Chapter Text
“We must be wise, where the matter of the flooding is concerned. We shall not be faster than the rising water, but we may gain a little here or there, if we think well through our strategy.” Maglor lays out a map on the table in front of them, running his hands over the creased parchment. Maedhros sees him wince where he presses his burned fingers a little too firmly to the table, but he does not recoil. “I have gotten estimates, the best I can, of elevation and of the speed of the flooding. The areas I have crossed in red ink are lowest, and likely already marsh. The orange shall be so in a matter of months, the green of years. Spots marked in blue may not sink at all.”
Fingon leans forward, hands braced against the wooden table, and surveys the map with a critical eye. “Where can all that water come from?” he asks. “It seems rather double than what was before.”
“Not double,” Maedhros says. He stops to think, and would do the math in his head, except Aredhel interrupts him from the opposite side of the map table, her voice sharp.
“I heard it has been in clouds, all this time, and now they shall wring all of them out and there shall be none left, until they go and craft new ones.”
At once Maedhros forgets his promise to be meek as a lamb with Aredhel, for Fingon’s sake. “Plainly that is ridiculous,” he says, and would say something of water vapors, of the temperaments and humors of the spirits of the air, but—
“In all likelihood it is ice.” Idril, now. The prim dryness of her voice is laced with a sharp, sad sort of twist, as though laughing at some private memory, an uncanny echo of her father’s manner. “Think of snow heaped on the edge of a shallow puddle; imagine how the puddle shall flood and overflow as the sun comes to turn it to water. Certainly there had once been plenty of ice in our seas.”
“Not so close as to have the battle melt it,” Maedhros begins, “not unless it was purposefully done, which—” He is not sure what he is about to say. Which I would find hard to believe. Which would be very much like them. Which is no worse than we deserve.
Either way he does not get the chance to say it, for another voice, soft and sad but quite full of melody, cuts into their conversation.
“Friends,” Orodreth says, “cousins. There is no more water than before. The land sinks. They threw mountains.”
They all turn to look at him. Orodreth had been a late addition to their little crew and an unexpected one. Maedhros had not wished to welcome him, but he had had little choice.
He had come quietly, the night before they set sail, and in truth they had not spotted him among the crew until it was nearly time to depart. He had been quite well-equipped to handle the ships, as the all children of Finarfin, and had kept his face down besides. But his mourning-black had given him away. Then Maglor had caught him by the hand, and looked it at him with a mix pity and incomprehension.
“What are you doing,” he had asked, “go home, Artaresto—do you not think your mother waits for you, your brother waits for you? They say you did not even go to fight, in that final struggle; what can you need now, on the broken land?”
“What can you?” Orodreth had echoed. He had not never been quick-witted in verbal quarrels, though quite sharp in other ways, and the retort had sounded only odd.
“… Penance,” Maglor had said, “exile.”
For a moment an awkwardness had hung in the air, so think the main point was quite lost in it. For everyone had known well, then, why Maedhros and Maglor were leaving the Blessed Isles; that among the living and reembodied they alone stood unforgiven, sentenced six-hundred and thirty-three years in service to the Valar and of those hurt by their misdeeds, send to shepherd home the ghosts of Middle-Earth.
The rest of the crew, most among them reembodied Noldor, came with their own motives. Fingon for love’s sake, foolish as it may be, for none were left to dissuade him from it. Aredhel and Idril seeking Turgon, who had gone to fight in the War of the Wrath and stayed, unwilling to subject himself to the rule of another. Some scattered elves among the crew looking for misplaced family members, or seeking the last possibility of trade; some having come to Aman and found they could not bear its perfection.
And now Orodreth.
“I know your task,” he had said firmly, “I know you seek wandering souls, and I know my daughter must be among them.”
He would not be dissuaded. Not by reminders of the awfulness of war, nor of the likely failure of that task, nor the grief he might bring his family by going, nor even the earnest promises to look for his daughter’s spirit in whatever remained the lands.
“I must go,” Orodreth had said, again and again, “if I had not done a father’s duty in life, then certainly it is to be done in death.”
