Fractures by Elleth  

Chapter Two: Maedhros and Fingon

Maedhros and Fingon deal with the aftermath of the attack.

Fingon was frantic and all Maedhros could do to physically restrain him from getting back on his horse was to wrap his arms around him and hold him back. There were pine needles caught in his braids and his armour and surcoat were smeared with dirt, having been wrestled to the ground in the attack, although his skill with his blade had saved him from a worse fate.

The Orcs had scattered as quickly as they had come. His soldiers had been overcome by the onrush and several of them lay slain or so wounded that they would not live to see the morning, but Maedhros, after briefly paying his respects to them in thought, willed down the pain in his heart, left it to his people to make order, and nearly pushed Fingon down to sit on the bedroll he'd spread out on the ground before the attack. Alphangil's pack lay scattered around her own bedroll, next to it.

"Think!" Maedhros said and recoiled from himself when it came out sounding more like a snarl. He forced his voice into a gentler tone. "Think. Please. You say you saw her being dragged away alive. They are baiting you - if you rush out into the dark after them, no doubt that is what they intend, and they will take you also."

He locked away the words that wanted out, but it seemed Fingon understood him regardless, the hidden meaning in them. And then where would that leave the Noldor without their High King? Where would that leave me and Alphangil, or Gil-galad? Would you make the same mistake as your father? Would you make the same mistake I made? But this was not a time to be selfish, so he swallowed the words down and Fingon did not answer. His face was so drawn and miserable that his cheekbones stood out like they were cut from metal and his teeth pressed together so hard that they would grind glass back to sand; his fingers clawed into the chainmail covering Maedhros' forearm, which was wrapping around his chest and holding him fast.

His eyes were over-bright with worry. "I cannot hear her - I cannot reach her, Maitimo," he said in response, and Maedhros' heart tore at the desperation in his voice, at the unintentional slip into Quenya. "I will kill all of them in recompense for all the hurt they will do her. Each one, singly."

"Not singly," Maedhros replied. "But first we need to find her. Listen to me." His voice dropped to a whisper, said directly into Fingon's ear. "I swear on the love I bear you and the love I bear her that we shall find Alphangil alive and bring her home."

Fingon shuddered under him, but finally his grasp of Maedhros' arm relaxed, and he let some of the tension go from his body. "We will find her alive and bring her home. If we do not - " and his voice began shaking again, "- then Morgoth shall have a battle more dire than anything that you and I have envisioned, and sooner, and I will not stop until he has set me captive or has fallen under my blade."

Maedhros pulled him back to his feet and rested his hand on Fingon's shoulder. "Our blades." He took up a skin of watered wine from among Fingon's provisions and pressed it into his hand. "Stay here and drink something. It will calm you. I will order my people and then we will begin the search. This is unkind ground, they cannot yet have gone far."

Fingon nodded numbly, and Maedhros pulled himself up taller before striding toward the wounded, wishing briefly that they had taken his Master Healer as she had asked, but he had left Idhlinn at Himring to prepare more stores for the war, in spite of her protests that she would be more useful on the road if they were attacked.

He resolved to listen to her the next time she said something of the sort, though it was an annoyingly Vanyarin trait - or perhaps a trait of those who had both Vanyarin and Noldorin descent - shared in some measure only by the few who remained of the House of Finarfin. It was a fact that she was often right. Now he approached Hwestonnen, who had come on the journey as his second-in-command because he knew Dorthonion well, having dwelt there during the Long Peace as an emissary to Angrod and Aegnor. He was the lord of the House of the Pine, a tall man who almost rivalled Maedhros himself in height, with dark brown hair and a stark, stern face that now seemed troubled and too pale in the darkness.

"What news?" Maedhros asked. Hwestonnen was unusually diligent and by his instincts someone perhaps more suited to Caranthir's people. He had already named and numbered the five dead and eighteen wounded, another three of whom would likely pass to Mandos soon. He sought to press a paper into Maedhros' hand with their names and ranks, but Maedhros rebuffed him with the question that he always dreaded most, even in the face of such heavy losses. At least the losses were certain.

"Were any but Queen Alphangil taken, are any others missing?"

"Only one, my lord," Hwestonnen answered, drawing himself up straighter as if he meant to voice his suspicion but dared not, knowing his own lord's history. "Cýronil, a former thrall."

"I hear you," Maedhros said curtly. "Not taken. And not former."

Hwestonnen nodded. "She volunteered to search the northeast of the village before we made camp the first time we passed through, as well as now - the direction the Orcs came from, and we had one of the wounded report that he saw her take the Queen away in the same direction."

