Work Text:
Of Old Wars and New Mornings
A tale of the House of Elrond, in the Fourth Age, in the land of Aman
I. The Fountain
There is a kind of morning that comes only to the Blessed Realm, and it came now to the green hollow where Elrond Half-elven had built his house among the birches and the tall grey pines: a morning neither cold nor warm, but washed, as though the whole world had been rinsed clean in the night and left out to dry in a light too gentle to be called sun and too golden to be called anything else. The dew had not yet burned from the lawns. Somewhere beyond the hedge a thrush was practising the same four notes over and over, as if it could not quite believe how well they fit together, and did not want to move on to the fifth until it was sure.
It was into this hush that Maglor came, some hours before the household properly woke, walking with the loose, unhurried gait of a man who does not know that anyone might be watching him, because for so many yéni no one had been.
He had come, without designing it, to the fountain by the west wing — a modest thing of pale stone, older in style than the rest of the house, carved in the shape of a swan with wings half-lifted, the water falling from its beak in a thin bright thread into a shallow basin ringed with moss. It was not the grand fountain that stood before the main doors, the one the guests saw first, the one that had, in another age entirely, borne witness to a company of dwarves scrubbing themselves pink and singing bawdy songs about soap. It was smaller, and half-hidden, and it caught the morning light in a way that must have pleased whoever built it, three ages ago, for love of exactly this: quiet water, and quiet light, and no one much about.
Maglor did not think of it as hidden. He did not think, in truth, in the ordered way that thought is usually described — in sentences, in plans. He thought the way a deer thinks when it comes to a stream: water, here, now, good. He shrugged the linen shirt from his shoulders — for he had been taught, patiently and many times over these past weeks, by hands gentler than his madness had any right to expect, that this at least was permitted, was safe, that his own small bathing-room adjoining his own chamber was his and no one else's business — but this morning some older current in him had carried him past that door and out into the grey-gold garden instead, toward water that moved, water that sang a little as it fell, water that reminded some buried and still-living part of him of streams in Beleriand he had washed his brothers' wounds in, once, a world and a death ago.
He knelt at the basin's edge. He was lean now — leaner than Elrond, watching later, would ever have imagined a Fëanorion could become, for the sons of Fëanor had been built like their father, all of them, broad through the shoulder and quick with a blade — but the leanness sat on him like the leanness of a wolf sits on a wolf: not weakness, but a body pared down to exactly what it needed and nothing it did not. The muscle that remained was hard and close beneath the skin, the kind of strength that comes not from a training-yard but from a life spent climbing wet rock and wrestling the sea for food. His hair, unbound, fell past his shoulders in a black gone startlingly through with grey and white — not the grey of age, for Elves do not grey with years, but the grey of grief, of centuries reckoned in wounds rather than in seasons, so that it looked less like frost on a dark hill and more like the marks left in wood by lightning.
He cupped water in his hands and drank first — always he drank first, some old wariness in him checking that the water was clean before he trusted it near a wound or a sleeping child, though there were no wounds here now, and no children in his tent — and then he began, methodically, unselfconsciously, to wash: the water dark with old habit, cold enough that another man might have gasped, though he did not, only breathed out slowly through his nose the way a man does who has bathed in colder water than this for longer than he can remember, in caves where the tide came up black and salt and merciless, and a body either learned to bear the cold or it did not survive to feel it twice.
It was in this attitude — half-turned from the path, water running silver over the old scars on his back, humming, without knowing he hummed, some six notes of a tune three ages dead — that Elrond found him.
Elrond's part of the morning had begun, as most of his mornings began now, with listening for whether the house was quiet in the right way or the wrong one.
He had learned, in the weeks since Maglor came into his household, to read silence the way a healer reads a pulse. There was the silence of a man sleeping — heavy, even, a little rough at the edges with old dreams, but held, contained within itself. And there was the other silence, the one that meant Maglor had woken somewhere in the grey hour before dawn and slipped, quiet as smoke, out from under whatever roof had been given him, drawn by some tide only he could hear.
This morning, coming past the west colonnade with a cup of miruvor in hand meant for no one in particular except perhaps himself, Elrond heard neither silence. He heard water, and beneath the water, a voice — low, unpractised, rusted with disuse but not, he thought with the sharp private relief that came to him now several times a day, unhappy — and he came round the hedge already smiling before he had even decided to smile, because he recognised the tune.
