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Kites and Kindling
I.
Long afterward, when the tale is told of how Maglor Fëanorion — Makalaurë once, before Sindarin speech and long centuries of exile wore the name down to its shorter shape — came at last upon his great black horse to the gates of Tirion, and of the fire that broke loose in him there upon the white stone before the eyes of half the city; when that hour is remembered, as it will be, for it is not the sort of hour that fades from memory whether in praise or in horror; it will be easy to forget that there were mornings before it. Many such mornings. Ordinary as bread, and just as easily taken for granted.
This is the tale of one of them.
Celebrían had, in the long years of her marriage, grown skilled in a particular kind of grief: the grief of other people, carried briefly and then set down again with clean hands. She had held the hands of mothers newly come from the burning coasts of Middle-earth who did not yet understand that their children were not coming after them. She had sat through whole nights with soldiers who screamed at shadows on the wall, and with children who could not remember what quiet felt like, and with one woman — not so old, by elvish reckoning, but broken in ways that had nothing to do with years — who introduced herself anew every single morning for the better part of a decade, because sleep erased her each night back to the day her city fell. Elrond's house had always been full of the mended and the mending. Celebrían had loved him for it before she had properly finished loving him for anything else, and she had gone on loving him for it every year since, with the whole unhurried patience of an elvish heart.
They had named the place, when first its foundations were laid in this new and healing land, Imladris Edwen — the Second Cleft, the deep valley built up again after the first was lost to the long unmaking of the world. Half in memory, the name was, and half, Celebrían always said, in sheer stubbornness: her own small joke, at first, worn smooth by years into something no longer a joke at all — that whatever had been broken once might, given time enough and enough patient hands, be built a second time, and built better. Edwen was an old word, older than the valley itself, carrying under its plain meaning of second a fainter, gentler sense of returning — of a thing come back — and Celebrían had always privately thought that fitness, more than cleverness, was what had made the name stick.
So it was not, at first, the wound in this newest soul to come stumbling into that gentle returning that troubled her. Grief she knew. Madness, even, in its many wearying shapes, she had met before and would meet again. What troubled her — what she turned over in the dark some nights like a stone she could not quite put down — was whose grief this particular grief belonged to, and what it had already cost, long before it ever came walking half out of its own wits through their gate.
She thought of it, privately, as three debts, though she was too careful ever to say so where Elrond might hear her count them, and a little ashamed that she counted them at all.
The first: that this same elf, with the one brother who might have shared the burden of memory now gone forever beyond the world's mending, had taken from two children everything a child is owed — father, mother, home, the ordinary safety of not yet needing to be brave. She did not blame him for the fire at Sirion the way the old grim songs blamed him; she had heard Elrond defend the dead and the near-dead of that house too many times, too fiercely, to believe the matter was ever so simple as the songs made it. But simple or not, the twins had walked out of the wreck of that morning with nothing at all, and someone had lit the wreck.
The second debt came later, and stranger, and it was the one Celebrían privately judged the cruelest, though she had never once dared say so aloud, even to her husband. That the same hands which had, in the end, chosen two frightened children over the last demand of an oath that had already cost him everything else he loved, had then vanished from those same children's lives without a single word of farewell — vanished in the very hour the twins had first begun to choose, for themselves, what manner of people they meant to become. Elrond spoke of it seldom. When he did, his voice went very level and very quiet, which Celebrían had learned across centuries of marriage was precisely how he sounded when a thing hurt him past the reach of ordinary anger.
And the third debt was the newest, and it was being paid out now, this very year, in small coin, every single day: that the same lost, dangerous, unlooked-for uncle-father had come wandering half out of his mind into the one safe harbor her husband had spent an age of the world building, and had made of himself, in his wreckage, one more soul for Elrond to nurse.
Eru knew Elrond's mercy had no bottom to it. She had watched him empty it out for strangers a thousand times and always, somehow, find more beneath. But this was no stranger. This was the one who had held him as a small child and then let him go as an orphan twice over, and Celebrían — who loved her husband entirely, and who had loved him precisely for this bottomless mercy long before she understood what it might one day cost her own household — could not quite forgive the second debt, even as she watched Elrond forgive it fresh every single morning, freely, as though forgiveness cost him nothing at all.
It cost him everything. She believes he only never says so.
But this is not yet the tale of that grief, nor of the fire it would kindle many months later on the white road into Tirion. This is the tale of one morning before all of that: an ordinary morning, golden and small, the kind history does not trouble itself to record — and that Celebrían herself might have forgotten entirely, had it not been followed by an evening she would never manage to forget at all.
II.
Elrond had stopped, some years before, keeping any true count of the mornings that were merciful.
At first he had hoarded them like a miser hoards coin, because for a long while there had been so pitifully few — a handful of lucid hours scattered thin across a whole season, each one held tight, each one grieved the moment it ended, because ending was the one thing Elrond could be certain such mornings would eventually do. But grief kept in that particular shape too long begins to poison the very thing it mourns, and Elrond, who had buried enough of the world's dead to know poison when he tasted it in his own heart, had made himself stop counting. He tended his foster father now the way he tended anything precious and uncertain: with his whole attention, and without keeping ledger of the cost.
Which was why, on this particular morning, he came to Maglor's door before the sun had troubled itself to rise, carrying nothing but a small covered lamp and the old, familiar dread he no longer let himself name outright — and found the room empty, the bed already made with more care than the servants themselves generally gave it, and the washroom beyond holding only the ghost-warmth of water long since used and drained away.
His heart did the old, humiliating lurch — not fear exactly, not any longer, but fear's close cousin, the reflex of a man who has once too often followed an empty bed out into disaster — and he went out through the kitchen door still in his night robe, lamp swinging unlit and forgotten in his hand, following the one sound in the grey hush of the world that made any sense at all: the steady, unhurried chock of an axe.
The path he took was not the path guests walked, nor even the path the family generally used — it ran behind the kitchen gardens, past the row of espaliered pears Celebrían tended herself and permitted no one else to touch, out to the low working yard where the estate's wood was split and stacked, and where, as a rule, only the household's own foresters and the boy who minded the goats had any proper business being. Elrond came round the garden wall into air that smelled of cut grass and resin and the particular mineral coldness of the hour just before dawn, and there, in the grey half-light, with the stars only just beginning to loosen their hold on the sky, was Maglor.
He had washed. That was the first thing Elrond's eye caught and clung to, foolishly grateful for so small a mercy: the dark hair, still damp at its roots, bound back from his face in one plain, unadorned plait, humble as any servant's, nothing at all like the elaborate court-braids that had once, in some age so distant it barely felt true anymore, marked him a prince of the Noldor. He had dressed himself without help, in plain grey wool, sleeves rolled past the elbow, and had — Elrond saw this with a small private ache he did not examine too closely — folded and set aside his outer coat with the same neat, unthinking precision Elrond remembered from a childhood now so far behind him it sometimes felt borrowed from another life entirely.
