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Healing by final Hope, as Manwë hath spoken of it, is a law which one can give to oneself only; of others justice alone can be demanded.
Despite the name, the Exiles’ Camp was obviously a city. It gleamed below him on the valley floor, bright and open and permanent. There were no walls around it, but the streets were stone, and so were the buildings, from the low solid houses shaded by plane-trees on its outer borders to the high graceful spires of the complex of buildings at its center. And yet, though it was built in stone, it did not entirely fit what he knew of the cities of the Noldor. It bewildered him, all of it, from its bafflingly inaccurate name to its exposed and unguarded situation to the unplaceable style of its construction and craftsmanship, and under the bright sunlight of the late morning he felt more lost and set about by shadows than he had ever been in the twisting paths of Nan Elmoth. But his errand goaded him; he set his teeth, summoned a composure as stern and lofty as he could under the circumstances, and made his way down to the streets below.
Unannounced and unopposed he entered the city, and found himself checked again by uncertainty. The king should be at the heart of his realm, but all he had seen at the center of the city were the towers of the Halls of Learning. The city’s life swirled around him in unhurried patterns: the conversation of friends gathered around fountains in the public squares, the scent of food cooking, the sound of hammers in the street of the stonemasons and the cries of children at play. At last, though it galled him to do so, he stopped one of the passersby, a woman whose silver hair, he hoped, showed her one of his own people. He asked her, as courteously as he could, where it was that he found himself.
“This is Estolad Eledhronnath,” said the woman, looking up at him with a little puzzlement, “Are you also an exile, stranger of Doriath? Do you seek a refuge?”
It was his own language at last, but he found little relief in it. The shock of the familiar was scarcely less than the shock of the unfamiliar, and both were surging around him in a constant battery that would have been wearying if he had not felt within him the restless vigor of life renewed. The sunlight jabbed at the corners of his eyes, the sounds of foreign speech and of his own speech made foreign by time and distance clattered and bubbled in his ears.
But he was a king, not an exile, and so he meant to bear himself. “Has bright Aman made you careless with our speech, daughter?” He gestured to the stone streets, the towers of the university. “This is no camp; this is a city, a realm!”
She laughed, as if at some private joke. “Indeed, stranger. One of the oldest after the Return.” He heard murmuring from the passersby, and though the language was strange, he knew they were speaking of him.
“I seek your king,” he said, still unwilling to speak the name without the force of need. “Where can he be found?”
“Ah. Which are you speaking of?”
This could not possibly be a problem of the language; her accent was Falathrin but perfectly intelligible. He had no intention of resorting to shouting and sign-language in the streets like a Nogrod tinker. “Your king,” he said through gritted teeth. “The one who rules here.”
“Oh. Well, you’ll find them –“ She took his hand without any show of hesitation, and sketched a quick map on his palm. “This street here, that will take you down to the gardens. The house of the king is there, in the center of the grove.”
He thanked her and did not press her on the inexplicable use of the plural, quietly adding it to the list of questions to bring against the King when he found him. Making his way to the place she described, he found the king’s house was one of the few structures he saw that justified the name of camp, built not of stone but of wood and cloth. Though it was suggested somewhat by its shape and form, it was no field-tent, but a rich and graceful pavilion. It was also the least Noldorin architecture he had yet seen in the city, but somehow that was an insult rather than a comfort, considering whom it housed.
There were no guards and no heralds. It was either a question of standing outside and calling, or simply pushing his way in unannounced, and he was attempting to determine which would do less injury to his dignity when someone within drew one of the door-hangings aside. The man in the doorway was tall enough to look him in the eye, and did, with a clear and disconcerting gaze.
He would not greet him as a king, with gesture or word. “Maedhros Indagnir.”
“Elwë Thindicollo1.” The eldest of the sons of Fëanor inclined his head with a grave courtesy and a slight smile; if he were sensible of the insult he certainly did not show it on his face. Then, holding up one hand in a request for a moment’s excuse, “Findekano!” he called. “We must be out of wine; can you go and get us some?”
“But we have -“ came a voice from inside the house. There was a slight pause, then. “Oh! Yes. Certainly.” The sounds of motion, of more cloth being pushed aside, and then, in the corner of Thingol’s eye, a figure slipping away through the trees on the other side of the king’s house.
“Come inside, Elwë,” said Maedhros then, “and refresh yourself. You have come a long way to be here.”
Reluctantly he followed him. “Are you unwilling your friend should hear you named, that you send him away?” he asked as he stepped under the door-hangings and entered the king’s house.
“It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before; grim Namo knows me as Maedhros Self-Slain2, and we were long in his hospitality. But since you are not the Judge of the Earth, I don’t know how well Findekano would take your use of it. I doubt he would forget his duty to a guest, but I am unwilling to tax his patience, and I wouldn’t want your first experience of life in the world to be having your newly regained teeth knocked out.”
The light in the house was soft and diffuse, filtering through the material of the roof as through leaves in the forest. Laegrim, he realized; he had seen similar structures in the great mobile camps of Lenwe’s people when they first came to inhabit his lands, settlements that sprang up with the speed of an opening flower, and vanished as quickly. Before the Great Battle, before the Girdle, before the sun rose to drive the creatures of Morgoth to the shadows of the woods. How had it come to pass that the leader of the proud and murderous Noldor should dwell in one of the houses of the Green-Elves?
“You do have standards, then, for the welcome of a guest? It is not your custom to let them drift through the streets like withered leaves?” He had meant this to be a reproof, but whether it was the softened light of the interior, or the quiet authority in the bearing and manner of his detested host, it sounded, even in his ears, more plaintive than pointed.
“Have you found your welcome cold?” Maedhros asked, leading him into a round room and drawing up low chairs for both of them.
“Incomprehensible, at least.”
Maedhros had not taken a seat, and so Thingol remained standing, refusing the offered chair. His host’s own Sindarin was clear and formal, marked with the accent of the North but avoiding the more distinctive Mithrim colloquialisms. “Yes,” he said, “now you can no longer keep Quenya out of your ears. It’s not just the language of Kinslayers; it’s the language of your kin. Still, it’s not only Quenya we speak here. There are more Sindar than Noldor in the Exiles’ Camp.” He saw Thingol’s eyes narrow at his words. “Do you wonder at that?”
“What did you call it?”
“Estolad Eledhronnath – Estonath as it’s become known3. So you find its language strange? Many people make their home here, and through the long years of peace their tongues have blended. The loremasters, I understand, are even now debating whether Post-Beleriandic Amanyar Sindarin should be considered its own language, or merely a dialect.” He fixed Thingol with a keen look. “But I do not think you came here out of linguistic curiosity.”
Thingol returned his gaze coldly. “How does it come to pass, thrice-dispossessed Noldo, that you should claim authority over the Peoples of the Starlight?”