And so now he is with them. He keeps his distance from Maedhros and Maglor, and they keep their distance from him. Aredhel and Fingon had once been close with him in their youth—as they had with all the children of Finarfin—but Middle-Earth had hardened them differently, and now they regard him with a sort of pity.
Aredhel, Maedhros remembers, had not lingered to wait for her son’s reembodiment. Maedhros would ask her of it, if she did not hate him.
(“She does not hate you,” Fingon says, when he brings it up, “she is only reasonably cautious.” But Maedhros knows the truth, of course, and blames her little. Having wedded one monster, is it any surprise she does not wish to see her brother wed another?)
Which brings them here.
Aredhel examines the map carefully, her fingers skimming over the blue areas, the ones that shall not sink. “Turno told us he was making for Ered Luin,” she says, “many were, it seems; even as we were leaving it was clear the land was changed, and would fall to ruin. We can expect to find rather a lot of disorder, refugees fleeing from broken lands.”
Idril twirls one golden strand of hair about her finger, rather like a ring. “He would know what to make of it. Who is left to rule, then?”
“Only that boy-king,” Maedhros scoffs. He has no very high opinion of Gil-galad. They have met once, in negotiation, and nearly crossed blades. Maedhros cannot imagine he will hold on to power long; some king he is, lanky and pale-faced, painfully young in his manner. The unearned confidence had grated on Maedhros almost as badly as the vague allusions to his ancestry, the insinuations of a pedigree he could not prove. “I imagine your father shall have him bereft of his crown quickly enough.”
“He might wear it long enough,” Maglor says thoughtfully, “for Elros to come into his own.”
But Idril only frowns. She thinks herself above such things, Maedhros can tell. Well—let her. Let her think them power-hungry, if she must. Let her think them cruel.
“We stray from the point,” Fingon says, looking down at the map, but he cannot help it himself. His fingers ghost against the red-shaded plains. “The fish shall die in lake Mithrim, I expect. From the salt water.”
For a moment all of them are silent, dwelling on that little tragedy. Then Maglor says: “But there shall be ghosts, in the mountains,” and the conversation picks up again, overlapping voices debating the ghost-concentration in each region, the most straightforward means of accomplishing their task.
Maedhros hears it little. His eyes are on Himring, shaded defiantly in blue.
They do not find their stowaway until they have been sailing for three and a half weeks, and by then it is too late to do anything for it.
Maedhros has some impression of being haunted before then; once a saddle-bag looks arranged out of order, the top two buttons of his coat pulled loose. Another time he hears footsteps on the deck of the ship, too quick and too light to be anyone who ought in truth be there. Their stores of food seem now and then to be slightly diminished, and though they blame it on ship-rats they see neither hide nor hair of them, nor even droppings.
But that is easy enough to write off. Maedhros knows himself to be forgetful and imprecise with his things, especially when fits come upon him. Many of the elves on board would have good reason to trust him little enough to search his bags; Fingon might have gone in search for hair-oil and forgotten to say something. Maedhros fidgets with his buttons at times, for something to hold. He hears things often—screams in the wailing and howling of the wind, the voice of the Enemy rolls of thunder, footsteps of long-gone elves in the creaking of wood. Perhaps someone had been hungry, in the middle of the night, and ashamed come morning. He cannot say with any degree of certainty that it had not been him.
“Did you touch my braid?” Maglor asks him, one morning. “Before you went to sleep last night. Something woke me, but I did not see.”
Maedhros shrugs. “Perhaps,” he says, “I cannot remember.” For often he goes to his brother for comfort, often enough there is nothing remarkable about it.
Maedhros imagines it might have gone on that way for some time, except some dream wakes Orodreth in the middle of the night, and he goes up on the deck to smoke.
They all hear him scream, a long howling wail more sorrowful than hurt. Maedhros thinks there is some name in it, or some word; but what it is he cannot say.
In no time at all they are stumbling out onto the deck behind him, half-dressed. Aredhel has twin daggers in her hands; Fingon has taken up his bow. The rest of them carry swords, silver in the starlight. The night, Maedhros notes distantly, is a full moon.