Maglor split wood the way, Elrond suspected, he had once done everything: completely, as though the task deserved the whole of him. Each round he stood upright on the block with something close to tenderness; each stroke of the axe fell true and clean, without any wasted violence in it; and the cordwood was stacking itself at his feet in a wall of pale new-cut faces, square and level, more of it than any one elf ought reasonably to have managed before sunrise.
For a moment Elrond only stood in the gap of the garden wall and let himself have this: his foster father, whole in his motions if not yet whole in himself, laboring in the cold blue dark not because anyone had asked it of him, but because — Elrond understood this without needing to be told, understood it in his own marrow, having spent an age of his own life doing precisely the same thing in his own quieter ways — it was one burden fewer that someone else would otherwise have had to carry.
"You'll wake the whole household," Elrond said at last, quiet, so as not to startle him, "chopping wood as though it owes you a debt."
III.
Maglor's shoulders stilled at the sound of his voice — not startled, exactly; Elrond had long since learned to read the difference — and he set the axe head-down against the block with the same unhurried care he seemed to give everything this morning, before he turned.
His face, when the lamplight found it, was clear. That was the word Elrond used for it in his own mind, though it was an imperfect word for what he meant: clear the way a winter sky is clear, showing you exactly how much distance and how much cold lies behind it. Maglor's eyes, when the fog was upon him, slid past things, or fixed on things that were not there, or looked at Elrond and saw a war-camp, or a beach beneath a false and terrible dawn, or nothing at all. This morning they looked at Elrond and saw Elrond, and something in Elrond's chest that had been braced for weeks against the opposite loosened all at once, painfully, the way a clenched hand aches worst in the very moment it finally opens.
"My lord," Maglor said — not Elrond, not the old name he sometimes used in his better hours, but the formal one, and Elrond understood, before another word was spoken, that this was going to be one of those mornings where his foster father's lucidity turned first, and always, toward shame. "Forgive me. I did not think anyone would be about."
"It's my house, Maglor. I'm generally about in it." Elrond came further into the yard, set the lamp on the block's edge, and looked at the wall of stacked wood with the frank admiration it deserved. "You've done in an hour what takes Bregil's own son half a morning, and he's been splitting wood since before Beleriand had a name for west."
He had meant it lightly. He watched it land wrong.
Maglor's gaze went to the woodpile, and something in his face folded inward — the particular collapse Elrond had learned to recognize as the beginning of an apology that would not stop at a single sentence. "It is not my place," he said. "The wood, the yard — I have taken a servant's labor and called it my own notion of usefulness, when likely some man of your household needed the coin for the doing of it, or the honest pride of a task well finished, and I have robbed him of both merely for my own comfort." He drew a breath. "I have been meaning to speak with you, Elrond. I think — I have been thinking, in the mornings when I can think clearly, which are not so many, but enough — I think it would be better, for you and for your household both, if I removed myself from it."
The grey yard went very quiet. Somewhere past the garden wall, a bird Elrond could not name began, tentatively, to test the coming morning.
"Removed yourself," Elrond repeated. "To where."
"I had not gone so far as to decide. Somewhere I would trouble no one. There are empty places enough in Aman for an old fool who no longer always knows what year it is."
And this — this, of everything that had happened in ages of Elrond's long and generally well-governed life — was the thing that abruptly and entirely undid his composure.
He had not known, until the words were already leaving him, how much heat had been banked beneath his calm all this time, how carefully he had built his patience like a dam against a river that had never once, in all his years of practicing mercy, been given leave simply to run. "No," he said, and his own voice startled him, rough and too loud for the quiet yard. "No. You have no right to leave me yet again."
Maglor went very still.
"You do not get to decide, alone, in some grey hour before anyone else is awake to argue with you, that the kindest thing you can do for the people who love you is to disappear from them." Elrond heard himself say love and did not take it back, though some careful old part of him flinched at handing Maglor so plain a weapon. "I was fifty years of age the last time you made that decision for me. Fifty. Elros was fifty. We woke on a morning very like this one, and you were simply gone — no word, no sign, not even the mercy of a farewell we might have hated you for and then, eventually, forgiven you for. Do you have any notion" — his voice cracked, an indignity he was too far gone to be embarrassed by — "any notion at all what that silence did to two children who had already lost everything else a child is owed? We searched the beach three days running. Elros was half convinced you had walked into the sea. I was convinced it was my own fault — that I had said something, done something, that a better foster-son would have made you stay. I built that conviction into the very foundation of who I became, Maglor, and I have spent three ages of the world quietly taking it back down again, stone by stone, and I had very nearly finished — and now you stand in my own woodyard, healed enough after months of my own care to hold an axe steady and speak good sense before sunrise, and you tell me you mean to vanish a second time. For my own good."
He stopped, breathing hard, and heard, in the ringing silence after, exactly how much of that had been true, and exactly how much had been aimed to wound.
"Is that truly what troubles you," he pressed on anyway, unable to stop now the dam had gone, "— that you believe yourself a burden? Or is it that you don't trust me — don't trust my skill, after everything I have studied and everything I have mended in my house across thousands of years — to know how to care for you? Or perhaps," and here his voice did something worse than crack; it went thin and young and far too honest, "perhaps this is not even truly your own wish at all. Perhaps it is only the madness talking again, dressed up in the sound of good sense the way it dresses itself sometimes, and I am meant to indulge it the way I indulge every other delusion that walks through you, because apparently even now — even lucid, even after everything — I am not to be trusted to tell the difference between my father's true wish and his broken mind's newest disguise."
Silence. The bird past the garden wall had found its courage and its full song both; it went on rehearsing them, absurdly cheerful, into the wreckage of the yard.
Maglor did not raise his voice. He never did, even now, even here — it was one of the strange small mercies of his affliction that whatever else it had taken from him, it had left his old gentleness mostly intact, so that even his worst hours were quiet ones, and his best hours, like this one had been until a moment ago, were quieter still.
"No," he said. "It is not the madness talking, Elrond. Though I understand why you would wish it were — it is easier, I think, to be angry at a sickness than at a man who has simply, finally, worked out his own worth to the people he loves, and decided to spare them the reckoning of it before they are made to do the sum themselves."
He set the axe down properly then, laid it flat against the block instead of leaning it, the way a man puts away a tool he does not expect to need again soon, and Elrond watched him do it and felt something in his own chest go cold with a fear entirely separate from his anger.
"I did not leave you and your brother that day because I stopped loving you," Maglor said. "I have never, not once in three ages of grief, stopped loving either of you, and if that confession means nothing else to you, it should at least mean that I am telling you the truth now, when I say: I left because I looked at what I was, and at what the two of you were becoming, and understood that the second could not be permitted to grow too near the first. You were choosing your fates that year. Both of you. I could feel it happening the way one feels weather changing before it breaks — and I thought, better the wound of my leaving, which at least you might grieve and be done with, than the wound of my staying, and watching you learn, drop by drop, everything that I am."
His eyes, still clear, still terribly present, found Elrond's. "I am no less a coward now than I was then. I have simply less strength left to dress the cowardice up as sacrifice. Forgive me the dressing, if nothing else."
Elrond opened his mouth to argue, and found, for one of the very few times in countless centuries of practiced diplomacy, that he had no words at all prepared for the space where his anger had just been standing.
