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I
It has been a long time since Amras peered down at his own wavering reflection, pretending it was Amrod. Pretending that Amrod spoke. He wonders if it was a kind of minor madness that led him to believe that it was ever more than his imagination. Madness does run in the family, after all.
“Stop standing there, goggling like a poke-weed,” Sticks says severely. Amras calls her Lucy—most of the time—but he always thinks of her as Sticks. Same with Frog. He doesn’t mean to be disrespectful, or belittling, but he just thinks the first name you know remains the best. Maitimo. Macalaure. Ambarussa.
“We’re catching frogs,” Amras points out. “It’s watching-work. I don’t need to do anything.”
Frog—Amlach—is happy again, the rooster’s fate forgotten, splashing around among the cattail roots. A breeze off the silver-blue water ruffles Amras’ hair against his brow. He hasn’t let Caranthir cut it since Maitimo rode away.
All the way west, little snippets of his and Amrod’s hair were scattered in the dust, perhaps plucked up by birds to make their nests, or else lost in the falling leaves. Now, Amras is the sole shaper of what Ambarussa would have become: he can look at his own face in a mirror and guess, but he cannot look at his brother. Why not have Maitimo’s hair, or Celegorm’s, instead?
Sticks says, “I think the frogs have all gone into hibernate.”
“Hibernation.”
Sticks scowls, then sighs. “Why do so many words have tails? Never mind. Amras, you’d better be square with me.”
“What?” Amras hunches his shoulders defensively. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“Just the rooster,” Sticks points out. “But that isn’t what I mean.”
She has changed, along with her name. She looks more like a proper girl, with her fair plaits of hair and her rosy cheeks. Amras knows that she is about eleven years old, which is, of course, a baby—but she is no longer an ageless, feral waif.
“All right,” Amras says. He drags a bare foot through the water. The mud beneath is silky-soft, but not entirely a comfort. Despite his suggestion that they come here, Amras doesn’t like to think of plump amphibian bodies wriggling unseen near his toes. “What do you mean, then?”
“If you find out something—anything—you’d better tell me.”
Caution is always a fair course of action where Sticks is concerned. Amras asks,
“What do you think there is to find out?”
“Questions, questions,” Sticks sneers, impatient as usual. “You know just as I do, something’s not right. Russ—Maedhros looked like his own ghost.”
Amras shudders, not only because of the breeze. Sticks, seeming to understand, nudges up against him for a brief moment, her elbow digging into his hip in painful show of affection. A second later, she’s darted off again, scolding Frog about not properly rolling his trousers.
Up the hill, the fort looms with the same gloomy aspect as usual: a squat creature hemmed in anew with a fence many months in the making. Amras wishes that the knowledge of Alexander, safely at home in the stables, and Maitimo, safely—one must suppose—in Maglor’s arms, could be a comfort.
Somehow, it isn’t.
He didn’t want to help Caranthir with cleaning his bird. He didn’t want to loiter, like an unwelcome tagger-on, with Estrela and Gwindor. Their concerns, compared to his, always feel so grown-up and serious, though they are both good friends to Amras.
What does he want? He tips his head back, imagining that he is one of the sun-scorched reeds, swaying.
He wants Maedhros to look at him, really look at him without shying away, frank and grave and confiding. He wants Maedhros to say, Ah yes, Amras, you’re the one I want to hear this first, and to unburden that most strained and generous heart while Amras listens.
But the momentary imagining cannot even support itself for its duration. Why on earth would such a thing come to pass? Amras cringes away from the unreality of it. Maedhros has no reason to confide in the surviving half of his baby charges.
Maedhros wants Maglor. Wants Celegorm. Wanted Fingon, whom he let ride beside him when no one else could.
It is not a comfort either to see Maeglin loping downhill, his black hair and lanky limbs immediately recognizable against the dun-and-green hide of the fading earth. Still, Amras perks up, feeling the wind change.
A little way off, Sticks and Frog have caught a frog—a real one, not a nimble boy taking ponderous hops down the hillside—and are trying to coax it into a sheltered, reed-ringed pool.
“A home for you!” Frog is saying, with urgent invitation.
Stealthily, Amras lifts his feet out of the squelching mud and goes hunting for his boots, which he left on higher ground. Maeglin is the sort of person who trades in information, however reluctantly. He began his tenure in Mithrim in an even lonelier state than Amras, but now he keeps consistent, if curious company. Amras has seen him trailing Aredhel like a shadow; gamely setting stones and digging post-holes for Turgon. Amras has felt some jealousy over how easily Maeglin has stolen Mollie away as an especial friend. And he has watched, positively baffled, as Maeglin willingly works alongside Curufin in the forge. Amras can’t imagine loving forge-work as it is, but if he substitutes whittling for smithing, he still feels he would give the former up, if it obliged him to be under the thumb of his most querulous and spiteful brother.
