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The story Maglor tells them goes like this:
Once upon a time there were two boys left in a cave, and Maglor Fëanorion, who came back for them. He decided a cave was no place to raise children, so he left them in the care of Maedhros his brother (“Such as it was,” Maedhros says) and went in search of somewhere better.
Maedhros: “In truth he was very angry with me, and wished to be alone. He was so angry that when he left he did not even take his harp.”
Elros: “You played us lullabies. You weren’t very good.”
Roaming in the wilds, Maglor was beset by orcs, and finding himself outnumbered, he fled far from the cave, that his pursuers would not discover it. He ran so heedlessly that he ran quite off a cliff, which was obscured by a thick bank of ferns and choking brambles.
(PAUSE, that Maedhros may give his impression of Maglor wheeling through the air, the more outlandish the better, generally accompanied by screaming.)
As Maglor fell, a calm fell over him. He felt sure that he would die, yet he fell so lightly into a blooming cherry tree that he landed without even a scratch. He was as lucky as he had ever been in his life, save the day he met Elrond and Elros. When he climbed down from the tree he saw he had come to rest in a cleft in the forest, quite hidden, as by some vestige of Melian’s Girdle. The branches of the cherry tree sloped against the ground like great eaves. Maglor decided that if he made it back to the cave in one piece, he would collect his brother and their charges and bring them here to live. And he did, and so they did. In the spring of that year, in the gathering winter of the First Age, they slept beneath the stars and the cherry blossoms while Maedhros and Maglor built them a house, tucked between the tree and the cliffside.
The little vale has only grown more beautiful, though Beleriand falls to shadow around them. Orcs and wolves issue from the darkening forest, but they never find them here. In this, at least, their fosters chose wisely. Elrond and Elros have grown up mostly whole and mostly safe. And though the sons of Fëanor snipe and squabble about many aspects of their history, when Maglor takes credit for their home Maedhros yields without protest, which makes Elrond think the story must actually be true.
Elrond and Elros ask for the tale unflinchingly, for in time it has come to seem as if it happened to two other boys. Maglor grows more cheerful for the telling, and Maedhros for his embellishments and corrections, and it feels as though with each retelling the past grows lighter, as though they are soaking out a stain.
They are not expressly forbidden to go into the forest alone, but Elrond suspects this is a simple matter of oversight. Maedhros and Maglor often forget to tell them the rules. There are days he and Elros wake up to find them gone scouting or hunting, the house left empty. If they are lucky there’s a jug of water set out on the table, sometimes bread, and they usually go down to the river to fish and roast their catch over a small pit-fire the way they were taught. Sometimes they are alone for half a day, sometimes days, sometimes longer. The longest yet was a week. Elrond drew a line of ash on the wall every morning, for it frightened him how time ran together if he did not mark its passage.
When Maglor and Maedhros are gone, Elrond plays a game. What will I do, he asks himself, if they don’t come back? He does not consult Elros during the game. If it happens, when it happens, Elrond wants to know the plan already, and tell it to his brother with no trouble.
One morning in autumn, he wakes at first light to see Maedhros in the open doorway. He has a pack on his shoulder and a fractious look in his eye. The scar that bisects the right side of his face gives him a permanent half-scowl, but today both corners of his mouth are downturned.
“Where are you going?” Elrond asks. Beside him Elros stirs but does not wake.
“Never you mind. Go back to sleep.”
“How long will you be gone?”
Maedhros does not answer. “Come on,” he says to Maglor, and goes out of the house.
Maglor is slightly more solicitous. He dumps a bearskin rug atop the quilt for warmth and runs a rough hand through Elrond’s hair. “Not long,” he says. “Be good, and mind the forest.” And then he too is gone.
Elrond thinks to call after them, but then he remembers the look on Maedhros’ face. Settled back in bed, he drifts off again and does not wake until later in the morning.
There is food on the table for them, bread and a hard rind of cheese. Elros scrapes along the wax with a knife and hands the cheese to Elrond curl by curl. The feed is mean in the little village where they go to trade, and the scruffy goats there crop at bitter ferns and foraged chestnuts. Elrond does not care today; the cheese is as savory as he’s had in months.
Elros rips his bread into successively smaller pieces. “Where do you think they went this time?”
Elrond shrugs. The year is waning; every day the light seems thinner, and chill air sharpens the mornings and evenings. Maedhros and Maglor roam less in winter, when deep snows make the paths in and out of their little vale impassable. On the coldest, darkest days the sun barely reaches through the trees and the wolves howl and they do not leave the house at all, and on those days Elrond finds it easiest to forget they ever had another life.
They finish the cheese and clear the table by rote. Chores are another thing they won’t be told to do, or at least not with any regularity; if they wish the cabin to be reliably orderly, they must see to it themselves. Sometimes Maedhros and Maglor attend to housework, but often they move through the world as though it is made of vapor, compelled by something far beyond the scope of errant crumbs, or children. Elrond has seen Maedhros sit for hours and stare at the wall, or answer questions no one living has asked. Maglor sometimes hums a distant music, or tells them only half a story, or plucks out chords on his harp Elrond does not recognize.
“What are you playing?” Elrond asked him once.
“It is an old song of Aman, in the days of the Trees. It came to me just now after—after a very long time.” Maglor considered his harp with some bemusement, inclining his head as though to better hear a whisper or a far off call.
“Will you teach it to me?”
Maglor held up a hand and was silent, listening. Then he blinked and looked at Elrond, his face all changed, as though some flame had been dampened deep within him. “Of course I will,” he said, but when he took up the harp again the song he played was not the same at all, but a lay of Beleriand Elrond had heard many times before.
After breakfast Elros declares that he is bored. He doesn’t feel like fishing, he says, and anyway Elrond is better at it, more inclined to sit motionless waiting for a bite. They can fish tomorrow when they’re hungrier, if their guardians have not returned.
