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# OF THE SHADOWED GARDEN, AND OF CERTAIN MATTERS THAT WERE LONG IN THE KEEPING
*Being an account of Makalaurë Canafinwë, called Maglor, in the days after his coming again to Aman, and of many things that came before and shall not easily be forgotten*
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Now, if you are the sort of reader who comes to a story expecting its grief to arrive all at once — a clean wound, a single blow, the way a tree falls — then this is perhaps not the story for you. For this story is about a different sort of ruin altogether: the slow kind, the patient kind, the kind that follows a soul the way its own shadow follows it at noon, shortening with every hour until at last the shadow is underfoot and the soul does not notice it has been swallowed. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. All things, even endings, must have their beginning. And this one begins, as so many of the great sorrows of the Elves do, with a king.
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## I. Of Finwë, Who Loved Twice
There are things that happen only once in all the long history of the world, and most of them are glorious. The making of the Silmarilli was such a thing. The sailing of Eärendil was another.
But some things that happen only once are not glorious at all, only lonely; and the remarriage of Finwë Ñoldóran was the loneliest of all singular things, because it was born not from joy but from grief, and the grief was not even his alone to bear.
He had loved Míriel Serindë as perhaps no elf had ever loved before, with that whole and unguarded love that comes only to those who have never learned they ought to be careful. And she had loved him in return, loved him with all that she was and all that she made, until the making of their son consumed the very fire of her, and she lay down in the gardens of Lórien and her spirit departed and did not return.
What do you do when someone you love chooses, in effect, to leave? When their body remains but the person you knew has gone somewhere you cannot follow?
Finwë waited. He was a patient king and a patient husband, more patient than any who have not loved so desperately could understand. He waited long years while the body of Míriel lay in Lórien like a beautiful and unanswerable question. He waited while their son grew, extraordinary and terrible, filling every room he entered with the brightness of a thing that costs too much. He waited while other elves watched him with that particular sideways pity that is almost worse than open sorrow.
And then, at last, he stopped waiting. Not from faithlessness — let that be clearly said — but because a living elf cannot wait forever beside what is not truly a grave, and still remain a living elf.
He married Indis of the Vanyar, she of the golden hair and the careful kindness, and he was glad again, in the way that people are glad after a long illness: not with wild delight, but with the steady warmth of someone allowed once more into the light.
Now here is a peculiar thing. Míriel's spirit had been in the Halls of Mandos all this while, and she would speak with Námo in that grey and quiet place, and the Vala heard her. And the Valar deliberated, as they do, at length and with due ceremony, and in the end decreed that Míriel might be released — but that if she returned to life, Finwë must then remain in Mandos in her stead, for the Law permitted only one binding of such a kind. Finwë chose to remain with Indis, and Míriel remained in the Halls, learning to weave the histories of the Elves in tapestry, which was some consolation, and perhaps more than most.
This is the thing that Fëanor could never forgive and never fully understood: that his father had loved his mother without ceasing, and that the choice had still been made, and that love and choice are not always enemies, but they are not always allies either.
And what of Finwë himself, in the end? He met his end alone, at Formenos, in the darkness, when Melkor the Enemy came and broke open the vault with a power that shook the earth to its roots, and took the Silmarilli. Finwë alone of all the Elves who might have fled stood in the door of his stronghold and did not give way, and was slain.
He was the first of the Eldar to die by violence.
He is in the Halls of Mandos still, for the grief of both his wives is too knotted a thing for any simple unwinding, and Námo does not hurry such matters. He is patient there, as he was patient in Valinor. This too seems to the chronicler to be a kind of loneliness without equal, though there are those who would call it something else.
His grandson Maglor might have thought of this, sitting in the shadowed garden of Elrond's house in Aman, on a morning in a year of the Fourth Age that will not be named. He might have thought: *we are a family that does not know how to leave the places we are trapped in, nor how to return to the places we have left.* He might have thought many things. He was thinking so many things, in fact, that he had lost track of most of them, which had been the trouble for a very long time now.
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## II. Of Fëanor, and the Oath That Was Also a Shadow
Fëanor Curufinwë was the greatest of the Eldar in craft and mind, and this is not a small thing to say of a people who were the firstborn of Ilúvatar and counted among their number Galadriel and Celebrimbor and the makers of Gondolin. But greatness in craft does not make a person wise, and greatness of mind does not make a person kind, and Fëanor was many things but he was not always either of these.
The Oath happened at night, which seems appropriate. Things sworn by night have a different character than things sworn by day. By day a person can see what they are doing. By night, with firelight throwing shadows of the wrong size and the exaltation of grief running through the blood like strong wine, a person can say things in the full conviction of their heart that their heart, given a morning and a cold breakfast, would have second thoughts about.
