun and ridden north alone, and that was all.
Elladan and Elrohir had, in the oblique fashion of twins who have spent millennia perfecting the art of appearing in exactly the place they were asked not to be, managed to hear rather more of the afternoon's proceedings than their father had intended.
They had begun, it must be said, from honest curiosity. The woman who had arrived that morning with the bearing of someone carrying a very old argument on her shoulders had attracted Elladan's attention first — "She has his eyes, brother, look at her — not the colour, no, but the way she looks at things, the way she takes the measure of everything she sees" — and Elrohir's shortly after, and from honest curiosity they had progressed to tactical positioning below the relevant window at a moment that was, they would insist, purely coincidental.
They were still arguing about whether it counted as eavesdropping if one was standing in a garden and the window happened to be open when they knocked, three hours later, on the door of Maglor's chamber.
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V. A Question Not Asked Idly
Maglor was sitting in the window-seat when they entered, his harp across his knee in the manner of a man who had taken it out with the intention of playing and had then sat for a long time not playing it. He looked at the twins with an expression that Elrohir would later describe as watchful and Elladan would describe as tired, and also watchful, and which was in truth something more difficult to render: the look of a person who has recently been seen — genuinely seen, in the uncomfortable way — and has not yet determined what to do with that.
The firelight caught the angles of his face — a face that was unmistakably Fëanorian in its structure, strong-boned and precise — and turned the darkness of his hair to something close to absolute, while his eyes in the dim room held their peculiar, unsettling brightness. Elrohir found himself thinking, irrelevantly, that he understood now why the songs all mentioned the eyes.
"Your father sent you,"
Maglor said.
"No,"
said Elladan. "Father specifically told us not to bother you."
"We are here in spite of Father,"
added Elrohir, and had the grace to look mildly guilty about it. They came further into the room with the particular boldness of young men who have calculated that the worst likely outcome of their boldness is a sharp word, and settled themselves on the low bench near the wall with the ease of those long accustomed to making themselves at home in rooms that are not their own.
Elladan folded his hands and looked at the harp, then at Maglor, then at the harp again in the manner of someone who has rehearsed the opening to this conversation and is discovering that none of his rehearsals have accounted for the reality of the moment.
"Is it true?"
he said at last. "What the rumours claim. That our father's mother — that Elwing chose the Silmaril over her own sons?"
Maglor was quiet for a moment that felt, to Elrohir at least, rather longer than its measure in actual seconds.
The fire in the grate was low. Outside, the sea moved in its ancient, indifferent way, and the banner of the House of Fëanor made no sound against the evening.
Maglor set the harp aside with careful hands.
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VI. What He Remembered
He had not spoken of it. Not once, across the full length of his years at sea, through the gradual dissolution of grief into something more bearable and the still more gradual willingness to set foot, again, on land. He had not spoken of it because there was no one to speak to of it who would have understood the fullness of it, and because understanding was not, he had decided, necessary to survival.
But here were Elrond's sons — Elrond's sons, who had their grandmother's cheekbones and their grandfather's eyes and something in the jaw that he recognised, to his discomfort, as Maedhros — sitting in his room asking with the directness of people who have had the luxury of growing up without certain necessary evasions.
And Elrond has not told them, Maglor thought. He has not told them. And who am I to say whether that is mercy or omission?
He closed his eyes.
And it came back with the totality that memory always brings to things it has decided not to release:
The tower. The cold of a shore-wind at dusk. The sound of Maedhros on the stairs behind him — the particular rhythm of his brother's step that he had known since before he had known anything else. The door. And then the room — bare, a store-room converted by haste into a nursery, its window flung wide over the cliffs and the sea — and two small shapes in the far corner who had clearly, from the state of them, been running: breathing hard, gripping each other by the wrist, dark-haired and wide-eyed and small enough that Maglor could not immediately reconcile the evidence of his eyes with the scale of what he had been riding toward for so many years of ruin.
Children. They were simply children.
And standing in the open window: a woman of extraordinary beauty, her dark hair loose in the sea-wind, one hand gripping the window-frame and the other pressed against her chest — pressed there with the held-breath concentration of a woman holding something she has decided she will not relinquish.
The Silmaril.
Even from the doorway, from across that small room with its smell of salt and old timber, its light came to him. The light of the Trees. The light of the world before the world, the light his father had poured his whole genius into capturing, the light that had cost — but no. There was no accounting for what it had cost. There was only the light, and his father's hands, and the long sequence of things that followed.
