Chapter Text
“My Lord Gil-galad,” said Círdan, ducking into the tent with a slight smile that betrayed the unfamiliarity of the address. Gil-galad stood immediately—as courtesy dictated, as was his habit—and his own smile, in answer, was wide and genuine enough that his cheeks ached.
“Círdan!” he exclaimed. “Just whom I wanted to see. Look, that thing about the Nandor, any chance I can foist off the dinner to you? You are their kinsman, after all, and they probably hate you a lot less than they hate a Noldorin High King.”
“On the contrary,” Círdan said, and damn, there went Gil-galad’s hopes for freeing up the evening, “the people from Ossiriand at least must have warmer feelings toward your people than to mine.”
“Come on, Círdan, not even as a favor to me? There’s a boat by the docks with my name on it, you know. And Lady Galadriel says the weather tonight will be lovely.”
“Then I am afraid the Nimfalas would have to wait.” Here Círdan turned a disapproving look on him, frowning thoughtfully. “A lovely weather, hmm? My lord, have we not been warned of high waves and storms for the week?”
Gil-galad shrugged, knowing full well he’d been caught out. “Ah, well. Depends on whether one might find storms lovely, I suppose.”
Círdan sighed the begrudging sigh of exasperated councilors everywhere, saddled with an unruly king. “Is that so,” he said flatly, and Gil-galad did his absolute best not to giggle outright at the tone. “But that is beside the point, Gil-galad. You have hours yet to prepare for the dinner, and I—well, have you seen Elros? The boy hasn’t turned up for any of his meals today.”
“That’s odd,” said Gil-galad. For all that the twins were finished growing, they certainly seemed to need much more sustenance than their Elven kin did. He walked out from behind the desk, drumming his fingers on his chin. Concern always did make him restless. “All right, I’ll send someone to look for him. What about Elrond?”
“That one, at least, has been seen. I believe the Lady Galadriel is with him,” Círdan said, and smiled reassuringly. “It has not even been a full day, Gil-galad. I’m sure nothing’s wrong. Although . . . would you mind looking for the boy yourself?”
“Huh?” Gil-galad asked, dumbfounded for a second. “Me? Why?”
“The boy might benefit from it,” said Círdan, who after all could be as cryptic as the best of them when it suited him. “Indeed, you are one of the highest authorities in his life. The highest, perhaps.”
And that, well, that was how he ended up combing the entire encampment and its surrounding area for one young Peredhel.
He finally found Elros standing over a cliff, his back straight as a rod and his gaze far away. The cliff—which hadn’t been a cliff until yesterday—wasn’t exactly stable ground, though, and as Gil-galad carefully picked his way towards Elros, he could sense the tremors in the rock that told him the very ground beneath his feet would crumble to silt in another fortnight.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” he called, stopping a few steps behind Elros. “Not without a guardsman at least.”
“Ulmo will not leave me to my death.”
The arrogance in his voice was a surprise, and Gil-galad eyed him warily for a moment. There was almost nothing left, here, of Ëarendil’s little boy; this tall, hardened warrior in front of him was as much a stranger to him as the glittering army of Valinor.
But then he realized—it had not been arrogance, nor even conviction, but merely an acceptance of the truth.
“You seem aggrieved,” he said, and then nearly flinched at his own words. Why had that slipped out?
Elros made no answer, even as Gil-galad closed the rest of the distance and stood next to him. Down below, the water shimmered darkly under the bright afternoon sun, the depth too much for proper waves to form. The land was quite literally breaking apart.
He wordlessly handed Elros a piece of bread and a wine-skin. Elros bit into the bread, and then devoured it in seconds—in any case, there went Gil-galad’s worry over his appetite—before bringing the wine-skin to his lips. Something from the vineyards of Valinor, Gil-galad knew, mild and sweet with a fascinating tang for which the best descriptor was golden; Elros swallowed it down as if it were watered ale.
“Elros,” Gil-galad said, unsure how to proceed. Had it really been only a handful of decades since he’d first met Ëarendil? Back then, if someone had told him that the little boy would marry the Iathrim princess, jaunt off to the West, bring back an entire army of Maiar and Noldor, and leave two sons in Gil-galad’s care—he would never have believed it. And that was without getting into the whole Fëanorian side of things.
“Yes, sire?”
“What troubles you?” he asked, deciding on a direct approach. “I would help if I could, but I cannot unless you tell me how.”
Elros was silent for a moment. There were seagulls circling overhead, and from time to time the ground rumbled, but Elros could’ve been carved from stone for all that he stood there with a wine-skin in his hand and a tattered cloak around him, like a Mannish hero from some fireside tale.
“A king is he who can hold his own, or else his title is in vain,” said Elros, when he finally deigned to reply, and something about the way he said it told Gil-galad he was quoting someone else’s words.
It struck him, then, that minya, he had no idea which of the twins was older and therefore Ëarendil’s heir, and tatya, here was someone who could rightfully contest his claim to the High Kingship of Noldor—really, Elros could declare himself king of all Free Folks on Middle-Earth, and probably succeed. Such was the blood that coursed through the veins of this young man.
Elros seemed all too aware of that as he took another swig of the wine and continued.
“That’s our home, sire. It may be broken, it may be ruined, but that’s our home. And don’t give me that bullshit about Elven-home either; you and I both have no idea what Valinor’s like.”
“I won’t,” he said, but Elros barely acknowledged it.
