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The light that glinted off Lake Mithrim speared Fingon by the eye. He’d crested the encircling hills at the head of his scouting party a moment before and paused to consider the mirror-bright lake, nearly white, and the two darker silhouettes that winged it on opposite sides.
Too late, he noticed the oncoming group from the Fëanarian camp, mounted and lightly armored as Fingon and his companions. Blinkered by the sunspots that danced under his eyelashes, he spotted the auburn hair of the foremost rider and his stomach swooped.
But when Fingon reined in his horse to greet the party, it was Amrod who hailed him, followed by his twin.
“Good day, cousin,” Amrod said. “Are you coming or going?”
“Coming,” Fingon replied. “We had reports from the Sindar of small orc parties assaying out of the mountains and across the plains under the fog. But they seem to have retreated, or hidden themselves well, now that the skies have cleared.”
“We heard the same,” Amras said.
“Well, I wish you safe hunting,” Fingon said, “if that is where you are going. Are any of your brothers joining you? Later?”
Fingon would’ve hesitated to make even an oblique inquiry, if faced with Celegorm in a particular mood, Caranthir in any mood, or, worst of all, Curufin. What had been relief at Maedhros’s return, their gratitude and gifts, had transmuted into sour resentment when it was clear that Maedhros would live—and that it meant Fingon and Fingolfin perforce must also be permitted not only to live, but to come and go freely along Mithrim’s shores.
In Valinor, Fingon’s elder cousins—with one notable exception—regarded him little, as though he was fundamentally beneath them. Now, he was hated by a few of them in truth.
Amrod and Amras, however, had once been Fingon’s agemates. Whatever contempt they had for him was only hereditary, not individual.
Amras’s eyes flicked over Fingon’s shoulder, where his escort and the rest of the scouting party waited, while Amrod said, with forced care, “Tyelkormo has taken a party of his own to the northeast even as we go to the northwest. We plan to rendezvous with him tomorrow morning. Our other brothers are busy with their own duties. Nelyafinwë held us all in a deep council last night, until the little hours of the morning.”
“I see,” Fingon said. Nightmares, again. “Is he still in private council? I hope whatever concerns him isn’t too grave.”
“He’s the Noldóran and we’re at war,” Amrod scoffed. His contempt was almost a relief, but he lowered his voice and went on. “Nothing—urgent. Maglor was with him for many hours after the rest of us departed, and now he’s teaching Tyelpë some game or other. But a visit from you wouldn’t be unwelcome.”
Fëanor’s sons resented him, loathed him, mistrusted him. Except in this, when they wanted him to do what they, because of fear or inability, could not. Even together and at their most ferocious and loathsome, Maedhros’s six brothers were not worse than wandering Angband alone.
Certainly not worse than hearing Maedhros beg for death.
Hopefully Maedhros had not repeated that plea from the mountain again. It had been weeks since the last time he’d done so, an unending stint of dark hours.
With that fear lodged in his spirit, Fingon did not stop to leave a message for his father. He rode to the Fëanarian sentries still wearing his armor, but none denied him entry. No one stopped him as he made his way to the royal residence, the king’s honor guard bowing and announcing him as they had strict orders from Maedhros to do.
As Ambarussa had said, Fingon found Telperinquar in the royal apartments with his uncle. The two men sat on red upholstered chairs on either side of the small wooden table, staring intently at what was set on it, surrounded by several bronze braziers for warmth and Fëanarian lamps for light. Tyelpë’s dress was plain: undyed tunic and trousers, dusted with forge-soot around the cuffs.
Maedhros hadn’t even bothered to dress this day. Possibly he’d risen in the night, when the dream-terrors struck, and donned his dressing robe. The burgundy fabric was heavily embroidered in geometric patterns, the inside lined with a bear or some other beast’s dark brown fur. It swallowed him up less than it had a few weeks ago.
“Hello, Uncle,” Tyelpë greeted him, since his father wasn’t present. His eyes shifted to Fingon but he didn’t rise to embrace him, shoulders stiffly angled towards Maedhros. He’s afraid to move, Fingon thought, and startle the beast.