Fëanor had no morning. The light was gone from the world. His father was dead. His gems were stolen. And there, on the hill of Túna, with the stars above them and the darkness pressing in from every direction, Fëanor swore an oath by Ilúvatar himself, and called upon Manwë and Varda to witness it, and named Mandos, and swore — everlasting or swift — to pursue and destroy anyone who kept or claimed or held any Silmaril that was not his.
Seven sons swore with him.
Maglor swore with him.
Later — long, long later, in the grey-green years of his wandering, with the salt-wind in his ruined hair and the sound of the waves making a kind of language he had stopped trying to understand — Maglor would try to remember what he had felt in that moment. He would press his memory like a man pressing a bruise, returning again and again to see if it still hurt (it did), trying to excavate something that would explain it.
He had been afraid. He remembered the fear clearly enough. Not of the oath — that came later — but of the darkness itself, the darkness that had swallowed the Two Trees and come spilling over the world like something that had always been waiting its opportunity. He had been afraid and his father was incandescent with a grief so pure it looked like rage, and his brothers were there around him, Maedhros tall and steady, Celegorm bright with something less clean than valor, and his heart had said: *do not let him go alone into this dark.*
This is a thing that love does, which its practitioners often regret: it follows.
But the shadow of the Oath began, he thought afterward, even before the Oath. It began the moment Fëanor first shaped the Silmarilli and looked at them and could not look away, and Maglor had seen even then — had heard even then — a note in his father's voice that was not joy, or not only joy. The same note a harpstring makes when it is tuned too tight. A brightness that was also a warning.
He had said nothing. He was Maglor, the singer, and he was perhaps the most perceptive of his brothers, and he said nothing, because what do you say? *Father, put down the light you have made from your own soul and breathe freely?* Fëanor did not put things down. Fëanor held on.
This was the first failure. Maglor would add it to the list, which grew very long.
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## III. Of the Burning of the Ships, and What Was Lost on the Shore
There is no good way to tell this part. Let it be told plainly then.
The Noldor came to Middle-earth by two paths: those who sailed in the ships of the Teleri, and those who crossed the Helcaraxë, the grinding ice, in the bitter north. Fëanor and his sons took the ships. They did not take those who had come with Fingolfin.
On the shore of Middle-earth, at a place called Losgar where the land meets the sea and neither is comfortable about it, Fëanor looked at the fleet that had carried them across the sundering water and made his decision.
He ordered the ships burned.
There are several versions of what happened at Losgar, as there are several versions of most things done in darkness and haste. In the one that concerns us here, the one that settled at last into Maglor's memory like sediment into water, not all the ships were empty when the fire was set. Amras, the youngest, beloved twin, was sleeping below decks. He had been tired. He had always been gentle, gentler than the rest of them, and sleep had taken him before anyone thought to look.
The fire was very bright. Maglor remembered that too, with the particular, obscene clarity that the mind reserves for moments it cannot absorb. The way the orange light reflected on the water. The smell, which was a terrible smell, wood and sail and something else that stopped him breathing for a moment before his mind carefully declined to understand what else was burning.
Amrod stood on the shore and did not speak. He stood very still for a long time. Then he walked away from the firelight, and Maglor watched him go, and thought: *he will not be the same after tonight.* And he was not. None of them were. But Amrod least of all, because Amrod had lost not only his innocence at Losgar but his other half, and there are wounds that cannot be survived as the same person who received them.
Maedhros did not weep. He stood at the edge of the light with his face doing something that was not quite an expression.
Maglor wept. He was not ashamed of this. He stood on the shore of the new world with his father's decision burning behind him and wept, and no one looked at him because everyone was busy not looking at one another, and the fire ate the last ship down to the waterline and there was no going back.
He had not known, in that moment, how thoroughly there would be no going back.
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## IV. Of the Losing of Brothers, One By One
If you have ever held something that you knew you were going to drop, and felt the moment lengthen impossibly while it fell — that was something like how it was, only stretched across millennia.
Maedhros first, in the fullness of time: the tall one, the one who should by rights have led them all but lost that chance at the pass of Thangorodrim, where Morgoth hung him from the cliff by his right hand and left him there, and even rescue is sometimes a kind of wound that does not close. Maedhros who took up Fingon's hands in his remaining hand on the plains and forged an alliance that might, in a different world, have saved them, and held it together by force of will for as long as will can hold things. Maedhros who in the end could not hold on to himself, who took up his Silmaril and walked into the fire, because the gem burned him, burned his very hand, and he had sworn to keep what he could not keep. This too Maglor had witnessed from a distance, and this too he had survived, which did not feel like surviving.