Of course you remember that one, he thought. Of course, out of everything, your hands remember a bathing-song for children before your mind remembers your own name most days.
He found his foster-father — for so Elrond had called him, unhesitating, from the very first morning it became clear that Maglor would need calling something, and lord felt like a mockery and Kinslayer a cruelty and Fëanorion a weight no one recovering ought to carry — kneeling shirtless at the swan-fountain, scrubbing at his own forearm with the unselfconscious thoroughness of a man who has never in his life had anyone to be embarrassed in front of.
"There you are," Elrond said, and made no effort at all to keep the warmth from his voice, because there was no reason to.
Maglor's head came up sharply — the old wariness, the flinch that had not yet worn away and perhaps never fully would — but softened at once, seeing who it was, into something almost sheepish. Water dripped from his chin. "The room's fountain," he said, slowly, working the sentence out the way a man works out a knot with cold fingers, "was — there was a sound. From this one. I followed the sound."
"I know," said Elrond. "You always do." He set the cup down on the basin's rim, out of the splash-range, an old habit of three children's-worth of mornings resurfacing without his even noticing it. "Come, let me see your arm — that's not a wound, is it, or only old scarring?"
"Old," said Maglor, and held it out for inspection without being asked twice, which was itself, Elrond thought, no small mercy — a month ago he would have hidden it, or lied, or simply vanished before the question was fully spoken.
Elrond looked it over — an old white line, decades healed, said nothing of it beyond a small private note filed away with all the others — and then, because he could not entirely help himself, because some things simply demanded to be said aloud, he laughed. Not unkindly. Not at Maglor at all, in truth, but at the sheer, absurd, well-worn familiarity of the scene: a person of great age and greater tragedy, washing half-naked at his fountain in the pale hour before the household woke, entirely unbothered by who might see.
"Do you know," he said, "you are not the first to bathe uninvited at one of my fountains. Not even close to the first."
Maglor blinked water from his lashes and regarded him with the mild, patient incomprehension of a man for whom most sentences now arrived a half-beat delayed, like light from a very old star.
"There was a company, once," Elrond went on, settling himself on the low stone rim as though this were the most natural conversation in all of Arda, "thirteen dwarves and a halfling and a wizard besides, who came to my house in the Wild — Imladris, you'd not remember the name, it hardly matters — and within a single evening of their arrival I found the whole lot of them, every dwarf down to the last button on Bombur's waistcoat, entirely unclothed, splashing about in the fountain before my very front doors, singing the most extraordinary song about the injustice of getting one's beard wet. Thorin Oakenshield himself, King under the Mountain that would be, up to his knees in my ornamental carp pond, quite unrepentant." He shook his head, still smiling at the memory the way one smiles at an old and well-loved scar. "So you see. This household has weathered stranger mornings than this one."
For a moment Maglor only looked at him — and then, slowly, as though the muscles required for it had to be rediscovered one at a time, something in his face loosened, and a sound came out of him that Elrond had not yet heard in all the weeks since his coming: not quite a laugh, more the ghost of one, dry and startled, like a door opening on a room that has stood shut a long time.
"Dwarves," Maglor said. "In your pond."
"In my pond," Elrond confirmed. "Singing."
Celebrían came upon the tail end of it — the laughter, the dripping, undignified scene of it — from the far path, where she had gone to see whether the roses along the south wall had taken the late frost, and what she found stopped her mid-step as surely as a wall of stone.
Her husband was seated at the edge of the little swan-fountain, at ease, sharing some jest she had not heard the start of, while across from him a half-naked man old enough to remember the Trees of Valinor knelt dripping in the water with his hair unbound and his scars on open display to the whole waking garden, and laughed — actually laughed, a rusty broken sound like something long unused — as though this were an ordinary morning, as though nothing at all were amiss.
She did not go closer.
She stood instead at the turn of the path with her basket of pruning-shears still on her arm and felt, in quick and disorienting succession, several things she did not much like feeling.
Embarrassment, first and simplest — for what if a servant came this way, or one of the grooms, and saw the great lord of the house sitting cheerfully by while a stranger bathed half-clothed in the family's own garden, as though propriety itself had been quietly set aside the moment this creature crossed their threshold? What must it look like, to anyone with eyes and sense, that Elrond found this charming?
