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They all saw the Eagle, flying out of the North, but no one agreed about what it had carried. Tyelkormo, in a high temper, informed them that the Eagles of Manwë were not beasts of burden, and that it was impossible for the eagle to be carrying anyone at all.
He said this, of course, because Ambarussa – who they still called by that name, even though it cut all of them every time they said it – had whispered, barely loud enough to hear, that he was sure there had been a rider, bright red hair catching in the sun.
“It was probably Findekáno,” Carnistir said, to no one in particular. “And about time, too. If he had been gone much longer, they really would have attacked us for kidnapping him. As if we would want Findekáno here!”
“Ah yes, our famous red-haired cousin Findekáno,” Curufinwë sneered.
Quietly, between the bickering of his father and uncles, Telperinquar said, “I thought there were two of them, actually,” but nobody paid him any mind until, several hours later, a message arrived from the other side of the lake, and Makalaurë’s world came to ringing silence like the aftermath of a struck gong or a tolling bell.
“This is a trap,” Tyelkormo announced in the aftermath. “They’re trying to throw us off, to lure us in, to deceive us.”
“I saw him, you idiot” Ambarussa snapped, and tackled Tyelkormo into the dirt in a ball of rolling fists and fury until Huan and Curufinwë hauled the pair of them apart.
Makalaurë could not speak, and could not do anything else, so he only stood, in horrible, frozen silence, until Telperinquar said, “I saw them both,” louder and more confidently this time, which settled Curufinwë’s position in the conflict, at least. He let Ambarussa go, and dusted himself off primly.
“Tyelpë,” Makalaurë said, “I’m going to get your uncle. You have command while I’m gone. Moryo, help him with practicalities. Tyelko, go have your nose healed. Huan… I would put you in charge if you could talk. Sit on Tyelko if you need to stop him from starting a war.”
“Why am I in charge?” Telperinquar demanded, horrified.
“Do you want to start a war with our half-cousins?”
“No?”
“Good! Don’t.”
Ambarussa met him on his way out of camp, already mounted on his horse and leading another.
“I doubt he will be well enough to ride.”
“I know,” Minyarussa agreed, “but they have no horses with them, that I have seen, and Ambarussa’s will hardly do him any good now.”
“Are you going to try and trade a horse for our brother?”
“No,” he said, without much humour. “But am keenly aware this may be a trap, and in that event, someone needs to ensure that at least one of you makes it back alive, because Tyelko will start a war if he gets the crown, and Ambarussa is dead, and Atar is dead, and Arakáno is dead, and I am tired, so it ought to be me. But if that doesn’t happen then I am going to give Findekáno a horse, and I am going to say thank you, because someone should, and you don’t seem to be able to string two words together.”
It was bold of him to say that when that tirade was probably the most he had said since Atyarussa died. “Give the horse to our uncle. He’ll care for it better.”
“He didn’t summon an eagle for Maitimo,” Ambarussa said, and as the sun began to set behind them, they rode out of the settlement, down the roads they had cut themselves, until they cleared the woods and were in the openness of the plains, and as the stars came to life over them – never so spectacular as they had been in those terrible moments of the darkening – Ambarussa leaned down, and whispered to his horses, and they flew ahead of Makalaurë with a wild, reckless hope that neither of them had felt in any measure for many years.
--
Nolofinwë had built high stockades, and dug a moat filled by diverted river-water, but the camp of the Ice-walkers sprawled out beyond these, filled with tents of strange skins and loosely-built homesteads. Within the walls, structures of stone were beginning to be constructed already, and the sounds of hammers and chisels – and the ringing of steel from forges – rang out, sounding a wake-up call to any still abed as the sun lifted above the horizon.
The outer wall, a shorter stockade watched over by dozens of furious archers, stopped their passage.
“State your purpose,” Írissë called down on them, though she surely must already have known it.
“I was summoned.”
“He was not.”
Apparently happy to be mercenary if it would get them through the door, Ambarussa said, “I came to give your father a horse.”
Everyone considered this statement for a moment until one of the other archers said, “he probably would like a horse.”
Írissë, greatly oppressed by circumstance, said, “drop your weapons – including instruments, Makalaurë. If the horse is a trap, somehow, I am going to strangle you with its intestines.”
