Fractures by Elleth  

Chapter Six: All

Alphangil has been rescued, but after being wounded with an enemy weapon, is she safe?

Fingon attempted to right himself on Pilin where he'd slumped against his stallion's neck; his hands slipped on the sweat-damp coat and his muscles had lost their strength.

Pilin nickered and danced under him, eager to rejoin the battle, but overcome with the pain radiating into him through Alphangil's ósanwë-message, Fingon found it hard to keep control over his mind and body, much less his horse. He slid from the saddle, trusting that Maedhros' people would not let any of their enemies escape this fight alive.

He stumbled the few steps toward his wife, and the noises from her lips - helpless, uncontrolled and utterly terrified sobbing, the sound of a crying child - broke his heart.

His wife was dying.

He fell to his knees next to her, pulled her onto his lap, glanced over her beloved face, smeared with dried blood from a broken, swollen nose that had left the skin around her eyes blackened, to the cruel bonds they'd forced her into, and cut those free. Her cries mingled with a noise of relief, her back and shoulders sagged and her left arm came around him, clutching at the cloak on his shoulders for dear life. Her right hand she held close against her chest.

A knife protruded from her shoulder. Through the torn tunic she wore, he could see her skin welting up in angry red streaks that were already darkening into something noxious and terrible, and he needed no training as a healer to know that this was no ordinary wound. He wanted to withdraw the knife and use it to slowly cut the Elf who had done this to his wife into pieces, the way Maedhros had done to the Orc. Suddenly, that deed was much easier to understand, and this time he would not show mercy, either.

It would not, he realized, change a single thing. Whatever he did to the thrall, if she were caught —

— Alphangil was dying.

"What do I do?" he asked breathlessly, now on the edge of tears himself, overcome again.

"Nothing, beloved," Alphangil replied, her pained voice on the verge of failing. "Only - please - do not leave me until I go. Take comfort with Maedhros. Raise Gil to remember me. Win your war. And if you are ever forgiven and may return to your Blessed Realm, I will await you. We will show them what blessedness truly means, Maedhros, you, me, the three of us."

Fingon could make no reply. He simply held Alphangil as, exhausted, her eyes slipped closed and her hand fell from his shoulder, and wept as had never thought he might weep, not even left behind in Araman, not on Thorondor's back, when he had not known whether Maedhros would live or die, not even after the Bragollach, when Rochallor had returned alone and he had known that his father was dead.

*

Maedhros found them eventually, dropping to his knees in the dust beside Fingon. The slaying was done, or nearly so, and had ordered his people to gather the Orc corpses into a pyre that would be burned once all they might find valuable had been stripped from them - armour, any worthwhile weaponry, intelligence, coin.

The only one they had not found - and whom he assumed escaped and far away by now - was Cýronil, but Fingon did not need to know that yet.

He was bent nearly double around Alphangil; his hair was falling forward over them both like a curtain.

Quiet, hoarse, desperate weeping came from Fingon. He did not react to Maedhros' touch other than to shrug it off as one might a fly, and did not seem to notice that it was him at all.

"Fingon. Is she alive?" he asked.

"Yet," Fingon answered, finally reacting. "Not for much -" He seemed to understand only when he lifted his head whom he was speaking to and looked at Maedhros from a face stained with tears and Alphangil's dried blood, and Maedhros could not help a startled breath when he saw Alphangil, her torn, bloodied clothing and battered face - though it seemed Fingon's tears had washed some of the blood away.

Fingon's voice took on a desperate quality.

" - not for much longer. She is dying. She is in pain! Your woman stabbed her with this!" he gestured at Alphangil's shoulder, where a knife stuck, between her clavicle and armpit. It was not part of the arsenal that Maedhros' people carried; he himself would never resort to cruel arts to create a blade that did not kill through its edges alone.

He could tell at a glance that he had seen knives of this make before. In Angband they were carried as a reward by those who had rendered Morgoth some great service. Ever so briefly, something dark and insidious flared up in his mind - yet more anger that he had not discerned Cýronil's true intent when she had joined his forces, and a black hatred for her - and himself.

Now he wished for good that Idhlinn were with them. She might be able to heal Alphangil even of this. He had learned only a little from her, finding that healing did not come readily to someone with hands that were stained with elven blood. Idhlinn had been at Alqualondë, but she had not fought, other than to save lives on both sides of the battle, and her coming into Exile had been his mother's request, to help and serve her sons. Her hands were unstained.