But beneath the embarrassment, colder and less easy to name, was the other thing — the thing that had been growing in her, day by slow day, since Maglor first came stumbling half-drowned and raving out of the western sea and her husband had, without a single moment's hesitation that she could detect, opened every door of their house to him.
She watched Maglor's hands — those hands, she thought, those exact hands, and could not stop the thought once it had begun — scrub unhurried water over a chest gone lean and hard as driftwood, and she thought of Doriath. She thought of the Havens at Sirion, and of the sound — which she had never heard, which she knew only from song and telling, and yet which some nights she was near certain she could hear, if she let herself — of a city burning at the hands of its own kin. She thought: this is the same body. Older, yes. Broken, yes. But the same hands that held the blade at the Havens are the hands my husband is laughing with over breakfast.
And worse than the memory was the fear it fed. For madness, she had been taught — had been taught by every song, every warning, every grim old tale told to Elven children about the wood-wights and the corrupted things that haunted Beleriand in the Elder Days — madness was not merely sorrow. Madness unmade a person. It stripped away the long civilising work of centuries and left beneath it something that could not be reasoned with, could not be trusted, could not be known — and a person who could not be known was a person who might, at any moment, without warning and without malice even, simply revert. Become again, in an unguarded instant, the thing that did that, at the Havens, to her husband's own mother's people.
She did not think Maglor meant harm. That was not quite the shape of her fear. Her fear had no meant in it at all — that was precisely the trouble. She feared the boar that does not choose to gore the hunter; the storm that does not choose to sink the ship. She feared what a broken mind might do without ever intending to do anything at all.
And her husband — her clever, wise, deep-seeing husband, three ages old and Half-elven and healer both — sat laughing at the water's edge as though none of that were true. As though a Kinslayer bathing bare-chested in their garden at dawn were no different in kind from a company of singing dwarves.
He does not see the danger, she thought, and the thought frightened her more than Maglor's scars had. Or he sees it and does not care, because he loves him too much to let himself.
She turned back the way she had come, before either of them noticed her, and did not go to look at the roses after all.
II. The Empty Morning
The alarm — though it did not begin as an alarm, only as a small wrongness — began three days later, and it began, as such things so often do, with an empty room where a sleeping man ought to have been.
Elrond woke at his own accustomed hour, before the sun, from the long habit of a life that had for three ages required watchfulness at exactly this hour more than any other, and went, as he had gone every morning since Maglor's coming, to look in on him — not from suspicion, or not only from suspicion, but from the simple healer's instinct to see with his own eyes that the patient had passed the night whole.
The room was empty. The bed had been slept in and left, the blanket thrown back with the particular carelessness of a man who does not expect anyone to mind, and the little adjoining bathing-room stood dark and unused.
Elrond did not call out at once. He stood a moment in the doorway with the grey pre-dawn light coming thin through the window, and felt the old cold settle into his stomach — not panic, not yet, for panic was a luxury a healer of many people and a war of a hundred years had long ago learned to postpone until it was useful — but attention, sharp and total, the whole of him turning at once toward a single question: where.
He searched the house first, methodically, room by room, with the quiet economy of movement of a man who did not wish to wake the household before he had reason to. The kitchens, cold and banked. The long gallery, empty. The little walled garden with the swan-fountain — empty too, water running its same thin bright thread into the same shallow basin, but no one kneeling there this morning.
It was in the stable yard, questioning a groom half-asleep at his own early chores, that he learned what little there was to learn: a shape seen crossing the east paddock before proper light, moving fast and low, gone before the boy had thought to call out or wonder at it.
East, Elrond thought, and felt the cold in his stomach sharpen into something closer to fear, because east, past the paddocks and the low stone wall that marked the edge of his own tended lands, the ground fell away in long green folds toward the coast — toward the Telerin settlements strung like pale shells along the shore, and beyond them, the sea itself, singing its endless siren note that had called Elves home across an Age and more.
