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The Homecoming of Maglor
A tale of the House of Elrond in the Blessed Realm
It is told that in the Elder Days the Noldor believed no grief could outlast the unmaking of the world, and that no wound could go so deep that even Ilúvatar's patience might not, in the fullness of days beyond counting, find some way to close it. Of the truth of that belief — and of the two who came to prove it, though they loved each other dearly,did not always agree between themselves on what mercy actually required of them — this tale is told.
Prologue: Out of the Sea
For six thousand years and more the shores of Middle-earth had known his voice long after they had forgotten his name. Fisherfolk of the Falas, in ages when there still was a Falas to fish from, told their children not to walk the strand at dusk, for a grey shape wandered there that did not answer to hails, and sang always some fragment of the same broken verses, over and over, as the tide allowed and denied him by turns. In time even the warning faded, as warnings do when the thing they guard against grows too old and too sad to frighten anyone; only the singing remained, thinner each age, though it never wholly ceased, even after the land it had first been sung upon had gone down beneath the waves with the rest of drowned Beleriand.
He did not know, by the end, that there had been a beginning to it — a jewel, a father's oath, a fire in Formenos and a greater fire after, three kinslayings and a burned hand and a brother who had chosen a fiery chasm's mercy over his own. He knew only the tide, and the cold, and the shape the notes still made in his mouth from long habit, the way a snapped harp-string, plucked, will sometimes still give a sound.
It should not have been possible for him to come to Aman. The Straight Road had long since been hidden from any vessel but the last elf-ships that still remembered the old way, and he was no shipwright, had built nothing more than driftwood rafts since the grey years when he had still cared whether he lived or not. But it is said — and this much, at least, wiser tongues than the teller of this tale have sworn to — that Ulmo, Lord of Waters, does not forget a voice that has sung beside his waves for six thousand years, however brokenly; and that when Ilúvatar's mercy comes at last, it comes by whatever door is nearest, even a door that everyone else has long since forgotten was ever there.
So it was that in a grey dawn the watchers on the cliffs above the Bay of Eldamar saw a boat that was scarcely a boat — little more than driftwood lashed together with weed and old rotted rope — ride in upon a tide that ought not to have carried it, and in the boat a shape that did not move until Telerin fisherfolk lifted it clear of the wreck, and found, to their own faint surprise, that it was still breathing.
They did not know him. No one living upon Tol Eressëa had seen that face since the Two Trees still gave their light unmingled, and grief and salt and six thousand years had done to it what six thousand years does to anything left too long in the sea's keeping. Nor did they know — could not have known, gentle as they were with what the water had given back to them — that some remote kin of their own had died upon a strand not unlike this one, in an age before their grandfathers' grandfathers were born, beneath the swords of the very House this broken thing had once ridden from Tirion to serve. The sea keeps stranger silences than that. They only knew that it had given something back that it did not usually give back, and so, in the manner of their kind, they were careful with it.
They carried him inland, to the healing house upon the height above Avallónë, where it was known from Endor to the Calacirya that the Half-elven turned no one away, and asked no name before he gave what help he had.
I. A Face Among the Broken
Celebrían
The Healing House above Avallónë had no wall to speak of on its seaward side — only a colonnade of pale stone through which the morning light came long and low and gold, and through which, on clear days, the sound of the sea was never quite absent, so that even the most fevered dreamer within was rocked, whether he knew it or not, by something very like the memory of being held. Celebrían had come to love this about the place in the years since she and her lord had made their home upon the Lonely Isle: that grief and salt water were old companions there, and neither was made to feel unwelcome.
She came each morning with bread and the strong sweet wine that eased the taking of medicine, and went from pallet to pallet among those newly brought up from the Hither Shores — for they still came, even now, in an age that the histories of Men would one day call late and golden and finished. Some few of the Eldar yet lingered in Endor, weary past all telling of it, and when at last their roads brought them over Sea they arrived in Aman not whole, but worn thin as old cloth, carrying griefs that no voyage, however blessed, could unpack from them by itself. That unpacking was the work of the Healing House. It had become, Celebrían understood without ever quite choosing to understand it, the work of her own life as well, bound up as her life now was with Elrond's.
She noticed the silent one on the third morning of that particular season, though she would learn afterward that Elrond had known of him since the very night the Telerin boats brought him in.