"I should not have said that," he managed at last. "What I said — about the madness talking. That was cruel, and it was cheap, and it was precisely the kind of weapon I have spent this whole year refusing to let anyone in my house use against you, including, apparently, myself." He pressed the heel of one hand briefly against his own eyes, an old, unlordly gesture Celebrían always teased him for. "You are allowed to want things, Maglor. Even things I do not agree with. Wanting to leave does not make you unwell, and being unwell does not mean you have forfeited the right to want. I conflated the two because it was easier than admitting the truth — which is that the thought of you walking away from this house a second time frightens me more than almost anything else left in this world has the power to frighten me, and I would rather accuse you of being out of your right mind than sit with how much that fear says about how little I have actually healed since the first time."
The bird finished its song. Somewhere behind them, in the kitchens, the first sleepy clatter of the morning's fires being built carried faintly across the garden.
"I am sorry," Elrond said again, plainer now, no rhetoric left in it at all. "Truly. Whatever you decide — I would rather you decide it knowing you are loved, than decide it thinking you must first earn the right to stay."
IV.
Maglor did not answer that at once. He looked instead at the axe lying flat on the block, and then at the pale new wood stacked at his feet, as though counting it might tell him something the conversation had not. Then, wordlessly, he bent and gathered up three more rounds from the uncut pile, set the first upright, and lifted the axe again.
Elrond understood this particular language well enough by now not to press it further. He sat instead on the low stone wall edging the yard, still in his night robe, feeling the cold of the stone come up through the wool, and watched his foster father finish the work he had set himself — because some conversations are easier walked away from sideways than ended head-on, and because there is, Elrond had learned, its own kind of honesty in letting a man's hands finish saying what his mouth cannot.
It was full light by the time the pile was done to Maglor's satisfaction — stacked square, faced outward, the sort of woodpile a house-steward would point to as an example to the rest of the staff — and the two of them walked back together through the kitchen garden in a silence that had, somewhere in the last hour, stopped being wounded and become merely tired, which Elrond privately counted an improvement.
"Come," Elrond said, when they reached the door to Maglor's rooms, on an impulse he did not examine too closely before acting on it. "Sit. Let me see to your hair properly before breakfast — that plait you gave yourself is holding together on stubbornness alone."
He half expected some new round of protest — it is not your place, my lord, I am no child to be tended — but Maglor only looked at him a moment with an expression Elrond could not immediately name, and then went, without a word, to sit on the low bench beneath the room's single narrow window, where the early sun was beginning to lie in a long gold bar across the floorboards.
Elrond had not braided anyone's hair in the old court fashion for longer than he cared to reckon precisely. His daughter had never worn it, preferring the looser styles of Lothlórien where she'd spent so much of her girlhood; his sons wore theirs however best suited a day's riding. But his hands, when he unbound the damp, hasty plait Maglor had given himself before dawn and began again from the crown, seemed to remember the pattern before his mind properly did — the old formal Noldorin work, three fine plaits gathered close along the temple, warriors' plaits, though neither of them had ridden to any war in a very long while, worked back at last into a single central braid bound with a strip of dark cord in place of the fine silver wire that would once, in some vanished and gilded age, have marked a prince of the House of Finwë.
"You did this for us," Elrond said, into the quiet, working the first plait free with more care than the task strictly required. "When we were small. I had forgotten until just now — I don't know how I forgot — but my hands remember it, the exact way you used to hold the strands. You did it every morning, before. And you kept doing it even when we were on the road, in whatever camp we had made the night before. Elros hated sitting still for it. I never minded."
"You never minded very much of anything I asked of you," Maglor said, low. "It was one of the ways I knew, early, that you would grow to be kinder than either of the men who raised you had any right to expect."
Elrond's hands did not still, though something in his chest did. He finished the third plait, gathered the whole of it together, bound it into the single central braid, and only when it was entirely done did he come around and crouch before the bench, so that he might see his foster father's face properly in the new daylight.
"I mean this the way I meant it forty years ago, and four hundred years before that," he said. "You did not raise a monster, whatever else you believe you made of yourself in the making of me. You raised this. Whatever this is worth, it is yours to claim as much as it is mine."
Maglor's throat worked once, and he said nothing at all, and Elrond — who had learned, this whole long year, precisely which silences to let stand — let that one stand, and rose, and went to find them both some breakfast.
V.
Breakfast in the small family hall was, on ordinary mornings, a fairly unceremonious affair — bread, new butter, whatever fruit the kitchen garden happened that week to be yielding, the twins arguing good-naturedly over the last of anything sweet — and Maglor came to it that morning still faintly pink about the eyes from whatever had passed in the woodyard, but steady on his feet, and, Elrond noted with the particular gladness of a healer counting small mercies, hungry.
It was the smell that struck him first, before he had even properly sat — rich, dark, roasted meat laid out on the sideboard in a dish plainly meant to be the morning's centerpiece rather than its afterthought — and Maglor stopped three steps into the hall with the stillness of a man who has walked into the wrong room of his own memory.
"Boar," he said.
"Correct," Elrond said, easily, taking his own seat and reaching for the bread as though nothing at all were amiss, because he had learned by now that the surest way to keep Maglor's footing steady was to keep his own voice entirely ordinary. "Roasted with the last of the autumn apples. Sit — it's good —"
"Who hunted it?"
Something in the register of the question — too fast, too flat, none of the loose ease that had carried them both through the hair-braiding not an hour before — made Elrond set the bread back down and look at him properly.
"One of the foresters," Elrond lied. "Why?"
"It is high summer." Maglor had not moved from the doorway. "No one hunts boar in high summer who does not have to, Elrond, not among any people with any sense left in the heads — the sows are still with young from the spring litters, or newly weaned of them, and a sow defending young will charge a man before he has finished raising his spear, and even a boar alone in this season is thinner-tempered and quicker to turn than in autumn, when the mast is down and its mind is on eating rather than on dying. Someone was careless, or someone was desperate, or someone simply did not know better — and any of those three is reason enough for me to ask who, and whether he came home from the hunt with all his limbs still attached to him."
Elrond, who had genuinely forgotten — in the small triumphant relief of finding Maglor lucid two mornings running — that the last true trade his foster father had ever practiced at any length, across all his broken centuries of wandering, had been the grim trade of keeping soldiers and refugees alive in country far more dangerous than this quiet garden, felt something in his chest twist with tenderness and alarm together.
"It was an accident, not a hunt," he said, coming round the table now to stand near enough to touch, though he did not, not yet. "One of the foresters startled it from the bracken while marking trees for the autumn coppicing — it charged before he ever meant to raise a spear at all, and he was quick enough and strong enough to turn it rather than be gored, and it went down clean. No one planned it. No one was careless. It was simply bad luck for the boar, and good reflexes for the man."
Maglor's jaw was tight. "Which man."
And here it was, the fear beneath the fear, and Elrond understood it a half-breath before Maglor said the names outright — understood exactly which two faces his foster father's mind had already leapt to, because they were the only two young hunters left in this house that Maglor had learned, against all his own caution, to love enough to be afraid for.