“I claim nothing. The Exiles’ Camp was here long before I was, founded after the death of Beleriand as the Eldar returned from broken Endore and from the darkness of Mandos. It was an in-between place; a home for those who could not or would not take up their place elsewhere. Many of those who settled here came from Hithlum and the lands around, people who had ridden in my train or followed Fingon’s banner, before we were scattered. And some of the Nandor, of course.” He gestured to the woven walls. “Did you think our unfenced realms made distinction of kindred? All foes of the Great Foe were our friends. The greater part of those who followed us were Northern Sindar, your people who you never willingly admitted to your kingdom for fear of the taint of Angband upon them. They shared the danger with us, and shared the knowledge we brought with us out of the Blessed Realm -”
“Do you think that my people of Middle-Earth loved art and knowledge and the works of the skilled mind less than you of the Noldor?” Thingol demanded. “No, only that we had greater love than you for the earth that was our home, before you came out of the West bringing war.”
“With fire in our eyes and steel in our hands and doom in our souls, is that it? But it was not for the shadowed rivers and starlit woods of Middle-Earth that you forsook the Westward journey, but for the bright eyes of Melian of Aman.” Maedhros looked at him thoughtfully, still making no move to sit down. “Who could resist the promise of being loved so greatly? Still, not lightly are such bonds entered into, by one who must speak for his people as well as for himself.”
Maedhros’s tone belied the insolence of presuming to lesson him in the duties of kingship. Thingol might have risen in sudden anger, but he reflected that falling to snapping and squabbling was more befitting of the princes of the endlessly quarrelsome Noldor. Bitter as it was to him, he was still a guest in the Exiles’ Camp.
“Did you ever find out what your people thought when you did not return to them at the end of the Great Journey? What your brother thought, when in grief and heartsickness he took up the kingship of the Teleri and led them to Aman? Did they believe you had fallen into the hands of the Dark Power? That is a grief I would not wish on anyone, still less on those who loved me.”
The thought of his brother pulled at Thingol’s heart, but he was unwilling to hear anyone who had drawn his sword at Alqualonde speak so. “I think Olwë has known greater griefs since.”
Maedhros did not answer this. “Have you seen Olwë?” he asked suddenly. “Since your return?”
“No,” Thingol admitted. He had not seen his own younger brother for years beyond counting, since the time before the Sun, before the shadows of Nan Elmoth and before Melian had come to him. He realized that he could not picture Olwë in sunlight or in moonlight, but only as he had seen him last, his hair white under the stars and his heart full of the longing for the sea. But Maedhros’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“Do you mean that I am the first you have come to? Why, Elwë Thindicollo, I could almost say I’m honored.” He spoke dryly, but he was still regarding Thingol with an evaluating, speculative air. “My grandfather told me of you,” he went on, his voice softening as he recalled the days of his own lost past. “He grieved for you. When he left the shores of Middle-Earth, he believed it would not be long before he saw you again in the light of the Trees. When at last Olwë and his people arrived without you, when he learned of their long and fruitless search for you, he mourned you as if you had been his own brother.”
“And so he had been to me,” Thingol said, almost to himself. The memory of Finwe as he had been before their peoples were parted was clear, but so distant it had taken on nearly the character of legend. “I knew him before I knew the word for friend. Proud he was, and eager. Fierce and impatient, but a king all the same – who else could have held that quarrelsome pack together, to the Great Ocean and then over it? Three opinions for every two of them.”
“To hear him tell it,” Maedhros went on, “it was Vana herself, the Lady of Spring, who brought the news that you had not been lost, and thus the lament that he had written for you was changed into a tale of hope, to be sung to children at the mingling of the lights. So my grandfather sang it to us: the story of his old friend, the starlight king, who married a goddess.
‘And never forget, Nelyo,’ he said to me, ‘that on the other side of the sea are your people as well.’ I wondered then if we might ever see you, if on that shore or this one we would meet together in friendship.”
Seeing that Thingol was still standing, and suspecting, perhaps, that his guest would not sit down until he did, Maedhros knelt at a side cabinet and drew out a decanter of heavy green glass with a black stone stopper. Having set this on the table between them, he went back for wine-cups. He moved with the stately, measured grace of the very tall, but there was something in his motion which jarred the eye, and Thingol could not tell what it might be. At last Maedhros pulled his own chair back and sat down, looking up at Thingol without the slightest sign of discomfort or humiliation.
Thingol looked back at him, trying to find something of his old friend in the face of Finwe’s grandson, and seeing only the blood between them, theft and murder and suicide. “What do you know of friendship, Maedhros Indagnir?” he asked. “You have broken every bond, every oath we hold sacred.”
“Yes,” Maedhros agreed gravely, “except one. And knowing what that one held me to, how could I risk bringing it into conflict with others?” Then, maddeningly, inexplicably, his eyes lightened and a smile crossed his face.
“I lived alone in Endore,” he said.“I am not alone now.”
He recalled himself to the presence of his guest. “Will you not sit, Elwë? Are you not weary from the road, afoot, all the way from the Halls of the Dead?”
“I have made greater journeys.” After waiting to make sure that Maedhros had taken his meaning, Thingol sat down, settling his robes around him.
“But you must have been attended by at least some of your kin.” Maedhros waved a hand at Thingol’s clothing. The robes he wore were fine, but simple enough for traveling; gray-blues and whites with intricate silver embroidery on the hems and the belt. Melian had come to him outside the Halls to clothe him; the work must have been her own.
“I thought you might come to me gray-cloaked indeed,” Maedhros went on, “since, as you say, you came straight from the Halls.”
“It does not, in these days, befit a king,” Thingol said carefully and with great dignity, “to walk these lands in such garments as the Valar deign –“
“I know Mandos and his customs; I walked that way myself.” Maedhros seemed quite unconcerned, and to remember the time with something like fondness. “Indeed, I had no mind to clothe myself in any other sort of garment. It was only Findekano who persuaded me to set aside the seamless and colorless robes of return and take up the clothing of my people. I believe his words were ‘Facing your brothers is bad enough, I am not going to face them undressed.’4”
Whatever concessions Maedhros had made to the clothing of the living were minimal; his clothes were muted and unadorned, though the grace with which he bore them made them seem richer than they were. The copper circlet holding back his hair was simple, verging on plain, but with an elegance that spoke of the work of a master in the craft. He wore no other ornament beside a copper ring on the first finger of his right hand. It too was simple, but almost crude in its simplicity; clearly the work of a child or a beginner.5The surface of the circlet had tarnished into a patina of dark and shimmering colors – deep green, purple, blue-black – but the ring was polished to a sheen as bright as his hair.