What does Celegorm see in Curufin, really?
What does Maeglin, to whom Curufin is downright savage at times, see in him?
Amras can’t say, and he can’t predict what Maeglin’s appearance portends. But there is something odd about Maeglin running—searching—a hint of unmooring that is more in accord with what Amras has expected from this strange day, than in the boarded-up feeling of stable and fort, the stark, brutal mundanity of Caranthir’s plans for his rooster.
“Maeglin!” Amras has found his boots, and with them in hand, is running too. The grass sloughs the mud off the soles of his feet.
Maeglin halts. There is a flush of color spreading over his sharp, usually pale features. Maeglin is not quite handsome; if he was a woman, he would be beautiful, but in an eerie, unsettling way. Sometimes, when he stares into Amras’ eyes, Amras feels like he is being held captive by the gaze of a hawk… or a snake.
“Amras, hello,” he says, awkwardly polite as usual. “Have you seen Aredhel?”
Amras shakes his head. “Not since—well, since they all returned. Likely she’s with Fingon.” Then, with all the expectancy he has earned by being so helpful, he asks, “Why?”
Maeglin’s smile is pinched. “No matter. I—I just wished to—uh—”
“You were at the forge,” Amras says. “With Curufin. You didn’t come to the gate to see everyone.”
“Curufin wasn’t finished with his work,” Maeglin says. “He is now—he went inside. I’ll just be off, then.”
Amras feels quite foolish, standing there with his boots in his hand and his rolled-up trousers slipping down to his muddy ankles. But he won’t be gainsaid. There is something in, embedded like a fishhook in body and soul, that is akin the emptiness he sensed beside him, the night that he woke to find Amrod—
“What do you know?” he asks, trying to pierce Maeglin with just as hawklike a gaze. “Come, Maeglin. We’re friends, aren’t we? What happened? Did Curufin say something?”
“No.” Maeglin is shaking his head, his eyes shifting. He stiffens suddenly, looking at something—someone—behind Amras.
“What are you two on about?” Sticks demands. Her hands on her hips.
“You can’t leave Frog—Amlach alone near the water,” Amras scolds, vexed to be interrupted. “He could pitch forward and drown.”
“He can swim,” Sticks says. “And I’ll call him in a moment, just as soon as you tell me what Maeglin told you.”
“Maeglin didn’t tell me anything,” Amras says, turning away from the indignant Sticks to see that Maeglin is already hurrying off. A moment’s distraction was all he needed. “Damn it all, Lucy! See what you’ve done!”
Sticks rewards his outcry with a bare-toed kick to the shin. It’s fierce, but not particularly painful—for Amras. Sticks curses like a sailor and stumbles back.
Sticks is fairly spitting. “You don’t need to be rotten to me just because you’re sour about having a bucket turned over your head! That’s why I told you that we ought to be square with each other, because—because nobody will do us the same curtsey!”
“Courtesy,” Amras says, automatically.
“Fucking—courtesy—then!”
They glare at each other for a moment. At last, Amras bites his tongue. He breathes through his nose, then explains.
“I thought Maeglin knew something. I mean, I do think he knows something. He just wouldn’t tell me. He was working with Curufin and now he’s running off in search of Aredhel—”
“Then let’s follow him,” Stick suggests. “He hasn’t even a stick to beat us away with. And he’s not so quick. Amlach runs faster than anyone.”
Amras glances back to where Frog has tired of soothing the bullfrog’s fears and is kicking up clods of mud.
“Amlach!” Amras calls. “Come on. We’re going back up the hill.” To Sticks, he adds, “We mustn’t go near the kitchen yard, though.”
She nods sagely. “Ah yes, the rooster.”
Amras doesn’t ask what Frog is so afraid of seeing, once the first, swift act of violence is over. Frog likes to gnaw at a drumstick as much as anyone. Why is it so much harder today to separate the killing from the bones left behind?
II
They don’t catch Maeglin. It’s no surprise, really, given how slow Amlach has chosen to be. Lucy could just—wring him, sometimes, but she promised Estrela faithfully that she’d never, ever hurt him.
He’s our boy, Estrela said seriously, in her soft-broken voice. He shall grow taller than you and me both, someday—but he will always be our little boy.