“Last time I went out in the forest with Maglor we found blackberry bushes. A whole clearing full, still ripening. They’ll be ready by now.” Elros twists his fingers in Elrond’s tunic, cajoling. “We’ve had no sweets in an age.”
Perhaps they have simply gone to town. If they have, they should be back by nightfall. Elrond imagines it will be a good night, then: Maedhros will have cast off his ill humor and will not be distant but jovial, asking them what they’ve seen and done. Maglor will have honey to go with the berries and will praise them for their foresight in collecting them. Elrond ought not to anticipate such a happy outcome; it seems to him one best prepares for disaster by behaving as though it has already occurred. But he finds today he does not want to borrow trouble. He wants to go out with Elros into the blue and gold of high autumn.
They bring cloth sacks for the berries and pack apples and the rest of the bread and cheese. They debate leaving a note in case Maedhros and Maglor return, but in the end do not, though later Elrond won’t be sure if they decided not to or simply forgot in the hurry to get out of doors. Outside, the cherry tree is far from blooming; instead her leaves are red as blood and like to fall. When they do they will blanket the vale in scarlet and the Peredhil will rake them into piles and pretend they are hoarded rubies or liquid fire run out of a mountain.
Waist-high goldenrod springs up at the edge of the clearing just before the treeline. Elrond puts his hands out and let it run over and through his fingers like water. When the grass gets too high here Maedhros will come out with a scythe and cut it back; he says the overgrowth disturbs him, makes it too easy to creep up on them unawares. Elrond doesn’t ask who he is frightened of, or what. There are many possibilities, some of which he suspects exist only in Maedhros’ own mind.
In any case, he and Elros are not frightened. The sun is still ascending and the patches of shade beneath the trees are cool and shallow. Elros makes a game of skipping through them, dodging and feinting against invisible opponents. He has brought his bow and quiver and given Elrond the knife he used to slice the cheese, but without Maedhros here to drill them the weapons feel more like toys, and are soon forgotten. Now and then they scare up game, rabbits and fat grouse, and it occurs to Elrond that they ought to try and hunt, but they are not of a mind to be stealthy now, picking their way through glade and thicket, singing marching songs of their own invention.
They wander in the woods for hours, leaving home behind them. The berry bushes are not precisely forgotten but are no longer foremost in their thoughts. Elrond does not consider them with any sense of necessity until the shadows begin to lengthen and his stomach growls. At once he is aware that they have missed the noonday meal.
“Where did you say the berries were again?”
They have paused under a doughty oak, and Elrond asks his question through a mouthful of bread and cheese.
Elros looks around them. “I thought just over that way,” he says, but Elrond can see no clear path through the forest, only a wall of foliage. “We found them the day we tracked that stag.”
Maglor had been teaching him to track large game, and they had followed the beast through the forest for hours before they found and killed it. They’d hauled it back on a makeshift litter and Elros and the Fëanorians had dressed the carcass on the grass before the house. Elrond had not wished to help them butcher, though he had acquiesced to be taught how to pack the meat in salt to cure for the winter.
“Do you recall this tree?” he asks Elros now.
Elros squints up at the trunk, its furrowed green-grey bark thick as his fingers are long and flocked with moss near the ground. “I think so,” he says. “Ah, yes! I am certain of it. Maglor told me how tree-lore is written, round and round in circles in the wood. He says the trees whisper it to one another, and to us sometimes. We may only see them if the tree is cut. But as we cannot read their language, in cutting it is lost.”
These words have the echo of Maglor’s. Elrond feels a twinge of envy, for he would have liked to hear of tree-lore, and is sure he would have had many questions for Maglor Elros will not now be able to answer. He resolves to ask him later, once they’ve returned home with the berries.
They make three full circuits through the woods in the vicinity of the tree, each wider-ranging than the last. They find a good many light, straight sticks to fletch for arrows and a crop of white mushrooms, but they do not find the blackberry bushes. Yellow-leafed shrubs grow beside the oak tree, laden with shiny red berries round as pebbles; Elros makes an argument for picking them, just to say they have picked berries, but Elrond feels sure that were they edible he would know about them. He has vowed to learn by heart the names and properties of every herb and wild fruit in the forest. To come upon something unfamiliar here bodes ill. Perhaps they have strayed further than they intended. Elros and Maglor dragged the stag home for the better part of a day, he remembers. They had dressed and packed the meat all night.
The sun begins to dip and the puddles of shade Elros danced earlier in have grown deeper and colder. They huddle in a diminishing patch of light and try to make a map: here is the little house under the cherry tree, here the river, which by rights they should hear rushing and babbling even this far away. But they have not bothered to listen. Elrond can hear rushing, but he cannot say whether it’s the river or the wind in the treetops, or simply the whisperings of his own mind.
“You said you were certain.”
“I am certain that my feet hurt, and that I am tired of walking.”
“We ought to have started for home hours ago.”
Elros does not answer, only rips sullenly at a patch of grass.
“Don’t do that.”
Elrond dislikes the way the wasted blades of grass blow about on the ground. He swats at Elros’ hand. Elros kicks at him in retaliation, and then there is a flurry of fists and elbows, the violence half-playful until Elros lands a true blow square in Elrond’s face and all explodes in stars. Elrond feels an animal surge of fury. He wheels on Elros, striking without quite seeing him, head spinning. His fists collide with some hard edge of his brother and pain doubles across his knuckles.
Elros yells out and shoves Elrond with both hands. He tumbles backwards, smacks his head against the trunk of the oak tree, and sprawls on the ground in a daze.
Elros’ face is suddenly very close to his. “I’m sorry,” he cries. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“Ow,” says Elrond.
“I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“Am I bleeding?”
Elros reddens. “Your nose, a little.”