“Arvernien, the Wall of Andram, Amon Ereb, Nogrod and Belegost . . . And the ruins of Gondolin and Doriath are there, sire, those lands are where my forefathers and mothers were buried. Hador Goldenhead fell before the walls of Barad Eithel that now lie forever beneath the waves.” Elros sighed, rubbing at his mouth with his free hand. “And you ask me why I am aggrieved, as if you have no eyes to see.”
“What would you have me do, then?” he asked. “Demand that the Valar restore Beleriand? They do not even heed Finarfin the fair, Elros. What makes you think they would listen to me?”
“You could at least try.”
The disappointment that radiated from Elros was like a thousand needles driving into Gil-galad’s skin.
Truth was, Gil-galad did not much feel the loss of Beleriand; it had never been really his. Most of his life had been spent in Falas and Balar, and a good deal at the Havens of Sirion—always he’d had one foot in the sea. For him, the sight of Beleriand sinking under the waves almost had a poetic beauty to it, a sense of vindication. A promise of burying the past and starting over.
But then it could not possibly be the same for Elros, who would have grown up roaming and protecting the woods of Ossiriand. And besides, Elros was right. He was a king, and duty-bound to—how had Elros put it?—hold his own.
Now if only that argument could hold up before the Elder King himself.
“I could try,” he parroted. “I should’ve tried.”
“Careful, that’s almost an apology.”
Gil-galad gave Elros a look. Elros shrugged.
“A king should never apologize.”
“That I have trouble accepting,” Gil-galad muttered. “I neglected my duty. I am sorry. To you, and all the people of Beleriand.”
“It’s something, I guess,” Elros said. “I’m not . . . I’m not trying to blame you or anything, sire. I’m just frustrated, you know, that no one seems to give a damn.”
“Is that why you missed your meals? Círdan was worried. And believe me, nobody wants a worried Círdan.”
The joke was weak, but Elros, bless the kid, chuckled lightly and nodded anyway. “Yeah,” he said, some of the tension loosening from his intonation. “I can’t figure it out, whether I should be angry at them or the Valar. Doing this, destroying the entire continent, the Valar are asking a lot of us, aren’t they? We’re forced to accept their word that this is all for the best. And if we don’t accept it, well, unlucky you.”
This yet again was another aspect Gil-galad hadn’t considered—the Eldar, at least the ones around him, seemed to have absolute faith in the Valar no matter what folk they belonged to. Perhaps some of the Avari might share Elros’s sentiments, but Gil-galad rather suspected that Elros had been spending much of his time with the Edain survivors.
Even if that were so, though, he didn’t know what he could do about it. Chide him? Instruct him to spend more effort with the other half of his heritage? The kid’s father was a star, his mother was a seabird, his former guardians a pair of kinslayers . . . and his current guardian, if he could be called that, a boy-king of nothing but rock-dust and sea-foam. Aw, hell. He was completely out of his comfort zone here.
“I’ll talk to Eönwë,” he ended up saying. “He wouldn’t give a shit, and it won’t amount to much, but I can still prattle my jaw off.” Elros looked startled, and Gil-galad grinned to see it. You learned some things, growing up among the Falathrim. “I’ll do it because you’ve made me realize that I should. And I’ll also be doing it for you.”
Elros nodded, an undecipherable expression flitting across his face. Funny thing was, Elros looked nothing like either Elwing or Ëarendil. The people he reminded Gil-galad the most of were the men of the House of Hador, really, those tall, broad-shouldered warriors who had seemed so large in his childhood, filling up the fortresses of Hithlum.
“And,” he continued. “Not that I want to pressure you, but I would appreciate it a lot if you’d talk about these things a bit more, before deciding that staring out at the ocean alone’s a better option. Do it for me, all right? For my peace of mind.”
“For you, then, sire,” said Elros.
It felt like a victory.
The ground gave a particularly hard quake, almost throwing Gil-galad off the cliff and even bringing a measure of shock to Elros’s composure. Gil-galad bit down on an expletive—although judging from Elros’s stifled laughter, he’d not been entirely successful—and hastily took several backward steps. Elros was certainly more graceful than most Men, he’d give him that.
“We should,” Elros started, and then quite openly suppressed a snicker. “We should probably head back down.”
Stop laughing at your king, Gil-galad wanted to say, but something stopped him, some inexplicable pride rising at the way Elros smiled and pressed his lips together.
“There’s a storm coming from the west,” he said in the end. “But I am an excellent sailor, and one might say it’s well beyond time you learned to handle a boat. So what do you think, Elros? Shall we put off all our sacred obligations for a joyride over lost Beleriand?”
Círdan was going to kill him, he was absolutely going to end up a mangled corpse in the bottom of the ocean for this—but then Elros shrieked “Oh dear Eru we are all going to die!” for the fourth time, and Gil-galad felt no guilt whatsoever at having alerted Círdan via messenger to take the Nandorin meeting in his stead.
The Nimfalas rocked viciously, riding waves four, five times taller than it was long, and Elros’s scream dissolved into a mess of jumbled curses. Gil-galad let out a delighted laugh. Elros recovered just enough to yell a particularly innovative threat involving several different species of land-dwelling bears, all of which were sensible enough never to step a paw on the death-trap that was a boat, and would most certainly devour Gil-galad for kicks and giggles. There was a distinct possibility that Círdan might have to get in line.
Rightly so, in Gil-galad's opinion. Compared to all the times Círdan had ditched Thingol’s courtiers in order to take his ward out sailing, this was practically respectable behavior. He had learned from the best after all.