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Finrod rolled onto his side and coughed, clearing the water from his lungs, recoiling from the bitterness on his tongue.
Not since he was a child had he been so overwhelmed by the waves. He had been Ulmo’s beloved, had won the long race from Alqualondë to Tol Eressëa with ease, had played in the surf and danced on the spars of his grandfather’s ships, tumbling from the rigging into the welcoming sea to laugh and rise again and again and again.
But it was Ossë’s hand he had felt, now, at the scruff of his neck. And not with his master’s fond embrace, but something rougher and less patient. Shaking him. Casting him out like a misbehaving kitten fallen into a fountain, waterlogged and aggrieved.
Finrod pushed himself up to sit, shoving his bedraggled hair behind his ears and peering at the horizon through salt-crusted lashes. It was a fair day for sailing, with a fine, fresh sea and a clear sky and a following breeze to carry a well-built vessel onward. He coughed again, as the water in his stinging eyes mingled with his tears.
The ship he had been aiming for was gone.
He had begged, at the end. On his knees in the Máhanaxar, pleading with all his broken and furious heart for it to be he who was sent. The mingled peoples of Middle-Earth were everything to him – surely they knew, who had watched his life flow and end from afar without raising a finger. But the Valar sat silent, their ineffable forms shifting in the mists, as stone to his tears.
Glorfindel had absconded with him, afterward, to an unmarked tavern in the depths of Tirion’s Fëanorian quarter – both of them with their hair wrapped and their finery put away, like any pair of workaday artisans with a heretical bent. The wine was sharp and crisp, and they swallowed cup after cup under the barkeep’s wary eye, fortunate to both be native users of the thorn as their speech swerved and dipped with the bleary genius of the truly, deeply drunk.
Glorfindel could not account for it: why him, of all people? Like Finrod, he had been tipped out of Mandos not quite fully healed, with a bruise on his shining heart and a lingering yearning. But that pain had eased in Eärendil’s company and in Valimar’s bell-filled courtyards. He had danced the worst of it away, cupping the sky in his open hands and spinning, spinning. The summons had been unexpected – an answer to a dream he had abandoned – and he was, suddenly, afraid.
Finrod was morose, resentful, maudlin. Tales of the Secondborn, of Aulë’s children, of the space of joy that was Nargothrond at its height spilled from his tongue as he restated his case, arguing his qualifications. Glorfindel listened with the deliberate focus of intoxication, alternately wide-eyed and squinting, his mouth pursed in thought. Plotting.
They had known each other from childhood, mutually complicit in juvenile intrigues and pranks whenever Finrod was in Valimar, both fiercely fond of and loyal to Turgon, each gripped by the longing for elsewhere that Fëanor had so brilliantly evoked. It had ended in blood, on the beaches and in the tower and on the crag. But to both of them it felt unfinished: that wild life, that dance of passion under the hallowed stars.
The whims of the Valar swirled uneasily in the cup of Return. A second life should exceed the first’s potential, or what was the world for? Why else had they been sparked alight again, and left to burn?
“Come with me, then. They need not know.”
Glorfindel breached Finrod’s soliloquy with the power of a branch caught in the spokes of a carriage wheel. As Finrod gaped, he laid it out: a cove in the predawn mists, a swim, a clamber over the side of the ship. A moment, only, of risk, and then they would be gone.
They sealed the agreement with a last cup of wine and their childhood’s ancient gesture: each spit into his hand, and they clasped their plighted palms.
But the Sea had refused him. For all his strength, Finrod’s strokes had carried him no further than the fall-off into the deeps. Each rolling wave embraced and lifted him, turning him about to be deposited on the beach like so much flotsam. He raged and swore and struggled, but the surf only grew higher, wilder, more unyielding, until a pounding breaker left him choking and beaten on the sand.
A pale gull rode the thermals above him, its golden eye watchful, warning. Finrod watched the bird’s cupped wings as they shaped the air to its needs, at peace with the element, making it its own.
So must he carve his own place in the wind, it seemed.
He pushed himself to his feet and began the long walk back to Tirion.
It was still morning, and a fair day for traveling. Finrod wiped his eyes and began to sing: an old tune from their light-filled youth, a twist on a song from the Journey, in which even the wanderer was always coming home.