Celegorm, Curufin, Caranthir. The middle sons, the ones he had not known as well as he ought, because there were seven of them and even among family the same gravity does not pull all equally close. They died in the wars, in the raids, in the endless grinding cost of the unwinnable war, and each death arrived like information that did not fit anywhere, like a key to a door that no longer stood.
Amrod died in the second assault on Doriath, or the third assault on the Havens — the years blur — and by then Maglor had stopped expecting anyone to remain.
He should not have been surprised. He had never expected to be the last.
And yet here he was. The seventh son. The singer. The one who was perhaps not the best in battle nor the worst, who had held his territory in Maglor's Gap with a competence that demanded no ballads, who had killed at the Kinslayings and hated himself for it and continued anyway, because the Oath pulled and pulled and the Oath was made of the same substance as love and was as impossible to put down.
He was the last of Fëanor's sons.
He was also, by that point, not entirely there.
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## V. Of the Descent That Has No Single Moment
People speak of madness as though it is a thing that arrives. As though a door opens in the mind and something walks in and you know the moment it enters. This is not how it works. This is the comfortable version, the version that preserves the idea that there is always a moment at which a person could have chosen otherwise.
The truth is slower and less fair.
It began, perhaps, with the Oath itself. Or earlier, with Losgar. Or with the Kinslayings, each one. Or with each brother lost. Or with the act that Maglor regretted differently from all the others — the taking of two small boys out of the wreckage of the Havens of Sirion, two half-elven children who stared at him with enormous grey eyes that were precisely the wrong color to meet just then, being the eyes of Lúthien given to a different generation — the taking of them, and the years he spent with them, and then the leaving.
No. If he was honest — and he was trying very hard at honesty now, in these late days, because dishonesty with himself had been so very costly — the leaving was not where it began either. The leaving was where it arrived. Where it was finally, undeniably here, where there was no more pretending.
He had been losing his grip on himself for so long before that.
There had been years during the Siege of Angband when he would find himself standing somewhere without being able to account for how he had got there, his mind having quietly excused itself from the intervening hours. There had been nights when the singing started — his own voice, without his permission, performing the old songs of Aman in his tent, while his men outside fell carefully silent and pretended they could not hear. There had been the moment at the second Kinslaying when he had stood at the edge of the harbor and felt something behind his eyes go very still and cold, and then he had walked forward, and he had done what he had done, and afterward he could not be sure whether the coldness was grief or whether it was something worse — whether he had felt, in some very small and terrible part of himself, nothing at all.
That frightened him more than anything else. More than Morgoth. More than the Oath.
He managed. He continued. This is what people do.
And then Maedhros walked into the fire, and Maglor threw his Silmaril into the sea, and the gem that had been made by his father's hands and had cost all of them everything burned in the dark water briefly and then was gone, and Maglor stood on the shore alone. He was the last. And there was no war anymore, and no brothers, and no task, and no enemy, and no reason in the world to move.
So he didn't.
Or rather — he moved, but in the way water moves in a pool with no outlet: turning on itself, covering the same ground, wearing the same channels deeper without going anywhere. He walked the shore. He sang. He wept and did not weep. He ate what the shore provided, which was little, and drank from streams, and did not think about why one foot continued to place itself before the other, because thinking about it seemed likely to stop it. The waves came in. The waves went out. The tide kept time. Time passed. He was in it the way a fly is in amber: preserved but not living, suspended in a substance that has hardened around him.
This was not a chosen thing. It was what happened when everything else stopped. Grief, left long enough without answer, becomes landscape.
He was on the shore for a very long time.
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## VI. Of Celebrimbor, and What Elrond Told Him
There had been, for a brief and extraordinary interval, a nephew.
Celebrimbor. Curufin's son. Dark-haired and precise and possessed of his grandfather's fire without quite his grandfather's consuming quality: he could put down his work and look up when spoken to, which already put him a tier of sanity above Fëanor on the matter of craft. He had even, to the bewilderment of many and the admiration of Maglor particularly, walked away from the Kinslaying at Nargothrond. Refused to follow his father. Stayed behind with Finrod's people and done the remarkable, the unprecedented thing of having a change of heart and acting on it.
Maglor had not seen him, not clearly, after that. The wars were not arranged for sentimental reunions. But he had heard of him, and thought of him, and the thought was a strange comfort in the manner of few comforts left to him by then: *there is someone of my blood who escaped the pattern. One. But one.* Celebrimbor the craftsman, who made beautiful things in the Second Age, who came to Ost-in-Edhil and built a city for the love of making, who —
Who met Annatar.
Who made the Rings.
Who died as no one ought to die.