Left-handed Maedhros had been named in the songs, but that famous maiming appeared to have been left behind with his death. For all that the eldest of the Sons of Fëanor had occupied a position of legend – both of good and of evil – in his kingdom, Thingol had never seen him on the far side of the sea. He looked at him closely, searching for the marks of Angband on his face, but his features were even, stern, and beautiful. Maedhros waited, without impatience, for him to explain his scrutiny.
“They say the armies of Morgoth fled at the sight of you.” It was part explanation, part challenge.
“Yes. So did small children, but that’s not the sort of thing you put in the songs.”
Maedhros poured the wine two-handed, and Thingol identified at last what it was that made his motion strange. He used both hands for gestures that would ordinarily require one, or left one hand motionless at his side when doing work that called for the use of two.
“I am still re-learning how to move within the world,” he said without embarrassment, noting Thingol’s attention and answering the unasked question. “The body may take its shape from the spirit, but my spirit seems to have a number of contradictory ideas about what my body is.”
“I should think so,” Thingol said coldly, “given the violence that you visited upon it.” He reached out one hand to take the wine that Maedhros offered with both.
A slight, uneven shrug. “I’m sure that accounts for some of it. Even after I’d found the courage to take up my life, I found the act of living – and it is an act, you know, as well as a state – to be surprisingly difficult.” The lightness of his words made an unsettling contrast to their content, and to the intensity of his attention beneath. “Findekano practically had to carry me when we first made our way from Mandos - it wasn’t the first time he’d done so.”
He leaned forward, setting his elbows on the table and interlocking his fingers, a gesture that might have been unconscious but seemed to take a good deal of thought. When he spoke, it was as much to himself as to Thingol. “When I stood before the Enemy in my youth,” he said, “I knew that I would never leave that darkness. This is the end I have met, I thought. This is the task that has been appointed for me. I don’t know who I thought was doing the appointing. It was a bitter task, but not a shameful one, unless it were only the shame of defeat.
“I do not speak willingly, even here, of the things that I saw and suffered in that place; the breath of such words fouls the clear air. But for all that, it was not the worst time in my life.”
Such a judgement, and from such a source, Thingol found appalling, but could not contradict. He must have moved in his chair, because Maedhros looked back up as if he had heard him, and his eyes burned with a hard and distant light.
“There was nothing that he wanted from me, save only my service, in the beginning, and he wearied of asking me for that long before I wearied of refusing him. He saw, I believe, that it kindled the fires of my spirit to be able to refuse him something, no matter the pain of the body. After that the worst burden fell on my brothers, to hold out again and again against the poisoned hope that I might be returned to them. Morgoth still had something they wanted while he had my life. But they loved me well enough to honor me as the High King of the Noldor in Middle-Earth, and that meant refusing to risk my people, and refusing to bow to the will of the Black Foe of the World.
“Perhaps Fingon would not agree that it was my brothers who suffered most, but he is not here.”
His eyes softened when he spoke of his friend. “He could have left the Halls with his father,” Maedhros said, “after the First Age ended, and the banished Noldor returned from ruined Beleriand and the darkness of Mandos. For my sake, at my side, he waited, turning his high valor into long patience. I cursed his patience at first, and I cursed his valor, and now I will never stop being grateful to him. He is my courage.”
He turned his attention back to Thingol. “That’s twice he’s carried me out of death, now; freeing me first from Morgoth’s fetters and then my own. But you were wondering whether I carried any of the marks of Angband on me?”
He set the wine down and held out his hands before him. The right bore the copper ring but the left was covered by a black glove. He drew this off and turned his left hand, open, to Thingol’s view. The palm was covered by a large silver scar, like an irregular, many-rayed star.
“Not of Angband, no,” he said.
Thingol swallowed the shock of recognition. “I thought the Silmaril blackened the hands of the unholy.”
Maedhros tilted his hand back toward himself, looking at it with an expression Thingol found hard to read. “So it did. The injury started in the spirit and worked outward. This is not the body that bore me from Aman to Angband and to the fire at last, but this is the same self. That was not, after all, wholly destroyed.” He flexed his fingers, curling them shut and then open again. Their motion was not entirely free, for the scar caught at them. Thingol wondered if it pained him; his face showed nothing but a contained contemplation.
“It brought Findekano sorrow to see I bore this with me back to the light of day, even in Aman, but I find it a relief. Healing does not mean the past is erased.” He pulled the glove back over the scarred hand and lifted his eyes to Thingol’s.
“Do you know the most remarkable thing about returning to life in the body?” Just as Thingol was deciding that the question was not rhetorical and was preparing to make an answer, Maedhros went on. “Pain. Well, its absence. Just as injury focuses your attention on the strength you took for granted, returning to the world you lost shows up all of your physical existence in detail you never imagined. It is,” he said thoughtfully, “beautiful.”
“Do you mean to tell me you are happy, son of Fëanor the Cursed?”
“Have you ever been seriously injured, Elwë?”
The question and the apparent sudden change of subject threw him off balance. He groped for a reply, his mind darting over the centuries before Mandos. He skimmed across memories of the sickness at heart on learning of the death of his daughter, of the loss of his foster-son, of the murder of his lost kindred by their fellows on the holy shores of Aman, before bursting out “I was killed by dwarves!”
“That’s death,” Maedhros said. “Injury you have to live with.” He looked at Thingol with his head slightly on one side, and took a sip from his glass. “That will make this harder for you, then. You will have to learn how to heal, if you mean to live.”
The temerity of the chief of the kinslayers offering him advice about healing might have been enough to choke him, but Thingol mastered himself, and strove to outmatch the dignity of his host. “Why have you brought me here?” he asked after a moment or two.
“Brought you here?” He set down the cup and spread his hands. “Elwë Thindicollo, you came as you may depart: of your own will and by your own wish.”
“You know what I mean.” He glared at Maedhros, choosing his words carefully. “Namo came to me in the darkness of the Halls of the Dead.” He waited for his response.
“Such is his way.” Maedhros clearly intended to offer no help whatever.
“He told me that you had interceded for me.”
“I had.”
“Before the Valar.”
“Yes.”
This was inexplicable, this was unconscionable, this was a grotesque perversion of any conception of justice. It was bad enough that Maedhros should have somehow been permitted to return to the world, let alone that he should have found himself capable of return before Thingol himself. But that he should have been allowed to speak to the Valar, that he should have pled for Thingol, and that he should have been heard, that was a grinding and wretched wrongness. He felt himself lost again, wandering in a world made strange, not knowing whether he sought an explanation or an apology or merely to be discharged of this incomprehensible burden. He felt contaminated by association, contaminated in having this conversation in the first place. He looked at the wine-glass in his hand, but did not drink.
