High in the Clean Blue Air - Chapter Forty One

[starspray]

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Maglor, Elrond, Maedhros, various others
Warnings: References to torture and trauma
Summary: Maglor keeps a promise, and comes to Valinor, only to find the ghosts he thought he'd left behind are alive and waiting for him.
Note: This fic is a sequel to Clear Pebbles of the Rain, which is itself a sequel to Unhappy Into Woe.

Prologue / Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

 

Maglor had not expected Curufin to ask to speak to him. Something was amiss, but he didn’t know how to ask, so he just kept silent, waiting as they walked along the edge of the lake. A flock of birds erupted in a raucous explosion of calls and rushing wings out of the reedy shallows as they passed, and they stopped to watch them until they descended again like a pale cloud on the other side of the lake. Finally, Curufin said, “I used to look for you in Vairë’s tapestries. I didn’t understand why you never went to Telperinquar. And then—and then his city burned, and…”

“I know what happened,” Maglor said quietly. “He and I have spoken of it.”

“He speaks of it to no one,” Curufin said. 

“Finrod got us drunk and insisted—the three of us having one particular thing in common.” Maglor folded his arms and looked out across the lake. “But we’d spoken a little even before then, when he came to see me on Eressëa—after he learned what happened to me.” It had been awful, seeing how the knowledge upset Celebrimbor, and he should have taken that as a warning. How foolish to have ever believed he was ready to come to Valinor, to receive all the questions and the stares and the worried looks.

“I stopped looking for you after that,” Curufin said after a moment. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish—”

“Are you trying to apologize?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I just—I watched what he did to Tyelpë but not what he did to you, and—”

“Curvo.” Maglor stepped forward to embrace him. Curufin was shorter than he was, the slightest-built of all of them, wiry in his strength rather than broad; Maglor rested his hand on the back of his head, tucking him under his chin, the way he’d once held Elrond and Elros when they were still short enough. He’d never had to comfort Curufin in this way before; there had been little cause for it in their youth—and Curufin would have gone to Celegorm first anyway—and later in Beleriand Curufin had so swiftly grown too hard for any kind of gentle gesture. “I’m glad you didn’t see me,” he said, “and I wish you hadn’t had to see what happened to Tyelpë.”

“I stopped looking because I was angry,” Curufin said into his chest, voice muffled, as his hands fisted in Maglor’s shirt. “Because you weren’t there when he—”

“I’m sorry,” Maglor said. “I’m sorry that I never saw Eregion in its glory, and that I was not there to do what I could when it fell.” He wasn’t sure that he would have made much of a difference. He had been captured later by Sauron diminished, Sauron only slowly regaining his power as the Necromancer in Mirkwood, and had been unable to withstand him. Sauron at his height, so soon after the forging of the One—Maglor would never have stood a chance. But Celebrimbor was his nephew, and he should have been there. He should have done something. But he hadn’t even known what was happening—not until long afterward, and nothing close to the full truth of Celebrimbor’s fate until Sauron himself had revealed it to him.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Curufin sighed. “I’m not angry anymore. I just—I saw the brand on your chest and remembered he did the same thing to my son and—” His voice broke and he fell silent. Then he whispered, “You should never have come to that place, Maglor. Why did you go anywhere near it?”

Maglor hadn’t known that Celebrimbor had also been branded. Sauron had shown him terrible things, but not that—only the end, after any brands or similar marks had been obscured by other, worse things. “I had heard rumors of the Necromancer,” he said, looking out over the water again. The sun was sinking behind them in the west, casting a warm glow over the water so that it seemed to be made of liquid gold. Insects buzzed through the reeds, and a frog croaked before splashing into the water. Ducks were nearby, quacking softly to one another as they paddled about. Even there, surrounded by warmth and light and beauty, it was difficult to talk of it. The Anduin Vale had been beautiful, too. He had made it to the Gladden Fields, full of irises and lilies, before the orcs had found him. He hadn’t known the name of the place, then. He hadn’t known it was where Isildur had fallen, long ago; he hadn’t known anything at all about the rings, had only even known the name of Isildur through faint rumors and old stories. “I thought that keeping near the river would allow me to avoid him, whoever he was. It was only a whim that I struck north at all, following the Anduin. I had had some thought of finding its headwaters.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose. I wasn’t…I did not feel so unhappy and lonely then. I was unhappy and lonely, but I was used to it, and out in the world there was always something to see or do or find out, to distract me from it.” There had been moments of happiness, of satisfaction—even of connection, when he came to a Mannish village to trade songs for new clothes, or a little bit of labor for a warm place to sleep and a supply of food to take with him, though he never stayed long enough for there to be a chance at anything like real friendship. Maglor did not often remember those moments, these days. Dol Guldur had stripped everything away except the loneliness and despair of his exile, and it was only long afterward that he’d found real joy in the wandering again, and remembered that even those long solitary years had never been filled with constant misery. “I wouldn’t have gone that way if I had had any idea of who the Necromancer really was. But even the Wise did not know, in those days, and I knew far less than even the least of them.”