Maedhros too looked to Fingon, the manic flame behind his eyes belying the grey bruising beneath his eyes and the wan pallor of his skin. Maedhros lifted his hand in greeting, but diverted his attention immediately back to the wooden board on the table, filled with ivory and ebony stones.
When Maedhros offered no verbal greeting, Tyelpë said nervously, “Uncle Nelyo is teaching me a new game. A variant of arantyalmë.”
The board they played on was a similar size to the arantyalmë board that Turgon owned and on which he’d taught Idril. He’d carried the board and its pieces all the way from Tirion to Beleriand. One year, on the Ice, Fingon and Aredhel gifted Idril her own set of ivory pieces for her begetting day. They’d carved them from whatever small bits of tusks that they could scavenge and spare from the whiskered Ice-beasts they slaughtered for lamp-oil and food.
Tyelpë and Maedhros, however, did not play with pieces of king and queen, eagle and judge, but with smooth stones colored to match the board, which were set at crossings of straight lines scored into the wood. Tyelpë played white; Maedhros black.
“Not truly arantyalmë, no.” Maedhros’s voice grated out from his throat. Whatever nightmares troubled him in the night had made him scream himself awake—again. With grim curiosity, Fingon wondered how long he’d gone on screaming after, before anyone could calm him. He’d thought the sleep-terrors were getting better. Maedhros continued, “The object of the game is to capture as much territory of the board as possible, by encircling the opponent’s stones. By this measure, you can see that Tyelpë is losing badly.”[1]
Tyelpë flinched. Maedhros must have seen, he had to have seen, but chose to ignore it. The black pieces encroached upon the white, dividing Tyelpë’s territory into small islands in the two corners of the board closest to Fingon. And even as he watched, Maedhros swiftly placed another black stone near in the center of Tyelpë’s whites.
“But he’ll improve, with practice,” Fingon said. Moving behind Tyelpë, he set a reassuring hand on the young man’s shoulder. Tyelpë tensed, then relaxed into the touch. This close, Fingon could smell the damp sweat the darkened the hair on his neck.
Maedhros grunted.
Fingon asked, “By what name is this new game called?”
“If it has a true name in Quenya or the Grey-Elves’ tongue that you all now speak so well, I do not know it, but those who I last played with call it by another name, which I will not here repeat. It would translate to something like…hm. Peltyalmë.”[2]
“Do you mean to say,” Fingon said, “that this is a game of Angband?”
“Not only of Angband,” Maedhros said, looking up for a moment, eyes fierce with light, before placing a black stone near to one of Tyelpë’s white, “but of Morgoth, yes. And also of my father, who refined some of the rules and stratagems.”
“Your father played this game against Morgoth?” Fingon asked, with that same twisted horror and fascination that filled him whenever he heard Fëanor's deeds spoken of. “In Valinor? When?”
“Before our exile to Formenos,” Maedhros said, “but I do not believe they ever finished their match, because Father was so angered by something the Foe did or said that he left ere their play was finished. He refused to speak with him again ever after. At Formenos I helped him recreate the rules. Careful, Tyelpë!” The young man's hand froze above the board before he could place his white stone. “I intend to teach Fingon to play, but I would prefer that our match not end so quickly.”
Fingon considered saying that Curufin was looking for his son, but the lie would be obvious.
Instead, he said, “I have only a little time before I need to return to my father’s camp, and I wished to speak with you in private, Russandol.”
There. Tyelpë was left out of it, except as obstacle to their privacy.
“Well, if you only have a little time,” Maedhros said, and shooed his nephew with a wave of his hand. Tyelpë bowed to Maedhros, and Fingon, and hastened from the room in what could only be relief.
At the table, still seated, Maedhros sighed and began to remove the black and white stones from the board. His lips moved as he did so, counting.
“You truly played this game against Morgoth Himself?”
“Have I not mentioned it in my ravings? The winner would gain a Silmaril, if he did not already possess one. The loser would have some skin flayed off by the orcs’ whips in Angband’s dungeons,” Maedhros said, “and how could I refuse such a tempting offer! Of course, I did not win a single time.”
“Russandol,” Fingon sighed, “it’s not my place to tell you not to speak of such things—”
“And yet here you are!”