He lay apart from the others, in the westernmost alcove where the light came latest and left soonest, as though even the House's healers had understood, without being told, that this one flinched from too much brightness. His hair, dark once, she guessed, was shot through with a grey that had nothing to do with age — for the Eldar did not grey as Men did — some frost, rather, that only grief could have laid there. His right hand he kept curled to his chest even in sleep, the way a wounded animal will guard the place it hurts, and when a young healer had once tried, gently, to open it and look beneath, he had made a sound that Celebrían heard from three alcoves away and did not forget for the rest of that day.
She thought little of him that morning beyond the ordinary ache any healer's heart will feel for a stranger's pain. It was only when she went looking for her husband, meaning to press bread into his hand before the day's work swallowed him whole, that she found him.
Elrond was kneeling at the silent one's side. That alone was nothing remarkable — he knelt at a hundred bedsides in a season — but he had been kneeling, one of the younger healers told her quietly, since before dawn, and had sent away everyone who came to relieve him. His satchel of instruments lay closed and untouched beside him on the stone. He was not, in that moment, working. He was only looking, with a stillness Celebrían had seen in him perhaps three times across all the long years of their marriage, and never once without grave cause behind it.
She did not go to him at once. Some instinct older than reason held her at the edge of the colonnade, in the gold light, watching her husband's hands — hands she knew better than her own, hands that had closed a thousand wounds and never once, in her sight, trembled — reach out and, with a care that looked almost like fear, begin to loosen the stranger's ruined hand from where it lay curled and guarded against his chest.
The scarring beneath was old — old enough that no healing house in Middle-earth or Aman could do more for it now than had already been done, which was nothing, for six thousand years; only the slow, unwilling labor of time upon flesh too stubborn to entirely die and never once permitted to entirely heal.
Elrond went very white. Celebrían, watching, thought at first he had found some hidden hurt beneath the skin, some fever creeping where it should not — her healer's mind ran ahead even as her wife's heart lagged fearfully behind it — but then her husband made a sound she had never in all their years together heard him make, low and broken and entirely involuntary, and said a name.
Maglor.
It was not a name spoken lightly in any house of the Eldar, and least of all in her own. Celebrían had first heard it as a young bride, late at night, when Elrond spoke of his childhood in the particular careful voice he kept for nothing else — the voice of a man handling something that would cut him again if he gripped it wrong — and she had heard it many times since, always in that same guarded tone, always with that same old grief wrapped round it like a cloak against weather. She had not thought to hear it spoken over a dying stranger's ruined hand in a tone that was not grief at all, but something far more dangerous. Hope.
She did not go to her husband's side. Not yet. She stood in the gold light with the bread going cold in her hands and understood, with the peculiar clarity that only ill news brings, that the peace she and Elrond had built on this island, stone by stone, out of the wreckage of everything both of them had lost in Middle-earth, had just been asked to make room for one more ghost — and that this ghost, unlike all the others who had passed quietly through that Healing House and out again, might not consent to remain a ghost for very long.
II. The Song Beneath the Fever
Elrond
Elrond had tended the broken for so many centuries that he had stopped, somewhere in the early Second Age, trying to keep a count of them. This was not, he hoped, callousness — Celebrían, who knew him better than his own reflection did, would have been the first to say it was not so — but a discipline: a way of being wholly present to one suffering creature without spending the whole of himself upon it, so that there would be something left over for the next, and the next after that, and the thousand after that one. It was, he sometimes thought, the single inheritance of his mortal blood he had never once regretted. Men, who healed one another knowing that the healer too would someday need healing, seemed to learn this balance by instinct; the Eldar, who had all the time in the world and none of its urgency, did not always learn it at all.
He had kept that discipline for six thousand years when it failed him utterly, on a grey morning above Avallónë, over a stranger who would give no one his name.
He had gone to the westernmost alcove before dawn only because the young healers were afraid of the man there, and fear, in a healing house, is a contagion worse than any fever it treats. The stranger had come in on the tide three nights before, half-drowned, raving in a tongue the Telerin folk did not know — though Elrond, listening from the doorway before he had so much as seen the man's face, had known it at once for the high formal Quenya of Valinor before the Exile, twisted by long disuse into something nearer a wound than a language.