Elrond had told him this, when he arrived in Aman — arrived is perhaps the wrong word for what had happened; *washed up* is more accurate, *deposited by the sea* like something the water had carried long enough — when he came, when he found himself, against all expectation, standing before a face he knew and had never expected to see again. Elrond had told him many things in those first days, when Maglor could barely manage words at all and mostly stood or sat or was guided gently from place to place like a man who has been very ill. Elrond had told him carefully, because Elrond told difficult things carefully, feeling for the weight of what a person could carry before adding to the load.
But he had told him about Celebrimbor.
Maglor had not moved for a long time after that. He had not wept. He was beyond weeping by then, though he has since recovered the ability; recovery is one of the terrifying properties of elves, they do not get to stop. He had simply sat and understood that his nephew — his one nephew, Curufin's only son, the escape from the pattern — had been used as a weapon, used literally and physically as a means of carrying terror across the land, had died in anguish, had died alone, had died unmourned by anyone of his blood because his blood was scattered across the world and in the Halls of Mandos.
And he had thought: *Curufin is in the Halls. Curufin knows. Curufin knows what became of his son, and he knows I was wandering the shore, singing to the waves, for an Age and more while Celebrimbor was being broken.*
He did not know if Curufin, in the grey and quiet of Mandos, was capable of hatred. Perhaps he was past it. Perhaps Mandos smoothed such things over time. But the thought of his brother's face — Curufin, who had loved his son more clearly than he had loved most things — the thought of what Curufin must think of him was one of the thoughts that Maglor returned to, as one returns to a bruise, to confirm it still hurts.
It still hurt.
---
## VII. Of Elros, and the Thoughts That Went in Circles
And then there was Elros. There was always Elros.
Elrond, who was here, who was whole, who had survived and done extraordinary things and was now, in this new age, precisely the person Maglor should have expected him to become — Elrond he could see. Elrond was in the next room, or in the courtyard, or coming down the corridor with a spe
VII. Of Elros, and the Thoughts That Went in Circles
And then there was Elros. There was always Elros.
Elrond, who was here, who was whole, who had survived and done extraordinary things and was now, in this new age, precisely the person Maglor should have expected him to become — Elrond he could see. Elrond was in the next room, or in the courtyard, or coming down the corridor with a specific expression that meant he was carrying something that needed thinking through. Elrond was present in the way that the living are present, which is noisy and solid and impossible to mistake.
Elros was not present. Elros was five thousand years dead by mortal reckoning, having lived the brief bright life of Men, having chosen it — chosen — and Maglor could not look at his brother's face without his mind sliding sideways to Elros, because they had the same eyes and the same way of tilting their head and even the same pause before they spoke when something had troubled them.
The thought went like this: Did he choose it because of me?
He would push it away. It would come back.
I was not a good example. I was Maglor of the Oath, Maglor of the Kinslayings, Maglor of the burning ships. I was mad already when I took them in, mad already and hiding it, covering it with function and camp routine and the careful daily performance of someone who is holding himself together by force of habit. What did they have in me? An elf who was not whole. An elf who sang them to sleep with songs of Aman because it was all he had left and at least the songs were genuine. What did Elros look at and think: yes, I will be this? Or think: I will be anything but this?
He thought of mortality. He thought of it specifically, deliberately, the way a man prods an aching tooth with his tongue. Old age — the betrayal of the body by slow degrees, the stiffening, the dimming of sight and hearing, the indignity of it, the fear. Sickness — the vulnerabilities that elves did not carry, the winters that killed men, the infections, the fevers. He had watched mortals die. He knew what it cost. Elros had paid that cost, or some version of it, because all the accounts agreed that the first King of Númenor had lived greatly and well, but even greatly and well you came to it in the end, the final narrowing, the moment when the body said: here is the limit. This is where I stop.
Had there been pain? Had there been fear? Had Elros in his last days been still himself, mind clear, thoughts his own — or had that too gone, crept away before the body was willing to follow?
And behind all of that: did he die knowing I had not come? Did he wait? Did he look for me?
The thoughts went in circles because circles have no end.
VIII. Of the Shadowed Garden
Elrond's house in Aman was, by any standard, a remarkable thing. It had about it that character of places made by someone who has spent a very long time thinking carefully about what a home ought to be: each room landing on some particular quality — warmth, or quiet, or light — with the confidence of a decision. The garden, too, was largely excellent; Elrond had strong opinions about gardens, which surprised people who knew him only as a lore-master and healer, but should not have, because lore-masters understand the value of things that take a long time to grow.
There was, however, a corner of it that no one tended.