He knew — none better — what the sea had been to Maglor for two thousand years of madness. He knew the shape of that old habit: a mind broken past reason, and beneath the breaking, some animal constancy that had kept a body alive by keeping it near water, near caves, near the tide's changeless rhythm, because rhythm was the one thing a mind that could no longer hold a thought could still, somehow, hold. If he has gone back to it, Elrond thought, standing in the cold yard with his heart beginning, despite every discipline of a healer's mind, to hammer, if some old grief has called him back down to the shingle and the caves —
He did not finish the thought. He turned instead, with the crisp economy of a man three ages practised in emergencies both martial and domestic, and gave the order that sent two of his most trusted riders — quiet, capable, utterly discreet men who had served his household since Imladris and would not gossip a word of this in any hall — down toward the Telerin shore to ask, gently, without alarming anyone, whether a tall grey-haired stranger had been seen upon the strand.
Celebrían found her husband in the stable yard in the grey not-quite-morning, giving orders in the low, level, dangerous-calm voice she had learned over three ages meant he was more frightened than he would ever say aloud, and her first thought — before she had even properly understood what was happening — was a small, shamed, entirely involuntary flicker of relief.
He is gone, was the thought, quick and ugly and gone again almost before she had finished thinking it, chased at once by guilt so immediate it was almost its own kind of pain. He has gone, perhaps he has gone for good, and the house will be ours again, and I will not have to watch my husband tend a Kinslayer's scars at the breakfast table —
And then, hard on the heels of the guilt: Elrond is afraid.
That undid the small ugly relief entirely, and replaced it with something rawer. Whatever she felt about Maglor — and she felt, if she was honest with herself in the cold grey yard, a great deal, none of it comfortable — she had never for one moment doubted what Elrond felt, and to see her husband standing white-faced and controlled in the half-dark, giving orders in that flat healer's voice he used only when something might genuinely be dying, reached past every one of her own guarded feelings and struck directly at the oldest, simplest thing between them: he is in pain, and I love him.
"Elrond." She came to him quickly across the frosted grass, her wrap still loose about her shoulders. "What is it? What's happened?"
"He's gone from his room." Elrond did not look away from the riders even as he answered her, watching them swing up into their saddles with the particular attention of a man who cannot make his own body move fast enough to do the thing he wishes it could do. "Since before light. A groom saw him crossing toward the east wall."
"The shore," she said, understanding at once, for she too knew the old songs, knew what the sea had been to that particular grief for two thousand years.
"Perhaps." He said it carefully, the way he said most things now, weighing each word for whether it would help or only frighten. "I don't know. I would rather know than fear, so I've sent to ask."
She wanted, in that moment, to say something comforting, and found — with a small private shock — that she did not entirely know what shape comfort ought to take, when the thing she would have to comfort him about was the possible loss of a man whose presence in her own home had cost her sleep for weeks. She settled, in the end, for the truth, or as much of it as she could manage.
"I'll have Nandurion ready warm clothes and food, in case he's found cold," she said, and saw something in Elrond's shoulders ease, very slightly, at having one more thing taken care of that he did not have to think of himself. "Whatever else — he oughtn't come back to a cold room."
Elrond looked at her then, properly, for the first time since she'd come into the yard, and there was something in his face — gratitude, plain and unguarded, and beneath it a flicker of something that might almost have been surprise, as though he had not entirely expected the kindness — that made her own chest tighten with a complicated ache she did not have a single word for.
I do not know if I can love him the way Elrond does, she thought, watching her husband turn back to give further quiet orders to the household. But I can do this much. I can do this much, at least, for my husband's sake, whatever I feel about the rest.
III. The Vinyacoimo
The wrongness of the season had been building for a week before the wood-elves rode out, and any adult with sense enough to have lived through even one boar-birthing season would have told them so, had they thought to ask — which, being young, and being six together and therefore twice as certain as any one of them alone, they had not.
They were of the Woodland folk, this little company, sons and daughters of Silvan families who had made the long grey road from Middle-earth some centuries past and settled, as many of their kin had, in the wide wooded country that fell under no lord's close governance save, loosely, whatever courtesy was owed a neighbour — and Elrond's own lands, gentle and lightly-held as they were, offered exactly the kind of unwatched forest that six vinyacoimo — for so their own folk styled the young unmarried adults of full Elven blood, grown now some three or four centuries into their long slow lives but not yet grown into the settled wisdom their elders would only grant them after the third century's turning, or the fourth — might slip into unremarked, with hounds at heel and spears in hand, and no grown huntsman to tell them the one thing every grown huntsman in Arda could have told them: not now. Not the sows. Not their young.