“—but perhaps have a care for how you speak in front of your nephew? You have no grievance against him. You need not unsettle him deliberately.”
“Because I unsettle him enough by existing? Or because I returned to existence, puncturing the delusion that I was safely dead? Or that I will not play the part of anguished thrall and allow myself to be cosseted?” A hint of bitterness entered his voice. Maedhros punctuated the end of this speech by waving the end of his amputated arm.
The gesture failed wholly in its aim to disturb Fingon. He’d made the cut, staunched it, later washed and bandaged it before Maedhros was well enough in mind to let another do it in place of Fingon, or well enough in body to care for it himself. Would that some anguish would depart from Maedhros, or that he would allow himself to be cosseted a little more by his family. The questions, Does your shoulder pain you today? and Did you rest soundly? elicited from Maedhros a response, in proportion and tone, that suggested he’d heard instead, And why couldn’t you have gotten down from that mountain yourself?
When Fingon did not stir at his provocation, Maedhros grimaced.
“Perhaps I see him as too much an extension of his father.”
“He isn’t,” Fingon said, “and consider also that you’re old enough to be his grandfather.”
Maedhros’s chapped lips formed an o as he paused in sweeping the pieces away from the board, startled. Then he laughed, a scraped-out sound, two pieces of plate sliding against each other on a picked-over battlefield. It heartened Fingon more, these days, than it hurt him. The glimpse it gave him into the future—in these brief moments when he did not mourn every lost piece of the Maedhros he knew in Valinor—heartened him also. They could move forward, they could reforge themselves and their peoples anew, in friendship and love, in anger and endurance.
“Now,” Maedhros said, smiling less grimly, the light of his spirit less fierce and more welcoming than when Fingon first entered, “what does my brave, noble-hearted cousin wish to discuss with me? He is looking quite the valiant, today,” and Maedhros leaned back in his chair and looked Fingon up and down with a gaze that dripped affection and desire like honey.
Another provocation. Fingon ignored it, though it seemed to pour honey down the insides of his thighs.
Better to be direct, to answer Maedhros’s attempts to distract with bald purpose that held no allusions. “I heard that you slept poorly, so I wished to see how you were.”
“Heard from whom?” Maedhros asked. He tsked. “Are you saying that my servants are passing tales across the lake?”
“I met Ambarussa after my patrol,” Fingon said. There would be trouble for Amrod and Amras later, for which they would be sure to resent Fingon all the more, but he wouldn’t evade Maedhros’s question to protect them. “You kept all of them, all night?”
“I cannot be blamed if my brothers wish to fret and cluck like little hens, for all they think they are wolves. But I am fine, as you can see.” Maedhros spread his arms wide. The tie that secured the dressing robe was not very tight. Its slackness allowed a view of the pink, scarred planes of Maedhros’s chest in the vee of skin revealed. “If you would rather believe my brothers’ word over my own, then I invite you to come make your own… inspection.”
Steadfast, Fingon raised his eyes to Maedhros’s face and kept them fixed there, with effort. “We should also discuss your meeting with my father.”
As soon as he was hale enough to issue orders from his sickbed—which was not very long at all, though Fingon had experienced that period as an eternity, longer than the crossing of Ice—Maedhros had ordered the better part of the Fëanarian horses given to Fingolfin as partial recompense for Losgar and in tribute to Fingon’s great deed. Between them and among their own peoples, Fingolfin and Maedhros were still determining how partial and what the other part of recompense might be. Wildly different views abounded even among Fingolfin’s own host. Even among his own children. And then there was the letter from Thingol, and the division of realms that it implied, casting all of their discussions and negotiations into disarray.
Fingon absented himself from the familial and logistical discussions as much as possible. He did not feel the desire to offer anything besides what he’d already accomplished by going to Angband. If his father wished to know Fingon’s opinion on some matter, he would ask directly and in private, and probably come to him last before any great decision was made. Until then, Fingon contented himself to play the part of envoy, emissary, but mostly courier.
“You arranged it, didn’t you?” Maedhros asked.
“You know I did,” Fingon answered, “since I delivered my father’s missive into your own hand. Please tell me you didn’t discard it in a fit of pique.”
