Chapter Text
Maeglin had not been outside of Nargothrond since before the preceding winter, being unfond both of the extreme cold of deepest winter and of the feeling of being uniquely exposed to whatever might be soaring overhead in the sky, out of sight thanks to a passing cloud or some especially tall, jutting tree. Oh, there were those who had attempted to persuade him to put aside his unease and join them outside, either to ride or to run errands or, in some cases, simply to play in the snow. There had been many—at least, Maeglin had perceived them as many—who had attempted to coax him into joining them outside.
Maeglin had attempted to warm himself to the idea of doing such. There was a part of him that feared the day when those who made those failed persuasions would cease doing so, now thinking of him as not being worth the wasted time or words they had spent trying to budge him from his spot down in the city, where there were at least fires to warm them and ventilation systems to distribute heat somewhat evenly throughout the city—even if evenly in this case meant that everyone was still a little chilly. And there was a part of Maeglin which had tried to force himself to give assent, and go outside into the snowy fields and the gray skies, to listen to the song of the Narog when it wore its winter colors, with icecaps in its hair. When he refused these requests, so kindly made, he felt… He felt as if he had more than one shadow, as if he had become a child once again. The child he had been quailed at the idea of going out under Anor, where there was no shelter of leafy boughs to shield him from her piercing eye. If the child Maeglin had been had not feared this thing for itself, that was something he did not care to share as a man. He did not wish to be that child any longer, either in whole, or piecemeal with parts of the child resurrected at inopportune moments, and a sore trial to banish afterwards. He did not wish to be caught between the life he lived now, and the one had once led.
Alas, it seemed at all times that that specter of what had once been had more power over his responses than anything that bore the present in his mouth. He was, as ever, too weak to subdue it. He strayed not outside of the city gates during winter.
But eventually, the sleeping earth of winter must stir, waking from its long slumber. Eventually, though it had come a little later this year than it had in years past, spring began to spread its fingers down into the vaults and deep halls of Nargothrond, gently thawing the chill which had chafed the skin of its people for months on end. Eventually, a green smell could be detected wafting through the front gates when they opened to let people through. Eventually, spring arrived, and Maeglin no longer felt so apprehensive about leaving the shelter of the city.
Not that he had ventured outside by himself. He had yet to find it within himself to do such a thing. He was not his mother, alas. He lacked her courage. Today, when he ventured outside, into the light of Anor which still stung and burned his eyes when she sat high up in the sky, he did so trailing in the wake of a group much more inclined than he to gaiety.
“Ah,” Nimloth called out brightly, shielding her eyes with one long hand dripping with jade and citrine and gold, as she surveyed the hills around her. “Alas that it was so late at night when we finally arrived, Finduilas. This is quite a sight to see, so different than Doriath.”
“How so?” Finduilas called out from her place at the head of the procession, never looking behind her as she carefully hefted her canvas and stand and stool up the hill they were mounting. “I have never thought it so very different from Doriath. It is a forest, after all. Many of the trees are of a kind as what you would find in Doriath.”
“Yes,” Celebrimbor agreed, his voice barely audible over the brisk wind that whistled over the hills of the Taur-en-Faroth and the largely empty floodplains further south of it. “One forest is much like another, or so I’ve always thought.”
Which was nonsense, and Maeglin could have told him so in a heartbeat, if he had cared to. The trees of the Taur-en-Faroth were gentle and welcoming, spreading their branches so that sunlight and moonlight could pierce the gaps between them without issue. These trees would have never thrived within the precincts of Nan Elmoth. These trees would have been choked into moldering death within a month in Nan Elmoth. They would have stood no chance of living long enough to become as tall as the great pines and spruces and elm trees of Nan Elmoth. The words, Maeglin restrained within his mouth. His mouth was a strong and sure cage for such words. But they never died quickly. They always festered on his tongue before they finally withered back into the nothingness of sub-thought, and the burns they left on his tongue formed thick scars, which the next round of burning words used to gain purchase in his mouth when he tried to swallow them, resisting the eventual slide into nothingness for a longer stretch every time Maeglin found himself in such a place anew.
As it happened, Nimloth spared Maeglin the need to debate with himself whether he should choose this time to give voice to those burning, noxious words, or whether he should swallow them down as usual. She laughed, harsh as the cawing of a crow, to match the ruff of shiny black feathers caging her throat. “What a thing to say. I suppose I should not expect better of you—” sharp words slung at Celebrimbor, who barely flinched in response “—after having been brought up on such desolate plains, but Finduilas, really?” Now less sharp than pleading, “I had thought you had a better understanding of the forests of Doriath than that. I thought you had heard the voices with which they sing, I thought you had smelled the earth from which the trees did sprout, and listened to the voices of the streams and the rivers. This—” Nimloth stared all around her, and for just a moment, her face spasmed in a mask of unease, though Maeglin could not have said why “—this place is strange to me. It speaks to me in a strange voice, and I find its moods unpredictable. The birds sing melodies unlike any that I have heard in Doriath, and they fly away when I approach them, as the birds of Doriath never would. I have hearkened to the Narog, and it sings in a language I cannot parse. I tell you, I have never been anywhere less like Doriath.”
No… No one really had anything to say to that. Even Maeglin, who thought he understood some of what she had meant, was inclined only towards silence. They let her carry the point, and moved on, trailing once more in Finduilas’s wake.
Finduilas, in spite of all that she was carrying, managed to get some ways ahead of the other three as she was cresting a particularly steep hill. When she reached the summit, she stopped dead and turned around, so that she stood with her left side turned towards them, her head craning down towards the slope of the hill where Maeglin, Celebrimbor, and Nimloth still walked. “I think this should be a good place to stop—if you all still insist upon following me out here.”
“There was naught better for me to do in the city,” Nimloth countered. “Why should I not follow my host outside?”
Celebrimbor murmured something considerably milder, which nonetheless reached the same point. Maeglin said nothing. He instead stared up at Finduilas, unblinking, mouth dry.