Elrond struggles up to sitting, Elros fussing over his head. Elrond snuffles and swipes at his face with the back of his hand, brings it away smeared bright red. He looks for something to use to wipe himself clean and finds nothing, only empty sacks that ought to have been filled with blackberries and his own clothes he is loathe to dirty. He can’t hold back a muffled groan of discontent, more sob than anything else. For they are far from home and his face hurts and now he is bleeding and he is hungry and the Fëanorians aren’t coming back and they are probably lost.
“We’re not lost,” says Elros.
“We are lost.” Elrond sniffs and gags, tasting blood. He spits onto the ground.
“Here.”
Elros rips a length of fabric from the hem of his tunic and spits on it. Elrond wants to protest, but he feels he has lost the will. He lets Elros try to clean the blood off his face. As he submits to this indignity he feels an ache rise in his chest, a weight as though a great stone has been set there.
Elrond does not remember much from their last day at the Havens. What he does remember seems to be carried more in the body than the mind, as though his heart and limbs take up burdens too heavy for his head. Maedhros told him once great pain may be borne by divorcing hröa from fëa. He had neither questioned why Elrond was asking nor told him how he knew.
Elrond remembers being on the ground, like this. He and Elros, wrapped around and atop one another. An attendant had been with them but he cannot recall her name or where she went, though the memory he knows that she is dead and that soon he will join her. He cannot think of his mother. They are in a hole in the ground (Lie flat, their minder said before she ran, like hares in the grass, lie flat and be silent.) He cannot think of his mother. Elros breathes too loudly. Their faces are pressed into the mud. A shadow falls over them—o death!—but they wait and wait and no sword comes.
Two brothers for two brothers. Their hair had blown together, black and red. They were both of them blood spattered, but there had been no regret on their faces, only bright rage, and then dismay, and Maglor had cursed.
Elrond has not cried for his mother in years, and he is not entirely sure he is crying for her now. But he is crying, hot tears streaming from his eyes unbidden and embarrassing. Elros stares dutifully into the middle distance, chewing on his bottom lip.
Elrond puts his cloak on and puts the hood up over his head. He sniffs hard, as though he could draw every last scrap of sadness into his lungs and blow it back out and away. “What should we do?” he asks, when he feels as though he can speak.
Elros does not answer.
“I said, what should we do?”
Elros still does not speak. He continues to stare into the forest, but he slides his hand against Elrond’s and grasps him around the wrist.
“Quiet,” he mutters. “Look there.” He nods in the direction of the trees.
Elrond shoves his oversized hood back down again, the better to see what Elros sees. He only has to look for a moment before he spies it: an orc, watching them intently from the partial concealment of a stand of young pines, drawn by the sounds of their fight or the smell of Elrond’s blood.
“What is it doing? Why does it not attack us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something is wrong with it.”
Something indeed seems strange about the orc. It must be traveling alone, for a whole band would not have hesitated. Even in the weakening sun, they would already have descended. But this one seems cautious, almost frightened of them, as though it is not sure of their strength. Perhaps it does not know what they are; as they were told over and over in Sirion, they are large for elf-children and small for men. Perhaps the orc perceives something of their mixed breeding and is likewise confused by it.
Evening encroaches on the clearing. Once night falls, Elrond is sure that whatever lingering sun-fear stays this orc will no longer protect them. They might run, and hope to lose it in the darkness, but an orc’s sight is just as keen as theirs, and they have nowhere to run to, no path home that does not risk leading them even deeper into the forest, to countless other dangers. Beside him Elrond knows his brother can sense his thoughts; he always says he can tell when Elrond is stewing over something. Let him sense them clearly now, Elrond thinks, for he has an idea, and would rather not waste time explaining.
He catches Elros’ eye and looks behind them, to the great oak sturdy at their backs. Elros furrows his brow as though to ask for confirmation.
Elrond nods. Elros raises one finger, then two, and then they are up and running, Elrond’s heart thudding against his ribs, all woe forgotten, crowded out by terror. He is dimly aware of motion at the treeline, sticks snapping like bones and fallen leaves crunching, the rustling of a heavy thing moving at speed. He does not look back, because if he sees the orc coming for him he fears he will freeze in its face. He has lived through much, but in truth he does not think himself particularly brave.
Elros reaches the tree first and kicks up the trunk with sheer force of momentum, leaping for the stout lowermost branches. The bark bites into Elrond’s palms and he hesitates, hands and feet forgetting all the other trees they’ve climbed, far worse climbing trees than this. Please, he thinks, and thinks wildly of the tree rings and all the secret things that might be written on them. How to fly, how to become invisible, how to vanish into the darkening sky and reappear at home to see the woodstove alight and Maglor chiding them for tardiness.
“Hurry,” cries Elros. He holds out his hand, though Elrond cannot reach it and would pull his brother down atop him if he tried.
Elrond does not dare look behind him, though he can see Elros’ stricken face and this is almost worse, for Elros is not quick to frighten. He flaps his hand frantically, urging Elrond along. Behind him comes an awful sound, that crackling of old wood but now a terrible dragging too, a slow but relentless progression, as though at any moment he might turn to find the creature at his shoulder.
Elros screams his name.
Elrond backs up, though he is loathe to reduce what distance remains between himself and the orc. He launches himself at the tree again, and this time it seems to him the tree bends to catch him and make his landing easier. The trunk seems less vertical, curving so that he can quickly get his feet under him, and from there it is short work to clamber after Elros as he moves higher into the oak, well out of reach of the ground.
“Did you see that?” he asks Elros, puffing with effort. He means the tree, its strange motion, but Elros does not seem to notice.
“Keep going,” Elros orders, and continues to climb, Elrond following after, trying to copy his foot- and hand-holds. They do not stop until they have reached a thick branch halfway up the tree that forks gently into a natural seat wide enough for the two of them to rest upon. They cannot help but peer down through the branches to look for their pursuer as it sniffs around the base of the tree.