She had taught him some field medicine and a few of the methods she had used to help him survive the aftermath of Angband. A little more theory he had learned listening to Inuthind and Idhlinn bicker about and discuss healing methods while he was caught in bed recuperating, as well as through his friendship with Idhlinn. But Maedhros knew nothing about combating weapons of the Enemy - or rather, not of this kind. Orcs often used poison on their blades and arrows, but this was not an Orcish knife - it bore a mark that was darker and more powerful.

"It needs to come out," he judged, even knowing how dangerous it would be, in case Cýronil had struck one of the shoulder's arteries. "The longer it can work its evil on her, the more her chances dwindle."

"Did you not hear what I said? She is dying. Maedhros, it does not matter."

"It does matter," he objected, tipping up Fingon's tearstained face to look at him and stroke his cheek.. "Even if - if - she dies, she will be more comfortable until then if we take it out. Wait here." He waited for a spark of recognition, but Fingon only mulishly pulled his head away.

Maedhros sighed and rose. He sent one of his people to bring wood enough for a small fire and went to find a healer's kit. When he crossed paths with Nellómin, finding they had both a kit and a waterskin with them, they handed both over without complaint. They even offered to try and tend to Alphangil, but they were not a healer either, so Maedhros doubted that Fingon, as he was now, would allow anyone else to intrude into perhaps the final night he'd be able to spend with his wife.

Again he wished that Idhlinn were there, or at least that he could wing his thoughts to Himring, but as he'd told Fingon before, he dared not reach out. With Thangorodrim so close and the Shadow so near and heavy, he doubted that ósanwë would be able to reach across the long leagues unnoticed. He had felt the weight of Morgoth's mind on his, and likewise knew of the astounding secrecy and guile that Morgoth was capable of in the realm of thoughts. If Morgoth learned that Maedhros was in reach of his thought, if he found some well-meaning disguise to slip in, the entirety of the war planning would lie open to him.

Even at the risk of Alphangil's life, he could not endanger all the other parties who had sworn themselves to him, Fingon not least. Maedhros closed his eyes, trying to will the pain into submission, at least until it was safe to grieve.

His steps were heavier when he made his way back to Fingon and Alphangil. A small fire was burning there now, a tripod and pan of already-heating water set up. His man had been diligent.

Kneeling at Alphangil's side again, Maedhros began to examine the knife wound, more worried than reassured by Alphangil's lack of reaction - she must be deeply unconscious, and what else was ailing her he could not yet say. He did not want to risk moving her more than he had to to remove her tunic, so he resorted to cutting away a swath of the torn fabric on her shoulder. Around the knife there was only a little blood and it was already crusting into scabs. The way the knife had gone in, it had likely missed any of the large blood vessels. With a breath to steady himself, he reached for the hilt and pulled.

Even through the leather of his glove, he could feel some - presence, perhaps, like the cold that lurked among the stars, but where he expected resistance, the knife came out easily. The wound welled with blood when the blade was gone, but not overmuch - what worried Maedhros more was how dark it ran, and the dark streaks that were exuding from the wound. Wrapping the knife in a cloth, he stored it away. Idhlinn would have to see it.

He rinsed his hand and washed out the wound until Alphangil's blood ran red again, although the marks stretching like evil fingers toward her heart would not vanish. In the healer's kit was a gracious supply of dried asëa herb, enough to make a poultice to pack the wound with, knowing the herb helped against the despair and darkness that the Enemy used as one of his strongest weapons. Then he dressed it, and hoped that it would be enough

"That is done," Maedhros said to Fingon, who had been watching numbly through the procedure, stroking Alphangil's hair. Maedhros was trying to keep his voice level. "We should stay here for the night. Let her rest, let the horses rest, and make all possible speed toward Himring in the morning."

As soon as Maedhros was done with her, Fingon once again folded himself around Alphangil and did not reply. Maedhros took the lack of protest for an affirmative. He shrugged off his coat, heavy and dark, and laid it over Fingon's shoulders and over Alphangil, who had begun shivering but showed no sign of waking. His people needed to know to make camp and to not light the pyre until morning after all. With Alphangil so hurt, he did not want to attract more attention than routing the Orcs might already have done.