"Not Elladan. Not Elrohir." Elrond said it plainly, without waiting to be asked, and watched some of the rigidity go out of Maglor's shoulders at once, like a held breath finally let go. "They were nowhere near the coppice yesterday — ask them yourself at dinner, they'll tell you they spent the whole day being scandalously idle by the river, which I understand from their mother is a full-time occupation for both of them this time of year. It was an experienced hunter who turned the boar — a grown man with thousands of years sitting upon his shoulders, warrior-trained since before either of my sons was causing any trouble of his own in these woods. He came home with nothing worse than a torn sleeve, and, I am told, a story he intends to tell at every dinner table in the valley for the next decade at least."—Elrond hardly ever lies and never without the reason: he wished to sooth Maglor's worry,not to trouble him further by revealing that his foster father does not remember his own hunt spent in delusions just the past day.
Something that was almost, though not quite, a laugh moved through Maglor then — more breath than sound, but real. "So many years in the trade, and still a torn sleeve is the damage. I have known worse woodsmen live to be a millennium on rather less skill than that." He came, finally, to the table, and sat, and looked at the dish of roasted boar with an expression that had traveled, in the space of a few sentences, from something like dread to something almost like appetite. "Well. If the man is whole and the meat is good, I suppose I have made a great deal of noise for very little. Forgive me. Old habits."
"Old habits kept a great many people alive, once," Elrond said, sitting back down across from him, and meant it entirely. "I would rather live with a father who worries too much over hunters in high summer than one who never thinks to ask at all."
VI.
The messenger arrived before the breakfast dishes were properly cleared — a young rider from the lower valley, the dust of a hard ride still on her, with word that would ordinarily have been welcome news delivered at a considerably gentler pace: that Aewen's mother and two sisters, believed for some years still to be awaiting release from the Halls, or else simply lost somewhere in the slow business of a world remaking itself, had that very dawn come unannounced to the river-crossing, newly down from Tirion, and meant to travel on again within the week to kin in the west. Aewen and Brannor, who had been betrothed the better part of a year and in no particular hurry about the rest of it, sent back word within the hour that they did not mean to let this chance pass by: if their lord would come and speak the words over them, they meant to be married that very afternoon, family present, however unceremonious the haste.
Elrond, who counted such small unlikely mercies — families finding one another again across the wreck of an age — among the very things his whole long labor in this world had been spent trying to make possible, did not hesitate a moment before calling for his horse.
He hesitated, rather, at Maglor's door, hand already raised to knock, the message half-formed — I must go, I may be gone the better part of the day, there is bread and cold meat if you're hungry before I'm back — and heard, from within, only the deep, even quiet of a man returned to sleep after an early morning's hard labor, and could not, in the end, bring himself to wake him.
It was, he would think much later, turning the whole day over in the small merciless light of hindsight, the first small link in a chain he ought to have seen forming.
He left word with the house steward instead — tell him where I've gone, when he wakes; tell him I am sorry to have missed him to tell him myself — and rode out into a morning that had, by every outward sign, every promise of long golden light and small mercies returning, absolutely no business at all turning into the evening it was about to become.
VII.
Maglor woke a second time that day to full late-morning light and an unfamiliar, oddly pleasant sense of his own body being merely tired rather than strange to him — the good, honest ache of a morning's real labor, nothing like the heavier fog that usually greeted his waking, the fog that took long minutes even on good days to blink through to whatever year and whatever face happened to be waiting for him there. He lay a moment simply noting the difference, the way a man recovering from a long illness notes, with cautious gratitude, one single unremarkable day of feeling well.
He went looking for Elrond first from habit — the small daily habit he had built for himself these last months, of finding his foster-son's face early in any lucid stretch to anchor himself against it, the way a sailor takes his bearing from a known star before trusting himself to the open water of an ordinary day — and found instead an empty study, an empty hall, and a young kitchen-maid who told him, with the particular careful gentleness the whole household had learned to use on him without ever quite admitting they were using it, that the lord had ridden out that morning to marry two of his own guard, and was not looked for back much before evening.
The old instinct that rose in him then was so immediate, so entirely without his own permission, that Maglor recognized it a full breath after it had already begun moving his feet: the instinct to be useful. To find some small task that would spare Elrond one measure of labor upon his return, because usefulness was the one coin Maglor still trusted himself to spend without fear of spending it wrongly.
It carried him, before he had properly decided anything, into Elrond's own study of medicines — a small north-facing room lined floor to ceiling with jars and bundled herbs and the neat, cross-referenced ledgers Elrond kept on every soul the house had sheltered across countless centuries, a room Maglor had been permitted into perhaps a dozen times, always with the particular hush of a man entering a temple built to a craft he respected far past his own understanding of it.
It was on the third shelf, at eye level, where habit alone told him Elrond kept the things he reached for most often, that Maglor found the jar of royal jelly sitting nearly empty, no more than a pale smear left clinging to the glass, and beside it a small stack of Elrond's own notes on its use — for wasting sickness, for the very old and very frail among the reawakened dead who came to him thin and unable to keep down heartier food, for exactly the kind of patient, Maglor understood with a small private wince, that he himself had not so very many months ago been.
He stood a long moment simply looking at the empty jar.
Then he went, with the particular decisiveness of a man glad to have found, at last, one problem in the world simple enough for him to solve outright, to the small drawer in his own room where Elrond — without ever once being asked, without ever once making it feel like charity rather than plain household order — had some weeks before begun leaving a little purse of coin, in case Maglor should ever want for anything and Elrond is not near enough to ask, and took it up, and went out into the bright unfamiliar noise of the market for the first time since he had washed ashore into this new and difficult grace.
VIII.
The market town below the valley had never, across all the months of Maglor's slow mending, been anything to him but a rumor heard through the walls of his own careful confinement — a sound of distant bells and cart-wheels carried up on the wind some mornings, nothing more — and he came into it now for the first time with the wary, over-alert attention of a man testing ice he does not yet trust to bear his weight.
It held. That was, in itself, a small triumph he did not let himself examine too closely for fear of jinxing it. He walked the packed-earth lanes between stalls hung with dyed wool and strung onions and the season's first plums, past a boy selling tin whistles who played him three bright unbidden bars by way of advertisement, past a weaver's stall where two matrons argued with enormous good humor over the price of undyed linen, and felt, moment by moment, something in his chest unclench that he had not quite realized was clenched: the specific, particular relief of moving unnoticed through a crowd of strangers who did not know his name, who saw only a tall blue-eyed elf in plain wool with his hair neatly plaited, and thought nothing more of him than that.
He found the beekeeper at the market's far end, past the fishmongers, in a stall hung about with dark combs of wax and small clay pots sealed in linen and wax-cord: an elf-woman of some ancient and unhurried dignity, gold hair gone to true gold-white at the temples in the way only the very eldest of Vanyarin blood ever quite achieved, who looked Maglor over once, top to toe, with the frank unbothered appraisal of a craftswoman assessing a customer's seriousness, and seemed to find him satisfactory.