After the manner of spring mornings, at least the manner which Maeglin had learned since coming to a place where he could catch more than the occasional glimpses of sky in the winter when the leaves of the elms and the other deciduous trees were brown and dead and fallen, so fleeting still that he would wonder sometimes if it had really been sky he had seen at all, or more of the silent gloom that was so characteristic of his home, there were no clouds in the sky. He had seen spring mornings when there were many clouds in the sky also, of course, had seen spring mornings when he would not have strayed past the Doors of Felagund for all of the rain, but when he thought of spring mornings, he thought of the pale blue sky, sheer as silk, so vivid that you could never have hoped to see it reflected properly in any painting or tapestry, that unfurled before him now. He thought of the wind he heard blustering south down the Taur-en-Faroth and the floodplains, rushing so that it sounded more like the rushing of the Narog down its course than it did as something as intangible as air. And he thought of this dazzling sunlight, so bright he found himself near-constantly blinking his eyes against it.
Finduilas stood in that sunlight now, backlit by light so fierce that Maeglin was near-blinded, before he was able to squeeze his eyes shut against it, and then open them again to find it more bearable. She glowed. The yellow dress she wore, so much simpler than the heavier, more elaborate robes she favored in the city, and yet moved about in with as much ease as she had ever done in several layers of heavy cloth and jewelry, twinkled as if washed in starlight, as if some of the essence of the stars had been sewn into the fibers of her skirts. Her hair, waving freely in the wind that buffeted them all to and fro, shone like molten gold. There was a light in her face which the uninitiated might have thought had been bestowed upon her by Anor, but which Maeglin knew had come from within, and was only amplified, only brought to the surface in such an intense, almost overwhelming glow, but the sunlight which cut now through the trees of the Taur-en-Faroth.
Maeglin had seen this light completely unveiled, from time to time. He had seen it shine out from her eyes and her mouth, as if she had caught a sliver of the fruit of Glewellin in her mouth and swallowed it, and made it part of herself, imbued herself with the radiance of the Daystar. But it hurt not to look upon—well, not physically. Maeglin never felt as though his eyes would be blinded or his skin burned when he looked upon Finduilas as she was now, when she bore so little resemblance to an Edhel that he would sooner have believed her to be one of the Maiar, strayed far away from her home in the Undying Lands. But she felt…
No, there was nothing about what she felt, not to him. Maeglin could not ascribe anything to her. He could speak only of himself. She felt so distant to him, when she appeared like this. They stood no more than thirty feet away from one another, now, so close that they could have carried on a conversation with ease, so close that Maeglin would never have struggled to make out the features of her face and the straight line of her body. And yet, the distance between them felt insurmountable, and Maeglin felt as if the shadows were calling him back, as if they wrapped about his legs and dragged him back down, out of sight of her, out of sight of everything.
The tree branches above them quavered in the wind, and the light was shattered into shards no less bright or cheery, but less overwhelming in their power. The intense glow was banished from Finduilas’s form, leaving behind the fainter gleam always present in her face down in the city. Maeglin could look at her again and remember how little distance there was between them. He could look at her and breathe properly once more. But he did not feel encouragement. He did not think he had ever felt encouragement, after such.
Truth be told, Finduilas had called upon none of them to follow her out of the city. Nimloth likely always would have done—when Finduilas had wintered in and spent the earliest part of the spring in Menegroth, Nimloth had kept her company during her time there, and though Finduilas had been, by her own retelling of it, content to entertain herself in Menegroth without calling upon Nimloth to come join her, Finduilas was considerably more familiar with Menegroth than Nimloth was with Nargothrond, and Maeglin could remember no occasion since they had arrived the week before when he had seen Finduilas about her business in the city, when Nimloth was not trailing after her. Celebrimbor had caught sight of them making their way towards one of the side doors out of the city and had professed a need to stretch his legs, and a desire not to do so alone. Maeglin…
Maeglin did not care to leave Nargothrond alone. He did not care to contemplate the idea of being found alone in the Taur-en-Faroth, in the Talath Dirnen to the north, or in the empty floodplains to the south. It was not to be borne. But there came a time when he did desire to be out from the shelter of the walls and the caverns of the city, even if only for a short time. He could not expect those whom he would have preferred accompany him to be available whenever his whims demanded he breathe fresh air. It was too selfish to expect that. When he saw an opportunity, he could not claim to know when the next would come to him. He had set aside what else he had intended to do this morning—admittedly, not very much—and trailed after the three of them when he had become aware of what they intended.
When Finduilas began to set down her materials, Nimloth gladly took a seat at her side, seemingly unconcerned by the way the grass and the trees’ discarded leaves might stain the pale skirts of her robes. Celebrimbor took up a post leaning his back against a slender birch tree. Maeglin took a seat a little ways behind them, close to the lip of a nearly-sheer edge of the hill, where the ground simply dropped away for roughly ten feet before it began to slowly, roughly begin to become something less nimble than a mountain goat could have safely scaled.
It was… It was really all so very different from Nan Elmoth, here. He had to remind himself of that, sometimes, especially after he had been sequestered in the city for long stretches, on account either of weather, or because of some project that had demanded his attention for so long that sunlight began to feel more like a dream to him than a reality of the world without the walls of Nargothrond. (Mother had attempted to coax him away from those same projects, many times. If it was not a hunting trip into the woods she wished him to accompany her on, it was to go to the market, or to come out of the forges to the main banqueting hall for supper more often, or simply to join her when she had nothing better to do than aimlessly wander up and down the streets and squares and narrow passageways of Nargothrond. Maeglin wished he had hearkened to her more often. Perhaps if he had, she would not have—) Many times, Maeglin would find that his mind had deceived him into believing that when he ventured out any of the many sets of gates cunningly carved into the hills, he would be greeted by permanently-dusky gloom so thick that his eyes struggled to pierce its shadows, sheltered by towering trees with great, leafy boughs greedy for whatever sunlight they could suck up, leaving none behind for the soil to nurture flowers or bushes or even smaller trees.