That alone should perhaps have told him something. It did not, not yet, because Elrond had learned a second discipline over those same six thousand years, a harder one than the first: not to hope. He had buried that particular capacity somewhere in the early Second Age, gently, as one buries a friend one still loves, and he had not gone digging in that grave for a very long time.
The man would not eat while watched, would not suffer himself to be touched without flinching so violently that twice he had struck a healer who came too near his right side, and slept — when he slept at all — with that ruined hand curled to his chest like something dying that refused, out of pure stubbornness, to finish the dying. It was the hand Elrond had come that morning to see to. Only that, he told himself: a hand, badly burned, badly healed, in need of a healer's ordinary competence and nothing more.
He knelt. He waited, as he had learned to wait with the most frightened of his patients, until the man's breath eased into the shallow rhythm of true sleep. Then, very slowly, he began to loosen fingers that had been curled so long they seemed almost to have forgotten how open hands worked.
It was not the scar that undid him, though the scar alone — a wound given no chance to close in six thousand years, because its bearer had never once let anyone near enough to try — might have been enough on its own to break a lesser composure. It was the sound the man made in his sleep as the hand came open: three notes, tuneless, half-swallowed, the ghost of a melody so old that Elrond had not consciously remembered it in three ages of the world.
His whole body remembered it before his mind caught up. It remembered small hands — his own, once, small and cold and gripping — and a voice, low and unsteady with a grief no child could have named but every child in that tent had felt anyway, singing the same three notes over and over in the dark that smelled of salt and smoke and fear, until a smaller boy beside him stopped shaking, and then he himself stopped shaking, and the man singing — their captor, their captor who was already, impossibly, becoming something else — went on singing long after both boys slept, as though the song had never truly been for them at all, or not only for them.
He had not heard that melody since the last night he ever looked upon Maglor Fëanorion's face, and he did not, ordinarily, permit himself to count how many ages ago that had been.
He looked now — past the matted hair, past the salt-cracked lips, past the grey that grief had laid where age could never touch an Elda — and found, beneath six thousand years of unwitnessed suffering, the face he had spent his whole long life carefully not-hoping to find again.
"Maglor," he said. It came out of him broken, the way the ruined hand beneath his own had been broken, because some things, released after so long a holding, can come out no other way. He was aware, distantly, of tears on his own face, of a joy so violent it was scarcely distinguishable from grief, and of Celebrían somewhere at the colonnade's edge, very still, very pale, watching him become — in front of her, in front of every healer in the House — someone she had perhaps never quite had occasion to see before: not Elrond the Lord, not Elrond the healer of a thousand griefs held always at the careful distance a healer learns to keep and had never before found himself unable to keep. Only the child who had once been held, badly and imperfectly and by a murderer, and had loved him anyway, and had never — not through six thousand years, not through a brother's whole mortal life spent searching, not through his own long practiced forgetting — entirely stopped.
He had built his peace, in the years since Elros died, upon a single certainty: that the Eldar do not lose one another, not truly, not the way Men fear losing one another into a dark none can follow into or send word back from. Maedhros he had long believed dead outright, and had grieved him in the slow, patient way the Eldar grieve — as one grieves a companion gone ahead on a road one will surely walk oneself someday, and be reunited with at its end, whenever the Powers judged fit to release so grave and so self-condemned a spirit from the Halls of Waiting. Even that grief had never been without its own quiet comfort. But Maglor he had not known how to grieve at all, in six thousand years, for Maglor might yet be walking beneath the same Sun as himself — alive, and lost, in a way that admitted no comfort, because it admitted no certainty either way. That uncertainty, Elrond understood now, kneeling in the gold light with a stranger's ruined hand cradled in his own — that, and not the old crimes themselves, was the wound he had carried longest. Not-knowing had always been heavier to bear than knowing, even when the knowing was terrible. And here, unlooked for, was an ending to the not-knowing that he had never once dared to imagine even in his most unguarded hope: not Maglor released from Mandos in some unimaginably distant age of healing yet to come, but Maglor here, now, alive, before Mandos had ever needed to be troubled with him at all.
He did not go to Celebrían. Not yet. There would be time for her, he thought — there was time now for everything, an ocean of it, because the one thing he had never quite let himself believe he would have was time with Maglor again, and now, impossibly, in the gold morning light of Avallónë, he had it.
He bent instead over the ruined hand, and began, very softly, to hum the same three notes back.