"Royal jelly," she said, before he had finished asking, and was already reaching for a particular shelf. "For a healer's stores, by the manner of that question — you asked it like a man reading off someone else's list. Elrond's house, I'd wager, since you've the look of someone new enough to Aman still to be startled by market noise, and it's his household that buys the most of it in this valley by a fair margin. How many jars does he want?"
"I — did not think to ask a number." Maglor felt, for a moment, entirely at sea, and then, absurdly, found himself almost smiling at his own uselessness. "I knew only that the old jar had gone nearly empty."
"Four, then, and I'll not be argued down from it — that's what lasts a house his size a proper season, and I'd rather sell you four now than have you back inside a fortnight." She wrapped them herself, brisk and competent, each small pot nested in straw within a cloth sack, and named a price Maglor paid without dispute from Elrond's purse — and then, because some old and stubborn habit of true nobility never entirely dies in a man, whatever else dies around it, pressed one small additional coin into her hand besides, for her trouble, which she took with the raised eyebrow of a woman who has not been overpaid by a customer in some centuries and does not entirely trust the novelty of it.
"Tell your lord Glorwen sends her regards," she said, "and that if his household keeps growing the way it has this past year, he'll want to speak to me about a standing order, rather than these market-day errands."
Maglor thanked her and turned back into the crowd with his small sack of jars held carefully against his chest, and felt, for the whole length of that walk back through the wool-stalls and the onion-strings, entirely and simply glad — glad of the sun, glad of the small solved problem, glad of one more hour spent inside his own clear mind rather than lost outside it — and did not yet know, could not yet know, that he had already spent the whole of that gladness, and that the day's account was about to come due.
•
At that same hour, some distance up the valley, in a river-meadow strung with early ribbons and the whole assembled joy of two families finding each other again across the wreck of an age, Elrond stood before Aewen and Brannor with his oldest formal words ready in his mouth, and found himself, not for the first time since coming to this new land, quietly astonished by his own household's particular customs.
He had married warriors before — had married, across the long both happy and unhappy centuries of Middle-earth, a great many soldiers in haste before some departure or another, never once knowing whether the words he spoke over them would outlast the coming season — but he had never quite grown used to how it felt to do it here, now, in a peace that demanded haste of no one, and to do it exactly as he had always insisted it be done in his own house: with no more weight given to the bride's blade-calluses than to the groom's, no more surprise at a woman who commanded a company of spears than at a man who, in the years before this one, had spent a full season teaching the valley's youngest children their letters while half the settlement stood watch upon the borders. Other lords of the Eldar, he knew — had heard it said often enough, gently or otherwise, at councils and at feasts both — found something faintly disordered in a household run so, where valor and gentleness were not sorted by sex into their separate expected boxes. Elrond had simply never once managed to believe that Eru, in all His long, patient shaping of the Children, had troubled Himself to decree that only men might guard a hall and only women might teach its children, or the reverse of it either. He said the old words over Aewen and Brannor with his whole heart behind them, and did not think again, until very much later that evening, of the small worry he had left behind him, sleeping, in an empty room some hours behind.
IX.
It happened at the very last stall before the lane opened out again onto the road home, where a lean, quick-fingered toymaker had hung his wares beneath a striped awning — spinning tops, carved horses, and, brightest of all, a rack of kites in every color the dyer's trade could produce, their long tails lifting and snapping in the small valley wind like pennants at a very small, very cheerful war.
A boy stood before the rack in an agony of choosing.
He was perhaps thirteen by the reckoning of Men, though something in the set of his ears and the faint, unfinished elvish light still gathering behind his eyes said he would go on being thirteen, in that particular way, for a good while longer than any purely mortal child — Peredhel, unmistakably, to anyone who had spent centuries learning to read that unfinished quality of feature — and he had, in the ordinary unremarkable way of any boy his age in any age of the world, saved up some private hoard of coin for exactly this moment, and was now agonizing over whether the red kite or the blue one better deserved it.
Maglor stopped walking.
He would not, later, be able to say with any honesty what came first — whether it was the boy's face that undid him, or only the shape of the moment itself, sun and market-noise and a child bent in fierce concentration over a small bright toy — but something in the sight of him struck through whatever thin new wall Maglor's morning of ordinary competence had built, struck through it entirely, the way spring floodwater finds and widens the one hairline crack a winter's ice has left in an old dam. And the wall did not merely crack. It came apart all at once.
•
It will perhaps be asked, by anyone troubling to follow this small domestic history so far into its own weeds, who the boy was, and why his face, among all the faces a market town offers a wandering stranger, should have been the one to undo a morning's hard-won peace. The answer, like most true answers, requires going backward some distance before it can be properly given forward.
His name was Elorn, and he had been born in a resettled village on the eastern marches of a war that both his parents had, in their very different ways, survived only barely, and only by a courage that far outstripped their years.
His father, Tavaron, was Noldorin by blood and by a long, quiet, essentially uneventful history of exile — one more craftsman among the many thousands who had followed the folly and the fire west out of Aman in an age so distant it had become, for most of his own generation, more cautionary tale than living memory — and he had spent the centuries since simply working wood, without any particular tragedy attached to his name, in whatever settlement of the scattered Eldar would have a steady pair of hands and no great ambition beyond honest craft. He had remained, by elvish reckoning, remarkably long unmarried — so long that his few close friends had begun, gently, to tease him for it, and had gone on teasing him right up until the season he met, in a refugee camp he had come to help rebuild after a raid, a mortal woman little older than three full decades of age by mortal men's reckoning.
Her name was Wulfhild.
She had been taken young — young enough that the wrong done to her would have been counted a crime against a child in any house of Men with the power to punish it, though there had been no one with such power anywhere near enough to help her — taken by the same dark trade that had, across those grim years, stolen away so many of her people into the pits and breeding-camps where Sauron's servants labored to arm their master's endless war: to force from her and from women taken beside her the get of orcs and worse than orcs, in the hope of breeding soldiers who would not fear the sun. Two decades she endured it, and endured it, the histories of that grim country agree on this if on little else, without once surrendering the small stubborn coal of her own faith — that Eru had not forgotten her, but that His mercy was, for the present, simply taking its time in arriving.
It arrived, in the end, in the unglamorous shape of an escape half-planned and half-desperate, and a long, hard road west toward rumor of an elf-lord's protection, and Elrond's own people finding her at last on the edge of a wood, more dead than not, and nursing her back — as they had nursed so many others, before her and since — into a woman who could stand, and then walk, and then, eventually, laugh again, though it took the better part of a year before that particular sound returned to her whole.
She was, by every account anyone in that valley ever afterward gave of her, no great beauty in the narrow way the old songs generally require of their heroines — tall past what her own people thought seemly in a woman, broad through the shoulder from years of labor no delicate creature could have survived, her face gone permanently freckled and weathered from a decade of sun she had never once been permitted to shelter from, her hair a plain unadorned brown she wore in one thick, unfashionable plait down her back, because she had never once had leisure enough, in the whole of her hard life, to learn the vanity of caring what fashion required of it. Half the elf-maidens of that valley, watching Tavaron's slow, unhurried, entirely helpless courtship of her, could not for the life of them work out what he saw in her. He never troubled himself to explain it to anyone who was not her. It was not, in the end, anybody's business but his own.