Cýronil's absence gnawed at him. He knew that she was valiant enough, or at least had seemed so. She had, even with her shadowed eyes and grey-streaked hair, always been eager to prove herself worthy through her relentless service, to prove that the constant scrutiny she'd found herself under was no longer necessary. Maedhros had eventually believed it, especially when her company leader recommended her and her prowess for surprising techniques and movements in training fights that would make her valuable. Now, looking back, he half expected her to melt out of the darkness and finish what she had begun.

And there was the question how and when she had gotten the knife, whether she had had it at Himring, unnoticed, and what her plan had been altogether, but unless she were captured and interrogated once again - or Alphangil woke to perhaps help them shed light - he did not think he would be able to find answers.

He ran his hand over his eyes, suddenly bone-tired and cold in the winter night without his cloak. His people, all of whom had ridden and fought as hard and fast as he himself, gave no appearance of tiredness, but he supposed he must look it, as he strode through the ash and dust of Anfauglith, stirring it up from the frozen ground in dirty clouds as he walked. They certainly gave him the kind of glances that spoke volumes.

With all settled and a handful of people called aside to tend the horses, wipe them down and see them properly fed and rested, as well as orders for Hwestonnen to draw up a watch schedule and to call on him at daybreak, Maedhros took his and Fingon's bedrolls from Pilin and Nimlach, and went back to Fingon and Alphangil in the corner behind the ruined wall.

Fingon hadn't moved, and on second look he seemed to have fallen asleep in the uncomfortable crouch around his wife, as if that could cocoon her from the outside world or the darkness at work in her own body. Alphangil was lying still again, though when he tenderly took her wounded right hand, he could feel her pulse in the swollen flesh and once again felt cold, livid fury well up in him, knowing that the one who had done this to her - this was Orc-work as much as what he had done earlier this day, but more refined and dangerous than the work of true Orcs - had fled and escaped her due punishment.

He thought he would not have slain Cýronil - not right away. He would have thrown her into Himring's deepest cellar and let her rot until the world's end, sending just enough food and drink to keep her alive, but deprived of company, free air, sun and stars.

Maedhros shook himself out of the dark thoughts. He was not a jailor and would not let the Enemy make him one, however much his creatures deserved it. Himring had been built without dungeons for good reason. He was not Morgoth. Even traitors and enemies should have, at the very least, a quick, clean death.

He stroked Alphangil's broken hand gently, and when she stirred, he touched Fingon to rouse him. He came to and sat up with a startled noise as if out of a deep sleep, and when his eyes lit on Maedhros, still unfocused, the previous empty helplessness crept back into them, his jaw set, and he turned to Alphangil, who was regarding the two of them from half-lidded eyes herself.

"Maedhr-" she began to ask, and then her entire body spasmed and convulsed on Fingon's lap, Alphangil's face a twisted mask of pain and muscles snapped taut to bursting. Fingon, who had had his hands on her shoulders, yanked them away as if stung and his horrified, wide eyes burned into Maedhros; he folded both his hands around Maedhros' left and held it. Fingon's fingernails dug into his flesh, and he didn't protest.

"Don't - don't hold her. Just - let it pass. You had these, after I brought you back," Fingon explained, breathless and horrified, until a moment or two later, Alphangil slacked and relaxed and she breathed out a shaking sob, hiding her face into the cloak Maedhros had laid around them, and another shuddering shiver passed through her before she lay still again.

Maedhros shook his head. Her pulse still beat under his fingers when he sought it, but she was far from well. "We need to dress the rest of her wounds at the very least. If you want to leave - go and see if Pilin needs aught else."

Fingon shook his head vehemently. "I will not leave my wife in her final hours! What has gotten into you?!"

"I apologize." He laid out the healers' kit once again, taking a clean cloth and searched Alphangil's face - she was unconscious again, her skin like clammy wax under his fingers, almost as that of a dead person, except that he could still feel the life in her, even if Fingon had not been wrong: It was fading.

He did not allow himself to dwell on that. He must act as if she had a chance of survival on the long road back to Himring. If he had ever needed estel it was now, and he could not disappoint all three of them by acting as if she had already died.

Maedhros passed the now-wetted cloth to Fingon. "Would you clean her face? Once the rest of the blood is gone, we can try and set her nose."