The great oaks had been there longer than the garden, which said something about the oaks, and their canopy was so complete that beneath them almost nothing would grow: not the careful plantings of more obliging trees, not the flowering things that Elrond's people put up along the south-facing walls. The ground there was deep in old leaves that broke silently underfoot, and the roots rose and fell through the earth like the backs of great sleeping creatures, and the light did not come in except in brief shifting coins of gold that moved across the shadow and were gone. It was not cheerful. It was not exactly uncheerful either. It was simply other, in the way of places that have their own character and have no interest in accommodating yours.
Maglor had found it in his first weeks here, when he was not yet capable of the sort of deliberate decision that would be called going somewhere. He had simply walked until he stopped, and he had stopped here, and the oaks had made no comment on who he was or what he had done or the condition in which he arrived, which was more than he could say for his own thoughts.
He came here in the mornings, on the days when his room felt too much like a room, when the walls were too close and the window framing the light too neatly. He would sit with his back against the largest of the oaks, whose bark was furrowed deep as river canyons, and he would think, which was not exactly the right word for what he did — he would be thought through, perhaps, the way a pipe is played, the thoughts moving through him without his entirely directing them.
On this particular morning, which concerns us, he had been there since before sunrise.
IX. Of Elrond's Morning
Elrond, meanwhile, had a household to run, which was a remarkable amount of work even in Aman, and which he performed with the thoroughness and slight underlying weariness of someone who has been doing this for a very long time and knows better than to pretend it is effortless.
He had risen early, as was his custom, and had his tea standing up in the kitchen while reading correspondence, which was a habit he had developed somewhere in the second thousand years of his life and had never managed to break. There were three letters of significance and two that required only brief acknowledgment, and one from a scholar in another part of Aman who had strong opinions about herblore and wanted to share them at length, which Elrond set aside with the care of a man placing a sleeping infant on a shelf.
He had meetings in the morning: a consultation about the archive project that had been ongoing since his arrival, a brief discussion with his steward about the household accounts (they were, as always, exactly fine; his steward was one of those people who make everything exactly fine so quietly that you only notice when you imagine them gone), and a conversation with a young elf who had come seeking instruction in healing and needed, gently, to understand that being sensitive to people's pain and being able to help their pain were related but not identical skills. This last took the longest, because Elrond believed in taking such conversations the time they required.
In between, he was distracted. He was distracted in the way you are distracted when you know something is happening in another room and you cannot make yourself stop listening for it.
He had noted, at breakfast, that Maglor's place was empty. This was not unusual. Maglor's place was often empty at breakfast, because Maglor often slept past it, or forgot, or — and this was the possibility that Elrond did not let himself rest on too long — or had been awake since before sunrise and had gone to the garden, which meant the night had been hard.
The oaks were visible from the window of his study, if you knew where to look. He knew where to look. He had very deliberately not looked before his morning meetings. He made himself not look. He had learned, with considerable effort, to give Maglor the space that Maglor needed, because crowding did not help, because Maglor needed room to find himself again and that finding could not be rushed or supervised. He knew this. He believed it.
At noon, he looked.
The stillness under the trees was the particular stillness of someone sitting very still on purpose, which is different from the stillness of someone comfortable.
Elrond closed his correspondence, set down his pen, and went to the kitchen.
X. Of Maglor in the Shade
The thing about thoughts that go in circles is that after sufficient time they begin to wear grooves, and then they travel in those grooves without effort, and you do not have to attend to them any more than a river attends to its banks. They simply go.
Maglor was not attending to his thoughts. His thoughts were attending to themselves. He was somewhere slightly behind them, the way you are behind your reflection, aware that it is doing your movements but not quite convinced it is you.
He had spent the morning — in that part of himself that was tallying, keeping the record even now, even still, as if the record would someday be of use to someone — he had spent the morning with his grandfather. He visited his grandfather this way sometimes. You can visit the dead if you know them well enough; they take up residence in you and if you hold very still they will speak, or something that sounds like them will speak. Finwë's voice was precise and warm, and it said things in the old Quenya that felt like sunlight on stone. In the Hall of Mandos, his grandfather waited. The only elf who had never been released. The only elf who had loved twice. The only elf whose family had, it could reasonably be argued, ended the world.
He thought of his father. Fëanor, who had never been at peace, who had burned so bright that existing near him was like existing near a fire: warming and dangerous in equal measure. His father, who had charged out onto the shores of Middle-earth in his first hour there with a rage so pure it looked like courage. Who had died of that courage, or of that rage, or of something that was both and neither. Who was in the Halls of Mandos now — recalled, as Tolkien wrote, before his body was cold — and who had refused to be released, or could not be, for what releasing him would require of him was too much like an undoing of the self. Fëanor without the Oath was not someone Fëanor could be.
Did his father think of him? Did his father, in the quietness of Mandos, look over his sons and find Maglor and wonder?