They married within the year — an elvish wedding, by her own particular insistence, though she was a woman of Men and would remain one all her mortal days, because she said she had spent two decades of her life having other people's choices made for her body, and did not intend to spend her marriage the same way; and if the man she loved was an Elf, then she would be married as Elves were married, in whatever manner he found truest, and no one who tried arguing her out of it lasted very long in the attempt.
Tavaron meant, in the plain, unhurried way he meant everything, to remain in Middle-earth until she died of age as her people did, and only then to sail, taking with him whatever children they were given, and hoping — though he knew better than to press the hope too hard — that in time those children might choose, as some few of the Peredhil before them had chosen, to walk the road of the Eldar rather than the swifter road of Men.
He was given one child only, a son, before the war took the rest of that plan from him.
Elorn was not yet ten, by the reckoning of Men, when the goblins came down on the resettled village in his father's absence — Tavaron gone that week hunting the last scattered orc-bands out of the eastern hills alongside Elrond's own sons and a company of the valley's guard, called out on word that proved, as such word in that grim country too often did, both true and badly timed. Wulfhild had been in the near field with a dozen other women, cutting the early hay with a sickle in her hand and her son minding the smaller children at the field's edge, when the raiding band broke from the treeline — and it was Wulfhild, no one afterward could honestly say it had been any other woman first, though several tried, in their own grief, to claim the honor for someone dead who could no longer refuse it — who went toward the goblins rather than away from them, sickle raised, shouting for the children to run for the palisade, and put three of the raiders down by her own hand before the fourth put her down with his.
Help came. It came, as help in that country nearly always did, not quite in time.
Tavaron sailed within the season, his son's hand held fast in his own, and asked to be received into Elrond's household when at last he came to Aman — not because he held any particular claim on that lord beyond the ordinary claim of an old refugee upon the man who had once sheltered him, but because Elorn had grown, in the two hard years since his mother's death, so quiet and so watchful that Tavaron had come to believe, with the plain desperate logic of a grieving father, that his son needed above all else to grow up somewhere already proven able to mend broken children — and no household in all of Aman had proven that so many times over as Elrond's.
•
Elorn had, that morning, precisely two silver pennies and an afternoon entirely his own — his father busy at a wood-stall three lanes over, selling the carved boxes and small furniture that had become, here in Aman, less a trade of necessity and more one of quiet contentment — and he was deep in the serious business of choosing between the red kite and the blue one when a hand closed hard around his wrist.
He looked up into the face of a tall, deep blue-eyed stranger gone suddenly, entirely white about the mouth, who was staring at him the way a drowning man stares at the one rope thrown toward him, and who said, in a voice gone thin and cracked and terribly, terribly urgent:
"Elrond. Elrond, thank the Valar — where is your brother? Where is Elros? You must not wander from me like this, not here, not in this camp, do you understand me. It is not safe—"
X.
Elorn did not scream, and did not immediately try to wrench free, though the grip on his wrist was hard enough to leave a mark, because Elorn had, in his short life, already met exactly this kind of trouble once before, and knew, from that meeting, precisely what it generally required of him.
There had been an old woman in the resettled village, back in Middle-earth, called Grandmother Ide by everyone though she was in truth grandmother to none of them, who had lived to be older than any mortal of that country had any right to live, and who had spent the last several years of that long life quite lost, most days, somewhere thirty or forty years behind herself, calling the village children by the names of siblings and playmates decades in their graves, weeping sometimes for a house that had burned before Elorn's own father had ever come west across the mountains. The village had learned, collectively and without much discussion, simply to be gentle with her — to answer to whatever name she gave them, and let her have her lost hour in peace until it passed, because frightening her further never once made the confusion end any sooner, and only ever made it crueler while it lasted.
So Elorn did not pull away. He turned his hand very slowly within the stranger's grip — not to escape it, but to hold it properly, the way one might hold the hand of someone genuinely afraid — and said, in the calm, over-patient voice of a child who has had considerable practice being calmer than the adult in front of him:
"I'm not Elrond, sir. My name's Elorn. Lord Elrond's all grown now — he's got children of his own, already grown themselves. I only look a bit like him, my father says, on account of both us being half-elven, I think, and mortal blood does something to the face that pure elf-blood doesn't." He said it steadily, though his heart had picked up considerably, and though he had, at the same time, already begun casting his eyes past the stranger's shoulder for any sign of his father's stall. "My da's just there, past the fish-stalls, if you'd like to come and see I'm telling true—"
"Elros would not simply wander off without you," the stranger said, as though Elorn had not spoken at all, and dropped to one knee in the dust of the lane, bringing his white, wrecked face level with the boy's own, still not releasing his wrist, his other hand coming up now to grip Elorn's shoulder instead — urgent, searching, entirely gentle even in its desperation. "He would not. Tell me true, has someone taken him — is that why you're alone, is that why—Elrond, look at me, you are shaking, are you hurt, did someone—"
"Da!" Elorn called out then, louder, because whatever patience Grandmother Ide had taught him did not quite stretch to cover a grown man kneeling in the road with such raw fear in his face — fear that was beginning, despite everything Elorn understood about it, to frighten him after all. "DA!"
It was, of course, exactly the sort of thing a market town gathers around. Word of the mad Fëanorian sheltered in Lord Elrond's own house had traveled, as such word always does, faster and further than any of the household's careful discretion could ever hope to outrun it — every soul in that valley had heard some version of the tale, embroidered variously in each new telling, and a good many of them had privately wondered, in the safe, abstract way of people who have never had to actually meet the danger they gossip about, what they would do if they ever came face to face with him. Now a fair number of them found out, and did what people in every age of the world have always done when confronted with a frightening thing they do not understand: they stopped, and they stared, and they did not, for the length of several very long breaths, do anything useful at all.
Tavaron came at a dead run.
He had heard his son's voice go up sharp over the market noise before he had properly registered the words in it, and some old instinct from a war he had thought long behind him had him moving before conscious thought caught up — shoving past the fish-stalls, past the tin-whistle boy, arriving in the cleared space around his kneeling son and the strange blue-eyed elf gripping him with the particular violent stillness of a man who has, in half a heartbeat, gone from ordinary market-day father to something considerably older, and considerably more dangerous.
"Let go of my son."
Maglor's head came up at the voice — a stranger's voice, sharp with a fear he recognized in his bones though he could not, in that moment, have said from which of his own centuries he recognized it — and some deep, buried soldier's instinct, faster than any thought, read the whole scene in an instant the way he had once read a thousand battlefields: a threatening stranger closing fast, a frightened child, himself between them. His hand, releasing the boy's wrist at last, moved instead to his own hip, to where a sword had not hung in an age of the world, and found nothing there but plain grey wool — and some very small, very clear corner of his mind noted the absence with a distant, horrified confusion even as the rest of him rose to stand between Tavaron and the boy regardless, empty-handed, tensed, entirely and catastrophically prepared to defend a child he did not truly know from a father he did not recognize.