Hwestonnen fell into step beside him as Maedhros strode through the makeshift ward that was being set up by those of his soldiers who had some aptitude in healing. He was as eager as Fingon to be gone, but he needed to hear it confirmed and learn if any of them knew more. Hwestonnen pointed him toward the right place, only for them to find a corpse.

The young man who had seen Alphangil taken was the sixth dead of the night; his life's blood had pulsed out of the deep slash in his thigh before the wound could be staunched and pooled into the frozen ground under him. Maedhros bent down and closed the dead soldier's eyes. "His name - Faelond, is it, of my Third Infantry?"

"Yes, my lord," Hwestonnen confirmed. "It honours him that you know your people so well."

"No less than the due for those who fight and die for me. A king is he that knows his own, for how else could he hold them?"

Hwestonnen inclined his head.

They found few people who reported that they had seen Alphangil being taken; most had been too busy defending themselves and the people around them to take much care of what happened on the outskirts of the battle, but all who had seen her agreed with Fingon's account that Alphangil had been alive until she was taken from view.

If it had been intended to demoralize or enrage them, Maedhros reasoned with himself and against the mounting pressure behind his eyes, they would have slain her in sight and full attention of all. With Cýronil holding her knife to Alphangil's throat, they could have done so without leaving time enough for a rescue. Their secrecy suggested a more nefarious purpose.

Maedhros had the village searched. The tracks split, the scouts reported upon their return - some went into a tunnel in one of the nearby houses, where the entire Orc-host had come from, but now others moved back northwest with speed. In the trample of footprints, they could not make out any possible elven tracks, not of Cýronil nor of Alphangil. They could not say where they had gone. He sent a pair of scouts into the tunnel after them.

Bent over a map with Hwestonnen and Fingon, Maedhros traced a finger down the most likely route for the host travelling out in the open, downward over the least steep slopes into Anfauglith.

"Do you think they have her?" Fingon asked. He had calmed down, though he still was restless and when he was not pacing tried to sink himself into ósanwë often, testing the bond that connected him and Alphangil, and snapping out with despair in his eyes when he could not find her mind or glean a response from her.

"No, or I would have sent people to follow them as well," Maedhros answered. "They are a distraction, a means to have us spread ourselves thin and make any counter less effective, much less a rescue. We wait until my scouts return from the tunnel, and go after that group, as soon as we know it can be done safely and stealthily. I fear for Alphangil if we cannot take them at unawares. You should not try to reach out for her - we are too close to the Enemy here, and what would you do if he came into your mind?"

"Waiting, waiting!" Fingon snarled. "I have heard nothing of Morgoth, and cannot even feel her mind - how can you be so calm when we are running out of time? How can you be so certain she is even still alive?"

"You are anxious, and she is likely unconscious - and if she were awake, as afraid as you are. Believe me, if she had died you would know," Maedhros tried to calm him. "Grandfather spoke at times about how it felt when my grandmother passed to Mandos, and he described a pain like no other that moment." He did not say that he was not calm, only knew that he had, through painful experience in the dungeons of Angband, learned to control himself.

Fingon's lips were pressed into thin lines. "To you perhaps. To us he mostly spoke of his happiness with grandmother Indis, never of the shadows that came before. But I have heard and seen enough to know that you speak true. I crossed the Ice and saw Elenwë fall, and we all fought battles here and saw spouses separated by ill chance. Regardless, that is not a comfort. I need to know that she is well. How can you be so calm?!"

Maedhros eventually dismissed Hwestonnen when the conversation veered into the private, ordering him to make ready, and rolled the maps back into their protective leather tube, then pulled Fingon into one of the houses. In the privacy of the sheltering walls, he pulled Fingon close and kissed him deeply, brushing his thumb over Fingon's cheek.

"How can I be calm when one I love is taken?" Maedhros asked, picking up the thread of the conversation that had dropped away. "And how, when I see the other one I love - you - as you are now?"

Fingon laughed against his lips, a watery, upset sound now that they were alone. "My mind gives me only this thought: Finding her - not in pursuit, but too late. Finding her as I found you, hanging from the same shackle on the same wall of Thangorodrim - and me, calling and calling until it is clear that no eagle will come for her rescue, and my only way of saving her is to - " his voice faltered, but Maedhros knew what he thought. He himself had begged for his death that day.

"We will not let that happen," he could only say against the burn of bile in his throat and the despair that threatened to swallow him as much as it had taken Fingon.

Outside the house it was almost daylight.