Elros was right: there is something wrong with it. It moves with a peculiar stumping gait, more ungainly than any orc Elrond can recall seeing. There are more and more in the forests lately; Maedhros and Maglor speak sometimes of their encounters, and the last time they took Elrond and Elros along to the village to trade they’d spied a band on the way home, though only from a distance. They had debated fighting them, or at least get close enough to better grasp their numbers, but in the end Maglor wouldn’t allow it, and so they had retreated and gone a different way along the river to muddy their scent in the water. Those orcs had been well-muscled and athletic, and had moved with a rollicking sort of grace, not at all like the lone orc circling the bottom of the tree, mumbling to itself in its rough language.
“Can it climb?”
Elros wraps his arms around his knees. “I don’t know.”
They watch for a time, tensing at every sound arising from below, but the orc does not start after them, perhaps having decided to wait them out. Elrond settles beside Elros on the branch, drawing his cloak around them both, for Elros’ lies on the ground along with their packs, forgotten in their flight. They see the orc pawing through them, looking for anything worth salvaging. Elrond thinks longingly of the bread and cheese, and as if on cue his stomach growls loud enough that Elros looks up and snorts despite their unfortunate circumstances.
“You will be complaining of your hunger at the very end of Arda.”
Elrond shudders at the this, though he is not sure why. As they watch, the orc kicks at their packs a final time and slips back into the forest.
“Do you think it’s really gone?”
“Do you want to go down there and find out?”
Elrond slides his arm through Elros’ by way of answer. Elros pulls the cloak tighter around them.
Once night falls in earnest the forest begins to come alive, and for all they dwell in the midst of it, it is one thing to hear its many wild sounds snug in bed and another for a bird to call at arms-length, or for a distant chorus of howls to start up in reply. They huddle together, trying to be quiet, though they do not know what they are hiding from, whether the orc still hides in the trees or if there are other things out in the forest to be afraid of.
They pass the time telling stories, trying to conjure the same fell gravity as Maedhros, who can look quite transported when he talks. Maedhros mislikes talk of blood and battle, for all they press him for such tales. On a good day he will simply demur, on a bad day shout or stalk away or throw a piece of crockery, or go and sit outside drinking the sour beer the men brew in the village. But rarely he will tell them stories of his youngest years, when he and his brothers and his cousins ran roughshod over the fair lands west of the sea. When he speaks of these ancient times (“Ai, do not call me ancient,” he says, wincing, though of course he is, they both are, Maglor watching his brother with a shrouded look, mouth tight as with pain) the light in his eyes seems to glow like banked fire, and Elrond thinks that if he stared into Maedhros’ eyes like this he could gaze upon Valinor as easily as looking through a window.
“It’s no use,” says Elros, after Elrond has yawned his way through an attempt at the story of Maglor leaving them in the cave. “You are no lore master, at least not tonight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
Ordinarily Elrond might chafe at Elros’ heroics, but tonight he is glad of them. He is hungry and very tired and feels dangerously close to tears again, and so is all too happy to tuck himself between his brother and the oak trunk. He rests his head against the tree and thinks again of the tree rings, imagining them circling beneath his cheek.
“Thank you,” Elrond whispers into a knothole, and then he is asleep.
Cradled in the oak tree, Elrond is visited by strange and ranging dreams. He dreams he has left his perch in the branches, or perhaps his body entirely, and taken wing over the dark forest. From his vantage he can see all Beleriand, from the northern mountains to the flinty glimmer of the sea. The sky in his dream is moonless, filled with the light of a single star, so bright he can see no others, bright enough to cast great shadows over the land. He can see two figures lit silver in the starlight, and these he knows somehow to be Maedhros and Maglor wandering abroad, perhaps searching for them or perhaps for something else. It does not occur to Elrond to wonder that the scope of his dream world has been thus reduced, distilled to starlight and a riven country and two kinslayers. Nor does he wonder where Elros is. Elros sits watch in the tree beside him. Where else would he be?
He wakes to screaming, and to Elros gone. Elrond flails, and it is only by dumb chance that he strikes wood and recollects he is halfway up a tree before he can rise to run and step straight off the branch into the open air.
He shouts for Elros. There is no clear reply, only more screaming from below him, where Elros has ended up for some reason. But you were keeping watch, thinks Elrond, and we are in a tree, and why, why had he let himself fall asleep? How long has Elros called for him, begging him to wake?
“Hold on,” he calls out vainly, and begins to scramble down the tree, slipping in his haste, losing his grip on the branches and half falling. He will never reach the ground. When he judges himself close enough not to be too badly injured he jumps clear of the tree altogether. He lands hard on his hip, but the ground is soft enough he feels no crack of bone. When he stands, he stays upright.
Beside the tree Elros grapples with the orc. The orc is on top of him, head down. Elrond cannot see its face or clawed hands but he can see one foot bound in a rag and oozing dark blood. Elros’ body arcs as he twists in the orc’s grasp and kicks fiercely at its belly; he has his bow in hand, but Elrond sees no arrow, and even were an arrow nocked there is no room to draw. He cannot see a weapon in the orc’s hands. The contents of their packs are strewn around; Elrond sees an apple ground to pulp in the leaf litter.
Elrond is cold with panic. His throat closes. His mind seems no longer to control his body, his hands hang useless as blocks of wood and the air is thick with the stench of the orc and with blood and Elros screams again and Elrond thinks of Maedhros, of being a thing not of mind and body but of one only, and if he cannot crawl fully inside his mind perhaps he can cast himself fully out of it. Elros’ screams grow higher and more ragged. The orc’s broad back hovers over him like a stone table. It has not even turned to look at Elrond, too consumed with its attack to notice him come down from the tree.