Maedhros regarded him with the same measured manner he had worn from the minute Thingol set eyes on him. He did not seem to be in the frame of mind to volunteer any explanation or offer any excuse. Question and demand and accusation roiled in Thingol’s thought, but at last he spoke, cold and calm as his host. “Why should the Powers listen to your words, Maedhros Self-Slain?”
“Well, you did,” Maedhros pointed out. “That’s the important thing. You know as well as I do that the final decision to return to the world is one that no Power can make for you. If my words made that decision easier – if my words made that decision possible – the choice was yours not theirs.”
“Your words?” Thingol hissed. “Your words? What are those worth? The clean-handed and the pure-hearted pleaded for me. My people pleaded for me. For centuries Melian wept in the gardens of Estë. And yet the walls of Mandos penned me in, doorless and windowless, until you spoke for me.”
“The intercession of the wronged matters,” Maedhros said slowly. “Or so I am told. Do you know the words the Doomsman spoke to us as we left the Blessed Realm? They are carved on every Noldor heart. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. I am sure you see why that would present a problem in my case.” He was looking past Thingol now, out toward the city, as if he could see through his woven walls to the Exiles’ Camp. “If it had been up to Mandos alone I never would have left the Halls. There is no greater violence than to will your own destruction – for the self is the only thing that we have the power to unmake.”
Suddenly he laughed. “No, as for the Powers listening to my words, I got the impression that they would really rather not. Frankly, the Valar that I have met appear to be deeply uncomfortable in my presence. When I came before them in the Manahaxar, they wore the forms that they use for converse with the Eldar, so they showed their unease in a way that I could recognize - even blindfolded Namo, whom I had last seen on his throne in Mandos. When last I called Manwë and Varda as witnesses, after all, the consequences had been, well, far-reaching.”
Before Thingol could determined if he was making light of the Oath in whose name his realm had been shattered and his people slain, Maedhros went on, his voice deepening. “Before that mighty company I renounced any quarrel there might be between us. And I begged that you might return again to look upon the stars. I might have said ‘look upon the sun’,” he added, “but you never seemed particularly fond of it.”
This was perfectly true, but Thingol ignored it.
“After that, well...” Maedhros took a sip of the wine. “The choice was yours, Elwë, to take up freedom in a land where I walk free, or to remain behind the walls. And here you are.”
“I could have chosen not to leave. I very nearly did. But I have come to ask you for an explanation.” He drew a long breath. “What do you mean by this, Kinslayer? Why you, and why me? What do you want?”
Maedhros seemed pleased to be asked. “To ask your pardon and to grant you mine.”
Thingol stood up. “This will be a short interview then; I do not give it and I will not take it.”
Maedhros looked up at him with quiet attention, but wrath was building in Thingol’s voice. “How do you have the effrontery to stand before me and declare that you, the leader of the most infamous scourge to arise among the Eldar, the chief of the Noldor invaders, the one responsible for pulling down Morgoth’s wrath on all our heads, that you, murderer of your people and your family and yourself, have something to forgive me for?”
“Have you already exhausted the list of my crimes, Elwë? I am surprised at you. Surely even a few minutes thought – let alone the timeless contemplation that the Halls afforded you – would show you I have more. I murdered mothers and children. I murdered the people whom I had defended from Morgoth. I murdered those were kingless and helpless. My crimes cry out, Elwë, from the waters of Alqualonde and the beaches of Losgar, from the havens of Sirion and from the shadows of your own carven halls.
“But I have more. You saw the Sindar among the folk of the Exiles’ Camp. Did you know that there were Sindar among the people whom I led against the remnant of your realm in Doriath? I led kin to slaughter kin. I made murderers of those who trusted me to lead them. And when the strong-hearted declared that they would not attack peaceful Sirion, I made traitors of those who chose to betray their lord rather than to murder the defenseless. There are people I killed, Elwë, here in Estonath, who had followed my banner and shared my fortunes. Findekano stained his hands with innocent blood for my sake before we even left these shores. My deeds against the guilty weigh as heavily as those against the guiltless.
“But I have more. Do you remember the Fifth Battle, Elwë? Did rumor of that ruin reach you, safe in your guarded realm? When I drew the last strength of all the willing together in one great effort against our great enemy, and saw that strength shattered beyond repair? Even the Noldor, who make an art of defeat and sing undying songs in the face of our doom, could draw no beauty out of that. Those who trusted me perished in the dust. Did I do wrong to lead them against Morgoth? I bear the responsibility for the consequences all the same.”
There was pain now in his voice, but no sign of weakness, nor even of the coldness of distance. His eyes had never left Thingol’s through the recitation. “But if it’s a short interview you desire, I suppose I should leave it there,” he said. “I do not claim that there is any similarity between your deeds and mine, save only that they stand between us. We have done each other injury.”
“I have wronged no one, Maedhros Indagnir.”
“I don’t think you believe that. You wouldn’t be here if you believed that.”
The arrogance of the assertion against the steady gravity of his manner was practically a tangible thing, a warping of the air like the enchantments of his wife on the borders of his realm. Was it also meant to bewilder him, to turn him away lost and wandering? Slowly he sat down again, took up his cup, and drank.
The cup was heavy, asymmetrical, imperfect; its shape more fitting for a thing of earth than a thing of glass. But as he drank from it, he realized it was perfectly balanced in his hand, and that the tiny bubbles trapped in the pale glass swirled in subtle patterns like seafoam, or the flight of a flock of white birds. Telerin work, he thought, and that of a master. Surely it had no more place in Maedhros’s house than he had himself, no more place than Maedhros should have had in the world.
“I do not wonder at your anger that I should walk the world.” Maedhros seemed to be following the course of his reflections. “I had much more to answer for than you, and many more to whom I must atone.”
“You did,” said Thingol flatly. “You do. Even after two ages of the world have run their course I cannot imagine all ye have slain have been so generous, or so blind, as to lay down their claims against you, or the Valar so softhearted as to accept such pleas. But I suppose I cannot expect justice even from the gods.”
Maedhros thought about this for several minutes. “No,” he said at last. “Justice is exactly what you can expect from the gods; anything beyond that we have to contrive for ourselves. No one will force you to share the world with the ones who wronged you. Or with the ones you wronged, if it comes to that.
“No, all I have slain have not laid down their claims against me – certainly you haven’t, and you aren’t even properly of their number! But I am willing to answer those claims. And no one can leave Mandos without having forgiven, in some part, the one who killed them - at least so far as to be willing to accept their existence. Otherwise, Aman would be a nothing but a dueling ground where the Returned pursued endless revenge against each other.”
He leaned forward, his chin on his good hand, apparently contemplating this prospect. “There’s actually a group of Men that believe this very thing,” he added, “that the highest and most desirable fate is to be gathered to the Timeless Halls where they can spend eternity killing and being killed by the ones they wronged.”