"Set her - " Fingon took the cloth and began to dab the blood away from her nose and cheeks, revealing scrapes and small pinpoint burns amid her freckles, while Maedhros tried his best to wash the dirt from the wounds ringing her wrists. They went deep in places, and he worried that they might be beyond healing, but after he had carefully rinsed them out, he found an extract of comfrey root in the kit. With Fingon's help, after he had finished the task of cleaning Alphangil's face and simply sat there staring into nothing, Maedhros uncorked it, mixed the liquid with more dried leaves of asëa and dabbed it carefully into the wounds before following up with clean bandages, and repeated the procedure with her maimed right hand as well, where the cuts went even deeper into the swollen flesh, bruising red and purple around the broken bones.

None of her bones, luckily, had broken the skin, or he would have feared infection even more than he already did, but Maedhros also could not tell what to do other than immobilise it all with more bandages. This would be a task for a true healer, not someone with his paltry skills.

A memory came unbidden, looking at Alphangil's face again. "Fingon," he said. "Do you remember, in Aman, the only hunting trip that the two of us ever took with Tyelko?"

Fingon did not reply. He was stroking Alphangil's hair, once again staring off into nothing with an expression as though he stood at the gates of Mandos himself. "Fingon." Maedhros repeated. "Findekáno."

Fingon looked up. "I heard you the first time," he said quietly. "What does that matter now?"

"Her nose. Again - it does, if only for her comfort. Recall, Tyelko startled you out of the tree you were sitting in, you fell, landed wrong and sprained your ankle. And had nothing better to do than wrestle him to the ground and hit him in the face, breaking his nose."

"I'd returned from Tulkas' courts just before," Fingon added in a monotonous, faraway voice. "I was full of it."

"You were," Maedhros confirmed with a fond note creeping into his own voice. "But more importantly - I showed you how to set his nose. Do you remember? Make a roof of your palms, fingers touching, against the root of her nose, then pull downward."

"I am not hurting her any further," Fingon protested, without ever leaving the same numb intonation, but a blaze passing over his eyes told Maedhros that he meant it. "You do it."

"I cannot do it with a single hand, and if you want to explain to her, if she survives, why her nose healed crooked, then you are welcome to."

"IF!" Fingon shouted, finally revealing that his unwillingness before had been denial of what he felt was inevitable. "I cannot - Maedhros, I can't. I cannot sit here to watch her die. Do not make me believe she will survive when she will not, do not make a promise you cannot keep." He carefully laid Alphangil's head from his lap into the folds of Maedhros' cloak that slipped from his shoulders as he rose, stumbled to the edge of their makeshift camp, then disappeared, leaving Maedhros alone with Alphangil, and the sound of barely-muffled weeping in his wake.

He let Fingon go.

Instead of following, he bent, placed a soft kiss on Alphangil's forehead and ran his fingers through her hair, finding a patch where the skin was nicked and broken, with the hair hacked short. He combed it out as best he might with his fingers and carefully wove what they had left her into a loose braid with the help of his hand and stump, so that it no longer lay like a mussed, dark glory around her head.

He could still hear Fingon and realized after a short moment that he must be on the other side of the wall. Hacked-up sobs that he was trying his best to keep quiet - and failing - echoed in Maedhros' ears, threatening to pull himself into despair as well. In the weeping, he could hear words, muffled but audible and painfully familiar.

Fingon repeated the words once more, this time louder and clearer, as if he drew a measure of strength from them. "Oh King to whom all birds are dear…"

Maedhros hoped that Manwë still had pity on them, if they came to him out of this far country. He spent a long time listening for the beat of mighty wings in the darkness, but the night stayed silent. No eagle would be coming to take Alphangil to safety.

Time passed; the stars slipped onward from the early night and he kept the fire burning low and hot against the chill of the winter night. Fingon still had not returned, but his sobs and prayer had gone quiet at last. Alphangil had slept, or been unconscious. Once she spasmed again, but it was over quickly, and Maedhros cradled her through it.

Finally, when perhaps the middle of the night had passed, Alphangil stirred in his arms. Her eyes opened, focused briefly on him, and she reached out with her right hand, before letting it fall again with a soft noise of pain.

Maedhros forced a smile. "Hello," he said softly. "It is good to see you awake. All will be well."