Do not think. Shove your hands in your pockets and feel for the knife.
The orc roars when Elrond leaps astride it and gets an arm around its thick neck, meaty and bulging with muscle and tortuous veins. Elros’ face is white with fear and pain; his forearm bitten, the orc’s teeth marking his flesh in the shape of a crescent moon. The knife handle is slick in Elrond’s sweaty hand and when he plunges it into the juncture of the orc’s neck and shoulder he loses his grip on it immediately. The orc screams and rears, sending Elrond crashing to the ground beside Elros. It is furious and clutching at its neck and not at all dead. It yanks at the knife, reels and spits at them, blood leaking from between its clamped fingers. It curses them both in the tongue of the enemy, and Elrond does not know the words but he understands the orc is reading them the story of their deaths.
Elrond shuts his eyes and waits.
Something spatters his face. He screams. His eyes fly open — if Elros’ throat has been torn out beside him, better to see, better to know and thus bear witness to his passage beyond, to Mandos or that unknown place where men go after life. He screams again at the horror of Elros dead, but someone gropes for him and it is Elros saying his name and again death has not come.
The orc’s head has been neatly separated from its body. Behind its slumped torso stands an elf, broad shouldered and dark haired. His sword, which he still brandishes in front of him, is tarnished but is evidently no less sharp for being so. The elf stares down at Elrond and Elros with a look of disproportionate calm.
“Oh dear,” the elf says. “We have killed Clodfoot.”
“You—knew this orc?” Elros, incredulous, clutches his injured arm to his chest.
The elf makes a face. “As one knows a lame cur apt to bite. I knew of him; he made his way to these woods at summer’s end, and I have marked his movements since.”
Elrond can see his reflection in the orc’s glassy open eye. “You named him.”
“For my own amusement. Distasteful, perhaps.” He wipes his sword on the grass. “But we should get away from here. Every ill-meaning beast for half a league will be roused.” He nods to Elros. “Can you walk?”
Leaning heavily on Elrond, Elros gets to his feet. The elf inspects his arm and gives a low whistle. “You shall have an impressive scar,” he says. He produces a kerchief and wraps the wound, frowning in concentration as he does so. His face must have been fair once, but it too is scarred; on his left side a great pale twist of flesh runs from hairline to eyebrow and halfway down his cheek, and the left eye is cloudy. The elf’s head snaps up and he meets Elrond’s gaze as though aware he is being examined.
“Do not forget your knife,” he says coolly.
Elrond is tempted to abandon it, but the knife does not belong to him. Maedhros gave it to Elros, and Elrond knows it to be very old, of Noldorin make. Too fine to leave behind, and much too valuable. He approaches the body of the orc. The knife will not come free before he braces his boot on the creature’s chest and pulls with both hands, which come away sticky with blood.
He gathers what he can of their scattered supplies, including Elros’ bow, which has snapped its string, and then follows the elf into the forest. The elf gives a high call and after a moment a horse breaks through the shrubbery, a blue roan who approaches her master with head lowered, nosing at the twins like an oversized hound. Elros staggers in the thick leaf litter, suffering from fatigue or from his injury or both.
“Here,” the elf says. “Aiwë has borne me in far worse condition.” He hefts Elros quite easily astride. Though the elf is not so tall as either of the Fëanorians, he has a similar bearing and a hint of their hunger in his face.
Elrond draws himself up to make his introductions. He has not truly been a prince in years, but he feels compelled to project nobility now, even alone and disadvantaged in the forest. “What is your name? We would know who to thank for our valiant rescue.”
The elf smiles and strokes the horse’s neck. “You may call me Nivol.”
By the time they have arrived at Nivol’s dwelling, the sky has turned rosy with dawn and Elrond is numb with fatigue despite riding the last stretch of the journey, mounted on Aiwë behind his brother. Nivol’s shelter must have belonged to marchwardens once, a southerly outpost long ago before Doriath fell. A well-hidden hut of mealy wood and mossy stone, it sits tucked in the lee of a small, densely forested hill.
“It was quite ruined when I found it,” says Nivol inside, as he busies himself heating a pot of river water over the fire. “Yet easily restored.” Elrond can see where he has patched the chinks in the walls with clay and bits of timber. In the firelight Nivol looks even more forbidding than he had outside, and though his name is queer Elrond finds it apt, for there is a thinness to him as to watered milk, as though the light comes through him at the edges. As though he is indeed a phantom.
When the water is warm Nivol tends to Elros’ wound, cleaning it with the same lard soap they trade for in the village. Elros bites his lip against the pain as Nivol scrubs at the wound with a cloth.
“Easy. I know it stings, but you must endure it. I would rather ten cuts from an orc’s blade than a single bite from its mouth. I have seen limbs lost from such wounds left uncleaned.” He says this conversationally, with no care for Elros’ horrified expression.
When the wound is dressed Nivol leaves them to bathe while he tends to Aiwë. Elrond strips to the waist and cleans off the worst of the blood and grime, then does the same for Elros, who appears to be rapidly approaching the end of his strength. By the time Nivol returns Elros has climbed onto his stuffed-straw mattress and fallen sound asleep.
“I tried to make him wait,” Elrond says by way of apology.
Nivol shakes his head. “He needs rest, as do you. Sleep, and when you wake we will speak further.”
Elrond sleeps for the better part of the day. He wakes at intervals and dreams himself home, then back in the tree, and when he wakes again so great is his relief at remembering their rescue he can do nothing but burrow deeper into the bedclothes. He is dimly aware of Nivol stoking the fire, and when he wakes for good the shelter is warm and bright. Outside the sun is failing. Elros sleeps on, unmoving. Nivol sits on the wooden bench by the doorway, restringing Elros’ bow.
“I may have been too gentle on him earlier. We must keep a close watch on that bite.”