Curufin drew back to look up into his face. He was famous for his resemblance to their father, but Maglor could see very little similarity in them now. Fëanor, even subdued in his return from death, was a force, impossible to ignore, his very presence as intense as a forge fire. Curufin had his features, but he was smaller and more slender and at times seemed far more fragile, though that was an illusion, like the intricate roses he had once made of wrought iron, as lifelike as any of Nerdanel’s sculptures, that had seemed delicate while being the farthest thing from it. He was capable of the same intensity, of the same focus and drive—and that had been on full display in Beleriand, to the ruin of Nargothrond—but Maglor saw none of that now. He saw only his baby brother—and someone else who maybe did not know how to stop grieving. Maglor wondered, for a moment, what had become of those metal roses, if Curufin’s wife had kept them, or if they had been melted down or thrown away.

“Are you happy, Curvo?” he asked. “I don’t mean right now, I mean with your life now, as it is.”

“Yes. Mostly.” Curufin looked away, glancing back toward their camp. “Tyelko was avoiding me until we came out here.”

“Why?” He’d seen them butting heads, but hadn’t thought much of it. They were all butting heads in one way or another, except Ambarussa.

“It was…it was guilt and all kinds of other ugly things still tangled up in it. He thought I didn’t want to speak to him, or at least that I shouldn’t want to speak to him. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t speak to me.”

“How did you fix it?” Maglor asked. 

“Maedhros told us we were being stupid and made us talk to each other. Or—he made Tyelko talk to me, and he made me listen. That was at Midsummer.”

At Midsummer Maglor had been in Imloth Ningloron, singing with Elemmírë and dancing with Galadriel, laughing with Elrond, feeling lighter than he had since Arwen had died, feeling as though he was ready to move forward into this new life before him in Valinor in spite of anxiety about his brothers and the approaching specter of his father. He’d been wrong, of course—he wasn’t ready at all. It was a strange sort of comfort to learn that his brothers were struggling too, in their own ways. It was a bigger comfort to know that they were finding ways to move forward in spite of it.

Then Curufin asked, “Would you be angry with me if I went to see Atya?”

“Why would I be angry?” Maglor asked. 

“Because you were so angry at him. And he—after everything he did—”

“Curvo…” Maglor didn’t know what to say, how to reassure him. “Yes, I was angry when I saw him. It hurt. It hurt like…” He rubbed his thumb over his scarred palm. “I have not been to Mandos, as you have. I haven’t…I am healing, from everything, but it’s slow. There are things I cannot forgive, things I don’t know if I will ever be able to forgive, however much I wish I could. But that should not stop you. He is still our father. I don’t want to feel as I do. I miss him as much as I miss all of you, I just—”

“You don’t have to miss us, Cáno. We’re right here.”

“I can’t stop. I don’t know how. I can no more stop grieving you than I can stop breathing. It’s as much a part of me now as my lungs, as my heart.”

Curufin looked away again. “Is that why you keep pulling back?”

“I’m not the only one who has been pulling back.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.” A burst of laughter erupted back at the camp, and both Maglor and Curufin glanced that way. Then Maglor asked, “Are they angry with you, for wanting to see Atya?”

“No, except that I haven’t spoken to Tyelko of it yet; he wants nothing to do with Atya at all and we’ve only just—anyway, Moryo thinks I’m the one most likely to have a real—a real conversation with him, instead of just whatever you and Nelyo had.”