It was not so. Maeglin needed only to look about him to see that it was not so, and yet, memory was fickle and unreliable, and he found still that he needed the reminder, and needed thereafter to swiftly hide his shame at having churlishly forgotten again, at having churlishly attributed aspects of the sinister to a place where they were totally inapplicable. The birch and oak and cedar and myriad other trees of the Taur-en-Faroth were as gentle as they had ever been. The deciduous trees boasted new leaves, sweet and tender, still so translucent that the light shooting down from above lanced through them, between their narrow veins like light shining through colored glass before great lanterns, as was the favored method of illumination in some of the parks of the city. In between the fallen leaves and the mossy boulders that jutted from the earth so frequently in this part of Beleriand, the grass was cool and soft to the touch, so cool in fact that Maeglin found his hands chilled when he ran them through the blades of grass that had woken with the advent of spring. When he peered over the side of the ledge, he saw little white flowers with sharp, bladed petals, flowers whose names he had never learned, growing in seams of the rippling rock face that formed the sheerest part of the hill. Further below, especially as the ground began to level out, bluebells grew tall and proud, quivering in the wind, flooding the forest floor in rivers of indigo and sapphire and violet.
Maeglin let himself drink in the air, and slowly, very slowly, he felt some of the tension seep out of his back. Not much, but some. He was, he hoped, far away from anything that could do him any harm.
Before him, he was starting to catch snatches of the conversation which had apparently been going on while he was checking up on his surroundings.
“—lived in Menegroth for all of your life, then?” Celebrimbor was asking, picking at the edges of a leaf he had plucked up from the ground.
Nimloth herself was frowning, having seemingly taken up some of the tension which Maeglin had let out of his back and made it her own. “Indeed, I have. Given my family, I fail to see why I would ever have needed to live anywhere else.”
“And this is the first time you have left Doriath?”
“I—Yes.” She quirked a silvery eyebrow, her frown deepening slightly. “And what is your point? I assume you have a point; I doubt you ask me this simply to pass the time.”
Maeglin looked to Finduilas, wondering if she perhaps had some better idea than he, or Nimloth, of just where this conversation was meant to go. But Finduilas was absorbed in sketching on her canvas, and Maeglin was not entirely certain that she heard aught of what was going on.
Celebrimbor shrugged his shoulders. Fixing his gaze on the treetops before them, just a little absently, he explained, “I hear so little of what Menegroth is like. I must admit… Well… You cannot fault me for being curious, can you?” He laughed ruefully, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “I thought I might like to learn a little more about it.”
“Why would you be curious about a place you will never be permitted to see?” Nimloth asked bluntly in return. “I fear I do not understand your meaning, son of Curufin.”
Maeglin swallowed, finding the air suddenly fraught and sour, something that might have put him to trying to impose an end upon the conversation or perhaps even go so far as try to make his way back to the city by himself, had that fraught, sour air not slid as neatly into his lungs as the fresh, light air before it had ever accomplished. He knew better what was best for him, than trying to intercede—to any particular end. What was best for him was merely to keep silent, and not interfere. This conversation could carry on perfectly well without Maeglin’s interference. It would likely run more smoothly without Maeglin’s interference.
Celebrimbor straightened, flattening his back against the trunk of the birch tree. “You most likely will never see Aman,” he retorted, a brittle stiffness in his voice which Maeglin thought he had only heard there once or twice before, in all of the years he had known him, “and yet, if you ever expressed a desire to know more about those lands, I would not scorn that desire.” The brittle stiffness which had dried and hardened his words began to crack, ever so slightly, revealing something a touch wet underneath. “I know little of Aman, myself, beyond what I have been told. Had circumstances been other than what they are—”
“But they aren’t.” Not particularly moved, was Nimloth. Her suspicion buzzed about her like a swarm of bees—not angry, not quite yet, but they could easily be provoked to such, to stinging relentlessly; all it would take was one short, sharp thrust with a stick. “I may someday be allowed to see Aman for myself, though I profess little interest in doing so. You, sir, shall never be permitted to enter Doriath under a banner of peace. So once again, I ask you: what precisely do you mean by what you have asked of me?”
“Menegroth is lovely,” Finduilas broke in suddenly, never looking away from her canvas, her clear voice as light and as pleasant as if naught was amiss here, nothing at all.
Nimloth frowned deeply at her. “Finduilas…”
“I am afraid I have about as much interest in Aman as Nimloth does,” Finduilas went on, behaving for all the world as if Nimloth had not just spoken. “I have been told tales, of course, but I never sought them out, and have retained little of them as a consequence of my disinterest.”
Celebrimbor rolled his eyes. “Caranthir and Maedhros might have been happier to have you as a niece than me as a nephew, in that case. They never wish to speak of it to me.”
To that, Nimloth’s eyebrows shot up towards her hairline, and Maeglin could hear the outlines of the grumbling thoughts rattling about in her mind, but she gave physical voice to none of them, and slowly, the air began to ease once more. It did not ever feel as it had before it had soured, at least not to Maeglin, but he had no more difficulty breathing it than he had before. His lungs were well-adapted to sour air. Anything else was could push through just the same.
Finduilas kept on sketching on her canvas. The angle at which Maeglin viewed the canvas was no good for getting a good idea of what it was that she was sketching. Instead, he had an excellent view of her hand as she drew straight and diagonal and swirling lines with a pencil across the creamy canvas. She wore no jewelry when she went outside of the city into the sunlight this day, but all this meant was that her flesh was unobstructed from sight. Her slight, tapering fingers brushed against the canvas as she sketched, the bones under her skin and the layer of muscle beneath that fluttering as she worked like the wings of birds in flight. She was not in the habit of gesticulating when she spoke, or when she engaged in any other activity, for that matter. She did not gesture wildly with her hands as some of the others in the city were accustomed to doing. Maeglin was rarely allowed any instance where he could watch either of her hands fly as her right did now. He was rarely allowed to see what she made of work which did involve her hands. Much as he had longed to be out in the fresh air again, if only for a short while, among gentle trees growing out of earth which stirred and sat wakeful once more, he had longed for that as well. It was silent in his mouth, but the longing was still there.