He rises and goes to the fire, spoons porridge into a ceramic bowl and hands it to Elrond. The warm food in his hands is shocking; at home he rarely eats hot meals unless they are roasted meat caught on the hunt. The porridge is faintly sweet and Elrond finds chestnuts hidden throughout, softened by the grain.
“Thank you,” Elrond says. “For everything.”
Nivol bows crisply, and there is a wryness to the gesture that reminds Elrond of Maedhros when he is drunk and at loggerheads with Maglor. Hail, Prince of the Noldor in this forsaken corner of dissolving Beleriand, he drawls, dancing his brother around the house, Maglor swatting at him in annoyance until Maedhros finally deigns to step away and make that same neat little bow.
“Why did you come out here alone? The wilds are dangerous, and have grown more so in the season since I’ve come. Were you fleeing someone?”
Elrond shakes his head no.
In the early days of their captivity—for he had thought of it thus at first, even if he has ceased to do so somewhere along the way—he thought often of escape; he would speak of it to Elros whenever they were left alone, try to get him to join in his plotting, though of course the schemes were childish and doomed to failure. One night, when they were still living in the cave and Maglor was off in search of the hidden vale, he had awakened to find Maedhros gone. He had shaken Elros awake.
“Now,” he said. “Hurry, before he comes back.”
He does not now remember the specifics of the plan; probably he meant to return to Sirion, possibly to beg Círdan for command of a boat, to search the seas for their parents. Whatever it was, Elros would have none of it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said to Elrond, and curled back onto his side.
“They slew everyone! They will slay us too!”
“I do not care,” said Elros. “It’s cold out there, and there are orcs. I am staying.” And he had piled the filthy blanket atop his head with an air of finality.
Elrond had begun to cry. He gathered what he could of their meager belongings; they had come with nothing, really, only the clothes on their backs, though as they fled the halls someone had thrust a bag at them of what had turned out to be silverware, as though they thought the Fëanorians had simply come to loot. In the end he left most of their things behind, for he would not steal from his brother, even if he would betray him by leaving. But, he thought as he paused to look back from the mouth of the cave, was it not Elros who was the betrayer?
He had turned away, and gone forth from the cave, and plowed headlong into Maedhros.
Elrond stammered some excuse, but Maedhros shook his head and gestured at the entrance. “Go, if you like. I will not stop you. You may fare better away from us.”
Elrond had squared his shoulders.
“Though if you go you must go now, while I alone am watching,” Maedhros continued. “I will not come after you, but my brother will. I fear now he has made the foolish decision to save you he would go to the ends of the earth to do it. That is no small thing.”
At the time, Elrond had not particularly cared what Maglor would or would not do. But Maedhros’ words made him think of Elros, of how it would be for him to wake in the morning and find Elrond gone. Would he insist on going after him, or would he abandon Elrond to his fate? Would you really be parted from him forever? Elrond asked himself. That night, the answer had been no.
Elrond wishes Elros were awake now, in Nivol’s house, that they might discuss how best to explain themselves. Maglor in particular has always cautioned them to keep close counsel, especially around other elves, and when they go into the village Maedhros hides his red hair beneath the hood of his cloak. Soon, he is certain, Nivol will ask where exactly they are from and where their parents are, and he would rather not have to come up with the answers all by himself.
“There we are.”
Nivol sets Elros’ restrung bow on the table and takes up the knife Elrond retrieved from the orc’s fallen body. The metal has been cleaned of blood and polished to a sheen for good measure. Elrond has never properly appreciated how finely made the knife is, with its sinuously curved blade formed into the shape of a leaf complete with inlaid veins, and the handle enameled in green so dark it is nearly black.
“Where did you get this knife?”
“It belongs to my brother.”
“And where did he get it?”
“It was given to him. By a friend of ours.”
“A handsome gift.” Nivol’s tone is light, but something in his words sets Elrond’s teeth on edge. “Do you know where it came from?”
“Only that it’s very old.”
Nivol smiles. He takes the knife carefully by the blade, turns it around and offers it to Elrond handle first. “Do you see that rune there, just above the guard? That is the marker’s mark. This one belongs to a smith who worked in the forge at Dor-lómin, in Hithlum. He sang songs of Tirion while he made this knife for me. He said the metal liked to hear of our old home.”
Elrond snatches his hand back as though burned. He wants even more desperately for Elros to wake up. “Take it,” he says. “We would not steal your knife.”
Nivol shakes his head. “It was never mine. I had it made as a gift, many years ago, and gifts may be given more than once. I am certain your friend came by it honestly.”
He sets the knife on the table and flicks it into a spin. The metal makes a singing sound against the tabletop, and Elrond thinks unbidden of the strange song he heard Maglor play, once and never again.
Elros’ wound does begin to fester. Later that second night he begins to burn with fever, growing so hot he wakes Elrond from his own sleep. Nivol pulls the blankets back to cool him and he immediately moans that he is freezing.
“Wait,” says Elrond. “I have read that one must sweat a fever. We should bundle him up.”
Nivol steps aside and lets Elrond mass the quilts and furs over his brother. He stands beside the bed and watches, the expression on his face unreadable. Elrond strains to remember the book of herb lore he has set to memorizing back at home. Oh, would that he had put it in his pack, but he had been overconfident, sure he would know any plant, sure he would not need to know them.
He turns from the bed, finds his pack amid the detritus strewn on Nivol’s table. He takes up the knife, too; let Nivol stop him, if he means to keep it after all. But though he watches Elrond he says nothing, nor does he stop him when he shrugs into his cloak and starts for the door.