“No.” Maedhros’s gaze was very heavy and hot upon Fingon, who shifted his unblinking gaze to the middle of Maedhros’s forehead. “If you arranged it, then it’s arranged. Why worry, valiant heart?”
“If you could give us, me, some indication of what you plan to say about the division of realms that Thingol allows us to claim, it would surely help my father prepare for—”
The fixed point of Maedhros’s forehead moved suddenly as he stood. Now Fingon’s eyes moved hastily away from the collarbone, still too sharp, exposed beneath the fur robe. His gaze traveled the graceful, warmly freckled line of neck, and then Maedhros stood very, very near, forcing him to look up even further to meet his eyes.
Maedhros, bastard, smirked as Fingon drew in a sharp breath.
Two knuckles tapped against his armored chest. Once, twice.
“Help your father?” Maedhros sounded almost curious. “Are we to reopen the matter of the first and second house again? Are you not meant to render aid unto me?”
“Russandol,” Fingon said, “I thought we were done discussing this. What more reassurance could you need? I came for you. I killed for you. I would have killed you, at your command.”
Maedhros leaned down, his mouth ghosting against the curve of Fingon’s right ear. “That was love. I would have your loyalty, also. For you did not obey me, in the last. Are you not my knight? Did I not give you this gift of the very armor you wear now?”
The armor was similar in form to that of leather worn by the Sindar, light and easy for fast riding over long distances, but the followers of Fëanor had of course made their own improvements. The cuirass and pauldrons that covered Fingon’s torso and shoulders were constructed with plates of silvered steel, fastened together like so many scales of fish with a fine silk of Nolofinwëan blue.
There was a helm, too ceremonial for patrol, which he had not worn today, glittering as it did with rich blue gems. If they were not the true sapphires of Aman’s abundance, then they were the best-quality jewels that could be pried from Beleriand’s scarcity. Another gift of recompense—or of gratitude. Who knew what Maedhros’s brothers had been thinking in crafting it, or if he’d simply commanded them?
Even Turgon couldn’t deny its quality and use in protecting Fingon in sorties against the orcs and wolves of Angband, as the Noldor pushed their frontier out from Mithrim. The work of the Noldor’s finest and greatest living smiths, the armor belonged not to Fingon but to Maedhros, who deigned to see him in it. Less vassal, more tribute. As much a part and parcel of Maedhros’s desire for him as having Fingon undressed in his bed.
Buckled into his armor, Fingon felt terribly exposed.
His blood ran hot. Beneath his cuirass and the padded chausses that covered his legs, his thighs and belly quivered. He searched himself for protests about duty and diplomacy, loyalty and liege-lords. There were none to be had, not once Maedhros leaned in and pressed their lips together, Maedhros’s left hand and right arm coming to rest on his shoulders. For what had he saved Maedhros, if not for this? Saving the Noldor from their worst impulses, yes, but also savoring his own reckless impulse to feel Maedhros’s body on his.
And Maedhros’s body was very close, now, and it wore little. Nothing at all beneath the fur-collar robe, which Fingon discovered when he dragged it away from Maedhros’s shoulders, splaying it wide and exposing his chest.
Dispensing with his leather gloves, Fingon touched Maedhros’s bare skin and feasted on the touch-reward of many hours spent helping Maedhros to learn the sword in his left hand. The shoulders thickening with muscle again, the flesh lightly freckled instead of peeling and burnt. All the while Maedhros kissed him roughly, chapped lips scraping against Fingon’s, drinking him in.
The archer’s calluses on Fingon’s fingers brushed against still-livid scar tissue on Maedhros’s back. Neither of them flinched; thus the new and awful became familiar and mundane. And so this was how they healed, by Fingon cleaving himself to Maedhros and hungering to press bruises over scars. Maedhros’s bare chest and hardened nipples pressed against Fingon’s armor—and Fingon couldn’t feel it, not through the metal and cloth he wore, but the heat emitted from the furnace of Maedhros manage to sear him through his layers, and he gasped.