"Stand back," Maglor said, low, and the market crowd — already thickened to two dozen souls and growing — went utterly silent to hear it. "I don't know you. I don't know what you want with him. But you will not touch this child while I am able to stand between you."
Tavaron, who had spent one grim autumn hunting orc-bands through hills not so very different from these, who knew exactly what he was looking at when a man's stance went suddenly, completely still in that particular soldier's way, did not step back. His hand went instead, from long grim habit not yet unlearned by a decade of peace, to the belt-knife every woodsman in that valley still carried out of custom rather than necessity, and the crowd, sensing at last that something was about to happen that words alone might not stop, drew its breath in as one.
XI.
It was, in the end, two voices calling the same word that broke the standoff before the knife could clear its sheath — two voices, familiar past any mistaking, coming fast and hard through the parting crowd:
"MAGLOR!"
Elladan and Elrohir had spent the better part of that whole golden day exactly as their mother had predicted they would, sprawled at their scandalous ease on the riverbank a mile below the house, arguing without any real heat over whose turn it was to fetch more wine from the cold shallows, and had come home only as the light began to slant properly toward evening — sun-warm, unhurried, and entirely unprepared for the small anxious flurry of servants that met them at the gate with word that their father was still off marrying two from his guard, and that their grandfather — for so they had both, without ever quite discussing it between them, come to think of him, whatever the strict genealogy of the matter actually held — had gone alone to market some hours past, and had not yet returned.
They had not run, exactly, on the walk down into the valley. They had gone at what Elrohir liked to call a purposeful stroll, and Elladan, more honestly, called a barely restrained trot, telling each other the whole way down that it was surely nothing, that their grandfather had had a full week of good clear mornings and was entitled to one unaccompanied errand, that they were only going to check because checking cost nothing at all — and had come around the last bend into the market square to find precisely the scene their unspoken fear had been quietly rehearsing the whole way down: a ring of frightened onlookers, a woodsman's hand upon his belt-knife, and Maglor standing white and rigid and utterly lost between a stranger and his own child, poised for a fight that would end, however it went, in disaster for every soul in that square.
"Maglor." Elladan said it again, closer now, and dropped his voice from the shout into something gentler — the particular careful gentleness both twins had spent months learning by watching their own father use it — hands raised open and empty as he came slowly into the cleared space, Elrohir a half-step behind and already angling himself, without any need for discussion between them, toward the boy and his furious father instead. "Maglor, look at me. It's Elladan. You know me."
The blue eyes that turned toward him were still, for one long, terrible heartbeat, the eyes of a man in some other year entirely, seeing some other face laid over his own — and then, slowly, painfully, like a man surfacing through water gone thick and dark, they cleared, focused, found him properly.
"Elladan," Maglor said, and his voice cracked clean through the middle of the word.
"That's right. Elladan. Elrohir's just there, talking to the boy's father — look, see, they're all right, no one's hurt, everyone's whole." He kept his voice low and even, kept coming forward at the unhurried pace one might use to gentle a spooked horse, until he could put one steady hand on Maglor's shoulder, feel the fine violent tremor running through him. "You've had a fright, that's all. You're in the market, in Aman, and it's a summer afternoon, and nobody here means you any harm, and nobody here is in any danger from you either — do you understand? Da's off marrying Aewen and Brannor, remember? Mother's home. Elrohir and I only just came up from the river. Elros—" and here Elladan's voice found, without any rehearsal at all, exactly the gentleness the moment required— "Elros sailed the circles of the world a long age ago now, Maglor. He chose Men's fate, in the end, and lived a long, good life as a king among them, and died an old man surrounded by his own grandchildren, full of years and entirely at peace. He isn't lost. He was never lost, not after that year at Sirion. He's only gone on ahead, the way mortal men do, and Da grieves him sometimes the way you grieve anyone gone on ahead of you — but there's no child of that name anywhere in this market for you to be frightened for. Da's whole, and grown, and thoroughly middle-aged by elvish reckoning, and has three children of his own besides, all of them safe, all of them exactly where they ought to be."
Maglor's knees, very nearly, went out from under him. Elladan's hand tightened on his shoulder, steadying, and Maglor stood there in the dust of the market lane, breathing hard, looking at this tall, grown, grey-eyed man calling him by name with such patient certainty, and felt the whole terrible false camp of his own mind's making finally, entirely come down around him, leaving him standing in nothing more dangerous than an ordinary summer market, having very nearly done violence to a stranger's child out of nothing but love gone terribly astray.
"Elladan," he said again, and this time it was not confusion in his voice but simple, wrecked apology. "I am so sorry. I am so very sorry — the boy, is the boy—"
"Frightened, but not hurt, and mostly, I think, more worried about you by now than himself," Elrohir called back, dry and warm at once, having by then talked Tavaron's white-knuckled hand down off his belt-knife through some combination of his father's own diplomatic patience and his own easier charm, though the woodsman's face was still thunderous with the aftershock of a fear no father forgives quickly. "Come — let's get you both home before the whole market decides it needs a story to tell over dinner."
It did not, in the end, prove quite so easy as that.
Word had run ahead of them, the way word in a small valley always does, and the walk back up through the market lanes and out onto the home road drew its own small procession of the curious and the anxious — a woman snatching her toddling son up onto her hip at the sight of them passing, an old man spitting pointedly into the dust and turning his back, a cluster of children trailing at a safe distance to gawk until their mothers called them sharply in — and Maglor walked the whole distance with his eyes fixed on the road before him and his jaw set against saying anything at all, while Elladan kept one hand at his elbow the entire way, and Elrohir walked backward half the time, cheerfully and pointedly greeting every gawker by name until the sheer social awkwardness of being personally addressed sent most of them hurrying about their business instead.
By the time the three of them came at last through the garden gate and into the ordinary green quiet of home, Maglor's four small jars of royal jelly still, absurdly, unbroken in their straw-packed sack clutched the whole way against his chest, the golden ease of the morning felt to all three of them like something that had happened to entirely different people, in an entirely different year.
XII.
Celebrían had known, from the particular over-cheerful way her sons came through the garden gate that evening — Elladan's smile pitched a half-degree too bright, Elrohir already talking before he'd properly crossed the threshold, both of them steering Maglor between them toward his own rooms with a solicitude that had nothing casual in it at all — that something had happened that neither of them meant to tell her outright.
She had raised them, after all. She knew the shape of her own sons' guilt from a hundred childhood scrapes long before either of them had learned to disguise it half so well as they clearly believed they now had.
She let Maglor go to his rest without pressing — whatever had happened, his face held the particular grey exhaustion she had learned, this past year, to recognize as a mind that had spent its whole day's strength and needed nothing more from her now but quiet — and caught her sons instead in the kitchen passage on their way back out, and folded her arms, and waited, in the manner that had never once, in either of their lives, failed to produce a confession inside two minutes.