“Men will believe the most appalling things with very little prompting.” Thingol was in no humor to allow Maedhros to digress on the peculiar customs of mortals. “And you have shown admirably what you might expect as consequence of your crimes, but not what that has to do with me.”
“There’s a temptation to believe that if only you can do everything right, then everything will be all right,” Maedhros began quietly. “If only you can keep your hands clean of kindred blood, your ears clean of the sounds of the murderers’ language, your lands clean of the footsteps of the accursed... And if nothing bad is happening to you, then clearly what you are doing must be good. A soft logic, a comfortable logic, and one that worked for you for a long time, didn’t it, Elwë? And yet it was no doing of Morgoth that brought you low in the end. No doing even of ours.”
A soft half-laugh. “But I am not mocking you. I know what it is to stand aside and let evil be done.”
“To stand aside? Maedhros Indagnir, I was defending my people from the creatures of the Darkness while you of untouched Aman were crafting weapons to raise against each other! Is there no truth left to you even in your corrupted thought? What is it you mean to accuse me of?”
“Letting people suffer whom you could have saved, King of Doriath. You appear not to regard that as an action with moral weight. I cannot agree. Cirdan was besieged in the Havens when we arrived on the shores of Endore. Your kindred were bleeding and dying in the lands that you deigned to grant to us, in cold Hithlum and in gentle Nevrast. Did you hope Morgoth was just going to go away?”
He met Thingol’s eyes, and his own burned with cold light. “How many of the Eldar died outside your guarded borders, Thingol? As many as died at Alqualonde? More? And yet you still claimed authority over the lands beyond it.”
Thingol nearly choked on his own laughter. “This is the deep logic of the Noldor! Since I did not save the entire People of the Starlight, their blood is on my hands and not on Morgoth’s? Strange I should not have noticed it before now!” He shook his hands sharply as if flicking off moisture, the gesture sharp as a blow. “Alas for the wisdom that comes too late! I should never have let holy Melian weave her power about Doriath, since by guarding something from ruin, I evidently – forgive me if I cannot quite replicate the intricacy of your reasoning – destroyed everything else? Or should I have thrown open my doors and let the brigands of the Noldor – and the Orcs, why not? – feast on the richness of Doriath? I was accounted generous, murderer and thief, but such generosity would have beggared me and mine.”
“Do others have a right to what is yours? No.” Maedhros’s voice was mild again, the fire in his eyes veiled. “But are you accountable for the harm that comes from withholding it? Absolutely.”
“Is that jealousy, dethroned lord of the Dispossessed, that we lived in peace and safety while you led your people from war to war?”
“Actually, I was thinking of my father.” He bent forward over the table, looking at his gloved hand, the fingers still curled as if they held something. “Of the darkness before the Darkness, when mistrust began to eat away at him and he withheld the light of the Silmarils from everyone but us. Not something you would have seen, although I dare say you have a pretty clear idea, now.”
He straightened, then leaned back in his chair. “No, I do not grudge the Fenced Realm its peace and its safety. We strove for the same thing, though our fences were our swords. How many mortal generations lived and died in safety behind the leaguer of Angband?”
“My people did not count the years by deaths, as your mortals did,” Thingol returned, “but I see even you can recognize that kingship means protecting your own.” The beauty of Menegroth rose before him: water and light gleaming in the depths of the Thousand Caves, stone blossoming like flowers and the song of birds echoing beneath the earth, the lost glory a deep ache in his thought. “But are you king now? None of your people will give me a straight answer.”
Maedhros’s expression hardened and chilled. “I laid down the kingship in Beleriand, Elwë. I would not claim authority over what I could not protect. And nothing could persuade me to name it to myself again, no, nor even to take it at another’s hand, after what I have done.” He looked down. “Even my father never understood this, or never really took it to heart. But putting others in the position of betraying those who trust in them – that is a deep wrong.”
“Are we back on the subject of my supposed wrongs against the people of Beleriand?”
“What? Well, if you see it that way – or if they do. The weight of my own deeds is heavy enough, Elwë, I have no intention of carrying yours as well! But I was thinking of my cousins, leading their people in my father’s wake, building their faith on a faith that we broke. When we parted on the shore at Araman, I told them not to worry, that we would soon be back for them...” He lifted his head. “I had known them all as children, Eldest. I had carried them in my arms.”
“An impressive catalogue of betrayals. It is fortunate indeed Doriath broke no such faith.”
“I understand why it would seem so to you. You never had to see what happened after Unnumbered Tears.”
“I fail to see why I should be held accountable for your failures, Indagnir.”
“Responsibility is not like water, where more for me means less for you.” He set his own glass down and held Thingol’s eyes. “You know the borders of your country. Our people fled. You turned them away. Do you know what walks in the wilderness of Nan Dungortheb, where the enchantments of your wife met the sorcery of Gorthaur the Cruel? Our people died, in sight of safety, because you would not open your doors to them.”
“Open my doors? To rescue your people from the bloody consequences of Fëanorian failure? I am surprised you have the gall to even consider that a possibility, after the insult your brothers offered me.”
The pause that followed his words was just enough to make Thingol uncomfortable. “Yes, I suppose you could think of it as an insult towards you. I had thought of it more of a grievous wrong done to your daughter. My brothers deceived her, kidnapped her, imprisoned her, attempted to kill her, and - yes - they did insult you as well. It was only mercy that I believed withheld from our house that kept them from shedding her blood, and if Lúthien had claimed theirs in forfeit – as, I believe, she had the chance to do – not even I would have called that less than justice.
“But, King of Beleriand, what of your people of Hithlum and Himlad and Ladros, of Thargelion and Helevorn, of broken Dorthonion and burnt Ard-Galen, the people who sheltered behind our swords until we could protect them no longer? They were your people, were they not, since you named those lands to yourself? Was it for our sake that you left them to perish between the forces of Angband and the hardships of hunger and the horrors of the poisoned land?”
Thingol drew in his breath to speak.
“Did you really hate us more than you hated Morgoth?” Maedhros asked, his voice quiet but sharp-edged as an unsheathed weapon.
“I certainly had no reason to hate you less,” Thingol returned.
The silence that followed his words grew more and more uncomfortable. Maedhros watched him, motionless, and it came into Thingol’s mind that he was speaking to someone who had seen Morgoth himself, who had probably spoken with him, had dwelt inside the Iron Hells that had been a horror on the border of legend to the people of Doriath. He began to wish that he would say something, but Maedhros only continued to look at him, his gaze resting on him like a weight that grew heavier by the minute.
“You did have reason to hate us, then,” he said at last, and Thingol found himself holding back the sharp breath of relief at having the pressure of that silence lifted. “And you have more reason now. My family may have done no injury to your person, Elwë, but what we did, what I did, to your people and your realm, gives you claim against us all.”