“I didn’t want to converse with him,” Maglor said. “I didn’t want to see him at all, only he was there, so I just…” He’d wanted to cause even a small fraction of the same kind of pain that Fëanor had, to make him feel even a hint of what he’d done to them. He didn’t know if he’d succeeded, and he didn’t think now, having had time to reflect, that it had been the right course to take. It had been cruel, and in the end it had not made him feel any better. “Moryo is probably right.”

“It just feels like I am caught in the middle.”

“You understand both sides, though. You and Tyelpë have reconciled.”

“Yes, but…”

“I don’t know what I want from him,” Maglor said. “Right now I don’t want to see him again and I cannot imagine ever wanting it—but if you and Tyelpë can build something new out of what once was, maybe there is hope for the rest of us.”

“I suppose if he can reconcile with Fingolfin, as Ammë tells us he has, then anything is possible.”

“Did Ammë go there? To Imloth Ningloron?”

“No. Tyelpë stayed, and he’s been writing to her. Atya has given up all his claims to the crown, and he and Fingolfin have been spending a great deal of time together—and not fighting.”

“Maybe anything really is possible, then,” Maglor said. Curufin smiled, but only briefly. “When we return, Curvo, go see him.”

“It’s just—if we can’t be united—”

“We don’t have to be. We aren't a faction, we are a family. We were never always united in everything before. One of us was always falling out with another, don’t you remember?”

“None of those fights meant anything,” Curufin said. “Not really. The worst fight we ever had was when I ruined your hair, and that blew over once it started growing out again. This is different.”

“You know what I mean, though. We have always had disagreements. The way that we ignored them in Beleriand for the sake of unity was a mistake, and I think it is what broke us apart in the end.” They had ignored a lot, in Beleriand. The way that Maedhros had never really recovered from Angband the way he wanted everyone to think, the ways that they were all changing and hardening, all sharp edges that didn’t fit together as they once had, and just cut instead, the Doom that hung over them and promised ill ends to whatever they began—and, of course, the Oath, until it refused to allow itself to be ignored any longer. 

“We all loved each other, before,” Curufin said after a moment. He did not look at Maglor, instead looking back toward the camp. Smoke from the campfire curled lazily up toward the sky. Someone laughed again. 

“We all still do,” Maglor said quietly.

“But you and Maedhros—”

“I still love him, Curvo. That’s the trouble. It feels as though I’ve loved him more than he loved me—”

“That’s not true.”

“I don’t know if he loved anything at all by the end. After Sirion he just—he kept withdrawing, fading, and there wasn’t anything I could do to bring him back, and I can see him doing it again now. If it hadn’t been for the Oath keeping him tethered I don’t think he would have lived long enough to try for the Silmarils one more time. I don’t know what’s keeping him here now.”

“Is that what frightened you so badly by the river?”

“Yes. That wasn’t the only thing, but—yes.”

“What was the other thing? Daeron spoke of you losing your voice as though it was something horrible, but it’s come back just fine, and you’ve overextended yourself like that before.”

It was Maglor’s turn to look away. He’d said he would explain when he had his voice back, but no one had asked him and he’d thought, perhaps foolishly, that they had forgotten. “Sauron had my mouth sewn shut,” he said finally, looking out at the water, “at the same time he had my chest branded. It was after I tried to sing down the tower around us.”

“Cáno—”

Maglor kept going; if he didn’t he wouldn’t be able to start again. He had not spoken of this even to Celebrimbor and Finrod while they were all drunk. “It didn’t work; I was too weak by then. I’m not sure I was ever strong enough. But—but when the White Council finally attacked, just before he retreated, he…he laid one last curse on me, and silenced me entirely. Even when Galadriel took the stitches out, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even scream even though the pain of it was horrible. I…” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his lips, feeling phantom pains there again, remembering the blank and cold expressions of the Necromancer’s servants that had brought the needle and thread, and how they had seemed not even to hear any of his pathetic pleas for mercy—the last words he spoke for more than sixty years. “Elrond lifted it the next summer. I was not without my voice even for a full year, but that wasn’t the point.” 