By then Orodreth is by the masts, his pipe still-smoking at his feet, clutching at his heart. Maglor—the most able healer among them—sheaths his sword and rushes to him, his hands skimming over his sides. He speaks in quick, lilting Quenya, which strikes Maedhros as unusual to hear. “What happened, Arto? What is the matter?”
“Finduilas,” Orodreth chokes out, “Finduilas—my daughter, you must believe me, I saw her ghost.”
Maglor blinks, then steps away, bending to pick up the fallen pipe. “You had a dream,” he says softly, “we all know these can seem very real at times. She is on your mind. That is all.”
“No,” Orodreth says, “no, I did not sleep; I felt the cool touch of the wind on my skin and the warmth of the smoke in my lungs, and I saw her, her silver braid and her dark eyes, and she was little—as she had been at only thirty years—and she bled, as she must have bled out.”
“Then you are mad,” Maedhros says flatly, “why should she haunt the sea, so far away from where she had lived and where she had died? There is nothing here.”
Orodreth begins to weep. Maglor and Aredhel turn to glare at Maedhros. One of them would say something of it, except that Fingon speaks.
“Not mad indeed,” he says, gesturing the feathered side of one of his arrows, “look up, at the mast. I daresay I see our little ghost.”
Maedhros does.
Dark brown elven eyes look down at him, sparkling slightly in the moonlight. He can see the dark ruddy mine-scars Orodreth had taken for blood, the silver hair messy around her face. Not Finduilas at all, but—
“Sían!” Maglor cries, holding out his hands for her. She trembles for a moment, plainly uncertain, then leaps down into his arms.
Maglor carries her in again, below deck. Maedhros hears the faint metallic sigh of Aredhel sheathing her blade, and belatedly does the same. Orodreth sniffs, looks stunned for a moment, then goes to follow them. Maedhros hangs back, the last of them to return below deck. He watches from the door way as Fingon uncovers the lighting-gems, as Idril goes to pour wine.
Aredhel sits down heavily on one of the chairs, her hand on her blade. “Who is she? What is she doing here?” her tone suggests that Maglor might have somehow set the child on the ship to scare Orodreth on purpose.
“An orphan,” Maglor says softly, “she had once been a thrall, and was set free by Finarfin’s men. I took her into my care for some little while on our way here. She is a gentle creature. Are you not, Sían?”
The girl, sitting now at his side, twirls her hair around her finger and stays silent. Maedhros has heard her speak clear Sindarin before, but in this company she seems shy of it.
“And what is she doing here, now?” Aredhel repeats. “This is no place for a child.”
“That I cannot answer,” Maglor says, “Sían, dear?”
But she will not speak then, either, except to mumble that she had not meant to, really. The truth of it does not come out until the following morning, when she breakfasts with Maglor and tells him that she had been at their trial and heard their fate, that she had been told to let them go without speaking to them, that the time spent in Maglor’s cabin on their journey had worn at her, and she had missed him. That she had stolen aboard the ship at night, meaning to say goodbye, but had fallen asleep before they got there and woken only after the ship had left.
Maedhros suspects there is more to the story than she lets on, that perhaps it had not been as perfectly accidental as she makes it sound. But he does not say it, and neither does Maglor.
“What shall come of her?” Fingon asks, when the three of them have a minute alone, on the deck. “This is no quest for a child, and I know not when the ship will return.”
Maedhros watches the ripple of the water below. “We go to see your brother first. I would expect he should have set himself up quite well, and should have room in his heart for a little foundling. Is that not so, Maglor?”
For a moment Maglor seems ready to argue, as he had argued on behalf of keeping the twins. But he sighs, and lets it go. “We must, I suppose.”
“Ered Luin first, then,” Maglor says later, with the two of them—and Orodreth—putting together dinner. Their crew is too small and too full of nobility to bother with distinctions of rank, so the duty passes on rotation, two at at time, except for Maglor and Maedhros, with functionally two hands among them—for Maglor’s left hand has been slow to heal and can be little used—who count for one.