He could not decide if his father's disappointment or his father's pity would be worse. He suspected pity.
The last one left, he imagined Fëanor saying. The one who couldn't end it cleanly. The one who wandered. He could hear the inflection perfectly, the particular shading his father gave certain words when he meant them to carry more than they said. He had always heard his father's voice very clearly. This too was something he could not fully decide whether to call a gift.
Maedhros would not have pitied him. Maedhros had understood the kind of thing that Maglor was, the perceptive one, the one who saw clearly and thus suffered clearly. Maedhros had said once, in the terrible years: the trouble with you, brother, is that you know exactly what we are doing and you do it anyway. It had not been kindly meant. It had been accurate. The accuracy was the kindness, if you wanted to find one.
He thought of Curufin. He returned to that thought in the same spirit that a man returns to a stone in his shoe.
He had not protected Celebrimbor. He had been on the shore. He had been singing to the gulls, or perhaps simply breathing in and out with the automation of someone who has forgotten why breathing is worthwhile, while Annatar arrived in Eregion with his beautiful smile and his beautiful ideas and his beautiful Rings. While Celebrimbor, who had escaped the pattern, who had walked away from his father and chosen differently — while Celebrimbor was taken up by the pattern anyway, caught in its second generation, bound to the doom of the house not by blood but by craft, by the irresistible pull of the great work calling to the maker.
I should have been there. The thought was familiar. It had been there so long it had its own room in him. Elrond was there, after a fashion — Elrond was in Eregion, and fled too late, and that too is mine to carry. And then Elrond without Elros to share it. Alone at Rivendell, building something remarkable from ruin, raising children who were not his, waiting — Elrond had also waited, it seemed, in the family manner. Waiting for something to resolve itself. Waiting for an end.
And Elros—
He stopped himself.
He could not do Elros this morning. He had done Elros three times already this week and it was — it was not helping.
So he did not think of Elros, and instead thought about what he had been thinking about before Elros interrupted, which was Curufin, and whether Curufin in the Halls of Mandos moved through his grey days with his son's absence like a hole in the chest through which the wind came, and whether that hole had Maglor's name on it.
Then, somewhat sideways, as an ambush: if you were also in the Halls of Mandos, Curufin would know you had not left him alone in it.
He examined this thought with care. He had had it before, or versions of it. They are all there. Grandfather, father, all his brothers except Maedhros who had taken the fire and might be somewhere else in the accounting of souls — all of them there. And here he was, outside it, the last living Fëanorion, still carrying the name that had become synonymous with catastrophe.
Was Elrond better served by his remaining, or by his going?
He felt the thought with the part of himself that could still feel, the part that the shore years had not entirely scoured away. And then from another part of himself, smaller and fiercer: there it is. There it is again. The thought that arrived wearing the costume of logic, of reasonable assessment, of care for others, but which was not these things. Which was the last stage of a very long surrender.
You would leave him again, said the small fierce part. You left him once. You left Elros. You left Celebrimbor. You are very good at leaving and calling it something else. You will not do this.
He held that. The cold came up through the leaf-mold and the oak roots. A coin of light moved across the ground in front of him, slowly, tracking the sun.
He had been, he thought, a coward in many ways. He had been a coward about the Oath — too afraid to refuse his father, not afraid enough of what the Oath would cost. He had been a coward at Losgar — he had done nothing to prevent it, he had wept and found that weeping excused him from action. He had been a coward in the wandering — surrendering to grief when grief could not be fed forever, letting it eat him rather than finding a way to set it down. He was being a coward now, in the thoughts he was having, in the old familiar shape of giving up dressed up as release.
He was so tired.
He was so tired of being a coward.
He put his back against the oak and looked up through the canopy, where the leaves moved in a small wind that didn't reach the ground, and counted, as he sometimes did, the patches of sky he could see between them. Seven. No — eight. The light was very bright beyond the leaves.
XI. Of Elrond and the Tea Tray
"Maglor—!"
He startled in a way that was undignified and he suspected had involved a small sound. Elrond was standing at the edge of the shadow, and this was not unusual, but Elrond's voice had carried something that was not quite alarm and was not quite sharpness and was not quite exasperation, but was some compound of all three: the voice of someone who has been saying a name several times and is now saying it slightly louder.
Elrond held a tea tray. He was also slightly out of breath, which on Elrond was nearly invisible but which Maglor, who had known him since he was small enough to be carried, could identify at once. He had come from the house at something faster than his usual deliberate walk.
"How long," said Maglor, "were you—"
"A minute, perhaps a little more." Elrond's voice had settled back to its usual quality, which was the voice of still water: untroubled at the surface, fathoms deep beneath. "I should not have startled you. I am sorry to interrupt. But it is quite chilly in the shade today. Would you mind drinking a cup of tea with me?"