They came for the thrill of it more than the meat, if truth be told — the particular fierce joy of youth just old enough to have been given real weapons and not yet old enough to have buried a friend by one, six of them laughing low and delighted with each other under the green canopy, hounds working the undergrowth ahead in eager loping arcs, utterly, gloriously unaware that the boar they meant to flush was, this very week of all weeks in the whole turning year, guarding a litter.
The hounds found the sounder first, and paid for it first: a great tusked shape came out of the bracken with a scream more than a grunt, low and black and impossibly fast, and in the space of perhaps four heartbeats two of the six hounds were dead outright and a third was dragging itself, screaming, into the undergrowth with its hindquarters opened to the bone.
What followed was not a hunt. It was six young people who had, until this precise moment, thought themselves nearly grown, discovering all at once and all together exactly how much of grown they still had left to become. Spears, thrown in panic rather than aimed in skill, mostly missed or glanced from tusk and shoulder without doing more than enraging the beast further; a bow-shot or two struck true enough to draw blood but nowhere near true enough to draw death, for a young sounder-boar in full charge does not politely present the vitals a hunting-song describes, and wood-elf archers, however fine their eye in the high canopy shooting down at leisure, had never in their short lives had to loose an arrow at a thing that was, in the same breath, trying to kill them where they stood.
By the time the last of the six had scrambled, breathless and weeping with the particular shame of terror, up into the low fork of a broad-limbed oak, three hounds lay dead in the leaf-mould and a fourth was dying, and the boar — vast, black, bristling, one tusk chipped and bloody from a spear-thrust that had drawn agony without drawing death — paced beneath the tree in slow, furious circles, grunting low in its throat, in no hurry at all, for it had all the patience in the world and they, quite plainly, did not.
It was into this scene of ruin — dead hounds, broken spears, six terrified youths treed like cats above an animal that showed no sign whatsoever of losing interest — that Maglor came, without any sound to announce him, the way he came upon most things now: simply present, where a moment before he had not been.
He had been walking inland for the better part of some hours, following nothing so exact as a plan — his mind held few plans any longer, only currents, old grooves worn deep enough by two millennia of repetition that his feet still walked them when nothing else in him remembered why — but this particular current ran deep and old indeed: the smell of green growing things, the particular quality of shadow under a full canopy, the low constant murmur of a forest going about its business, all of it calling up in him some buried certainty that this was the season to be hunting, that meat was needed, that somewhere behind him — always, always somewhere just behind him, in the tent, by the fire, waiting — there were mouths to feed.
He came to the clearing and took in the scene the way he took in most things now: not in ordered thought, but in a single total apprehension, the way an animal reads a landscape all at once. Boar. Wounded, angered, guarding young — no, the young are elsewhere, this one guards nothing now but its own hurt pride, which makes it worse, not better. Dead dogs. Broken spears. Elflings treed, frightened, no weapons left worth the name. And beneath all of it, wordless and immediate: danger to the young. Stop it.
What he did next, he did the way he had done such things a thousand times before in a life he no longer properly remembered living: without deliberation, without a plan he could have spoken aloud, but with a competence that had never depended on conscious plan in the first place, only on a body that had learned its lessons in blood and never forgotten them however far the mind that once directed it had drifted.
He whistled — sharp, short, deliberately provoking, a sound with nothing of fear in it — and threw a stone hard against the boar's wounded shoulder.
The beast's fury, which a moment before had been diffuse, general, patiently circling — found, in an instant, a single clean target, and came for him with the whole terrible speed of its considerable bulk.
Maglor did not run in the direction the beast expected. He ran at an angle, toward the nearest low-limbed pine, and was up it — bare hands and bare feet finding purchase in bark and knot with the sureness of a creature that had climbed a thousand such trees a thousand such mornings simply to reach a gull's nest or a better vantage on the tide — a scant half-breath before the boar's tusks raked the trunk where he had been.
And then, in the same continuous motion, with no pause at all for the treed youths above to even properly register what they were seeing, he dropped.