III. The Vigil
Celebrían
Three weeks passed, by the reckoning the Eldar still kept out of old habit though the count meant little in a land without a true turning of seasons, and in that time Celebrían watched her husband become, by increments so small she could not afterward name the day it happened, a stranger to his own household.
He still came to their bed, most nights. He still answered her, when she spoke to him, with the old tenderness, the old close attention that had made her, four ages of the world ago, choose him over every other lord who had ever looked twice at Galadriel's daughter. But he came later each night and rose earlier each morning, and the bread she left for him at midday went, more often than not, untouched on the sill until the gulls found it, and a hollowness had begun at his temples that no amount of the strong sweet wine she pressed on him seemed able to fill.
She did not know how to fight this. That was the particular cruelty of it: there was no enemy to name. Maglor Fëanorion did nothing at all, lying in his westernmost alcove, unable most days to hold a spoon without her husband's hand steadying his own — did nothing but exist, brokenly, and require, and Elrond gave and gave and gave to that requiring as though six thousand years of withheld love had all come due at once and must be paid in full before either of them could rest.
On the evening she finally went to the Healing House after dark, she told herself it was only to bring him his supper. This was not entirely a lie.
The colonnade by night was a different country than it was by day — the gold gone over to silver, the sea-sound louder without the day's business to compete with it, the alcoves full of the small noises of the healing and half-healed: a cough here, a murmured name there, someone weeping quietly in a tongue Celebrían did not know for a grief she would never be told. She found her husband exactly where she had known she would find him, seated on a low stool at the westernmost alcove, one hand resting — not gripping, she noted, only resting, with a gentleness that tightened something unbearably in her own chest — over the ruined right hand of the man in the bed.
She looked at Maglor properly, then, for the first time.
He was smaller than she had somehow pictured him, across all the years of hearing his name spoken like a wound in her husband's careful voice. Diminished, she corrected herself; he would once, surely, have stood tall, in the manner of the high princes of the Noldor, but grief and the sea had worn him down the way water wears down stone, and what remained in the bed before her was closer to the memory of a great elf-lord than the thing itself. Someone had begun, with patience, to comb the salt from his hair; it lay in dark, grey-shot hanks across the pillow. His face in sleep was not peaceful. Even Celebrían, no healer of the soul, could see that much: the small ceaseless movement beneath his closed eyes, the tension that would not leave his jaw even in unconsciousness, the way his whole body curved, ever so slightly, around the ruined hand, as though still, after six thousand years, guarding it from a blow already fallen.
She thought of her own scar then — the old orc-wound in her shoulder that no healer in Middle-earth or Aman had ever fully closed, that still, on certain nights, ached with the memory of a poison that ought by now to have been centuries beneath her notice. She knew something of what it was to carry a hurt the body would not release. She had believed, until that moment, that the knowledge made her generous.
Looking at Maglor Fëanorion, she found that it did not. His suffering — undeniable, visible, folded into every line of him — did not move her the way a stranger's suffering ought to move a healer's wife. It made her, if anything, more certain of the thing she had not yet said to Elrond aloud: that suffering, by itself, answers nothing. Orcs suffered. She had heard Elrond say so himself a hundred times, in the voice he kept for his most stubborn convictions — that the poor twisted things were victims first, bred to cruelty by a will not their own, worthy of pity even as they had to be fought, and, where there was no other way, killed. Her father's own kin, the remnant of Doriath who had come at last to Aman generations after its ruin, told a different history around their hearth-fires: of a green home beneath starlit trees, of King Dior and Queen Nimloth who had wronged no one save in the keeping of a jewel that had never rightfully belonged to anyone at all, and of a night when elves who had once sung beneath the light of the Two Trees came with drawn swords into that home and did not stop, some said, even when children wept. Her own great-kin had died that night. Not orcs. Not creatures twisted from their making by another's will. Elves, who had chosen — coldly, and more than once, with their eyes wide open — to do to their own kindred what even Morgoth's beasts might have hesitated over.
Maglor Fëanorion, got by Curufinwë Fëanáro on a mother wise enough to remain behind when her husband and sons rode out to their ruin, had not been bred to cruelty. He had been born a prince of the Noldor in the light of Valinor, taught letters and song and the making of beautiful things, and he had chosen, not once but three times across an age of the world, to draw his sword upon his own kin. That he suffered for it now — suffered terribly, she did not doubt that, could not have doubted it watching the twist of his sleeping face — did not, to Celebrían's mind, undo the choosing. It meant only that even the choosing of evil does not, in the end, spare a soul the paying of evil's price. She was not certain this constituted redemption. She was not certain it constituted anything more than a long, sad symmetry.
