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Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain
“Can it be?” His cousin’s voice is still hoarse and withered, one of the thousand ghosts that hang about his stooped shoulders. Morgoth, with his unholy mastery of all sound and music, must have delighted in scraping that rich voice raw. “That my life would heal a wound.”
He means between their families. He means the mantle of praise that has descended on Findekáno’s shoulders, for a mighty deed that was done for one alone.
“Trust that it is so,” Findekáno answers, his hands gripping his knees. He does not dare, yet, to lay a hand on Maitimo’s bruised skin. “You are a prince of our people.” And Fingolfin is not Fëanor, even if oaths live forever.
Maitimo shuts his eyes. In sleeping and waking, he is so little of himself. What will they call him, if he lives? One-handed Maedhros? Still he is tall, still to Findekáno he is beautiful, called so by his own mother long ago. But even Findekáno can see the names sloughing from him like dried blood.
Names are what they carry with them, to the end—an empty offering.
Names and oaths.
Findekáno shuts his eyes too.
On the sharp-shouldered peaks, they wept together. First in singing, then in silence, in the sobbing breath of the moment when Findekáno drew his bowstring to his ear.
After came his prayer, a prayer to Manwë. Surely they are all forgotten, surely the Valar are too terrible and pure to forgive Fëanor’s eldest, even when he hangs ravaged to the bone.
Surely, surely, there has been no sin as this since we fell.
He does not beg a reckoning. He asks not for forgiveness, only for speed.
And yet—the eagle descends upon them like salvation.
(Findekáno never learns again, though his cousin will, how much salvation can be found in falling.)
Blood in the high cold wind. Blood on Maitimo’s rough cheeks. Blood in the tangles of his faded copper hair.
Even the sun rises red. Findekáno’s hands will never be clean, yet he chose this.
Twice, the bards will sing. Twice did Maedhros Nelyafinwë beg Fingon to end his life in mercy.
(The bards know nothing of the third time.)
“Kill me,” his cousin breathes in the moonlight. One hand grips the soft white sheets. He has no other hand. “Please, Káno. If you love me.”
“Russandol,” he breathes, dashing sleep from his eyes. He slipped into a doze slumped forward at the foot of the bed, keeping watch. He wakes—to this? “What nightmare plagues you?”
“None,” Maitimo answers. His eyes are almost the color of the moonbeams. There it is: the steel and starlight of his father’s gaze. The sons of Fëanor have always been as keen-edged as their swords in battle, as exquisite as their father’s work in their curses and their footsteps on the earth. And to see one ruined—to see the scars marked forever, the bright hair hacked away—is grief enough for Findekáno.
“None,” says Fëanor’s son again. “I rest now. So kill me as I rest. Let death take me while I am at peace.” His only hand clenches tighter still.
“You must live,” Findekáno says—no, begs. Begs as he did to Manwë, only this time, he asks forgiveness.
I was not swift enough. I was not strong enough. Forgive me, cousin.
“If you live,” he promises, “You will heal.”
Maedhros breaks his gaze, and whispers, “I know.”
Later on a battlefield, when the news is carried far and wide—
No peace, no peace.
And any still left standing, gore-drenched, marked afresh as traitors to the light by their very defenses, shall hear the flame-haired captain cry, “Would that his arrow had flown that day!”
One-handed Maedhros falls to his knees, a mighty warrior and a keen-edged blade, for the High King of the Noldor lies dead beneath a black axe.
(Even the sun rises red.)
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.