The Second Kinslaying had not been before Thingol’s mind at all, until Maedhros spoke of it. “That was something else you did not have to see,” he went on, “but that is laid to our account.”
“What you did to Doriath,” Thingol said slowly, “justified every guard I had ever placed against you and your kind.” He went on, warming to the subject. “Were you waiting for its holy protection to fall so that you could plot its destruction?”
The look that Maedhros turned on him was as close to scorn as he had yet seen in his face. “You were not ignorant of what you brought into your land, Elwë, when you held the Silmaril. You were warned. Your heir was warned.
“I do not have my family’s aversion to compromise. If your heir had given me even the slightest hope that we might have been able to appease the Oath without bloodshed, there is nothing, nothing that I would not have done to avoid it. Our service to broken Doriath? The bright swords of the Noldor guarding your tattered borders? Even after what happened in the Nirnaeth, I believe I could have restrained my brothers. Even without my courage, I still had their loyalty...”
He shook himself. “That does not excuse what we did. Nothing can.”
“You, stiff-necked son of a prideful people, you would have served them? Are you lying to me, or only to yourself, to ease the knowledge of your crimes?”
Again the infuriating lightening of his expression, as if Thingol’s words had brought relief instead of pain. “Of course. A king wields his pride for the sake of his people, not for his own sake; he must be prepared to lay it down without flinching the minute that sacrifice is called for.
But we cannot deal in what might have been, Thingol, only in what was and perhaps in what will be. We attacked your people. Our kin. Your family. And if it is any comfort to your own pride, your people, even weakened as they were, did something that the full force of Angband had failed to do: slew the Sons of Fëanor.”
“You do not, I hope, call that anything less than justice?” Thingol spat.
“Justice? It was more than that, it was mercy. I did not grieve when their light was extinguished in the darkness of Menegroth.”
“What, you were as hateful to each other as you were to Beleriand?”
“It meant that we could die.” Maedhros went on as if he had not heard him. “I didn’t know that had been a question for me until I realized that I felt, underneath the loss and the bitterness, something like relief. We were not, after all, appointed to be the deathless scourges of Arda, ripping through the remaining strongholds of the Eldar, the Silmaril eating away at us from within. And it meant, for Curvo at least, and Turko, and Moryo, that they would sink no lower, become no worse, shed no more of the blood of the people they had once protected. Do you know what that’s like, to know your little brothers are better off dead?”
This time it was Maedhros who stood up, stretching his long limbs. His build was lean and spare but he was fully of a height with Thingol himself, who had been the tallest of his people in Middle-Earth.
“And now we come to you, gray-cloaked king. No one can just decide on their own that the enmity between themselves and someone else is over, but someone has to make the first move. I know what it is that keeps a soul in Mandos, Elwë. Intimately. And so when I had left the Halls I entreated for you before the Judge. I wanted to ask your forgiveness – “
“I deny it.”
“And to offer you mine.”
“I refuse it.” He glared up at Maedhros. “You waste the breath you have regained. What do you mean by this? Hoping to place me in your debt? Hoping that groveling to the Powers for me will win you my good will?”
Maedhros did not seem to register the insult. “I did not forgive you to make you happy, Thingol.” He refilled their glasses, and sat back down. “Do you think I particularly like you?”
“Is this the famous filiality of the sons of Fëanor?” Thingol returned. “The spirit of your cursed father burns still in the darkness of Namo’s halls. I should have thought, Indagnir, that if you interceded for anyone it would be for him.”
Even this blow did not land. Maedhros appeared to consider the question legitimate. “All that love could do for my father has been tried,” he said, turning partially away and raising his head, looking with the slant of the muted sun toward the east. “What I could do for him, I have done. But until the world itself is healed, I believe that pride and anger and bitter grief will keep him from the light.
“You, on the other hand, there is evidently hope for,” he said, turning back to Thingol, brisk and practical, “and so I have to try. Mercy was shown to me, Elwë, and if I am to be capable of receiving it, how can I refuse to show mercy in my turn? I cannot oblige you to forgive me, still less to accept my forgiveness. But perhaps we may come to understanding.”
“Why, then, how shall we understand each other, since I cannot claim to know what it means to murder my kin and plunder their treasure?”
“You always did keep your hands clean, Elu Thingol. When you tried to kill your daughter’s husband –“
Thingol started from his chair, but Maedhros fixed him with a look, and at last he saw in his host the deadly spirit that had set terror among the hosts of Angband.
“Were you hoping Morgoth would serve you as your executioner? Or were you hoping it would be me?”
He tried to speak, but the outrage and offense, argument after counter-argument, died in his throat. What good would it do to say I meant to frighten, not to kill, or I never thought he would get so far, or How did I know he would take me at my word? There it was at last, the matter between them. He looked for escape but it seemed in his thought that the familiar walls rose on every side, doorless and windowless and sheer. He had not named the Silmaril in ignorance; he knew that Fëanor’s sons as well as Morgoth made the jewels a byword for impossibility, a synonym for violent death. And having invoked the Oath, he could not deny that it had worked as he had intended, even if he had never meant – never truly meant –
At once he saw the Oath awakening as Maedhros himself must have seen it, the claim laid by a stranger on the Silmarils to which he and his brothers had been bound unbreakably. The insult of having their own bonded wills used as an instrument of terror, the dreadful knowledge that the stolen jewel was held not by their enemy but by their kin, and that there was now no longer any hope of avoiding another slaughter of Elf by Elf -
And vile as were the deeds of the wickedest of Maedhros’s brothers, he had counted on that vileness, he had called it down on the man who was now his son, and by extension upon his own daughter. To Elwë Thindicollo called Elu Greycloak, Lord of Beleriand, King of the Fenced Realm, from Tyelkormo Turkafinwë called Celegorm Fëanorion of Aman and Nargothrond, late thy liegeman of Aglon: greeting. It is my very great pleasure to inform you that we have recovered your straying songbird, and the treasure of Doriath is safe in our keeping. We are treating her with all the freedom and honor she would be accorded in her own home... Even a lesser insult would have been worth war, but had those words been false? Capture, imprisonment, attempted murder of her chosen spouse...
“I wronged him,” he said at last. “I wronged her.”
He met Maedhros’s eyes.
“I wronged –“ He could not force the words out.
Maedhros set both his hands flat on the table before answering; it seemed to cost him something to speak.
“I laid down my quarrel with you, Elwë, before the Powers themselves. My family’s claim against you is answered. Do you see it now? This is what I meant by this. This is why you, and why me.” There was a slight restless motion of his shoulders, and Thingol recognized Finwe’s own gesture, a sign that he would much rather be pacing back and forth in the aid of his own thought, but, conscious of his audience, was keeping himself still. “Perhaps we might speak to each other of murder and theft after all,” Maedhros went on. “Still, I knew you would never consent to live in a world where you would be under obligation to any of Fëanor’s kin. You are under none, now. You are free.”