Elwing looked back. Not at her sons — not at her sons — but at him and Maedhros in the doorway. Her face was unreadable in the way of the very frightened, who have gone past the point at which fear shows.
He heard Maedhros, behind him, begin to speak. He heard his brother's voice taking on the particular register he used for bargaining, for restraint, for the careful management of crisis: I will not harm them. Only give me the Silmaril. Only give it to me and I will not harm the boys, I swear it, I swear it on whatever remains of oaths worth swearing—
Elwing did not look at her sons.
She stepped back from the window and was gone.
And the Silmaril went with her — went blazing out over the cliff's edge, out over the darkening sea — and somewhere in the blur of that moment Ulmo's grace made of the falling woman a white bird, and the bird rose, and the light diminished, and grew small, and was a star, and was nothing.
And there were two boys in the corner, and one of them was weeping with the open undefended grief of a child who has not yet learned to do it quietly, and the other was not weeping at all but staring at the window with an expression that Maglor would spend the better part of the next several thousand years attempting to forget: the expression of someone taking into their body the understanding that they were worth less than a jewel.
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He opened his eyes.
Elladan and Elrohir were watching him with their father's gravity, younger and less armoured than Elrond in it, but unmistakably the same quality. They had not pressed him. They were waiting.
Maglor looked at his hands for a moment — the old burn-scar on his right palm, the Silmaril's final answer — and then he looked up.
"Your father,"
he said carefully, "has never, in my hearing, said an unkind word about Elwing daughter of Dior."
He paused.
"He is a wiser man than I am. He has always been."
Elrohir leaned forward slightly.
"You know, father used to tell us stories at night — when we were very young, before we knew what stories actually meant. He used to say that no one in all of Arda was a finer singer than you, and that no one was a stronger fighter than Maedhros. We used to listen to those stories and think: how exciting, what heroes, what great figures to imagine in the dark. And then we grew up."
He stopped. His brother did not finish the sentence for him, which meant he was meant to finish it himself.
"And then we grew up,"
Elrohir said again, more quietly, "and we noticed that father never spoke of his own blood parents. Not once. Not in the way he spoke of everything else he had seen and done and lost. That silence was — very loud, to us. And we thought: perhaps here is someone who can help us understand it."
The sea breathed outside. The fire settled. The banner, somewhere above, moved without sound in the night-wind.
Maglor looked at these two young men — young in the way of those who have centuries behind them but have not yet been broken by the particular grief that breaks things irreparably — and he thought of Elrond on horseback, shaking with sobs too young for the face that wore them. He thought of Elros rigid with something harder than grief. He thought of Maedhros lying the letter away, folding it small and putting it in a place where practical mercy required it never to be found again.
He thought: I do not have anything good to give you. I have only the truth, and the truth is not kind, and your father has made a choice about how much of it you should carry, and that choice is not mine to unmake.
And yet.
Here was the banner above the house. Here was the room given to him without condition. Here was Elrond at the door with his careful, earnest, devastating directness — I love you, I missed you, call this home.
Perhaps there was a way to answer the question without answering the question. Perhaps, for once, he could find words that were true without being everything.
"Your father,"
Maglor said at last, slowly, as one who is feeling the weight of each word before he sets it down, "is the finest thing that I have ever had any part in. Whatever was done to bring him into the world, and whatever was done to him after — he is. He is a remarkable person. He has been so since he was very small and had no reason yet to know it."
He looked at the window. Beyond it: stars, and sea, and the long dark of a night that had no malice in it.
"His mother loved the light,"
he said quietly. "That is the most complete thing I can honestly say. She loved the light, and she came by that love honestly, and the light went with her, and the world turned on its hinge, and here we all are."
He picked the harp up again.
"Your father will tell you the rest, if he chooses to. It is his to tell. But if you wish to sit here for a while, I can play something — it is an old song, older than you and older than him, and it has no conclusions in it, which means it can hold a good many different truths at once. In my experience, that is what songs are for."
Elladan and Elrohir looked at each other in the sideways manner of twins communicating something too habitual and too precise for language.
Then they settled back against the wall and did not speak again, and the harp began, and outside the window the star of Fëanor turned quietly with the turning sky, and the Undying Lands held their old unhurried breath, and the night was long, and the music did not end.
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Here ends the account · as it was remembered