Makalaurë let his travelling harp, a gift from his mother, and the sword his father had made him fall in the dirt as if they were worth nothing at all. When Írissë let them past the first stockade, and brought them through the walls of the second to the door of a stone house with Estë’s symbol, a fountain on an island, carved into the foundations, Makalaurë thought that perhaps they were little more than that dirt compared to this.
Findekáno emerged when Írissë rapped on the door, looking mussed with sleep, and yet still exhausted, as if all the energy his spirit accrued by rest was being channeled into another. His hair was gathered back in a single thick tail, coils straining against three leather bands without a trace of their usual gold. There was a single long feather tucked into it.
“It’s true?”
He nodded. “He sleeps yet, but he is healing. I think having you here will do much good.” And then, belatedly, “you’re not wearing your crown.”
“He left it with Tyelpë,” Ambarussa said helpfully. “And, of course, it belongs to neither of them. Can we see him?”
He was sleeping still, as Findekáno had said, but he looked up blearily at the light through the doorway, and Makalaurë stilled. Words had already failed him, music had failed him, but now his body did too. He was looking at Maitimo, hair thin and greying and spread out across the pillow, flesh raw and scraped by wind, old wounds and scars visible on the unbandaged parts of his chest and arms above the blankets, and then he was on the floor.
“Atto? Atyarussa? Am I-”
“Still alive!” Findekáno called, and knelt beside Makalaurë, seizing his wrist to check his pulse.
Ambarussa, apparently shocked back to his silence by his twin’s epessë, went to Nelyo’s side and knelt, as if in prayer, as Maitimo, equally reverent, reached a tentative hand out to stroke his hair. Makalaurë’s throat closed. Maitimo had always – always – favoured his right, for all their father had tried to train him out of it. Now the entire end of his arm was bandaged, where once it had been chained to the mountain. And it was noticeably, despite all the bandaging, too short.
“Breathe, Laurë,” Findekáno’s words were a command, but his tone was kind.
“I-” Well, Findekáno knew what he had done, and, more precisely, what he had not done. There were justifications, of course. The spectre of Tyelkormo’s kingship, the way Ambarussa was already falling apart. But the truth, pure and simple, was that Makalaurë was a coward. He had given up.
Ambarussa had buried his face in Maitimo’s shoulder and was weeping openly, messily, as he had not since the Burning. Maitimo had held him then, too, had held him back from running into the flame as bright as Laurelin. Ambarussa had fought him, had blacked his eye and split his lip, and still Maitimo had held him until the last embers had died.
“I love you,” Maitimo said, and, after Ambarussa mumbled something unintelligible against him, “I missed you too. I’m glad you came. I’m glad you stayed.”
When Maitimo had left, it had seemed rather uncertain if Ambarussa would. Losing Maitimo, after all the rest of it, had nearly killed him. The discovery of Arakáno’s death had been yet another blow. And yet he lived. Makalaurë's courage was to his as a worm before a lion.
Ambarussa mumbled something else, and Maitimo looked at him with desolate and ancient sorrow. Yet as he spoke, despite his face, his words became those of the youth – a parent too young to his own siblings – he had been in Tirion. “Telufinwë Ambarussa, if you had come after me, you would have had no need to worry about Morgoth, or Þauron, or any of the enemy’s other servants, because I would have killed you. You are banned from stupid rescue missions. Your brother and king forbids it!”
He directed part of this diatribe at Findekáno and Makalaurë, still in the doorway.
“This is the thanks I get,” Findekáno said conversationally to Makalaurë.
Perhaps it would be better not to look at them. He buried his head in his knees.
“Finno, would you…”
He bodily lifted Makalaurë and deposited him on the other side of the bed, where he found himself clutched to Maitimo’s chest just as Ambarussa was, but on this side, there were no fingers to stroke his hair.
They had been close enough in age that Maitimo had not helped raise him, not the way he had for Ambarussa in particular, but still, Makalaurë had not felt entirely whole without him. He was not made to be eldest, to be leader of anything. He was not made to be alone.
But then, of course, neither was Ambarussa. It had done neither of them much good. Makalaurë closed his eyes.
This close, he could make the words out when Ambarussa whispered, “you need not pretend.”
“I must,” said Matimo, “for myself, as much as for you. I am here. I am happy to be here.”
“And if you say it often enough you will believe it?”
“Perhaps.”