Nimloth, who had not been out in the Taur-en-Faroth in daylight before, stood up from her sitting place at Finduilas’s side, pacing the top of the hill to get a better look at her surroundings, craning her head with an interest which belied the swiftness with which she had decried this forest as being so different from the forests which had cradled her as an infant, nurtured her as a child, sheltered her as an adult. Maeglin wondered if the rapt attention which he had poured upon his surroundings when he had first explored the Taur-en-Faroth could find a mirror in her eyes, if he was to summon the wraith of the boy he had been when he had first come to live here. Certainly, the intensity would have been the same; Nimloth would be going home eventually, and who knew when it would be that Nimloth would have both the opportunity and the inclination to return, so it was perfectly sensible that she would pore over everything so intensely, cataloguing it all away so that her memories would not grow stale and fade away too quickly. But she was not…
There was a difference, here. Maeglin knew that there was a difference. He stared up at Nimloth walking a ring around the top of the hill, uncaring of how close she came to the edge in places where stepping over the edge would have seen her tumbling ten, fifteen, even twenty feet before she found ground she could gain any level of purchase on once more, in her long, trailing robes, the train of which was fast growing heavy with leaves. He swayed backwards a little when her circuit took her within a few feet of where he himself sat, and he marveled at how she could do so without worrying about tripping over him, without worrying about the possibility that he could reach out and grab her ankle to trip her, that she could walk so close by him when he was on a level with a part of her body which she could not have swiftly defended without being at all concerned by what he might do to her.
Was that what life was like in Doriath, where the enchantments of Melian the Queen succeeded in keeping out aught which could threaten the Iathrim? Was it so that the Iathrim could walk about the forests such, never fearing for a moment that any ill might befall them, either by the fell creatures which issued forth from Angband, by bandits who could wish to accost them for whatever valuables they might possess on their persons, by the malice of their fellow Edhil, by the wild animals which roamed the forests of Region and Neldoreth and Brethil, or by simple cruel mischance, when they stepped on what they thought to be solid ground and found themselves to be mistaken, or when they thought the path of boulders they were charting across a wide creek or a river proved to be much more treacherous of a path than they had supposed.
Was that what life was like in Doriath, Maeglin wondered, or was it perhaps Nimloth? Was it simply that Nimloth could move through the world in full assurance of the safety of her surroundings? Maeglin had no way of knowing for certain, not really. She had arrived in Nargothrond a week ago, and he had never known her before. This was the first time had spent any real amount of time in her company. To delve into her mind would almost certainly have attracted her attention and her animosity, and might well have gained him nothing in the process. He could not guess. He did not even care much to go into her mind seeking the answers. Maeglin had rarely found anything in the minds and thoughts of others to bring him joy. Far more likely to be found there was a clamoring voice of grief, urging him into shadow.
He did not know. He could not guess.
Nimloth paced, and Celebrimbor stood with his back against the birch tree and pointedly avoided looking at her, while she pointedly avoided looking at him. Finduilas sat at her canvas, seemingly putting the finishing touches on whatever her sketch had been of, and if she was aware of just how determinedly Nimloth and Celebrimbor were not looking at one another, she gave absolutely no sign of it. Her absorption in her art was too great for any concern with her surroundings to pierce it. Maeglin watched all of this in silence, increasingly content to let his attention be drawn off by the wind lowing through the canopy of the trees down below them—though when Nimloth would draw near him once more, he would stiffen, all contemplation of the forest forgotten until she had passed far enough away from him that she could not have, say, pushed him over the side of the hill down into what would likely have spelled an end to him. If he stiffened a little whenever he caught sight of a shadow that seemed too dense or too dark down below, he would not burden the others with knowledge of it.
But eventually there came another sign of Edhil from down below the hill, this one far less ambiguous than the shadows Maeglin would watch so intently, only to flush and turn his head away when it turned out he saw only the way clustering leaves projected their shadows down onto the ground, or when it turned out to be a deer or a fox or some other denizen of a forest where the trees actually allowed light through. There came the gay call of a horn through the trees down below, and Maeglin started, shooting up to his feet to determine the source.
Soon enough was that source determined. It was a beautiful day today, of course. Virtually anyone in Nargothrond would have agreed with that assessment, and not all of those had tasks and duties which obliged them to stay away from the sunlight in the city. Some were obligated instead to remain outside for any of the number of duties which must be carried out in the Taur-en-Faroth, and others… others could be outside simply for leisure, as Maeglin and the group he had trailed after were.
Far below, he spied a group of half a dozen Edhil wandering aimlessly through the woods. Most, Maeglin recognized as members of King Finrod’s court, led by… yes, that was Gwindor. Maeglin knew Gwindor and his brother, Gelmir, well enough. They were both friends of Celebrimbor’s, which meant that Maeglin had had enough contact with Gwindor over the years to say that he had a good idea of his character. There was nothing to offend him in that character. Maeglin supposed he should be clear about that, since it might be taken otherwise, were he not. There was nothing in Gwindor’s character that offended Maeglin. There never had been.
It was just that Maeglin had grown accustomed to quiet this day, you understand. He had gone outside hoping for relative quiet, and so far, he had gotten it. Even when Celebrimbor and Nimloth had argued—well, by a certain definition of arguing, though at least, the spirit of it had been there—they had not lifted their voices to shout, and they had been well-enough content afterwards to let the voice of the wind reclaim its ascendancy over the forest. Maeglin could hear the voice of the earth here without issue, the voice of the earth as it was when it had not been shaped and formed to Edhil tastes, as it had been in the city. It was quiet enough for that sometimes very quiet voice to reach his ears, even if it came in bursts of noise, even if it came only intermittently.
If Gwindor and his company saw them, they would of course come up to join them; there was little else that they could do upon spying Nargothrond’s only princess sitting atop the hill, even if she looked markedly less inclined than them to go wandering. They would of course come up to join them, and the relative quiet of this place would be shattered. Maeglin sucked in a deep breath, steeling himself in anticipation of such. He would wait, of course, for the two merged companies to decide that they wished to return to the city. He did not care to think about who he might have met in the forest, had he tried to find his way back on his own.