Smiling against his mouth, Maedhros pulled away with a quick bite to Fingon’s lower lip that left him groaning. “Wait, come back, where are you—” But Maedhros dropped to kneel before Fingon. All the blood not in Fingon’s cock already rushed there, so quickly that he had to grip Maedhros’s shoulders to steady himself.
Kneeling before him, Maedhros leered, copper hair gleaming, naked from the waist up, small bruises blooming like purple irises against his pale skin now burnished by a pink flush. Fingon couldn’t even tell if Maedhros was hard, beneath those thick furs pooled around his waist and legs, but then it seemed not matter, because Maedhros’s left hand was at the buckle of his sword-belt and his right arm was pressed against Fingon’s hip, fixing him in place.
“Come on, help me with this,” Maedhros said, “I may be a one-handed king, but I still would like to reward your service.”
“By sucking me off?”
Maedhros raised an eyebrow. “Is there some other reward you’d like in this moment?”
“Fuck no,” Fingon said hastily, because once committed to a course of action, however potentially disastrous, he did not waver. Also he felt that his loins would shrivel to nothing if he did not get his cock in Maedhros’s mouth very, very soon.
Together they removed Fingon’s sword belt and undid the ties that held up his leggings beneath the scale armor. When at last Fingon fumbled for the laces of his hose, he nearly got bitten for his troubles and made to retort but Maedhros was dragging his leggings down so that his erection and his ass were both exposed. Fingon bit the inside of his own cheek to keep from crying out as Maedhros laved and kissed his way from cockhead to root.
Then he pulled away, a gleam in his eyes as he looked up at Fingon, his hand closing around the base of Fingon’s cock. Where it stayed, for several hot moments as Fingon’s pulse drummed a war-song against the boundary of his throat.
“Russandol,” he panted, “king or no, I fucking swear that I will cut off your other hand if you don’t start moving it.”
Maedhros laughed and gave him one and then another languid stroke. Fingon cursed him and his house.
“I’m afraid yours will have less weight than the Doomsman’s. Worry not. I plan to give you satisfaction. Were we not talking of loyalty, and reward for it?”
Maedhros sucked the head of Fingon’s cock between his lips. Beautiful, perfect, obscene. How could the Enemy have ever wasted such loveliness on the ashy peaks of Thangorodrim? The regal curve of Maedhros’s cheekbone was prouder than any triumphant arch ever raised in Tirion, the brown freckles like flecks of mica in a vein of otherwise flawless white stone. The cheek hollowing beneath that arch and then bulging as Maedhros drew more of Fingon into his mouth, sucking and fucking him with his tongue.
“Do you admit then, that I am your king?” Maedhros asked.
“What?”
“You have not said that I am he. Would you come with me, if I went into the East to build my fortress there?”
“Russandol.” Fingon closed his eyes and grit his teeth. He could not bear the sight and the feel of Maedhros pressing small kisses to the head of his cock while his skillful fingers worked along Fingon’s shaft. Speech began to desert him as the pressure built “I—I, promised—”
“I know who you made your promises to,” Maedhros said, almost sweet. “Tell me that you would break them for me.”
He did cry out, when Maedhros’s fingers, slick with spit, rubbed at his entrance. Fingon’s hips jerked. Hand thus occupied, Maedhros worked Fingon’s length into his mouth.
“Please,” Fingon begged, knowing not what for. Hot tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. His body pistoned between the teasing touches Maedhros’s fingers danced at his entrance, and the slick, wet heat of his lover’s mouth.
Maedhros drew off again, lips shining with the proof of Fingon’s arousal. “Or, tell me that you will not break them. Tell me either way.”
“I love you,” Fingon offered, desperate, thrashed with pleasure, Maedhros circling his rim like he was teasing the lip of a thin crystal goblet. Fingon wanted those hard, scarred fingers to move inside him and stay there forever, he wanted to flee, he wanted his cock to hit the back of Maedhros’s throat while those red lips stretched over his shaft, he wanted to weep.
“I know,” Maedhros said, “but tell me regardless.”
“I can’t,” Fingon cried. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, please.”
He didn’t say, I can’t tell you. He didn’t say, I can’t call you my king, or I can’t betray my father.
Perhaps Maedhros heard, anyway.