“What gives you the right to say that, since you claim kingship of nothing?”
“By the right of my birth, I speak for my family. And you are very nearly all that is left to speak for yours.” He had not intended this as a blow, for looking at Thingol he drew back at the sight of the naked pain on his face.
“I lived in the Guarded Realm,” Thingol said in a low voice. “But what did it guard? My daughter is gone now, beyond all walls. Her child gone with her, and her husband. I lost my daughter to the fate of Men. I lost my grandson.” He had not spoken like this even to his wife; seeing no good in rehearsing the loss that her deathless nature still struggled to comprehend, a loss compounded by his own death and the ruin of the realm that they had built together.
“Did I do wrong?” he asked suddenly.
Maedhros looked back at him gravely. “I cannot tell you that, Elwë.”
“Maedhros Indagnir, you have been telling me nothing else from the moment I arrived!”
“Have I? I have no authority to condemn you. Once you’ve had to look straight at your own soul – once you’ve had nothing to look at but your own soul – it’s harder to judge people. I think even you’ll find that to be the case, Elwë.”
“Doriath would never have fallen if I had not named the Silmaril to myself. My daughter and her husband would not have fallen. I would not have fallen.”
“Perhaps,” Maedhros said. “But Arda never lacked for sources of ruin. And I am no stranger to the effect my father’s works have.”
“Do you know what it whispered to me? That all might not be lost. That even now...” He trailed off. The light shone before his eyes again, the light which had otherwise perished from the world, the light that was the last thing that he had seen as his life ebbed from him in the deep smithies of Menegroth.
Maedhros nodded. “There’s a danger in such stolen beauty. Outside of its true owner, who’s to say that you have a better claim on it than I do? Stolen treasure is like violence unleashed into the world: it cannot be taken back, it continues to compound destruction.”
He interlaced his fingers again, a little more easily this time. “That’s something that makes self-murder such a knotty problem,” he added, “and one that the Valar themselves hesitate to address. Violence introduced into the world cannot be taken back. What of violence introduced into the self?”
This troubled Thingol. The courtesy of his manner and the equanimity with which Maedhros spoke of his crimes had obscured the fact that he had committed a violation unthinkable among the Eldar. Violence was grievous, murder horrifying, but suicide was outside the compass of his understanding. Not, however – he shuddered inwardly at the reflection - outside that of the man before him.
“It’s a deed of Morgoth himself,” Maedhros said, answering his thought and seeming to agree with it.
Thingol recoiled, in body as well as in spirit. “I did not address my thought to you, Self-Slain. Or is it your custom to pry into the minds of all who come before you?”
Maedhros looked genuinely apologetic. “Your pardon, Elwë! I should have shown you more consideration. It is not uncommon among those leaving the Halls, to forget what it is to carry their thoughts within their own minds. But now you are again in the world of the living, and you may choose to veil your thought, to think and not to speak, even to have your words and thoughts at odds and no one the wiser.” He looked at his own frame again, the faint light of wonder in his face.
Thingol composed himself, recollecting from his days in the world how to distinguish between thought and speech, outward and inward self. Deliberately, he reached out in thought to his host. Maedhros answered him, his mind as open as his city, and Thingol felt rather than saw that his mind bore the scars that his body no longer did.
He did not trouble to mute his shock, but Maedhros did not seem surprised at it. “What is a scar?” he said aloud. “It says only: this did not suffice to destroy me. And I think you are not without your own scars, Elwë. But yes, now you know what it was I brought back from Angband. Murderous hate, joyless and pitiless and lightless, the hatred that is deadly strength. I employed it against Morgoth. I could, and did employ it elsewhere.”
“Against your people? Against yourself?” Thingol’s question was answered even as he asked. “Both at once. Your campaign of violence in pursuit of the Silmaril did look more and more like suicide.”
“You noticed that? I didn’t see it myself until Sirion. But not even when we sent the last of our people away – we should have done it long ago, we should have done it the minute we set foot on Middle-Earth – could our foes, our kin, strike us down. And so I bore the Silmaril with me into the depths of the earth.”
He looked into the clear glass he was holding. “I wonder, sometimes, if that was ill done.”
“You wonder!”
“Not the act of self-murder, the fact that I took the Silmaril with me. Earendil’s gem – Lúthien’s – shines as a sign of hope for all the peoples of Middle-Earth, even for us, since we knew that this one was farther beyond our reach than those of Morgoth, and no more of our kin would die at our hands for its sake. But when I chose despair, I took the light from the world.”
“The Silmaril still exists. It is hidden, not destroyed.”
Maedhros looked up at him, thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose you would know something about the value of the hidden light...”
“It is not lost,” Thingol went on, surprising himself with the depth of his feeling. “It hallows the dark places, the fires at the heart of the earth.”
“You comfort me, Elwë. I tell you this,” he added, “so you can stop, if that wasn’t your intention. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d do on purpose.”
Dry as his humor was, it was welcome as water after the doubt he had been expressing. Thingol realized that even over the course of their brief acquaintance he had become accustomed to the air of quiet command in his manner, even as Maedhros disclaimed all rulership.
“Well,” he went on, seeing his guest restored to equilibrium. “You came to question me, Thingol. Are you answered?”
“Are you?” Thingol returned.
Maedhros started to reply, then caught himself. “Yes, Thingol, I am, if not for myself then for the questions of my fractious family when first I told them what I intended towards you.” He laughed. “What was it you said of the Noldor before the Journey? Three opinions for every two of them? I think my brothers would consider that too meager an allotment.”
The light was kindled in his eyes then, and it seemed to Thingol that he saw his friend as he had been in the morning of the world, young and strong with laughter on his lips.
“You are very like him, after all, Nelyafinwë.”
***
“Thingol,” said Caranthir flatly. “Why.”
“Well, he is a king,” said Ambarussa, always ready to argue both sides and not, perhaps, prepared to hear whatever it was that Maedhros had to say.
“Was a king,” echoed his twin. “We do owe him, after Doriath.”
Celegorm snorted. “A king? Thingol is a horse’s ass.”
“Shut up, Turko, and stick to the point,” growled Caranthir. “Maedhros. Why. You don’t have to and we don’t want to. Elwë still thinks of himself as a king, though he rules nothing now. But you –“
“I am no king,” Maedhros said quickly, and Celegorm ostentatiously rolled his eyes.
“Am I the only one that can’t think of him out of ballad metre?” demanded Curufin. “An Elven-King there was of old/His hair of silver-grey/Behind his lady wife he hid/Behind her skirts did stay...”