That is all well and good, and Lucy abides by the promise, though the same can’t be said for Estrela. What about them sharing Russandol, and the looking-after of him? Here he is back again, and already run off, and something very wrong but nobody talking—
“Oh, hurry up,” Lucy says, stamping her bare foot against the dry grass. It makes no sound beyond a faint rustle. Celegorm can make his boots so loud when he likes. “Froglach, come along, you lump. We can’t be having you drag!”
“Didn’t want to go,” Amlach grumbles. “Wanted to swim.”
“It’s not time for swimming. Estrela says we can’t, alone.”
“Not alone.”
“You would be, because Amras and I are going up!”
“Luce, let him be,” Amras murmurs. He changes his mind too quickly, does Amras—and Lucy will think that no matter how much she likes when Amras says Luce.
Sluggish as a beached fish, Amras isn’t even watching to see where Maeglin went, just staring at the ground as if it will open up and swallow him. They’ve almost reached the stable, and along with the comfortable horse-sounds, there is laughter drifting from the high windows under the eaves.
“Chiwi,” Amlach murmurs, and stops dragging his feet. Grinning brightly, he darts towards the far end of the stable, leaving Amras and Lucy staring at one another once more.
“Oh, Lord,” Amras says, wrinkling his nose in disgust as his thoughts fall into place. “It must be Fingon and Wachiwi.”
Lucy would match him, look for look, but for an instant she is overcome by a memory. It is a mind-picture of Russandol, stooping down to kiss Estrela’s hand, and Estrela going so stiff and still she might have been charmed into a laurel tree.
Fingon and Wachiwi aren’t like that, they’re just a couple of bold fools—or at least, Fingon is. Wachiwi is mighty kind and impressive when she isn’t being silly over a man who can’t plait his own hair.
(Lucy was learning how to, when she was Sticks. Another memory: Russandol teaching her. His fingers moved swift and gentle through the tangles. He had rough cuts and burns all over his hands, same as the rest of the brats, but he never tugged. His breathing sounded almost natural, in those stolen moments. It didn’t sound like it hurt him.)
The stable door bangs open, which means Amlach must have gone in, but the music of laughter doesn’t turn to scolding.
Sighing, Lucy follows Amras towards the half-door, which is still swinging. In warm weather, the top shutter of the door is held open by a hook at all hours, for—Fingolfin says—ventilation.
Another word with a tail.
“There you are, Lucy!” cries Wachiwi.
It isn’t only Wachiwi and Fingon, and Lucy is grateful for that. Aredhel is here too, and Turgon who is always so grim. They are all seated cross-legged on the floor of the tack-stall, around a heaped-up blanket. Amlach is crouched in between Aredhel and Wachiwi, kneeling on the blanket’s edge. Happiness fairly shines from him like rays from the sun.
“New ones!” his voice pipes up, echoing down the straw-littered corridor. “Jib brought the new ones!”
Nearly two weeks ago, Jib vanished. Estrela said not to worry, she was minding her own business, the ship cats used to do the same, and hadn’t Jib a ship cat’s name? But Amlach, of course, had been desolate. What would Jib’s children do without their mother?
It was like that David Copperfield fellow all over again.
“And just when she was getting so fat!” Lucy had observed, to Amras, who had shrugged uncomfortably.
“She’ll come round again,” he said. “Just you wait and be patient, Sti—Lucy.”
Gradually, the truth had come out. Jib wasn’t fat from eating rats and ground-squirrels, she was fat from babies. Little kittens, still inside her. But she had run away to have them born, Estrela said. Mother-cats always did.
Amlach was troubled. Lucy was annoyed. Why did everyone leave when things were getting interesting?
“We could have helped her,” Lucy had told Estrela, not two days ago.
“I know,” Estrela said, sighing.
But here the mother is, choosing her day of returning to match with Russandol’s.
Jib, with an adoring audience all around her, and three wriggling bundles of fur nestled against her full belly, does not look ashamed. Two of her kittens are orange; a third is inky-dark.
New ones, Lucy thinks, and her heart wants to cry.
“A very fine welcome,” Fingon says, beaming. There is hay in his hair. “Sticks—I mean, Lucy, isn’t it? Come and see. Turgon found them!”
“Did you know?” mutters Lucy. “Did you see her come back?”
“No,” Amras mutters back. He sounds enough like Gwindor—grump-like, that is—for Lucy to quite believe him. His ignorance is better than his knowledge, kept from her, would be. “And I’ve been watching, too.”