The longest of Maedhros’s fingers pressed into Fingon, easing past the tight circle of muscle in the same instant that Maedhros swallowed him back down. The roaring wave of his pleasure crashed against the rocky shoreline, sundering his spirit from his body as in the white haze of release, he floated free and effervescent and ephemeral as bubbles of sea-foam. Iridescent, dissolving one by one back into the waters.
The tide pulled out. Awareness of his body returned, attention drawn in part by the seawater sting of Maedhros’s mouth delivering small, biting kisses to the tops of Fingon’s thighs where the skin was exposed.
What in Utumno’s pits had just happened? The fog of arousal lifting from his mind, Fingon considered that Maedhros had arranged Fingon’s pleasure as aggressively as he’d cornered Tyelpë’s white stones with black in his game. And why, Fingon didn’t bother to consider, because the soft groans spilling from Maedhros’s lips drew his attention like an arrow sighted. Maedhros’s single hand was now at work between Maedhros’s legs, and Fingon wanted a better look.
He dismissed his irritation—his confusion—his exhaustion, by grabbing Maedhros by the braid and hauling him to his feet, kissing him soundly.
“What do you want?” Fingon said against Maedhros’s mouth. He sucked the salty taste of himself off of Maedhros’s tongue. “My hand? My mouth?”
“No,” Maedhros said, despite the fact that he dragged Fingon by the wrist behind him, into the alcove separate from the seating area, where the bed was curtained off. Pulling Fingon to kneel beside the bed, Maedhros sat on the edge, fumbling with the laces of his small-clothes and cursing.
Fingon read his intention in the way he’d positioned the both of them, and took advantage of Maedhros’s moment of ineptitude with his left hand to say, “No, absolutely not, Russandol, let me put my mouth on you, last time—”
“You looked beautiful,” Maedhros gasped, freeing his straining prick from his small-clothes and pointing it at Fingon’s face.
“I’m not leaving here with my braids ruined because of your dick’s poor aim,” Fingon said, sense returning. “Lie back. Please? My—my lord?”
“Never call me that!” Maedhros snarled. Yet he lay back as Fingon asked him, stroking his own cock as he did. “Come—come kneel on the bed then. If we must have it your way.”
Belying Maedhros’s irritation was the way his cock was weeping in his hold. Fingon was careful to circle the end of the bed and approach from the opposite side so that he would not step over or jostle Maedhros as he knelt on the coverlet beside his lover’s form. Touching Fingon offered no obstacle to Maedhros, so long as the goal was Fingon’s pleasure. Neither did tender touches in the afterglow, once they’d both found release.
It was during the act and the pursuit of his own orgasm in which Maedhros could not suffer to be touched. And indeed he had tried to suffer it, when first they coupled after he recovered from his physical injuries. The spiritual injuries were, of course, harder to see, and that meant they were easier to irritate or re-open.
To even be allowed this much, after Alqualondë, to witness Maedhros hale and writhing on the bed, limbs straining with pleasure. After Losgar, to see Maedhros dewed with sweat and smirking up at him, knowing this desire was still shared. And after Thangorodrim, and all the horrible days after, to watch when Maedhros allowed himself to close his eyes as he chased his pleasure, trusting in the safety of Fingon's presence.
When Maedhros reached his peak, it was with a cry of Fingon! And Fingon’s doubts and fears were vanquished.
“Kiss me now,” Maedhros said, eyes still closed, a smile on his lips, the fire in him banked. Fingon fell forward to obey, pressing their lips together with an abundance of sweetness. That done, he fetched a damp cloth from the king’s wash-basin and gave it to Maedhros to clean himself.
They laid in that sweet silence for a while. Resting in his armor was far from comfortable, but the Ice once provided worse deprivations, and Fingon couldn’t bring himself to leave so quickly. Maedhros lay on his back, eyes yet closed. His breathing evened out while his body trembled slightly. Resting, but not asleep. It fell to Fingon to study him, which Maedhros likely marked, but in the short reprieve that followed sex, he was less inclined to snarl or snap. Otherwise, and often, he took great offense to his brothers, his healers, and even Fingon if he felt they studied him too intently.