He came down on the boar's back with the whole weight of his fall behind him, one arm locking hard about its thick neck, and before the animal had even finished its scream of shock and outrage his other hand had found its eye and driven in, thumb first, with a sound none of the six vinyacoimo above would ever afterward be able to fully describe even to each other, and the beast's scream changed register entirely, from fury to something closer to the sound the dying hound had made.
Blinded on one side, it bucked and thrashed with a strength that would have thrown a lesser rider clear across the clearing, and Maglor rode it — rode it the way a man rides a wave he cannot outrun, absorbing the violence of it rather than fighting it directly, letting the boar's own thrashing carry his second hand round to its throat — and there, for perhaps the span of a slow count to sixty, elf and beast strained against each other in a silence broken only by the boar's choked, furious breathing and the wet tearing gasps of six young people above who had gone entirely, utterly still, too shocked even to call out.
Then something gave, with a sound like a green branch snapped underfoot, and the boar's vast black bulk shuddered once, twice, and went down into the leaf-mould, and did not move again.
Maglor rose from the body slowly, breathing hard through his nose, and for a long moment simply stood over the kill with his bloodied hands hanging loose at his sides, chest heaving, his grey-streaked hair fallen loose across a face that showed, to the wide staring eyes above him, nothing at all that they could put a name to — not triumph, not horror, not even satisfaction. Only a kind of vast, tired stillness, the stillness of a task completed that had needed, urgently, to be completed, and was now simply done.
He did not look up at them. He did not speak. He wiped his hands, unhurried, on a hank of grass at his feet, in the exact economical motion of a man who has cleaned his hands after such work ten thousand times before and expects to do it ten thousand times again, and then he turned, without a backward glance at the six frozen youths in the oak above him, and walked on into the deeper green shadow of the forest, gone as suddenly and as silently as he had come.
None of the six spoke for a long while after. When at last one of them — the eldest of the party, a fierce dark-haired girl named for a star her grandmother had loved — found her voice, all she managed, in a whisper, was: "What was that."
No one answered her. No one, in truth, knew.
IV. The Search
Elrond found them at dusk, six frightened vinyacoimo still huddled in the wreck of their own hunt, arguing — for they had by then found their voices again, and youth being what it is, argument had followed shock as naturally as evening follows afternoon — over whether it was theirs by right to carry off the great boar that had killed their hounds, seeing as they had not been the ones to kill it themselves, and whether it was proper, even so, to leave their own dead dogs to rot ownerless in another lord's wood, or whether courtesy demanded they be carried home for burial regardless of the labour it would cost six exhausted, shaken elves already carrying three broken spears and their own considerable shame.
It was not a dignified scene, and Elrond — arriving with a small mounted party of his own most trusted men, having tracked the commotion of the day's earlier events through half his own forest on nothing more than a groom's report of "something, my lord, I couldn't rightly say what, out past the east coppice" — took it all in with the swift, practised, non-judgemental eye of a healer used to arriving at the aftermath of disasters he had not himself witnessed, and had, in the first several minutes, considerably more questions than answers.
The questions, once asked gently and answered in the tumbling, overlapping, still half-shocked manner of six young people telling the same tale six different ways at once, resolved themselves eventually into a single clear account, and Elrond stood very still in the failing light as he heard it, feeling something in his chest that was not quite relief and not quite fear but some difficult combination of the two, twisting together.
He is alive. He is here, or was here, some hours past. And he killed a full-grown boar with his bare hands to save six strangers' children, and walked away without a word, as though it were nothing at all.
"Which way did he go?" he asked, when the tale was told, and the dark-haired girl — Elenya, she gave her name at last, daughter of a Silvan family settled some decades past near the western eaves — pointed, wordless, deeper into the wood.
He searched until true dark made searching foolhardy rather than useful — for a healer's judgement, however urgent his own heart, did not permit him to risk good men blundering into unlit forest after a single set of half-day-old tracks — and found, in the end, nothing more than what the vinyacoimo had already told him: a trail of broken bracken leading on and on into deeper green, and then, at last, no trail at all, the forest closing over it as forests do.