Or perhaps a different course would be charted, today. Nimloth watched this new company with an interest even more intense than what she had directed on the forest just a minute ago. “Hmm.” She tapped her lip, visibly fighting off a smile. “Do you know, I had thought to see as much of this forest as I could, while I was here.”
And she was realizing that that was not going to happen, not so long as she remained in Finduilas’s company, was clearly implied, even if never said.
At last, Finduilas looked away from her work. “I did not ask any of you to follow me here,” she pointed out mildly. Her eyes kept straying back to the canvas, where she had begun to apply thin streaks of blue and green paint. “I would not keep you here, if there was anywhere else you would rather be.” Her brow furrowed. “I only ask that if you go down to join them, you stay with them until they return to the city, or else ask one of them to escort you back. You may grow lost here, otherwise.”
Nimloth waved a hand sharply through the air. “Oh, Finduilas, I promise you I know better than to get lost.” Her eyes gleamed when they flickered back down to the base of the hill. “Yes, though, I do think I will go join them. I wish you good luck with your painting, dear.” She favored the sky with a rueful smile. “And no rainclouds for the rest of the day.”
Celebrimbor hauled himself away from the birch tree. “I’ve not spoken to Gwindor in a while. It would be nice to catch up with him.”
Nimloth wrinkled her nose. “Oh. …You’re joining me, then?”
With a thin smile, “I am sure you will be able to avoid speaking with me without issue, Lady Nimloth.”
“Keep me from tumbling head over heels down the hill on the way back down, and I might be persuaded to speak with you a little more.”
And with that, they were gone, the crunch of their footsteps against grass and leaves and rocks soon lost to the wind.
Maeglin sighed.
And Finduilas turned about and regarded him with a small smile. “Are you to abandon me as well, then?”
“No,” was out of Maeglin’s mouth, so vociferous, almost viciously so, before he could think about himself and the sort of tone he would have liked to have used in response to such a question, the tone which it would have been most appropriate to use in response to such a question, what sort of tone would have been less likely to draw attention to him, the sort of attention that would have asked less of why he had taken such a tone. It was too late to take it back, and so all he could do was cast his gaze to the ground, red-faced and abashed, hoping beyond hope that she would guess nothing from it, and attempt to glean nothing more.
For once, it seemed that the Ainur, or whatever other power governed the world that had watched impassively as Maeglin’s life had passed him by, were inclined to bestow some measure of mercy upon him. No sharper light ever entered Finduilas’s eyes. No frown ever marred her face, nor did furrows appear in her brow. “Why not come sit a little closer?” she prompted. “We are hardly strangers to one another, to sit so far apart, pretending we have no knowledge of each other, that it would be improper to sit close enough to converse freely.”
No matter how close they sat by each other, Maeglin doubted there would be much in him that was capable of conversing freely with her, not anymore. That was an art which seemed to be forever lost to him. But he would heed her command, wrapped up as it was in suggestion. There was naught else to do. To refuse her would to be churlish. To refuse her was far from what Maeglin wished.
Standing, and coming close enough to the canvas that Finduilas’s body no longer obstructed it from his sight, Maeglin could see now that she had been sketching, later painting, a quick study of their surroundings, of the hilltops and the trees and the heavily-flowered forest floor down below. “It has been such a long time since I last did a landscape,” Finduilas admitted, tossing off a light shrug. “I have not had enough time to leave the city, at least not long enough to get even a quick one done. And the winter was too harsh for me to venture outside of Menegroth on such an errand—my paints would all have frozen.”
“As you say,” Maeglin replied carefully, taking greater care still to focus his eyes upon the canvas while she spoke, rather than her face, or her still-moving hand. He had never known enough about painting to judge if her work was especially fine or not. Artwork of this sort was all wondrous to him, in the same way that all things which were beyond his capacities were wondrous to him.
“I think that you would have liked Menegroth, especially in the winter,” Finduilas was saying as Maeglin sat down, not far from where Nimloth had originally taken a seat. She tapped the butt of her paintbrush against the ledge of her stand, frowning a little as she looked over her canvas. The forests of Doriath truly do dwarf this one, and the frost upon all of the holly trees around Menegroth was a sight to see.” She sighed reminiscently. “Menegroth itself is a sight to see in winter, as well. And during their spring festival…” That reminiscent sigh had been followed shortly thereafter by a similarly reminiscent smile. “There really is nothing like it.”
Maeglin nodded stiffly. “I… I would not know. I have never seen it for myself.”
She had carried tales of other spring festivals in Menegroth to him, in years past. Finduilas had hardly spent every winter since Maeglin had come to live in Nargothrond in Menegroth. Some years, the snows had come too early for the journey to be either safe or practical, and there were some years as well when her parents had come down from Tol Sirion to visit her and King Finrod in the city, and there were some years when she simply did not profess any desire to make the journey from the one kingdom to the other, though there were apparently many in Doriath who were happy to see her, and her visits were well-approved by her uncle, who could not visit and maintain good relations with Thingol and Melian the Queen as often as he would have liked.
She had spun stories of the sights and sounds and smells to be found in Menegroth during that time for him often enough. He had hung on those words the way he had hung on the stories his mother had told him when he was a young child, listening to it all and wondering if it could even be real. She made Menegroth sound like a misty dream, a place of jewels and rich tapestries and sparkling lights which had no obvious source, and yet managed to light up a room with the soft, twinkling shimmer of starlight on a clear summer’s night. It all sounded to Maeglin the way he suspected Nargothrond would have sounded to him, if he had been told tales of it as a child.
One… one could dream of visiting such a place. One could certainly dream of visiting such a place, when one was not barred from visiting said place as Celebrimbor was. There was nothing stopping Maeglin from actually going to Doriath, from making his way to Menegroth and presenting himself to Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen. He was kin to Thingol through… He was kin to Thingol. He was exempted from the ban placed upon the Exiles from entering the kingdom of Doriath, under circumstances similar to the House of Arfin. There was nothing that presented an obstacle to Maeglin, when it came to dreaming of visiting Menegroth. There was nothing that presented an obstacle to Maeglin’s actually visiting Menegroth.