“What I should like to know,” Aredhel says. “Is where on earth she finds gentlemen callers.”
“Men will travel,” Wachiwi says, reaching to tug one of Fingon’s plaits. “For a good reason.”
Fingon turns the color of beet-root. Amras coughs.
“Aredhel,” he says, “have you seen Maeglin?”
Aredhel’s smiling face becomes as wary and bird-eyed as her shadow’s. Her dark hair, twitching over her shoulder, reminds Lucy of Jib’s tail. “No—why? Is anything the matter?”
Amras kicks at a skein of hay on the floorboards. “He was looking for you,” he says. “Seemed… important.”
A look—quick, but with just enough of a trailing string for Lucy to catch—passes between Wachiwi and Fingon.
Aha, Lucy thinks, but it isn’t happy laughter in her head… it’s worry shared. Maeglin … Fingon… Wachiwi… a web is forming, with Russandol at the center.
Just where he always is.
III
Fingon knows something. Amras can see it written on his open features. His head is untidily straw-crowned and his face is smug with contentment. Fingon probably thinks himself safe from inquiry here, surrounded by own family, a happy homecoming done properly.
(Maedhros, tired and thin and with a streak of sunburn across his cheeks—Maedhros was kind, yes, but not happy.)
Amras shouldn’t let anger boil up in him, shouldn’t let it steal the joy of his relief, but anger is…
Smoke? Sickness?
Whatever it resembles, it spreads. You have to fight it back; breathe clean air. Choose what you ought to have chosen, without it.
Not so long ago, Amras behaved childishly in this same stable, venting his frustrated confusion to Gwindor and Estrela. He won’t do so now. Not with Amlach happily distracted from any worry; not with Lucy hanging on Amras’ every word. So Amras only smiles—no matter how falsely—and shrugs away Aredhel’s piercing look.
“I’ll tell him where to find you,” Amras promises, “if I see him again.”
“No,” Aredhel says firmly, already on her feet and half out of the tack-stall. “I’d best look for him myself. Before he twists himself in knots with worrying… he’s always worrying.”
“Hurry back,” Turgon says, “or we shall name these little fluff-balls without you.”
Aredhel glances back only to roll her eyes at him.
“Perhaps,” Wachiwi murmurs, “they are not ours to name.”
As if they are alone, Fingon drops his forehead to Wachiwi’s shoulder, bucking the crown of his head gently against the side of her neck. Wachiwi laughs and reaches up to pluck a few hayseeds out of his hair.
Disgusted, Amras turns to watch Aredhel go, striding down the corridor between the rows of stalls. Some of the horses put out their heads as she passes, as if in greeting. Aredhel’s sprigged calico tunic, even dust-streaked, shines like white linen in the afternoon sunrays that fan out beneath the eaves.
Aredhel has changed, as they all have, but sometimes she seems to have escaped whatever has made Amras feel like a stranger in his own body.
Even though she lost a mother, a brother, a home.
Aredhel could welcome Fingon’s return without doubting him. She bears nearly as much affection (Amras is sure it cannot be more affection) for Maeglin as she does for Celegorm.
She acts, most of all, and seeks out the answers to whatever question crosses her mind. What has she thought to ask Fingon already, while Maedhros was hidden indoors and Amras was wading in the soft, sticking mud?
Amras scuffs the floorboards again, scraping a little more mud from the sole of one foot. Out of the corner of his eye, he observes that Sticks has snuggled beside Frog, within easy reach of the kittens.
“Careful now,” Fingon is saying. “They’re very young, yet. They mustn’t be distressed.”
“As if we’d distress them!” Sticks protests. “Here, Amlach. Stroke them behind the ears. Oh, how small—their claws won’t even go in and out yet—”
Amras will not be missed. He does not need Aredhel’s easy confidence to know that; only his own readiness to face a bitter truth.
You do not matter. Not unless you make yourself matter.
A moment later he has retraced his steps to the nearer door—opposite from the path outward that Aredhel took—and is alone under the sky once more.
Amras approaches the fort through the kitchen yard. Neither Caranthir nor the unfortunate rooster are to be found there, though there is a large vat of cooling water on a trestle-table, in which a few feathers still swirl. Amras moves quickly away from it. He hates the smell of slaughter. Hates to recall how the headless birds, ruffled by death-throes, are dipped into a boiling pot to loosen the shafts of their feathers for plucking.
Meanwhile, the kitchen is busy with the washing-up. Caranthir isn’t there, either, though his name is mentioned by Mary, complaining that he chooses the most inconvenient times to hog the pump and the boiling-cauldrons.