Maedhros rose slowly and deliberately. It might have been authority or it might have been the lingering disorientation of the body that slowed his motion, but either way, the effect on his brothers was immediate and they hushed their squabbling. “In the second place, because our family has wronged his,” he said, without raising his voice, “and third, because I believe it will do him good. Firstly, however, and this is the only reason that any of you need, because I say this will be done. And that will be enough from all of you.”
Maedhros had not then been long returned to the world; it was his first visit to his mother’s estates at the foot of the mountains. Although they did not speak of it, more than one of his brothers had abandoned any hope of ever seeing him alive again. Reunited, they were nervous and tender with him, by turns overly cautious and overly rough, feeling out the edges of their renewed life together.
“Of course you start humiliating us the minute you return,” Curufin complained, “which is just like you. Were you working this out for the ages that you spent in the Halls-“
But Celegorm, speaking over him, was unexpectedly serious. “You speak of our wrongs. The ones we wronged have died indeed and left the world. Lúthien and her proud child are beyond me now. They cannot hear me nor can they pardon me.”
“Lúthien’s father, however, is not. That is, he will not be, if he and the Powers will heed my plea on his behalf. I lay down our quarrel with him; I will answer any claim he has against us.”
“You cannot claim the authorship of every ill in Arda, Nelyo,” said Ambarussa quietly, staring at the ceiling.
“Yes, if nothing else leave some for Curvo,” put in his twin.
“Indeed,” snapped Caranthir, “Show some respect, and allow that someone besides you might be responsible for something somewhere!”
***
The afternoon sun was beginning to sink as Thingol left the King’s House of the Exile’s Camp; it lit the leaves in the orchard from below and above as he took his way through the fruit trees. Maedhros had offered him hospitality for the night, but both of them sitting at table in the house of a Kinslayer was as far as he was willing to go to cement the bonds between them. He had also refused Maedhros’s offer of transportation more rapid than his own solitary pace, of horses and chariots and honor-guards. He would take his way toward the coast, walking under the stars as he had walked long ago. It had been a long time since he had seen Olwë; a little more would make no difference.
He heard someone coming toward him before he saw who it was, but there would hardly have been enough time to avoid the encounter even if he had.
“Lord Thingol!” Fingon exclaimed. He was not carrying wine.
“My Lord... King,” Thingol returned, with a half-bow, not taking his eyes from the bright, open face.
“Oh, be easy, Thingol!” Fingon laughed. “I’m not actually going to knock your teeth out. He gets nervous about my temper, but the only person I’ve ever actually punched for rehearsing Maedhros’s crimes is Maedhros himself. To be fair, it was after long provocation.”
His demeanor was in such sharp contrast to that of the host he had just left that Thingol was left momentarily confused.
“And King, is it? You’ve either been talking to Maedhros, or someone’s been talking in earshot of him. It’s one of the few things he’s still really sensitive about, as I’m sure you’ve observed; no one’s allowed to actually call him that, though it’s perfectly obvious to anyone what he is.” He looked down, smiling like one whose memories brought joy rather than pain. “He has always been more than himself,” he said, “and he draws the same thing out of his people; he makes them more than they were, and that is kingship. He remembers all the ill that he used that for, but my memory is more comprehensive and hence more accurate. How they shouted to greet us, in the Exiles’ Camp, when I brought him back out of Mandos! Our king returns! It echoed in the streets, it made the hills ring, and he turned gray as his garments and I believe he would have turned around right there if I had not persuaded him – and them – that they could be referring to me. I had borne the name, after all, if he had borne the burden, and we between the two of us may just manage to make up a king.”
“Yes,” Thingol broke in, seeing the chance of a plain answer at last, “is Maedhros son of Fëanor your king, or are you his, or what? Who is he to you?”
Fingon looked up toward the house, its cloth walls just visible at the end of the orchard where they caught the westering sun. “My courage.”
Plain answers were not, after all, the way of any of the kindreds of the Eldar. “Your courage?” Thingol asked mildly. “And yet you are the one named the Valiant. Or is this another title you bear in his stead? He named you his courage as well, when I spoke to him.”
“Hah! He would. I don’t think even he quite understands the effect that he has on others. I can rouse a troop to battle, put heart into a flagging company, I can kindle hope at need, but he’s the one who can carry us onward without it.” He looked at Thingol. “Why do you think I called out to Manwë and not to Oromë, on the Enemy’s doorstep, when rescue seemed impossible? It was mercy I needed, not marksmanship! If that arrow had found its mark, grief would have chased my spirit from my body, and I would have laid myself down among the rocks of Thangorodrim and never returned among my people.
“When I told him that, though, years afterwards, he got very cold. ‘If I had believed that for a minute,’ he said, ‘I would not have begged you as your friend. I would have ordered you as your king, and I would have ordered you to carry the news to my brothers as well.’”
“So that is the difference between the two of you then.” Thingol’s thought passed again to the protections of Doriath unraveling, its strength and virtue crumbling; he had learned something of what happens when someone loses a person whose loss cannot be borne. “Putting the one you love above everything else? That is a luxury, and not one that fits with kingship.”
“I know that now,” Fingon said, “and so it was just as well there’s neither king nor subject among the Dead, because I wasn’t about to stop doing so.”
“You’re speaking of the time you saved him from Mandos? I was surprised to hear you had lingered so long among the Dead; for a Kinslayer you were reputed as one who bore malice toward nobody.”
“Well, I can tell you that if I weren’t waiting beside him in the Halls, I’d’ve been waiting at the doors, possibly with a harp, till I wearied Namo himself with my song. I wouldn’t have left, either, except by command of my king.”
“Is that not the reason Namo has made the lands outside impassable to the living?”
Fingon laughed. “Do you honestly believe that would have stopped me? If love cannot save, then nothing can, for it’s love that makes us want to save ourselves. But you said saved him, and that’s not quite right. It was not my love for him that saved him, but his for me.”
He turned westward toward the setting sun, and despite its brightness on his face Thingol saw the shadow beneath. “No one can make that choice for another. And like death, life can only be entered alone. I did not doubt, in the end, that he would follow me. But the moment that I left him, as we returned to the world, that may have been the hardest thing I have done.
“I stepped into the sunlight, alone. I did not turn around. And then beside me I felt someone take my hand.”
He was silent for a moment, then returned to the present and to Thingol before him. “You aren’t staying for the evening meal?”
Thingol shook his head. “I have far to go. My brother on the coast. My people in the forests. And I should see your father. Nolofinwë. I allowed enmity to thrive between us.”
Fingon bade him a good journey with all the courtesy that might indeed have befitted a king, and then, to Thingol’s surprise, began to sing.
“I return singing,” he said. “He likes to hear I’m coming home.” So he lifted his voice and sang loudly and gladly as he walked away up the hill, and it seemed to Thingol that he heard the song behind him for a long time, as he took his way towards the Sea.