It was not really a question, in the way that Elrond's offers were rarely fully questions. He was already stepping into the shade, already setting the tray down on the flattest stretch of root, already organizing the cups with that small precision he had always had: everything in its place, everything considered. There were two cups. There was also, Maglor noticed, a small plate of things to eat, which Elrond placed where Maglor would be able to reach it without needing to be asked. He had not forgotten, it seemed, how feeding worked, from those early years — that you could not always ask someone who was lost to ask for what they needed.
Maglor shifted to make room, though there was room. Elrond settled beside him against the oak, which he did with the unself-conscious naturalness of someone who had spent a significant part of his youth sitting on roots in varying conditions of distress and had made peace with the hardness of them.
The tea was hot. It was very good tea. Maglor had not known until this late age how much could be communicated through the quality of tea — that it was good because it had been made with attention, and attention was what was being offered. He held the cup and felt the warmth of it through his hands, which were cold.
They sat for a while in quiet. The coin of light had moved further along the ground.
"I have been thinking about my grandfather," said Maglor, which was true.
"Mm," said Elrond.
"And my father."
"Yes," said Elrond, in the tone that meant I know, I could tell when I was standing in my study window at noon.
"And Celebrimbor." He said it plainly, the way you touch a wound to test it. "And what Curufin must think."
Elrond was quiet for a moment. He turned his cup in his hands once. He was choosing how to answer this, and Maglor waited, because Elrond's answers were always worth the wait — had always been, even when he was very young, even before he had the decades to back them.
"I think," said Elrond, "that the dead know things we do not. And I think Mandos is not an angry place, though it is a grave one." He paused. "I do not think you should build too much on what Curufin may think."
"He has cause."
"He has grief," said Elrond. "These are not always the same thing, though they can feel so."
The wind moved through the canopy. Somewhere distant in the garden a bird said something briefly and then fell silent.
XII. Of Elros
Maglor did not ask about Elros for some time. He ate one of the things on the small plate, which was good, and drank his tea, and looked at the roots, and thought of Elrond at his desk this morning dealing with the ordinary business of living that went on regardless — the letters, the accounts, the young healer needing instruction. He thought of what it had cost Elrond to build that ordinary business, everything it had required of him to become a person capable of it, from the Havens to Rivendell to this.
The desire to ask sat in him like a stone in a pocket: present in every movement, unignorable.
Was it painful? The first question, always the first. Was it brief? Did his body give up before his mind? Did he suffer the slow treasons of age in clarity, or did the clarity go first? And underneath these, the one he feared most: did he die knowing I was lost? Did he wait for word, at the end? Did he wonder?
He did not ask, because to ask was to place that weight in Elrond's hands, and Elrond was carrying enough; because Elros was Elrond's grief in a way that made Maglor's grief for Elros secondhand, borrowed, a grief he had not, perhaps, entirely earned through such long abandonment.
"You are thinking about Elros," said Elrond.
He did not say how do you know. He had never needed to say that. "I am thinking about Elros," he said.
"Ask," said Elrond. "Please. I know what you are doing, not asking to spare me. I would like you to stop."
Maglor looked at him. Elrond was watching the shifting coins of light with an expression of mild patience that did not quite manage to conceal — something else. The thing that sat quietly in his face when there was something quietly difficult.
"I know in your eyes," said Elrond, with a care and a slight self-consciousness that meant he had be
"I know in your eyes," said Elrond, with a care and a slight self-consciousness that meant he had been thinking about how to say this, "I must still be at times that frightened boy. The one you found in the havens. I understand why." A brief pause. "I would hate to overstate my own capabilities. But I am, I think — I am reasonably confident — many times more capable of difficult conversations today than I was then. If something troubles you, I am quite sure I can provide proper counsel. If you will let me."
Maglor looked at his cup for a moment. Then he looked at Elrond's face, which was patient and prepared and somewhat stubborn in the way that it had been stubborn even when he was small and had not yet grown into his stubbornness.
"Was he in pain?" said Maglor. "At the end."
Elrond was quiet for a long moment, and Maglor felt his throat close on the anticipation of it — the answer he deserved, the one that would be his to carry.
"No," said Elrond. "Not meaningfully. He was old — very old for a man, for a king of men. He had all his faculties until very nearly the last. I was told—" and here something in Elrond's voice shifted, took on the quality of something handled many times and worn smooth, "—I was told he was cheerful. That he made his people laugh on his final day, told a story he liked. He was comfortable. He was loved."
Maglor pressed his eyes closed for a moment. He breathed.