"You should eat," she said at last, low, so as not to wake the sleeper, and held out the bread and the dish of stewed fruit she had carried from their own kitchen.
Elrond looked up. In the silver light his face was so tired, and so lit from within by something she could only call joy, that for a moment she could not make herself say any of the things she had come half-intending to say.
"Is he improving?" she asked instead.
"He knew his own name yesterday," Elrond said, "for the length of about three breaths, before the fear took him again." He said it the way another man might report a great victory. "Three weeks ago he did not know he had a name at all."
"That is slow," Celebrían said, and heard, too late, how it sounded.
Her husband's face did not close against her — it never did, that was so much of why she loved him — but something moved behind his eyes, some old patience drawing itself up like a wall he had built long ago and had hoped never to need again. "It is faster," he said gently, "than six thousand years suggested it would ever be at all."
She had no answer to that which would not have required saying more than she was ready, that night, to say. So she only set the bread within his reach, and touched his shoulder — thin, she noticed again, too thin — and left him to his vigil, and did not look back at the sleeping man in the bed, because she was not yet certain what her own face would show if she did.
IV. What the Healer Owes
Elrond
There is a particular intimacy in caring for a body that cannot care for itself, and Elrond had learned it twice in his long life: once among the wounded of the early Second Age's wars, and once, far more thoroughly, in the last years of his brother's life, when the boy who had shared their mother's womb became, by the slow honest work of five centuries, an old man.
He drew now on that second learning more than the first. It was one thing to bind a wound; the Eldar, whatever their other gifts, had faced few enough hurts that would not eventually close, and had built no great art around the tending of what would not. Elros's failing had taught Elrond something else entirely: how to spoon broth into a mouth that had forgotten, in its confusion, how to want it; how to comb a tangle from hair grown too thin and too fine to bear rough handling; how to sit, simply sit, hour upon hour, offering nothing but presence, when presence was the only medicine that still answered.
He did all of this for Maglor now, and did it, he knew, with a gentleness that surprised even the young healers of Avallónë, who had tended the hurts of the Eldar across long ages and had never once needed to learn what it meant to nurse the merely, helplessly old — for the Eldar did not age in body, whatever grief worked upon them within. Elrond alone among the healers of that house carried in his own blood the memory of mortality's slow undoing, and understood, without needing to be taught, that this work called for something gentler than a healer's ordinary skill. It called for a nurse's patience. It called for love that expected nothing back — not thanks, not even recognition — for as many weeks or months as it took.
He was combing the last of the salt-tangles from Maglor's hair, one evening in the fourth week, when the memory of Elros's dying came upon him whole, the way such memories will, without invitation.
His brother had been ancient by then, older than any Man before him had lived to be — such was the gift given the Edain in that first generation — and yet small, in the great bed at Armenelos, in a way that had nothing to do with his stature. "You will keep looking," Elros said. It was not a question; his voice by then was mostly breath. "After I am gone. You will not stop."
"I have never stopped," Elrond said, which was true, though he did not say the rest of it, which was also true: that he had long since ceased to believe the search would end in anything but the confirming of what he already, privately, feared.
Elros smiled at him with the particular clarity dying men are sometimes given, as though the failing of the body burns away everything but the truth beneath it. "I am not asking you to find him," he said. "I am asking you not to grieve him twice."
"I do not understand you."
"You will," said Elros, "when I am gone, and find you cannot grieve me the way other men grieve their dead — because you know, in a way I never can, exactly where I am bound, and that you will follow, and that the parting is no true parting at all, only a very long errand. You have that certainty, for me. I want you to remember that you have had it, all this while, for him too. Whatever has become of him — drowned, or mad, or merely lost — he has not gone anywhere you cannot follow. None of the Eldar have. Grieve him if you must, brother. But grieve him as you will grieve me: as one waiting, not one lost." He paused, and his eyes, when they opened again, were fond, and very tired. "The rangers may stand down, once I am gone. Tell my son I bear him no grudge for it; searching costs gold, and gold is easier spent on the living. But you are not to stand down. That was never gold's to buy, or a king's to end."