Outside, night has deepened. Elrond can see no moon. The stars shine so brightly that the trees cast shadows, and all is black or silver. Nivol has a little meadow where Aiwë crops sleepily at sweetgrass. Elrond walks its borders, looking for wild herbs that might spring up in the manured ground. The trees that overhang the field are not so old as the oak but they are pleased to see him, and when he steps into their shadow he can hear them whispering: come and see, come and see. He follows their voices into the forest, into a clearing where the starlight flows through a gap in the trees and pools on the ground like clear water. And there on the ground, like pale lily pads, are patches of foamy white flowers. Elrond cuts them free with the knife. He thinks of Elros ripping grass so casually, says forgive me and I’m sorry, crushes them between his fingers. They smell familiar, like some of Maglor’s ointments. He does not know their names but he can hear them whisper to him, too, the living plants absolving him, happy to yield their brothers. He gathers as many as he can hold.
Nivol boils more water. They wash the plants and Elrond chops them on the table with the knife, finer than fine, leaf-blade shining. Nivol watches him work, sitting beside him with his chin cupped in one hand as though deep in thought.
Elrond makes a mash of plants and more water that has sat outside in the starlight. He smears it on Elros’ wound and makes him chew more of it: to cleanse the blood, to massacre invisible armies.
“That is battlefield medicine,” Nivol says, nodding at his efforts. “They say bloodwort grows where warriors spilled their last, that it may staunch future wounds.”
Elrond wonders who died in that clearing. “Warriors taught me,” is what he says.
For a day and a night, they tend to Elros as his fever burns, watching him in turns. Time slows and twists and Elrond cannot recall how long ago it was since they left home. It feels a century has gone by.
In a half-sleep he sees Maedhros and Maglor dead and gone, bones moldering, struck down by a star. A bad dream. He dreams them walking away from the house, shouldering what they deem worth carrying into the wastes alone, resigned to the twins’ absence. This dream is worse. And he dreams he is watching them argue, and this is the worst of all.
They have gone, says Maedhros. The pain in his voice is an old pain.
They would not, Maglor says. His hands fret - over his harp, perhaps, or one of their lesson-books. His gaze is furtive, looking not at Maedhros but anywhere else, looking for some sign. They would not leave us.
Elrond watches as Maedhros draws his hurt over him like a mantle. You, they would not leave.
Elrond peels the dressing back from Elros’ wound. The poultice has dried out and darkened, and when he cleans it away from Elros’ flesh the edges of the bite are paler and less livid.
“The redness retreats,” Nivol says, sitting at the foot of the bed. “And his flesh is cool. He will improve quickly now, I deem, and none the worse for it. Well done, Elrond. I am no herbalist, and I fear how I’d have fared alone.”
Elros stirs. He grumbles from his nest of blankets, half awake. “None the worse? You have not tasted those herbs.”
These are the first sensible words he has said in days, and at once Elrond's throat feels as though he is trying to gag down a dry bit of bread. He claps a hand over his mouth and pins his swimming gaze to the wall on the far side of the room. He sits very still beside his brother until he feels Nivol’s arms come around him and pull him back against his chest.
Elrond has not been held so in a very long time. The contact tears down a battlement inside of him, and he may do naught else but crumble. He folds against Nivol’s torso, cheek pressed against his tunic, which smells of woodsmoke and horse. His whole body shakes, but Nivol says nothing. His hands do not move; he does not try to gentle Elrond or to serve him platitudes, and perhaps it is this consideration that prompts Elrond to speak, mumbling into Nivol’s armpit.
“We were born in Sirion.”
“What?”
Elrond sits up and wipes his eyes. “Sirion. Do you know what happened there?”
Nivol stiffens, releasing Elrond from the circle of his arms. “Yes.”
“I suppose they think us dead. Everyone else is dead. Have you heard things, in your travels?”
Now it is Nivol who speaks as through a closing throat. He brings each word forth by great pain, hot coals pulled from a fire by hand.
“I have heard that the remaining sons of Fëanor took the two young princes captive. That they must have slaughtered them and thrown the bodies in the sea, for who could believe—who could believe they would be merciful?”
Elrond presses. “And?”
“I have heard that there is a very bright star come into the West.”
Nivol cries freely now. Elrond feels cruel to see it.
“They look at that star all the time,” he says.
Elrond is in the clearing again, gathering more bloodwort, when he hears Aiwë snort and whicker. He is alone, or thinks he is; Elros has remained inside on his advice, though with a measure of protest that Elrond finds reassuring. Tomorrow they will pack their things and let Nivol lead them to the river, and then they will go in the direction of home. Nivol has not said whether or not he means to follow them. Nor has he offered them any other name.
Elrond’s mind is hard pressed to resist the lure of story. Based on the available facts he might readily cast Nivol as a noble elf of bygone days, yet something stops him from speculating with any real purpose. Perhaps it is Nivol's kilmessë, its gesture towards invisibility. He has lived here in the woods undiscovered for a season, he said. Not so long, and not so nearby, but they might have found him anyway. He might have sought them out.
Nivol has asked him no further questions about Sirion. In fact, he has asked him no more questions about anything; rather he appears somewhat afraid of what Elrond might tell him next. Since Elros’ fever broke Nivol has not become unfriendly, but there is a stiffness between him and the twins Elrond did not feel before, as a limb held straight in fear of pain.
“What did you speak of when I was ill?” Elros had asked when they were alone. “He looks at you so strangely.”
“He recognized your knife,” Elrond said, and Elros’ eyes widened. Elrond knew he was thinking of what Maedhros would say.
Elros considered. “Perhaps they hurt him. Perhaps they slew his kin also.”
“I think they hurt him. It caused him pain to speak of them. But not like that.”
Aiwë squeals from the pasture again. Elrond leaves the bloodwort behind and walks back in the direction of the house. The mare’s disquiet troubles him; the forest around him is silent, and he strains to hear a scurry or a ruffling of wings, any of the small animal noises that will reassure him that the day is carrying on apace, that no fell intruders have strayed too close.
He is nearly clear of the trees when he hears a shout, and then another.