Now Fingon catalogued: the dark circles under Maedhros’s eyes, which he’d noted earlier; the flush on his skin easing into a greyer pallor; the trembling that still hadn’t subsided. But his ribs were no longer so sharply visible. And he knew himself, and he knew who Fingon was, and that he was king.
Fingon risked to ask: “Of what did you dream, last night?”
“My brothers, the war, the Oath, my father. Unwinnable games of strategy against an immovable Foe,” Maedhros murmured. “The stones on that game board are the Silmarils, or I and all my brothers are imprisoned inside the stones as the Judge or Melkor tosses us around the board.”
“We didn’t imagine it would be easy, when we set out from Tirion.”
Maedhros smiled, opened his eyes, and turned towards Fingon. “You would say such a thing and leave me unable to fault you for your hope. Not when you came for me when there should have been none.”
His hand caught one of Fingon’s gold-plaited braids twined it through his fingers.
“No, you cannot,” Fingon replied, smiling.
“You’ll be expected back at your father’s camp?”
“Yes… but I can send a message back across the lake, if you need me to stay so that you can take your rest—”
Maedhros’s hand froze. Fuck! Fingon had spoken incautiously. I did not say I needed you! Maedhros would sit up and say, eyes flashing, banishing Fingon. And that would infuriate Maedhros’s brothers, and the meeting with Fingolfin would be pushed back once more, and—
“No,” Maedhros said. He did sit up, but it was only so that he could lean forward and give Fingon a chaste kiss of parting. “I shan’t delay you further.”
Fingon rode his horse back around the lake. There was some kind of test that he had missed, or misunderstood, in what Maedhros had wanted. That was the part of him, the playing of games and hatching of schemes, that would always be Fëanor’s. In the face of his uncertainty, Fingon could only do what he always did, and seek to defy them with hope.
A fortnight later, as arranged, Maedhros came at last to meet with Fingolfin in the latter’s camp. The settlement of Fingolfin’s host, newer come to Endor’s shores, was humbler than that across the lake. The construction of wood shelters in place of tents had begun not long before Fingon departed for Thangorodrim.
Though Fingon, perhaps the only person who could come and go from both camps with relative ease, might also have been the only person who realized this intimately. Maedhros insisted that he come to Fingolfin for the meeting. None of Maedhros’s brothers were with him.
The two kings spent several hours closeted together. Maedhros and his company of guards had arrived in the early evening, but by the time he emerged with Fingolfin, Vasa had departed and Rana had risen.
In the moonlight, Fingolfin’s brow was creased, his eyes passing over Fingon and his own guard, focused on some far-off object—something the rest of them could not see. A pensive look, but as Fingon approached and greeted them, the ice cracked: his father smiled and clasped his shoulder.
“No one will forget the peace that was forged here between our two houses,” his father announced, “on account of the great deed of Fingon, Fingolfin’s son!”
It seemed a strange thing to say. Maedhros’s face was both more and less guarded now than it had been in those Treelit days when he lied with ease about his father’s sword-hoards. He’d looked almost triumphant when he and Fingolfin walked out together, side-by-side. His smile was not entirely gone now, but it lessened to a sadder, more private thing when Fingon looked to him now.
His father squeezed Fingon’s shoulder again. Is it done? What is done? He wished to ask these and other questions, but bit his tongue. Neither of them would answer. Especially not out in the open air, where anyone might overhear. Not when he’d been excluded from the meeting. Patience was not a virtue that Fingon cultivated in himself, but he would wait for a better, more intimate moment.
Instead, as dutiful son, he said, “Shall I see Russandol off, Father, if your business is concluded?”
“Please do,” Fingolfin said, and bade Maedhros good night.
Side by side, they walked a little ways toward the small hostelry where the grooms and the Fëanarian guards waited with the horses. Fingon stole glances up at Maedhros, who kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. Those same eyes, the burning grey of them, which the other day had speared Fingon through from where Maedhros knelt below, below him but yet demanding he yield everything that was not already his, was not already sworn to other causes, his father’s, devouring him. Fingon was grateful for the darkness, which hid the heat that flared in his cheeks; and also the cover that it gave to his sudden recklessness, to flex his fingers and brush them against Maedhros’s as they walked.