It took, in fact, closer to five, and only because Elladan held out with unusual stubbornness on Elrohir's behalf as much as his own, insisting the whole while that it was nothing, truly nothing, a small confusion at the market, quickly settled, no harm done to anyone that a good night's sleep wouldn't mend — until Elrohir, never the better liar of the two even when he tried, let slip the words belt-knife and Tavaron's boy in the same breathless sentence, and the whole story came out after that in the disordered, interrupting, over-each-other way her sons had told her every difficult story since they were small: the empty study, the market, the kite-stall, the boy's wrist gripped white-knuckled in a stranger's hand, their father's own name called out in that cracked, desperate, thirteen-years-old voice, a woodsman's knife half-drawn, a whole market square gone silent and staring.
Celebrían felt the color go out of her own face by slow, controlled degrees, the way it always did now when fear came for her rather than for someone she was merely tending, because fear on someone else's behalf she had thousands years of practice governing, and fear on her own family's behalf she had never once, in all that practice, learned to govern quite so well.
"He held a child," she said, very quietly, when the whole of it was finally out. "In the open street. Held him and would not let go, and a grown man had his knife half out of its sheath before either of you arrived to stop it."
"He wasn't going to hurt him, Mother." This was Elladan, low, urgent, already sensing the direction her quiet was traveling and trying, too late, to head it off. "He thought he was protecting him — he thought the boy was Da, thought Tavaron was some threat out of the old wars — it wasn't malice, it wasn't even truly him, not the part of him that's actually—"
"I did not ask whether it was malice." Celebrían heard her own voice go thin and hard in a way she rarely let it go, even now. "I asked whether a child was gripped hard enough to bruise, in a public square, by a man three ages of the world removed from his own right mind, while a stranger reached for a blade over him. Those are the facts I am holding onto tonight, Elladan. Not his intentions. His intentions have never once, in the whole history of this family, been the part anyone needed protecting from."
Neither son had an answer for that. She had not expected one. She sent them both off to their own rest with a kiss on each brow that she suspected neither of them entirely believed was as calm as she meant it to look, and then she went to wait for her husband in the one place in the house she knew, eventually, he would have to come.
•
Elrond came home well past dark, riding slow and easy up the last stretch of the valley road with the particular loose contentment of a man who has spent his whole day doing exactly the kind of good, uncomplicated work he had once feared, in his darkest years in Middle-earth, he might never again have the peace to do — marrying two people who loved each other, in a meadow full of family found again against every reasonable expectation — and it took him perhaps four steps into his own front hall to understand, from his wife's face alone, that whatever peace he had ridden home carrying was about to be spent very quickly indeed.
She told him everything, standing in the cold hall with her arms wrapped tight about herself in the one gesture of self-comfort she allowed herself even now, and Elrond listened to the whole of it — the empty study, the market, the boy, the knife, his own sons arriving just in time to a scene that might, by the width of a single drawn breath, have ended in blood on a public street — and felt something in his chest go very cold and very still, the particular stillness of a healer already, automatically, cataloguing every way a day might have gone worse.
"He could have been killed," Celebrían said, when the account was finished, and her voice, which had held steady through the whole telling, finally broke on the word. "Elrond. A frightened father with a knife half drawn, in a public square, and our sons the only thing standing between that blade and a man who did not even know, in that moment, what year he was living in. What if they had been a minute later? What if it had been anyone else who found him first — some man with less patience than Tavaron showed, some soul in that crowd who decided the mad kinslayer standing over a stranger's child deserved exactly what the old songs already say he deserves?"
"Nothing happened." Elrond heard the inadequacy of it even as he said it.
"Nothing happened this time." Celebrían came closer, and her eyes, when they met his, held less anger than he had braced himself for, and more of something worse: plain, unhidden fear, the fear of a woman who has spent hundreds years learning exactly how much of the world's cruelty her family has already survived, and does not intend to lose any more of it to carelessness. "Elrond, I know you love him. Do you understand that? I have watched what you've built with him this year, the mending of him, and it has moved me more than I know how to tell you. But love is not the same question as safety, and I am not willing to keep answering only the first while our sons' lives sit exposed to the second. He cannot be left to wander unwatched. Not into a market, not anywhere a stranger's child might cross his path wearing, for one terrible moment, a face out of his worst year. I am not asking you to stop loving him. I am asking you to keep him — closely, carefully, behind whatever doors and whatever watch it takes — until we can be certain a day like today does not happen again."
"Behind doors." Elrond heard his own voice go very quiet, the way it did, she knew by now, precisely when he was angriest and trying hardest not to be. "You are asking me to lock him in a room, Celebrían. To cage the last living kinsman I have left from my own childhood — a man who spent this very morning splitting wood before dawn so the household staff would have one burden fewer — because a stranger's fear and one bad hour of grief nearly came to a fight that ended, in the actual telling of it, in absolutely no one being hurt at all."
"A bad hour that could as easily have ended with a child's wrist broken, or a knife in your foster-father's chest, or—"
"Or not. It did not. You are arguing from the very worst version of a day that did not, in fact, happen, and asking me to build a prison out of your fear of it." He heard himself say prison and watched it land the way he had, hours before, in an entirely different argument, watched a cruder word land on Maglor himself, and some small honest part of him noted, distantly, the ugly symmetry of it — that he was apparently capable of doing to his wife's fear exactly what he had done that very morning to his foster-father's grief, seizing on the very worst reading of it rather than sitting with what actually stood beneath it — but he was too far into his own answering fear now to stop and examine that symmetry properly. "I have spent this whole year fighting to give that man back some shred of the dignity three ages of grief stripped from him, and you are asking me, on the strength of one frightening afternoon that ended in no harm to anyone, to take it away again with my own hands. I will not do it. I cannot do it, and go on calling myself the man who mends people rather than merely manages them."
"Then what would you have me do with my fear, Elrond?" Her voice cracked properly now, all the careful control finally giving way. "Swallow it? Smile at our sons and tell them everything is well, when I have just heard, in their own halting words, how close today came to costing us one of them, or him, or some stranger's child who did nothing in this world but wish to buy a kite? I am not your patient. I do not require you to heal me of loving my own children's safety more than I love being generous to a man neither of us chose to inherit."
They stood a long moment in the cold hall, the space between them full of everything neither one of them had meant to say and could not, now, entirely take back, and it was Elrond, in the end, who looked away first.
"I need," he said, very low, "to not finish this argument tonight, or I am going to say something I cannot unsay — the way I already did once today, to someone who deserved it rather less than you do."
He did not wait for her answer. He went instead down the cold hall to his own study, and shut the door, quiet and final, and did not come out again before morning — and lay a long while on the narrow couch he kept there for exactly the nights his work ran too late to disturb her, looking at the dark window and, beyond it, across the black shape of the garden, the one small unlit window that was Maglor's, and thought of a hair-braid worked fine and careful in the early light, and a woodpile stacked square and proud before dawn, and a wrist gripped white with love gone lost in old grief, and could not, for the whole of that long night, make any of those three pictures sit easily beside the others in his own tired heart.
Outside, the stars his foster father's people had once sailed half a world to chase came out over Aman exactly as they did every ordinary night, indifferent and lovely, and giving no sign at all of how many mornings, merciful or otherwise, still lay banked up unspent in the small remaining distance between this quiet, unhappy dark, and the fire that was still to come.
End.
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