He just couldn’t. He knew perfectly well that he could not. In Nargothrond, Maeglin was as sure of his safety as he ever really could be. But in Menegroth… In Menegroth, he could well be vulnerable. After all, his father held Thingol as his liege lord and his close kin, and though Eöl of Nan Elmoth had liked best to visit the Hadhodrim in Nogrod and Belegost, there had been many occasions when he had traveled along to Menegroth as well during Maeglin’s childhood, both on business and for purposes he had shared with neither his son nor his lady wife. He knew not the Iathrim of Menegroth. He knew not whether they would be inclined to write missives to the lord of Nan Elmoth if his prodigal son came to stay among them for any length of time. He knew not what they would do if the lord of Nan Elmoth endeavored to take his prodigal son back with him to his own lightless lands. It was no risk which Maeglin cared to take.
“You have never been there before, have you,” Finduilas reflected, frowning thoughtfully. That frown was soon directed back at the canvas. Maeglin could not be certain—he had learned better of seeking thoughts directly to glean answers years ago, after all—but there was always that bleed off of people’s minds in frustration, provided that their control was not absolute, and he thought that her frustration might have been related to her choice of paints to bring out here with her, or perhaps regarding her choice of a scraper to bring out into the forest with her, above all of the other scrapers she could have chosen, Finduilas having several scrapers of varying sizes and fineness. Her full array of scrapers, which Maeglin had seen once or twice when she was working on something particularly complex, was wide enough that he supposed that one would not be entirely sufficient to her need.
Of course, there was a part of him that would have liked to carry on a fuller conversation with her. Maeglin found the ability to carry on a conversation with ease an elusive beast, something he had the ability to catch only rarely, and then could not guess at how long it would remain in his grasp before slipping through his fingers once again. Passion for a topic could sometimes catapult him into easy speech, but it was no steady, consistent guide to the destination so desired. More often, Maeglin found himself with many things that he wanted to say, but just as was the case with all that he did not wish to say, they would become trapped in the labyrinth of his mouth, dying a slow death for lack of air. To be able to put into words what he wished more easily would have been a great boon.
But a fear of seeming foolish held him back from forcing out thoughts and feelings which were finding no easy avenue into speech. That and common sense, that any the caution which had always served Maeglin so much better than saying what came to mind with no thought of the consequences, and yet always made him feel as if something vital and necessary within was shriveling up, the way a plant with broad and delicate leaves would shrivel up when denied the sunlight. The shriveling was at least better than feeling as if he was about the tumble over the side of a cliff, though. Maeglin knew he could survive that feeling of withering—he already had, many times. He was less certain of the cliff.
Whatever it was that Finduilas had been thinking about regarding her paints or her scraper, she seemed to have reached a conclusion to those thoughts, one which had banished the buzzing frustrating worrying at the outermost edges of her mind. “I think,” she muttered, with some wistfulness but not any discernible regret, “that this is as far as I will come out here. I will remember well enough to finish this in my own atelier.”
And if she chose then to return to the city, Maeglin would follow after her, he supposed. He would follow her. Maeglin swept a regretful gaze over the treetops past the hill, missing already the quiet of the forest. He would follow. There was little choice for him to do otherwise.
Finduilas did not suggest they return to the city. Finduilas chose instead to surprise him. Instead of beginning to pack up her things, she slid off of the stool and sat down on the grass, a few feet away from where Maeglin had settled down previously. He supposed the paint would have needed a bit more time to dry before the canvas could have been taken back to the city without ruining it, but still…
Finduilas next chose to fix him in a long stare. Oh. It was leavened by a small smile, the more subdued cousin of the dazzling smile she sometimes employed when trying to persuade an especially stubborn councilor or courtier to accept a proposal which she or her uncle supported. This smile did not feel as if Finduilas was particularly looking to push him towards any conclusion in particular, but this only intensified the pleasant-queasy feeling that made the world spin a little when Maeglin’s stomach chose that moment to lurch, jumping like it wanted to take up residence in his throat.
“If…” Finduilas averted her gaze for a moment, staring with furrowed brow at her canvas, before turning her attention back to Maeglin, supposedly now satisfied that her canvas would not fly away in the wind which sought still to whip their hair in front of their faces. “…If ever you decided that you wish to see more of Beleriand than Nargothrond, I would recommend Menegroth as a good place to start.”
Would that it was that simple. Not a day went by when Maeglin did not wish that it was that simple. If he had his mother’s courage, he could have ridden away from Nargothrond on any one of the occasions when he had been invited to do so. Perhaps if he had marshalled such courage, then his mother would not have ridden away three years ago, to return but infrequently, the only traces of her which made their way back to him in between flat, voiceless, longed-for letters. He did not even care that much for riding, not the way his mother and certain of her cousins loved to ride, but to see more of the world that had been made so shining and wonderful and unreal for him by his mother, that had been denied him by his father, it would have been worth the discomfort. If he could have brought himself to do it, it would have been with discomfort, but also with joy.
Caution stopped him, as caution halted him so many times before. Caution had been a true friend to Maeglin on occasions enough that he hesitated to turn aside its advice. Even when heeding caution left him feeling small, left him feeling as if he was laboring under a shadow, better the shriveling than the cliff.
“For its proximity,” Finduilas was saying, “Menegroth would be the best place to start.” Her eyebrows quirked momentarily as she went on, “I can’t imagine how your grandfather would complain if you chose to visit Doriath before Hithlum—”
Though he could not see how it could have been her intent, Maeglin still could not help but wince. The High King could but rarely spare time away from his holdings, fearing (most likely rightly) that if he began spending extensive spans of away from his own lands, the Enemy would catch wind of it, and begin pressing an advantage and start to try to chip away at the lands the Exiles held in siege around the fastness of Angband. Maeglin had met him three times since he had come to live in Nargothrond, the only occasions when the High King had thought it safe to come visit Nargothrond for a span, and he was… He was everything his mother had made him out to be, and more. It was impossible for Maeglin to deny that his kingly grandfather had been very good to him, on those occasions when they had met. And he was the sort of man whom Maeglin was increasingly shamed to have to refuse, when he received letters inviting him to spend similar spans of time visiting in Hithlum.