How Fingon wished, wild with the phantom kiss of Maedhros’s skin on his, that his cousin would act with the same manic, driving need that animated him the other day. That Maedhros would abandon all the careful, distant propriety and care that he suddenly cared to cultivate in the midst of the Fingolfinian camp. To Utumno’s pits with all of it—fathers, politics, wars. Out of torment and beyond desire for death, Fingon had brought him back. For what else if not this? Maedhros was king, and all the king needed to do was turn his head and grab Fingon’s hand and take what he wanted, what Fingon must gratefully and obediently offer to a liege-lord, and Fingon…
He wanted that, too, didn’t he? His pounding heart must agree.
Before they reached the horses, Maedhros turned to him. Fingon curled his hand into a fist. Wished that he was more practiced with osanwe and could touch Maedhros’s thoughts—if he would even be allowed. Fingon’s heart drummed so loudly that surely Maedhros must know, even without extending his mind.
“Little cousin,” Maedhros said softly, cupping Fingon’s right cheek.
Fingon inhaled sharply. What would his father do, when he heard of this? Had he bargained away Fingon’s fealty? Was this the agreement between Maedhros and Fingolfin?
Maedhros bent down—and kissed Fingon on the opposite cheek. It was almost familial, could plausibly be a gesture between close kin, particularly as viewed in the dark. That was what Fingon would say—except it slipped too close to the corner of his mouth.
That part, he would not admit.
Fingon startled but Maedhros still held him fast with his remaining hand, thumb sliding over the point of Fingon’s cheekbone.
“Good night,” Maedhros said. Before Fingon could hazard a reply, he’d swiftly mounted his horse and was riding away, without looking back.
“You didn’t tell me,” Fingon said.
The Fëanarian encampment was quiet in the wake of Maedhros’s announcement that the kingship would pass to Fingolfin. After three days passed without word, Fingon marshalled his courage and took himself to the other side of the lake.
They walked along Mithrim’s shores together.
Maedhros said, “For that and many other things, I am sorry.”
“But why,” Fingon demanded.
“Why would I abdicate? Or why would I not tell you?”
“Why did you speak of loyalty and lieges the other day, in your rooms, when you had me?”
“I sensed that you didn’t want to be torn in two,” Maedhros replied. “Now you are not. By law and by oath of fealty you must follow your father. It is right that you do so.”
“So what was that, a goodbye? A test? Did you already know what you intended and were trying to see where I fit into your plan?”
“Oh, no.” Maedhros stopped walking, turned, and cupped Fingon’s face gently in his hands. The same way he’d touched Fingon the other evening before riding away. “Of late, I’ve oft felt that I have had little… control over—many things. Believe me that I wanted your pleasure, your joy. It seems to be one of the few unwavering qualities of the world. And there is a dark, selfish part of me, which I came to know over-well in Angband, that demands too much and is never sated. So I needed to know. What you said the other day helped me to know, Fingon.”
“Know what? My love is—”
“Mine already, I know,” Maedhros said, bringing his thumb to Fingon’s lip. “But your loyalty is not, and I should not have it. No, let me finish. I needed to know that, even in a moment where you would happily yield so many other parts of yourself to me, that your loyalty would not waver. It belongs to your father, and to the Noldor. Never to me, Fingon. Through me you would all follow the Oath. That must not happen.”
“I do not fear your Oath,” Fingon said. “Nor do I fear that its hold on you would make you senseless! You stood aside at Losgar. You argued with your father.”
Maedhros shivered, eyes going vacant. “Losgar was for you. I went to Angband for the Oath, even though my father counseled me not to with his dying breath.”
“You can fight against it,” Fingon insisted. “I’ll help. Even if I cannot be always beside you.”
“It helps already, knowing that your father and you after him have the kingship,” Maedhros said, smoothing Fingon’s hair back from his face. “And I have your love. When we part again to make our own realms, I will guard it in my heart like a treasure. Until, on some spring’s day, you come riding into my keep in your bright armor, and then I will fall down on my knees and give you succor and pleasure and relief.”
“None shall give me better fealty,” Fingon said.
Maedhros said, “I should hope not!” and laughing, kissed him.