Alphangil's eyes flickered back to his and underneath the pain that widened them, and the beating she must have taken that made her pupils uneven, there was a glint of scrutiny. "Usually you are a better liar," she managed, then closed them again, but shifted her body closer against his, shivering.

Maedhros pulled his cloak closer around her and opened the bedrolls for their blankets that he also spread over Alphangil to keep her warm and comfortable. "We will ride for Himring in the morning," he said. "Please - hold on until we reach it, when we can have my healers tend you."

She sighed, her eyes still closed, and moved her head from side to side, a wordless refusal, and Maedhros leaned down to brush a kiss over her cold, cracked lips, in comfort. He wanted to weep as much as Fingon did, and yet could not, not where she could overhear, or open her eyes to see his grief. There was a deep disappointment in Fingon, supposedly so valiant, lodged within his chest, to leave her and fall into his own pain, when it was Alphangil who needed them both.

"Try, at least. Please. I know how you must feel - I know. But it will not always be thus."

"The great Maedhros Fëanorion, reduced to pleading." A pause, another exhausted shiver. Alphangil's eyes stayed closed, her voice stayed weak and broken. "I thought of you, there. I will try, but take it for neither a promise nor an oath."

"Nothing like that should be laid upon you now," Maedhros replied quietly, taking her left hand and giving it a brief squeeze, careful to steer clear of the bandage around her wrist. "The attempt will be enough. I trust in your strength."

He bent again, this time to kiss her brow. "I have water here. Will you drink a little?"

No reply came from Alphangil. Her face was slack and exhausted once more; she had drifted back into sleep or unconsciousness.

He closed his eyes and bit down on his sleeve to muffle the weeping that broke its way free of him now as well. He moved back to sit leaning against the wall. Pulling Alphangil closer against him to share with her what warmth he could, Maedhros held her close, resting her head on his shoulder, drawing the cocoon of cloak and blankets closer around her still, and kept stroking her head mechanically, caressing her cheek and hair, finding swollen bruises at the back of her head - that would explain why she was passing in and out of consciousness.

Mindful of Fingon's earlier crying from the other side of the wall and of Alphangil's need to rest, Maedhros began to sing softly through his tears, the very song that Fingon had sung to pull him out of the darkness of his captivity and back into freedom.

On the other side of the wall, as Maedhros struggled with himself to breathe at one point, the drawn-on silence was broken only by hitched breathing. Fingon was listening.

He continued singing, beginning once again when the final stanza came, until he felt his own eyes drooping, until sleep muffled his voice and continued pulling him under inexorably.

He woke out of a dreamless darkness to a still-dark sky. Alphangil was still in his arms, securely held and - at least for the moment - seemed comfortably asleep. On his left a spot of warm weight lay, and fingers threaded through his where they lay on the back of Alphangil's head. Fingon had come back, moving up so that he was as close as possible to both of them. He, too, was asleep; the salt trails of tears clear in his dusty face.

Maedhros wanted to kiss him and apologize, but more than anything knew that Fingon, too, needed the rest.

He had been unjust to him, even if only in his thoughts. This was the second time that Fingon saw someone he loved after torture by the enemy, unsure of survival. Maedhros had never, much as he might have wished it, been his husband, and how much more deeply Fingon must be feeling Alphangil's fading he could not imagine, or how many of his worst memories of the rescue he relived now, merging with his present grief.

He remembered, too, how Maglor had been catatonic with grief after Lasbaneth had died in the Dagor Bragollach. When Glaurung had forced the land between the arms of Gelion, his brother had left his wife behind to protect her, still thinking she was safe in the keep from the flames, surrounded by water, but the moats and lakes around his fortress had been little obstacle for a fully-grown dragon vaulting himself across, bringing down the gates and passing in to burn at his leisure. Maglor had been forced to abandon his lands and his love as lost, and barely made it to Himring himself with those survivors who had been out in the field with him.

There had been no words of comfort then, and there were none now.

He let Fingon sleep. Although it was still dark, the stars were already fading in the clear, wintry sky, and it would not be much longer until Hwestonnen would come to wake them.

Maedhros quietly sat up and held watch over the two sleepers.

Chapter End Notes

Yes, the knife we're talking about here is something like a First-Age prototype for the Morgul-blade we are all familiar with from LotR.