Then, after a while: "Sing to me. The one with no words. I have not been able to remember the shape of it in years."
And Elrond had sung it — the three notes, and the long silences between them — sitting at his brother's deathbed in a tower that the Sea itself has since swallowed whole, and Elros had closed his eyes and smiled, and some hours later, in his sleep, had gone where Elrond could not yet follow, but would.
The comb stilled in Elrond's hand. Beneath it, Maglor stirred — some old instinct, perhaps, for a silence held too long — and Elrond, without quite deciding to, began to hum, very low, the three notes and the long silences between them.
He expected nothing to come of it. He had hummed those notes a hundred times across the past month, testing them the way a healer tests any remedy, and had won for his trouble no more than a slight easing of the sleeper's breath.
This time, Maglor's eyes opened.
They were clear. Elrond, who had spent a month learning every gradation of clouded, fevered, frightened absence those eyes could hold, knew the difference at once, and went very still — the way he had once gone still over a wound he was afraid to disturb by so much as breathing near it.
"That song," Maglor said. His voice was wrecked, unused in any true sense for longer than Elrond could bear to reckon, but the words themselves were clear, and shaped, and entirely his own. "I made that for—" He stopped. Something moved behind his eyes: some vast machinery of memory, grinding after six thousand years of disuse. "There were two of you," he said, wondering, as though the thought surprised him even in the speaking of it. "Small. Cold. You would not stop shaking."
"Elrond," Elrond said, very carefully, as one offers a hand to a creature that has forgotten, or never learned, that a hand can be offered without a blow following after it. "I am Elrond."
The ruined hand — the one he had spent a month coaxing open — moved, slowly, as though the movement cost everything its owner had left, and closed about Elrond's wrist. The grip was terrible: too tight, shaking, the grip of a drowning thing that has only just understood, against all sense, that it has been given something to hold on to.
"Elrond." And then Maglor's face did something for which Elrond had no healer's word — something between the beginning of a smile and the beginning of a collapse — and he said, in the broken wreck of a voice that had once, ages past, sung the greatest laments the Noldor ever made: "I did not let myself hope. I want you to know that. I did not dare."
"I know," Elrond said, and found that he too was weeping — for the third time in four weeks, which was three more times than he had wept in the several centuries before this one. "Nor did I, for a very long time. But I never entirely stopped, either."
The grip did not loosen. Maglor's eyes, after a moment, began to lose their terrible clarity again, the way a candle-flame gutters when a door somewhere in the house swings open — but before they went out entirely, he said one thing more, so quietly Elrond had to bend close to catch it at all.
"Is Elros—"
"He lived a long and good life," Elrond said, before the question could finish becoming itself, for he had learned, in a month of this work, that some mercies can only be given quickly, before the asking has time to ripen into dread. "He was a king. He was happy. He has been gone from this world a very long while, and I will see him again, in Ilúvatar's own time, as I hope now to see you fully returned to yourself. That is the whole of the ending that story has. It is not an unhappy one."
He did not know, watching Maglor's eyes close again at last, whether any of it had been understood, or would be remembered by morning. He found that it mattered rather less than he might once have thought it would. He had said it. That, at least, was its own way of keeping a promise made at a deathbed forty centuries gone.
V. Two Truths at One Hearth
Celebrían & Elrond
Their own house stood a little apart from the Healing House, on a headland where the wind off the Bay came unbroken and the lamps had to be set behind glass or else gutter before the first watch of evening was through. Celebrían had chosen the site herself, years before, for the particular slant of the light across the water at day's end; tonight the light had long since gone, and only the lamps remained, and the sea-sound, and her needlework lying forgotten in her lap while she waited for her husband to come home.
He came later than she had hoped, and later than he had promised, and she saw the apology already forming on his face before he was fully through the door, and found, to her own faint surprise, that she did not want it.
"Sit," she said. "Eat something. And then, if you are able, look at me while we speak, rather than at whatever it is you carry home from that house every night upon your shoulders."
Elrond sat. He did look at her — he always did; that was the maddening, beloved thing about him, that in four ages of marriage he had never once flinched from looking at her squarely — but she could see what it cost him tonight, the way a man's whole body labors to lift a weight he has carried so long he has forgotten it has any existence apart from his own.
"You are angry," he said.