He gave orders, before he turned his party back toward home in the full dark, that the dead hounds be gathered and carried gently for their young owners, and that the boar's carcass — for it seemed unjust, somehow, to simply abandon what had cost so much — be left where it lay for the forest's own scavengers, this one kill at least returned honestly to the wood that had made it. He saw the six vinyacoimo mounted and started safely on their own long ride home, with a promise, gently but unmistakably given, that their families would hear of both the folly of the hunting-season chosen and the mercy that had saved them from paying for it in full — and then he rode home himself, through the dark, with his heart divided exactly in two: half of it singing with the news that Maglor was, beyond any doubt, alive, and capable, and had that very day done something of unmistakable, if terrible, heroism — and half of it aching, cold and old, with the plain fact that his foster-father was still out there, alone, in the dark, in a forest he did not know, in a mind that did not, most days, entirely know where or when it was.
Come home, he thought, riding the last mile in silence with his men around him equally quiet, equally tired. Whatever tide is pulling you tonight, please. Come home.
V. What Maglor Brought Home
It was deep into the night — long past the hour even Elrond's most patient household had begun to allow themselves to hope — when the gate-ward came running with word that a shape had been seen at the west treeline, moving slow, dragging something behind it.
Elrond was out of the house before the boy had finished the sentence.
What he found, coming down the last slope of lawn toward the trees with a lantern in hand and his heart in his throat, was Maglor — filthy, blood dried black to the elbows, his grey-streaked hair matted with leaf-litter and worse — hauling behind him, by a rope of plaited vine over one shoulder, a makeshift travois of green sticks lashed crosswise, and upon it, unmistakable even in poor light, the considerable bulk of a second boar — the sounder, Elrond understood at once, with a cold lurch in his stomach that had nothing to do with the smell of blood — and beside her, smaller, piled with the awful economy of a hunter who has done this a thousand times and stopped thinking of the individual dead some ages ago, half a dozen piglets, killed as swiftly and as bare-handed as their mother.
Maglor's face, when he lifted it into the lantern-light, was not the face of a man returning from a hunt. It was lit — actually lit, with something Elrond had not seen there before, an eagerness so raw and so young it was almost unbearable to look at — and his first words, breathless with the effort of the drag but urgent past any weariness, were not an account of the day at all.
"Elrond." He said it the way a man says the name of someone he expects to find, not someone he is greeting after long absence. "Where is Maedhros? I need him to see this — six, I got six of the young ones besides the sow, tell him — and where is Elros, they'll both be hungry, have them build up the fire, I'll want it good and hot for the roasting —"
Elrond stood very still.
He had known, in the abstract, healer's way that one knows a fact without yet feeling its full weight, that Maglor's mind slipped its moorings in time more often than it held them — that some days he woke in the war camps of Beleriand and some days nowhere at all, adrift between one age and another with no more sense of the gap than a sleeper has of the hours he has slept through — but to hear it spoken aloud, to hear his own dead twin's name and his own long-dead second foster father's name spoken in the same urgent, ordinary breath, as though supper were merely late and the tent merely a little further up the hill —
"I apologise," Maglor was saying, already turning to begin the work of freeing the travois's lashings, entirely unaware of the silence that had fallen over the man before him, "tell Elros — I looked, I looked for hours upon hours for the creeping blue, I know how he loves the berries, but I couldn't find so much as a single vine of it anywhere in this forest, not one, and I don't understand it, it grew thick as bramble all up the eastern slopes near the old camp, I don't know why it isn't here, but tell him I'll look again tomorrow, tell him I'm sorry, I know it's his favourite —"
Celebrían, roused by the commotion and coming down onto the lawn in a hastily-thrown cloak with two of the household women behind her carrying lamps, arrived in time to hear the last of it — the dead animals, the blood, and beneath it all, worst of all, the small broken apology about berries that did not grow in this world at all, offered up in perfect earnest to a twin brother three ages dead.
She stopped at the edge of the lamplight and did not go closer, and for a long moment felt, more sharply than she had felt anything since Maglor's coming, the full collision of every fear she had been carrying since the fountain.
This is what I feared, she thought, watching the blood-black hands work at the vine-lashings with the same terrible unselfconscious competence she had seen at the water's edge. This is exactly what I feared. He does not know where he is. He does not know when he is. He is standing in my garden at midnight covered in the blood of six murdered piglets, calling for a dead man and a dead war, and any hour of any day he might wake believing himself back in that camp, believing anyone near him is his enemy or his brother's enemy — what is there in a mind like that to trust? What is there in a mind like that to be certain will not, some morning, mistake one of my own children for a threat out of some war two ages gone?