“—but there must come a time when he accepts that you have as much cause to spend time in Menegroth as you do in Barad Eithel.” Finduilas’s hand lit on Maeglin’s arm, making him jump a little. She tilted her head slightly, trying, most likely, to ensure that she had a good angle to look into his face, even if he did try to tilt his own head downwards to avoid her gaze. “I thought I should tell you, also, that when last I was in Menegroth, Thingol came to me, asking about you.”
That… was not ideal.
Maeglin had never known just what it was, whether Finduilas had less facility than he with delving into the thoughts of others and hearing the surface emotions which bled off of their minds, or if she was simply far, far more conscientious than he about not seeking out the thoughts of others, and not delving into those same bleeding surface emotions. If she knew what was passing through his mind just now, he had a feeling she would have thrown aside all of her typical control and recoiled from him, if only for the intensity of what was racing through that mind of his. She would certainly have lifted her hand from his arm. “He is aware that you are kin to him,” she went on gently. “Truth be told, I doubt that he would have ever expressed any interest in you if not for that tie; though I cannot claim to be any close confidant of his, I do not think Thingol has much interest in anyone outside of his own domains, if they are not bound to him by ties of blood. You may make of that what you will, Maeglin; I know that there are those who scorn such conduct, especially in a king. But when we spoke, I gleaned from it that he has no little interest in meeting you, even if he would not come out and say so directly.” She ducked her head and laughed to herself. “He spent a great deal of time trying to ask me what sort of person you are without actually asking me what sort of person you are. Perhaps it is because he is a king, but Thingol is not particularly expert in doing such things with any subtlety; it was not the easiest task in the world to keep a straight face through the conversation.”
It would, of course, be impossible to say in response to that that he did not want for the king of Doriath to be asking questions about him in any capacity, for any reason. On the list of things that were impossible, which included snuffing out Anor and breaking open the Gates of Night to release every fell creature which, similar to Ungoliant, there was no rational explanation for in all of the world, this was perhaps not as high up as it could have been. But to Maeglin, all things which were impossible seemed equally impossible, and saying to Finduilas that he did not want Thingol asking about him for any reason, no matter what the question it might have been, felt about as likely to him as his suddenly becoming imbued with the power to rip either Anor or Ithil out of the sky and snuff out the light which they blessed the world with. He could not do it. He absolutely could not do it.
So Maeglin was left to reach out for something he could do. And since there was no way he could answer this without coming across as at least somewhat churlish, since there was nothing in him which was willing to encourage this, he would simply have to sound churlish. Alas, it would not be the first time he had sounded churlish when speaking to Finduilas. It would not be the first time he had sounded churlish in Finduilas’s presence.
“I wonder,” Maeglin murmured, not meeting her gaze, though he could still feel her gaze fixed so firmly upon his face, like his skin was one of her paintings, and perhaps under other circumstances, he could have brought himself to enjoy that, but not now, “if I would truly be welcome anywhere in Doriath proper. I wonder if they would be so eager to accept the son of a princess of the Exiles, who was not one of the House of Arfin.”
And even when he had been a child, once he had been old enough to understand, really understand the context for why Thingol had banned nearly all of the Exiles from ever setting foot in Doriath, Maeglin had wondered about this. Menegroth had been made for him a place like spun sugar and the light cast upon a wall by a candle lit behind colored glass, and still, he wondered if it would be a place which would welcome him, he who was stained by the specter of Kinslaying, and whose maternal family’s hands could not claim to be clean of it, as the House of Arfin at least technically was. This stain would be especially dark and especially stubborn in the heart of Doriath, where an already evil deed was held more foul than most of the most terrible works of their Enemy.
Finduilas likely would not see it that way. She who passed between Nargothrond and Doriath freely, who seemed to be just as at home in one as in the other, such an anxiety would likely seem strange to her. Maeglin had never known her to feel any anxiety over how others might regard her, at least not close enough to the surface of her mind for him to hear it. She did not lack for courage in such an arena, and in his experiences in Nargothrond, he had come to the conclusion that those who possessed courage to spare in any one arena rarely had any real understanding of those who had no courage in it at all.
Finduilas… did not answer him immediately. That did stand out to Maeglin. She was not the sort of person who answered people impulsively, precisely, at least not in most matters, even those which were obviously close to her heart. Her responses were measured, at least when she was speaking to someone as a princess of Nargothrond, and when she was speaking to someone as Finduilas, she still clearly did not blurt things out to them, whatever they were speaking of.
Neither did Finduilas ever seem to need to take too long to answer someone, when they spoke to her. When Maeglin asked her a question, she either gave him the answer or admitted that she did not know the answer within the space of about thirty seconds, if that. When they spoke about something which required no questions, she had a quick reply to anything he might have said, nearly all of the time.
It was rare for her to pause as she had paused now. It was rare for her to turn her face away, staring at the ground as if there was something in her mind that she wrestled with, and rarer still that Maeglin could actually hear, from far off, the clamor of that thing being wrestled with in her mind. Maeglin’s brow furrowed deeply as he looked her over. What brought this on, in someone whom he rarely associated with such disorder? He wondered if there had been some… some incident which would cause her to lead her to associate Maeglin’s concerns with worries of her own. Perhaps there had been someone who had spoken to her impertinently, and the thought of it made Maeglin’s stomach boil into something like a burning coal.
“I wondered…”
Maeglin had been so caught up in his wondering just what it was that had provoked this long silence from Finduilas that he had been completely unprepared for Finduilas to speak once again. She did not notice him start, though, and for that much, he was grateful. He must always be grateful for something.
“I wondered,” Finduilas said softly, “if you felt that way.” She grimaced and shook her head choppily. “No, no. That isn’t accurate. I did not wonder if you felt that way; I knew you felt that way.” Offering him an apologetic smile, “I hope you will forgive me, but I made certain assumptions, based on what I knew of you and your upbringing. I do not think this one has led me wrong.”