Where is Celegorm? Where is Huan? Perhaps they are listening to whatever Curufin has decided to say, since he left his precious work and his much-less-precious assistant.
(Has Aredhel found Maeglin yet?)
The latter half of dinner is still being served and eaten in the hall. Amras picks his way past the overflowing quarters, the lean-stocked pantries. He passes Abe Phillips, who nods to him. He passes a man he doesn’t recognize, who stares at him—at his hair, rather.
Still, no sign of his brothers. He slips into the hall and cranes his neck to search the crowd for them. There’s Miles, and the smith from Hithlum, Azaghal, who went with Maedhros to Doriath. There is Homer, blast him, sitting in Uncle Fingolfin’s usual place.
Where is Uncle Fingolfin?
Amras ducks back into the corridor. He wonders if he will find his family gathered in their habitual bedchamber: Maedhros and Maglor in seats of honor on the bed, with Celegorm and Caranthir and Curufin standing around, admiring them as if they were newly discovered kittens.
Only Amras, absent. Only Amras, forgotten.
(Ambarussa.)
The bedroom door is closed. Once opened, the room beyond stands empty. As usual, Maglor has forgotten to make the bed.
Amras shuts the door again, turns around, and nearly collides with Caranthir.
Caranthir’s usually ruddy face is pale. He has seen a ghost. No—he is seeing one. He is seeing everyone whom Amras is not.
“Caranthir,” Amras says, desperately, as if Caranthir must be recalled, by name, from somewhere distant. “Caranthir, what is the matter?”
“Amras.” Caranthir grips him by the shoulders. Amras smells boiled feathers. The slaughter; the sacrifice. “I just spoke to Maeglin. He told me—”
Indignation surfaces first, over the injustice of it. “He told you?” Amras recollects himself. “No, go on. What did he—”
Caranthir is trembling. Amras can feel his brother’s fear and sorrow through his hands. How right that is; that hands should tell a story. Amras is grateful to Fingon for saving Maedhros’ life; he will always be grateful for that. But he will never forgive Fingon for cutting off Maitimo’s hand. No matter how necessary Fingon deemed it, he couldn’t have understood what it meant.
What that dear, strong, skillful hand meant.
“Bauglir.” Caranthir’s voice breaks on the name… a name so dreadful that, spoken unexpectedly, its meaning trails behind it, lumbering slowly through Amras’ thoughts before it reaches his understanding. Whenever Amras thinks of Bauglir at all, he sees a shadow first—not a man. A shadow looming over Maitimo’s torn and twisted body. A shadow with a voice that Amras does not know. “Bauglir was in Doriath, with Maedhros. Curufin knows, and so must Celegorm by this time. I thought they would speak to M-Maitimo, but I cannot find him, Amras! I cannot find any of them!”
“Hold—how does Curufin know?”
Caranthir heaves a breath. “Maeglin was with Curufin when they heard Homer talking about it, and Homer said that Bauglir was there, and that he—”
“I don’t understand,” Amras says stupidly, though he does, despite Caranthir’s rambling. When it comes to loss and grief, Amras is a quick study. “Maitimo is here,” he says, to reassure himself as much as his brother. “He is here. They must have all gone to Rumil’s study. Did you ask anyone else, who might have seen—”
“No,” Caranthir says, the tears starting in his eyes. “It has been… only a moment, I think, since Maeglin came to me. He was frightened. Frightened for Curufin. Curufin is never kind to him, and yet Maeglin knows that he is—somehow, he—”
A swell of shouting from the direction of the hall overtakes them both, halting all conversation.
“Get off me!” someone barks. Amras knows the voice, but not yet the name that belongs to it. His wits are always slow to make sense of the sounds of a fight. “Keep your goddamn lies to yourself—aye, and your hands, too! I’ll go where I please, and speak to who I please.”
Caranthir continues to hold Amras’ shoulders, and the confusion on his face could have been, an instant ago, a mirror of Amras’ own.
No longer.
Gwindor. The angry voice, the fighting voice, is Gwindor’s. The smoke clears; the anger in Amras’ own breast remains. That feeling has a purpose now, strengthened by a possible alliance.
“Gwindor will help us,” Amras announces, very sure of it. “If we help him—if we tell him where to go, he’ll break down the door. He’ll break down the secrets.”
Caranthir is still staring.
“Come,” Amras urges, reaching up to lift Caranthir’s hands from his shoulders and grasp them, briefly, in his own. “We have to know.”