"I am tired," said Celebrían, "of being married to a man I only ever see asleep. And I am—" She stopped, and made herself say the rest of it plainly, for four ages of marriage had taught her that the things left unspoken in that house grew, in the dark, into shapes far worse than the plain truth would ever have been. "I am angry. Yes. Not that you tend the sick — you have tended the sick since before I knew you, and I did not marry a man who could ever be otherwise, nor would I have wished to. I am angry that it is him."
"Say his name," Elrond said quietly. Not a rebuke. A request.
"Maglor." The word left her like something spat out. "The same Maglor who rode from Tirion with fire enough in him to burn down an age of the world, and did. The same Maglor who stood at Sirion, sword in hand, while your own mother chose the sea over yielding what she carried. Do you know that my father's kin died at Doriath, before ever Sirion burned — the first grief his House gave the world, not the last? I have watched you love this creature back to himself for a month now, and said nothing each night, because I love you, and because I know what he was to you once, when you were a child too young to have any choice in who held you. But I am not a child. I did have a choice, in what I would come home to each evening, and I chose you — and of late I do not feel the choosing has been returned to me in kind."
She had not meant to say quite so much, so fast. She saw it land on him — not as a blow; he did not flinch that way — but as something absorbed, and weighed, and taken with entire seriousness, which was so exactly like him, and so entirely unlike what she had braced herself for, that some of her anger softened at the edges even as she watched it happen.
"You are not wrong," Elrond said, "in any part of it. I have never told you Maglor was innocent of what he did. I loved a man who helped murder my mother's kin, and helped burn my first home to the waterline, and then vanished from my life without one word of farewell, at an age when his leaving very nearly undid me as thoroughly as his coming once had. I know the whole account, Celebrían. I have never needed you to remind me of it — though I do not resent you for doing so tonight. It has simply never been the whole of the account, to me, and I do not believe it ever could be."
"Then tell me the rest," she said, "since you seem to think I have not already heard it."
He was quiet a moment, choosing — she could see him choosing, the way he chose words for the dying — for exactness, and not for comfort.
"He was given an oath before he was given a choice," Elrond said at last. "By his own father, whom I do not doubt loved him, and whom I equally do not doubt should never have asked what he asked. I have spent six thousand years learning the shapes evil takes when it is not born but made — I have sat with orcs in chains, Celebrían, and pitied them, because whatever they became, they did not choose the becoming; it was done to them, by a will crueler and stronger than their own. I do not say Maglor is the same. He had more choice than any orc was ever given, and far less excuse. But I have come to think he had rather less choice than you credit him, once the oath was sworn and his father was ash and his brothers were dying, one by one, for the keeping of it. I think, in the end, he was two men. The prince who swore — freely, in the pride of Tirion, before he understood what the words would cost him. And the man who spent six thousand years alone upon a shore, singing his grief into the sea because he could not stop himself, and would not permit himself to die. I do not forgive the first of those men easily, Celebrían. I do not believe I am required to. But I have spent a month tending the second, and I find I cannot make myself hate him, however true every word of the account you have just given me remains."
"And the third grief?" she said — for she had promised herself, coming into that evening, that she would say the whole of it, not only the parts that came easily. "The years he had you — raised you, after a fashion. Even I have heard how he softened toward you both in time; how he taught you your letters; how he sang you to sleep. And then he vanished the very moment you were grown enough to be given a choice of your own, without a word, without so much as a farewell, and left you and Elros to spend an entire Age of the world searching, rather than simply stay, and let the two of you love him openly, without wondering every day whether you loved a corpse, or a captive, or a madman. That, too, was his choosing, Elrond. Not the Oath's doing. Not his father's. His own."
This landed harder. She saw it land harder — saw something move behind her husband's eyes that was not defense but old, old grief, freshly disturbed from where it had been resting.
"Yes," Elrond said, after a silence long enough that the lamp had time to gutter and steady again. "That one I have never fully forgiven. I do not know that I ever shall, entirely — not even now, not even having found him again, not even loving him, still, as much as I plainly do. Elros never forgave it either, whatever gentleness he spoke of it with near the end. We were both of us marred by it, in our different ways — I, by hoping too long; he, by giving up too soon — though I have never been certain which of us paid the higher price for his particular failing." He reached across the small table then, and took her hand, and she let him, though she did not soften entirely, not yet. "I am not asking you to love him, Celebrían. I do not think I have any right to ask that of you, given everything you have just said, every word of which is true. I am asking only that you let me finish what I began the day I first learned to forgive an orc for what was done to it, to make it a monster — save that this time the monster is also, somehow, impossibly, the nearest thing to a father I have left in all the world, and I find that after six thousand years of half-believing him dead, I am simply not able to turn away from the chance to say so to his living face."