The fear was real, and old, and she did not manage to set it down entirely even as she stood there. But beside it, unbidden and unwelcome and impossible to fully suppress, came something else — something that had been growing in her too, these past weeks, quieter than the fear but no less true: she looked at the small pile of dead piglets, gathered with such terrible care, and understood, all at once and with a kind of vertigo, exactly what they were meant to be.
He is trying to feed the men he believes still be children and his brothers, she thought. Brothers who died before my own husband learned to walk. He has spent this entire day — this entire, extraordinary, terrible day, in which he killed a monster with his bare hands to save six strangers he'll never remember meeting — hunting supper for two little boys who have been dead for six thousand years, because in whatever country his mind is lost in tonight, they are not dead at all. They are only hungry, and waiting, and he is late.
She had called him dangerous, in her own private thoughts, a hundred times these past weeks. She had not once, until this exact moment, let herself think the word that came to her now, unbidden, cutting through every careful fear she had built: he is not dangerous. He is grieving. He has been grieving for six thousand years and no one ever once let him stop.
Elrond, for his part, felt none of the vertigo his wife felt watching from the shadows — or rather, he felt a version of it so familiar, so many times lived through of exactly this work, that it no longer disoriented him the way it once might have. It only hurt, in the old accustomed place where such hurts always lived in him now, and he let it hurt, because pretending otherwise would have helped no one.
He did not correct him. He had learned, in these weeks, that correction in such moments did more harm than the small mercy of a lie, and so instead he crossed the last of the grass between them and set both hands, careful and firm, on Maglor's blood-dried shoulders, and met the too-bright, too-eager eyes with the same steady healer's calm he had offered a hundred fever-dreaming patients before this one.
"Elros is asleep," he said — and it was not, quite, a lie, for Elros was, in whatever country the dead kept, at peace, and asleep was as near a word as Elrond could find for that peace that would not shatter something in the man before him past any mending. "He'll want to hear all of it in the morning — the six young ones, and the sow besides, that's fine hunting, Maglor, truly, that's more than fine. Let it wait till morning. He's asleep, and Maedhros is settled for the night as well, and the fire can be built at first light, when there'll be proper hands enough to help you dress all this meat right."
Something in Maglor's face wavered — the too-bright eagerness catching, for a moment, on some obstacle it could not quite name, the way a man's foot catches on a stair he does not remember being there — and Elrond held his breath, and held the shoulders beneath his hands steady, and waited.
"Morning," Maglor said at last, slowly, testing the word. "Yes. Yes, that's — that's sensible. They shouldn't be woken for this." A long pause, in which something in him seemed to settle, very slightly, back into whatever fragile present he could still hold. "I am sorry about the berries, though. Tell him — tell him when he wakes. I looked for hours. I'll look again."
"I'll tell him," Elrond said, and did not trust his own voice with anything more than that.
He got Maglor inside at last — coaxed him, gentle and unhurried, away from the travois and its grim, well-meant cargo, promising with perfect truth that the meat would be properly seen to and none of it wasted, that his hunting would not go unhonoured merely for being set aside till daylight — and it was only much later, with Maglor finally settled and sleeping in the room down the hall, that Elrond allowed himself to sit, alone, in the dark of his own study, and put his face in his blood-marked hands, and grieve, quietly and without an audience, for a brother-in-arms six thousand years dead who was, in some broken and unhealed corner of another man's heart, still only late for supper.
It was Celebrían who found him there, near dawn, and said nothing at all — only came and sat beside him, and after a long moment took one of his hands from his face and held it, simply, between both of her own.
She did not tell him, that night, everything that had shifted in her own heart down on the moonlit lawn. It was too new yet, too raw, too tangled still with fear that had not entirely gone and perhaps never entirely would — for she was not her husband, had not his three-age patience nor his healer's steady certainty, and some part of her would likely go on, for a long while yet, flinching at scars that were not hers to have earned any right to flinch from.
But she held his hand in the dark, and let him grieve without asking him to explain it, and when at last he looked up at her, red-eyed and exhausted and faintly, disbelievingly grateful that she had come at all.
Elrond turned his hand in hers, until it was not merely held but holding, and for the first time in a very long month, in the grey hour just before a new day's light, allowed himself something that was almost, though not quite, like hope.