They make the best of the task. Among them Orodreth is the most suited to distinguishing flavor profiles, though often that lends him only to complaining they are missing this spice or that, and Maglor, given the experiences of his guardianship, the most conscious to the details of food preparation. Maedhros mostly holds things.
Maedhros looks around the little room, his eyes skimming over the counters—quite full now of dishes that shall need washing up after and tools whose purpose they only guess at— and the dusty floor, then the chair where Orodreth is messily attempting to divest a fish of its skin. Certainly he does not hear them.
“Ered Luin first,” Maedhros repeats, “and, I hope, not for very long.” For if Aredhel is bad, Turgon shall be orders of magnitude worse. “Then what?”
“I suppose we may see if there is anything of Nargothrond left to find,” Maglor says, keeping his voice low, “if we wish to be rid of all unwanted company as quickly as possible. He may be convinced to go, if… or after…”
“Mm,” Maedhros says. “And if not that?”
Maglor breathes in deeply. He takes an Aman-lime in his hand; unlike the limes of middle earth is huge, twice the size of his palm, and a brilliant emerald green. Maedhros watches as Maglor rolls it across the counter-top to better squeeze out the juice when he cuts it. “Doriath,” he says, “the last I was able to learn of it, it had flooded into a sort-of-swamp, the bones of her dead buried in the mud. We shall not have much time before before it all underwater. A few years at most.”
“As Nargothrond already is,” Maedhros says grimly, reaching to steady the lime as Maglor cuts it, to save him getting the juice on his burns.
“So far as we can guess,” Maglor says. Maedhros watches clear juice bubble around his knife, eager as blood to escape its skin.
“We shall have to tolerate the company a little longer,” he says, and sees his brother shares the sentiment. Doriath must be faced, while there is something left of it.
“What company?” Orodreth asks, suddenly quite close by. His fish is skinless, though raggedly so, tufts of pale pink flesh sticking out like feathers where the knife had slipped underneath them.
“Yours,” Maedhros says darkly, “do you much fancy Doriath?”
Dinner is a simple affair. Maedhros has come to like it, more than he has liked dinners in a very long time. That liking is accomplished quite strategically; he positions himself between Maglor and Fingon, and has done what he can to establish an order among the others. Orodreth at Maglor’s side, one of the sea-elves by Fingon’s, next to Idril. Aredhel too far along the table from him to make any conversation whatsoever.
He is sure she has noticed, and scents his weakness. But the company of his brother is comforting, or his lover pleasant, and the conversation around the dinner table does not stray close to the blackness of their deeds.
Aredhel speaks mostly to Idril or Orodreth; her voice retains a certain steely distance even with Fingon. Maedhros can tell that is troubles them both, but cannot say what must be done with it.
So he pushes it away from his mind and tries to focus on the taste of lime and fish atop sea-noodle stew, on the dark wood of their table, on Fingon’s easy low-laugh and the flash of Maglor’s teeth when he smiles. Tries not to dwell on the task ahead.
At night he shares a hammock with Fingon, though it is a tight fit. Years of weightlessness upon the cliff have left him hungry for solidity, for grounding, and Fingon’s weight atop his chest lulls him into a soothing dreamless state. Even his seasickness seems to settle at the pressure, though his back and shoulders complain of it in the morning.
But this night he cannot quite slip away.
“Findo?” he asks, quietly enough to avoid waking Maglor on the other side of the room.
Fingon shifts above him. One of his braids tickles Maedhros’ chin. “Mm?”
There is no easy way to ask it. “Did you speak to your sister? She seems cross with you, crosser than I remembered.”
“Mm.” For a moment, Maedhros expects that is all he will say. But he sighs, and answers. “Briefly. She asked if we were wed, and I told her it was so.”
Maedhros raises his hand. Runs his fingers over Fingon’s braid, counting the bumps. “Shall she try to kill me, do you think?”
Fingon takes some time to think about it, which is not reassuring. Maedhros feels the slight movements of his body atop him, his steady breathes, the little jump of his throat as he swallows. “No,” he says. Then, after a moment: “She begged Turgon to spare him, you know. As she lay dying.”
“As you begged,” Maedhros remembers, “for my life.”