Celebrían looked a long moment at their joined hands — his, scarred in a hundred small ways by a healer's long practice; hers, unscarred there, though scarred elsewhere, in places he alone had ever been permitted to see.
"I will not love him," she said at last. "I want that said plainly, so there is no confusion between us later. I do not think I am able to, and I am not certain I believe I ought even to try. But I will not stand between you and this — whatever it is you need to finish. And I will carry the bread myself, tomorrow, rather than send it by a servant, so that you eat it while it is still warm for once — whatever else I do or do not feel about the man you are feeding it to."
It was not forgiveness. Elrond, watching his wife's face in the guttering lamplight, understood that perfectly, and did not mistake the gift for something larger than it was. But he had tended enough wounds, across all his long years of healing, to know exactly how much a gift of that particular shape costs the one who gives it, and to be grateful for it in proportion to the cost, and not to the size.
"Thank you," he said, and meant, by it, a great deal more than the bread.
Epilogue: The Tide Turns Slowly
It was the turn of a season, not many months later — insofar as Aman kept seasons at all, which was less from any necessity of the land than from the Eldar's old fondness for marking time in ways Middle-earth had taught them to love, even here, where the Trees' light no longer required it of them — when Celebrían came upon Maglor Fëanorion sitting alone in the garden below the Healing House, and did not, for the first time since his coming, turn away.
He was stronger than he had been. Not whole — she did not think, watching him, that he would ever again be entirely what he must once have been, in the light of Valinor before the world asked so much of him — but stronger: he sat upright now without support, and his hands, both of them, lay open in his lap rather than curled against some expected blow, and the grey in his hair, though it had not receded, no longer seemed to her quite so much like frost as like the ordinary weather of a long life honestly outlived.
He was humming. Not singing — Elrond had told her, in the quiet, careful pride he kept for the small victories of this long work, that true singing had not yet returned to him, that certain doors in a soul shut so long needed more than one season to swing open fully — but humming, low, wordless, a thread of melody that even Celebrían, who had refused for a month to let herself truly listen to anything this man made with his voice, recognized now as something gentler than grief.
A gull cried, sudden and sharp, above the headland. Maglor flinched — badly, his whole body drawing inward in the old defensive curl she remembered from that first night in the westernmost alcove — and for one unguarded moment, before he mastered himself again, Celebrían saw precisely what her husband must have seen in him from the very first morning: not a kinslayer, not a fallen prince of a ruined House, not the sum of every grievance she had catalogued so carefully, and so justly, in her own heart. Only a frightened creature, flinching from a sound, the way any deeply hurt thing will flinch, whether it is guilty or innocent, whether or not it has earned the mercy of being startled gently back to stillness.
She did not go to him. She was not ready for that, and was honest enough with herself, even now, to admit she might never be. But she did not turn away either, and stood a while longer at the garden's edge, watching the stranger her husband loved slowly relearn how to be unafraid of an empty sky, and found that the watching, this time, cost her something a little less than it once had.
Elrond found her there when his own work in the House was done for the day. He said nothing at first — he had learned, this past season, exactly how much and how little to say to her on this one subject — only came to stand beside her, and took her hand, and together they watched the last of the light go long and gold across the water, the way it did every evening from that headland, the way it had done, Celebrían supposed, since long before either grief or mercy had a name to be called by.
"There is still Nerdanel to consider," Elrond said at last, very quietly, into the gold hush of it. "And my mother, in her tower by the water. Someone will have to tell them both, eventually, that he has been found."
"Eventually," Celebrían agreed. "Not tonight."
"No," said Elrond. "Not tonight."
Below them, in the garden, Maglor Fëanorion went on humming his wordless, mending song into the gathering evening, and the sea — which forgets nothing, and forgives, in its own slow, tide-bound way, a great deal more than it is given credit for — went on listening, as it always had, as it would, perhaps, for exactly as long as the story required.