“What was the point?” 

“It was a reminder of what he was capable of, of how he could extend my suffering even when I was taken out of his grasp. A hint of what he could do when he found me again. It’s—I know that losing my voice because I’ve done too much is different. But in the moment it did not feel different. And I know that he is gone, but it’s—”

“It’s like Nelyo after Angband,” Curufin said, very softly. “Is there anything…?”

“No.” Maglor held out his arms again, and Curufin embraced him as tightly as Caranthir always did. “I don’t get lost like that often. Not anymore. It was just—that was just a very bad day, on top of those memories being nearer the surface lately than they usually are.”

“Why are they so near?”

“Just—no one here has seen me with these scars before, except those who lived in Rivendell or Lothlórien. It isn’t anyone’s fault, and everyone means well, but even you all stared at them when you first saw me, even after Tyelpë told you what to expect. I can’t forget them again yet, as I could in Middle-earth.” He’d gone years at a time without thinking of them. No one in Middle-earth ever questioned anyone’s scars. “It will get easier with time, I think. Time is the only cure for most of the ills I suffer.”

“You could go to Lórien,” Curufin said, tentatively. “Estë won’t just take them away—at least, she’s never done that before that I have heard—but…”

“I should,” Maglor admitted. “I might have ended up there if Gandalf hadn’t meddled, and if I hadn’t met Daeron on the road. But I just—I don’t know how long I would have to stay there, and I did not want to leave Elrond again so soon. I wanted time to find my footing, first, and…before Atya came there I really thought that I was doing better than it seems I am.” It was easier in Elrond and Celebrían’s valley, where he was not the only one with shadows in his past, not the only one with visible scars or bad dreams. “I’ll go, maybe next year, or the year after.”

“Good,” Curufin said. He sighed. “Maedhros keeps refusing, and none of us know how to convince him to go.”

“I don’t either. I’m sorry.”

As they turned to walk back, Ambarussa came striding out of the grass. “Where have you been?” they demanded. “Tyelko doesn’t want anyone going off out of sight for too long,” Amrod added. 

“There aren’t any hill cats out here,” Curufin said. 

“No, but there are other creatures,” said Amras. “Cáno, come walk with us for a while. We’re looking for wild onions and garlic.”

“What happened to not going out of sight?” Curufin asked as he stepped away from Maglor, and the twins each seized one of his arms. 

“He’s in our sight,” said Amrod with a grin as he hefted his bow, “and we won’t be long. Go help Caranthir try to catch a fish!”

“I’m no fishermen,” Curufin said. “I just make the spears.” But he left them with a smile, and the set of his shoulders was not so stiff as he went. 

“You don’t need me to gather onions and garlic,” Maglor said as he let the twins pull him along. 

“No, but we haven’t gotten to spend any time alone with you yet, and we’ve missed you,” said Amrod.

“I’ve missed you, too,” said Maglor.

They found wild onions growing under a copse of trees some distance from the lake. Maglor didn’t do any digging, but he held the basket that Amras handed him, and sat amid the grass and flowers while the twins worked. They chatted to him about the places they had gone and the things they had been doing since their release from Mandos. They had come after Caranthir and Maedhros, but before Celegorm or Curufin. “I thought you’d joined Oromë’s hunt again,” Maglor said after a while, having heard no tales of it. They’d followed Celegorm into it in their youth, but that had not been very long before Fëanor had begun to speak more openly against the Valar, and in time even Celegorm had stopped going out. Maglor remembered the arguments; they shook the walls of their house in Tirion, and he’d fled to the palace, and Finwë’s woodworking shop behind the cherry grove, just to escape it.

“Everyone assumes we have,” Amrod said, “and it’s easier to let them all think so.”

“We have been following Vána instead,” said Amras after a moment. “And we haven’t really roamed around as much as we let everyone think, either. There is a small house in the woods some days south of Imloth Ningloron, but north of the deep woods of Oromë, where we live.”

“Why?” Maglor asked. “Why keep it a secret? Does Celegorm know?”