“No, ‘Ros,” Fingon says, his voice gentle, half-laughing, “I begged him to kill you quickly, and without pain.” He leans up, and kisses Maedhros on the chin, open-mouthed. “Go to sleep. You’ll think yourself sick.”
Maedhros shuts his eyes. Listens to Fingon’s level breathing, to the beating of his heart. For a moment he thinks of Aredhel and Eöl, though more in picture than substance. What must it have been like, to be cast so from the cliffs?
During his captivity he had seen many orcs ill-suited to their purpose. Too dull to follow their orders, or else too bright not to question them. Overly self-assured and rebellious with it, or else weak and groveling. Too belligerent and cruel to work with others, or—the worst of all—too soft-hearted to carry out their tasks.
All of them had had the same fate.
And so he can picture it now, quite clearly, though he had seen neither the peaks of Gondolin nor Eöl himself, the tumble against the cliffs, the broken body in a heap below him. His own fragile separation from that same fate, the length of chain pulled taut.
“Sometimes I thought I had already fallen,” he says, “that I was only… lingering.”
“Sweetheart,” Fingon says, yawning, “please go to sleep.”
It is horribly late. They will rise early. “Yes,” Maedhros says, “forgive me.”
Fingon hums his forgiveness, and shifts, raising a hand to brush back Maedhros’ hair. Soon enough he is gone again. Maedhros tries to hear Maglor’s breathing on the other hammock and cannot over the waves. Tries to push from his mind the images Maglor bleeding, of Maglor’s bones gleaming white stacked neatly on the hammock.
Of other untended bones scattered in the swamp-lands of what was once Doriath. They left Dior the king laid out in his throne room, for his people to find; now he wonders if anyone had. If animals had found him before elves. If—
“Do you think,” he says, “that the same scavengers ate Dior’s body and my brother’s head? We never did find it.”
Fingon stirs. He’d been asleep. “What?”
“Celegorm,” Maedhros says, “Dior. Their bodies slain on the ground.”
Fingon groans into his chest. “Elbereth,” he begs, “sleep.”
Maedhros does. Snatches of images dance before his mind, battle and swampland, bodies half-shredded out of their armor. But once he slips away there is nothing but darkness and Fingon’s deep sleep-breath, and this is well.
He tries with Aredhel the next morning, for duty’s sake. He catches her on the deck, helping better-able sea-men adjust the sails. It is a wonderfully bright day, and the sun plays in the water, light caught in cresting waves. While she is busy Maedhros watches it, and is almost calm.
But when it is time to face her, he fumbles.
“I wish,” he says, “I only wish to say— er.” The words stick, and he swallows them down. He is not used to caring what people think of him. In truth he cares only for Fingon’s sake. “That—whatever I have done. How horrible my deeds, and. The slaying of.”
Aredhel raises one dark, perfectly curved eyebrow. “Quite horrible, we should agree.”
“Yes,” Maedhros says, “yes. I only mean to say. Fingon is—. I wish to do him honor, and would not raise a hand against him.” He remembers his own raised sword, the twinkle of Fingon’s amber eyes beneath his helm. “Again, that is. I love him truly, and wish him well.”
“Ah,” Aredhel says. For a moment Maedhros thinks she is almost pleased with him. The sun gleams in the water, the waves hitting the side of the ship. Then Aredhel speaks, and her tone is steel. “Then send him from you and your doomed, awful quest. Take him not in the land of ghosts, of darkness; let him be with his kin.”
“I,” Maedhros says, and stops, because both of them know he shall not. That he has been given a beautiful thing far beyond what he deserves, and he shall not let it go.
“You have stained him; you have taken something pure and twisted it, made it unwholesome,” Aredhel says. Her voice is soft, but not without anger. “Twice he has bloodied his hands for your sake; and now he would follow you into darkness. What sort of love is that, son of Fëanor?”
Maedhros thinks of his father. Of the gems and the oath and the doom. Of Maglor, standing by him despite the call of his heart. Of Fingon, walking alone into the darkness with a harp on his back. The only sort I know, he does not say.