“It has not,” Maeglin confirmed, stiff in spite of himself. It should not… He should not be surprised. He felt as if there was no greater scandal in Beleriand than the circumstances of his birth, the circumstances of his childhood, what that had all meant for his mother. There were many who had made assumptions, and many of them considerably less kind in their nature and in the nature of their assumptions than Finduilas herself. He did not wish… He did not wish, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, to associate her with any of those. But it was not something that he could help. He was all too accustomed to people making assumptions. He was all too accustomed to those assumptions being unkind.
To her… Actually, Maeglin could not say what he thought it was, that Finduilas looked abashed at this. After a moment, he thought mostly that he wished he had not been responsible for it. He wished that he had held his tongue, or that at the very least, if holding his tongue was beyond him, that he could have at least kept from sounding so stiff. A blunt knife likely could have done less damage.
Finduilas looked abashed, and then she seemed to be find it in herself to push it down and nod to herself, as if this was some sort of answer to some sort of question that had been nagging at her for a while. “I thought so.” Her voice still sounded so soft, in a way which Maeglin heard but rarely, and typically only when the edges of her voice were made soft with worry or with old grief or with fresh grief over some project ruined, some dream lost to the misty light of morning, some opportunity slipped through her fingers. He… he could not help but listen more closely when her voice grew soft in this way. There was nothing to do but listen. “Do you know?” She smiled, but he could not say that it was a happy smile. “Do you know that there are times here in Nargothrond when I feel as if…” She paused, grimacing. “It is melodramatic of me to say it, but I can think of no other way to describe it properly. Everything else seems insufficient to what I actually feel.
“There are times,” Finduilas said slowly, “when, here in Nargothrond, I feel as if my Sindarin blood is as some strange appendage on my body, at least in the eyes of many of those around me, those Exiles who have never mixed with the Sindar in any way. They do not go so far as to treat it as unsightly, but to them, it serves no purpose, and it is better if I never reference it in any real way, if I behave as if my Sindarin mother does not exist to me, as if there is no other world for me outside the world of the Exiles. I am a princess of the Ñoldor, and I should look after the interests of the Ñoldor, without any deep concern for the affairs of the Sindar—at least, as far as they are concerned.
“As you can most likely imagine—” and here the softness scratched its way out of her voice, setting down hardness in the bloody ribbons it had left behind “—things are not so different for me in Menegroth. I…” She picked at her sleeve. “I cannot fault you your reluctance to go, Maeglin.” Though she must know that his reluctance was rooted in something far deeper than this. “I think it would be more difficult for you than it is for me, considering the avenue by which you claim descent from the House of Finwë. Though I am of the House of Arfin, ultimately, and there is no fault laid upon me for the Kinslaying in the Undying Lands, I have found it best never to speak of the fact that there lies within me the blood of the Ñoldor, at least not when I am within the bounds of Doriath. It has never gone over well, and I do tire eventually of alienating those around me, even when I wish for something on principle.” Distastefully, she added, “I tire of being treated as if any part of me is something I should be ashamed of.”
Maeglin nodded, uncaring of whether or not it might be appropriate to let on his own experiences in such a way. It was… It spoke of truth too deeply for him to ignore it. It went too far into his own heart to ignore it.
“Do you know of Celeborn of Doriath?” Finduilas asked suddenly, her eyes abstracted and her voice a little… Maeglin could not identify that emotion, actually. It was as faint as it was unfamiliar.
Cautiously, Maeglin tilted his head to one side and replied, “I believe I have heard the name mentioned to me.”
She folded her arms across her chest, nodding sharply to herself. “He is my uncle, though he is kin to me otherwise as well. He is married to my aunt, and kin to us through my great-grandfather, Olwë. To you, he is a cousin of…” Her eyes glazed over, before she shook her head as sharply as she had nodded a moment before. “It does not matter just how he is a cousin to you. He is kin to us both, is my meaning. He has not left Doriath since Anor first rose in the sky, do you know?” And that touch of strain in her voice, Maeglin had heard before, and he never cared to hear it again, considering the inevitable circumstances. “At first, I suspect he was simply too wary of how the world had changed with the rising of Ithil and Anor to wish to leave the place he had known and loved. But now he refuses to leave Doriath on the ground that he does not wish to associate with the Exiles on account of some of them being Kinslayers. I love my uncle, I do, but there are times when he behaves as if there is nothing of value in the Exiles, and loving my uncle becomes something like an exercise in cutting out a part of myself.
“What I want—” and now, she seemed to be speaking entirely to herself, but as long as she did so aloud, it was hardly as if Maeglin could avoid listening to her “—is to see both sides wedded together in both places, with neither considered awkward, or unwanted, or…” Her voice was catching, a little, and it made Maeglin sway forward, a little, though he was unequal to the task of providing anyone comfort, let alone her. But she waved a hand, and when she spoke again, there was none of that catch at all. No happiness, but no distress, either. “I have thought, many times, that it is not so much to ask for. I have thought that it is not so much to ask for that we all bear more respect for one another, those of us who have not shed each other’s blood.” She sighed heavily and shook her head, something that was too subdued, too self-deprecating to be a smile spasming on her mouth. “But affairs being what they are, it seems nothing more than a fantasy, now. A fantasy, and a foolish one at that!”
Maeglin looked away, jaw set. “I do not think it foolish,” he muttered, all of the tension he had once let out of his back in it once again, hard enough to snap.
He would have liked for a world like that, when he was a child. It would have made many things somewhat easier—and if he was wrong about that, than perhaps it would have provided him some comfort, nonetheless. But it was not foolish. He knew it was not foolish. She was not given to foolishness, and the words she had spoken spoke to him far too deeply for him to willingly name it foolishness.
There was not much said between them for the rest of the time they spent in the Taur-en-Faroth. Maeglin could not guess at the real cause of Finduilas’s silence. His own silence, he spent in long thought and stuttering longing, an idea germinating in his mind, taking root too quickly and too deeply to be weeded out and thrown away.