“He has rejoined Oromë’s hunt, so he knows that we haven’t,” said Amrod, “but he hasn’t asked us what we’ve been doing instead. I don’t know if anyone has told you, but hardly any of us spoke to or saw one another until we all came out traveling together. I think we’d only all gathered at Ammë’s house…once? Twice before? We haven’t even been to Curufin’s house in Tirion. I don’t think I even know where it is.”

“It’s been nice to escape…everything,” Amras said as he dropped a handful of small wild onion bulbs into the basket. “We learned the value of a quiet and green place in Beleriand, when we went to live among the Laiquendi.”

“We still live near their settlements here,” said Amrod, “though we are not a part of them—the Laiquendi of Ossiriand, and the Woodelves from farther east.”

“That’s how you got the imitation Dorwinion, I suppose,” Maglor said. 

“Yes. We visit them often, but—well, our house was always so loud growing up, and then we got used to the quiet, and then we were at war, and…there’s peace there, in the deep woods. Everything is green, even the sunlight that comes through the leaves. We don’t have to always be remembering whose sons we are, whose brothers. We can just be Ambarussa. Vána doesn’t ask much of her followers, you know. Just that we walk softly and carefully, and with our eyes and hearts open. There are gatherings in the spring to dance and sing and celebrate together, but it’s not really much like the followings of the other Valar, not even Yavanna.”

Their house had been loud and often full, by the time the twins had been born. Maglor had been splitting his time between Tirion and Valmar, studying under Elemmírë, when he wasn’t off wandering by himself or with Maedhros or with their cousins—who had also always been coming and going, before the unrest had entered into Tirion and driven its wedges between them all. “I didn’t know you were unhappy when you were young,” he said.

“Oh, we weren’t!” said Amrod, looking up. “We just find ourselves happier away from the city now. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“Not that Ammë’s house is loud, these days,” said Amrod after a moment.

“No, it’s very quiet—but that’s worse, because everyone is so unhappy.” Amras paused. “Well, no. Carnistir is tolerably happy most of the time, I think, and Ammë is also tolerably happy when she isn’t worried about all of us—but Maitimo has been miserable. He wouldn’t look either of us in the eye for almost a decade after we came back. A little like you’re not looking us in the eye in this moment, now that I’ve told you that.”

“It’s just—you died, and we couldn’t even stay to bury you.”

“Oh, Cáno. That doesn’t matter to us. Burials are for the living; the dead don’t care. Besides, I asked someone once—Gil-galad’s folk from Balar buried us. Everyone, no matter which side, was buried properly after Sirion.”

Maglor hadn’t known that. He didn’t know what to say to it now. The guilt of it would always linger—overshadowed by greater guilt and regret, but there all the same, that not only did he fail to save his youngest baby brothers, he hadn’t even been able to honor them properly afterward.

They left the onions to seek out the garlic, and found a berry patch nearby; Amras picked handfuls for the three of them to eat. The bright red berries were very sweet, and stained their fingers pink; they were not a kind that Maglor had ever seen before, and he would not have known them to be good to eat if Amras hadn’t said so. He sat with the basket and savored the taste, and watched the twins work. “Why did you tell me about your house in the woods?” he asked finally. 

“You’re the one that was always slipping away to find quiet, when we were all young,” said Amrod. “We didn’t understand why, then. Now we do.”

“You can always come find us, if you need to get away, even from Elrond’s house,” Amras added. “We won’t bother you. Sometimes we go weeks without saying a word to each other. And there’s no one in the forest to stare or ask questions. The Laiquendi come and go, but they won’t care what you look like or where you’ve been.”

The offer should not have made him want to cry, but Maglor felt that tell-tale prickle behind his eyes. He blinked the tears away; he was so tired of weeping. “Thank you,” he said, when he could swallow the tight feeling in his throat. “I’ll remember.”

“We won’t be hard to find.”

As they walked back to the camp the twins each threw an arm around his shoulders, though they had to reach up to do it, being only a little taller than Curufin. Maglor wrapped his arms around them in return, remembering when they had been much smaller, and he’d carried them around hanging off of his arms, the two of them swinging hard enough to nearly knock him over more than once, all of them laughing. He thought their mother might have made a sculpture of it once, though it had probably been lost in the long intervening years. 

Maybe one day she would have cause to make new sculptures, of all seven of them.