"He had a long reign," said Elrond. "A prosperous one. His health was extraordinary — he was almost never ill, in the manner of those of the lineage of Lúthien, the blood runs long and strong in that house. He saw his children grow and his grandchildren. He accomplished —" here something that was not quite a smile, was more complicated than a smile, "—a considerable amount. More than could be said for most kings of any race."
"Was his mind—"
"Yes," said Elrond. "Until the end. He was himself."
They sat with this.
"I blamed myself," said Maglor, which was not precisely news to either of them but which he had not before said plainly. "That he chose mortality. I thought — I was a poor example. Of what we are. Of what it means to be what we are. I thought he looked at me and chose something else."
Elrond set down his cup with a deliberateness that meant he was choosing not to move suddenly. "He chose mortality," he said, "because he was Elros. Because the choice was put before him and he considered it fully and made his decision, as he made all his decisions — thoroughly and without apology." A pause. "He was himself when he made that choice. Not reacting to you. Not running from you. Himself."
"I had gone mad by then," said Maglor. He said it flatly, because it was a fact and he had stopped being unable to say it. "Before they were called. I had been going mad for some time and it was reaching the place where it was visible."
"Yes," said Elrond, and that single syllable was, somehow, not an agreement that things had been bad but rather a statement that he knew, that he had always known, and that it changed nothing. "You were unwell for a long time before the end. Long before you left." He turned his cup again. "You raised us. You did — you did well, raising us. Whatever you think of it. We were half-elvish children who arrived in your life in the worst possible circumstances and you gave us what you had, which was—" he searched for the word, and found it: "—considerable. The songs. The language. The histories. The lore. The — the sense that we were safe." He said this last one carefully. "I do not think you know how much that mattered. That we were safe. With everything that had happened. That someone had us and we were safe."
Maglor found he could not speak for a moment. He looked at the roots. The light moved.
"You went mad," said Elrond, quietly, without judgment, as a healer states a condition, "before we were summoned to make our choice. And the news of your disappearance — it did not reach us in time to affect our choosing. Elros made his choice in full heart, with full knowledge of what he had, and what he was." He hesitated. Then: "Though I will tell you — after we heard that you were gone. That you had vanished. Elros —" another hesitation, very slight: "—he was greatly pained. More than he usually allowed pain to show. He said to me once, not long after, that he wished for a time that he had chosen differently, for no other reason than this: so that if you were somewhere, living in a mortal way, having mortal years, you might find him at the end of them, and know where he was, and not have to wonder."
Maglor turned to look at him.
"He looked for you," said Elrond. "For all his reign. He kept a company of rangers — their only charge was the coast. Looking. In case you came near shore. In case—" he did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. "The patrol continued until his death. His eldest son stood it down afterwards. He had not known why they served, only that his father had commanded it, and with his father gone he released them."
The silence after this was a different quality of silence. Maglor sat in it and felt the shape of it, which was large and strange. He had been on the shore. He had been on the shore for all those years, going back and forth along the same grey reach, and somewhere on that shore, or not far from it, men on Elros's orders had walked and looked. They had not found him. He had been there and they had not found him.
Or he had not let them find him. He was not sure, anymore, which was true.
He thought of Elros — Elros with his father's manner of deciding things thoroughly and without apology, Elros who had been the bolder of them from the first, who had laughed more and feared less and accepted the world as a thing to be engaged rather than managed. Elros keeping the patrol. Elros old, in his last year, telling a story and making his people laugh, with somewhere at the back of his mind — perhaps, perhaps — the thought of a shore, and men walking it, and someone who had not yet been found.
"I did not know," said Maglor.
"No," said Elrond. "You could not have known."
The wind came through the oaks again, and this time it reached the ground. It was cold and smelled of green things on the other side of the shadow. Maglor felt it on his face and thought: I am still here. I am sitting under the oak in Elrond's garden in Aman and it is afternoon and I am still here.
He thought of the small fierce voice earlier, the one that had said: you will not do this. He thought of how it had been right. He thought of how he was glad, with a gladness that was not large yet but was genuine — unassuming as a small fire but real — that he was still here.
"More tea," said Elrond, which was not a question. He was already pouring.
Maglor held out his cup.
The coins of light moved across the ground, keeping their own slow time. Above them, the oaks kept their own counsel, as oaks have always done, through all the long changes of the world. And in the shadow beneath them, two elves sat together in the afternoon, and held their cups with both hands, and were quiet, and were there.
And this is, perhaps, how healing begins — not with the lifting of grief, for grief does not lift, but with the slow, improbable discovery that one is still present inside it, and that beside you, patient as the tide, someone has brought tea and is waiting, and does not require you to be other than what you are.
Here ends this account. What came after is another story, and it is not finished yet.