“Elros, come here! Get away from him!”
Elrond knows that voice, has heard it call to him in woods like these before. He runs.
He finds Nivol and Elros outside. Elros holds a bucket on one hip with his good arm, so perhaps they came to feed Aiwë or to fetch water from the river. They seem to have emerged at the same instant Maedhros came out of the woods on the far side, the way they came the night Nivol saved them from the orc, and now they stare at one another across the meadow as though uncertain what to do. The air feels charged; Elrond’s excitement shifts to fear, for at once he can sense the possibility of violence, smell it in the sky like the tang of iron.
Nivol and Elros are still as stones. Nivol in particular has frozen with one hand on Elros’ shoulder, and Elros looks from him to Maedhros and back again.
Maedhros draws his shortsword. Elrond sees the bright flash of the sun upon the blade. He tries to see what Maedhros sees—the two of them, a stranger. And danger—that they might be harmed, that they might be kept, that they might allow it. He knows, somehow, that Maedhros wishes Maglor were here to sing them all back days hence. We shouldn’t have gone. He should have stayed behind. Him, they would not leave.
Maedhros rolls his shoulders back and then he comes, crossing the open grass in great gobbling strides, the tallest elf Elrond has ever seen. Nivol has no weapon, and he does not look for one. He straightens his back and tightens his jaw and pushes Elros behind him.
Maedhros charges straight up to Nivol and stops, sword arm drawn back, muscles trembling. He stares. In his mind, quite plainly, is a war. Maedhros has lived through an age of the world; he carries fey light in his eyes and is driven by forces Elrond cannot understand. Yet he is come here now to do what he once said he would not: he has come to find them. He would cut down any in his path, though he has sworn no oath to do so.
“Wait,” cries Elrond.
A muscle jumps in Maedhros’ cheek.
“Wait. You know him.”
When they spoke of the bearing of pain, of the forcible split between hröa and fëa, Maedhros had been mostly circumspect. But there was one thing he told Elrond. He was still talking of pain, of which he had suffered much. In the same offhand manner with which Nivol had described rotting orc-bitten limbs, Maedhros said that the greatest pain he ever felt was after he was rescued from Thangorodrim, after he knew for certain he was not going to die.
"When I came back to my body," he said, "it felt like being lowered into fire."
This is the pain Elrond thinks of now, when Maedhros drops his sword, and goes to his knees before Nivol’s trembling form, and wails.
Maglor does come, eventually. He and Maedhros had split up to search this section of the forest, having a certain peculiar feeling, having heard strange sounds at night. Maglor bears pain in his own stout heart, but a measure more of hope than Maedhros has. Such was his way, he said to Elrond once. "For he has borne burdens I could never dream of, and so I would carry a little extra hope for him."
He is led to Nivol’s house by a goshawk, whose shrill cold call he follows north. He hears the song before he sees them: an old song of Aman, in the time of the Trees.
There are Elrond and Elros, safe and whole and feeding a horse.
There in the dirt is his brother, with his head in the lap of a ghost.
In the last days of the following year, the vale is buried under snow again. So deep does it fall that the door of the little house is wedged shut by a great drift, and nobody can leave. Elrond and Elros sit at the window for hours as the light shades from blue to bluer to black, playing finger games they grow too old for, shelling nuts into a small clay bowl.
“Tomorrow I think we will send Elros up the chimney to dig us out,” Maglor says. “Or perhaps it ought it to be Elrond. Who is smaller?”
“They both grow tall as well as broad,” says Maedhros. “They outstrip all their clothing and shall soon have need of mine. Stand together, back to back, and we may make a determination.”
The boys look at one another with shy pride. “I think it is Elros,” Elrond says, for he would prefer not to climb the chimney. But he stands in stockinged feet and wriggles his heels flush with his brother’s anyway, as Maglor and Maedhros set hands upon their heads.
“It is close yet,” Maedhros says, and yelps, Maglor pinching at his ribs to skew his measurement. “Peace! Peace. We need objectivity. Finno, come and be our tiebreaker.”
“He is hardly objective,” Maglor says, but there is no true protest in it.
There was some strife when Fingon came into their home. He had still been Nivol then, and he had nearly refused to come at all, as though held together only by the borders of his scant patch of dying greenwood. In the end it was Maglor who convinced him; he spoke with him a long time, and walked beside him singing as he led Aiwë. Maglor continued to sing laments to him for many days after. Such was the only way, he said, to tell their cousin what he did not remember, to tell him everything that had happened.
“Be patient,” Maglor told them. “He has been lost a long time, and has only come back among us by fate. One grows accustomed to one’s doom. It must be—jarring, to find it changed.”
He looked at Maedhros when he said it, and though Maedhros made plain he did not like it, he agreed. What discourse he and Fingon eventually had between them, Elrond was not party to. They often walked in the woods together, and sometimes they came back with closed faces, and sometimes smiling, and then they seemed younger, like the elves in Maedhros’ stories.
Fingon sits apart from them now, staring into the fire, wrapped in a cloak. Old wounds pain him as they do Maedhros, and at times he too is adrift in his own mind. Maedhros calls his name again and he seems at last to hear it and looks up.
“What game is this?” he asks. He wears an uncertain smile.
When he looks so Elrond always feels an ache, though he cannot name the feeling more precisely. As he grows older he becomes aware of just how long they all lived before he knew them. Perhaps he aches for the loss of those years, though of course he could never have had them in the first place. Perhaps he aches to have known them all some other way, in some other time.
“Tell us who is taller,” Elros says.
Fingon rises from the fire and approaches them. He crouches so his eyes are level with both their heads, and he frowns in utmost concentration.
“Impossible,” he says finally. “Of a height, down to the last hair.” He sets his own hands on their heads, over Maedhros' and Maglor’s, and he begins to laugh.