Fractures by Elleth  

Chapter Seven: All

Through the night on into morning...

Her own shivering woke Alphangil.

It was daylight and she was alone, though beyond her sight she could hear elvish voices, the comforting nickering of horses and the loud crackling of what must be a large fire, smell the stink of charred, unclean meat.

She felt weak - weak and ice-cold and alone. Even though she tried not to move aside from the spasms of shivers that wracked through her uncontrollably, her field of vision was inconstant, flickering and dizzy, and she quickly closed her eyes against the soft blue of a morning sky, the plume of smoke from the burning that swept southward on the wind, and the ruins that loomed into her sight.

Tears formed unbidden in her eyes as she remembered Cýronil and the knife, the evil shimmer on the blade, and the piercing pain far beyond any of the ordinary wounds she'd suffered. As if the mere thought of it re-awakened whatever evil was in her, the wound pulsed again with a dark, throbbing pain, stretching around her heart and seizing it in its claws.

She could not help a whimper of pain that only did not turn into a scream because she bit down on her lips, sobbing. Even the pain of childbirth had been nothing, nothing compared to this.

She pressed her face into the blankets that wrapped her and tried to keep breathing, tried to remember the scents of Fingon and Maedhros as they'd held her through the night, tried to remember her love for them, something beyond the all-consuming pain.

It lightened and let up slowly, but it left her exhausted and too weak to even push herself up. Even her eyelids were leaden. By the time she thought she could breathe unhindered, she was no longer cold - she was burning up and once more her body started shivering beyond her control to stop it. Against the fabric of the soft blankets, her skin felt paper-thin and as ready to go up in flames as a secret letter held to a candle.

A shadow passed across her vision, looming large, something - someone - blocking out the morning sun as they knelt by her. She could not tell who.

"Alphangil, beloved?"

Fingon. He sounded near to tears, worried as she had never heard him. That was, in the end, what made her re-open her eyes, even though her vision still swam. There were two of her husband, and both wavered like a reflection in restless water.

She couldn't find the strength to even lift her hand toward him, and new tears of frustration sprang to her eyes. Her throat and mouth were so dry that she couldn't form words; only a formless croak came out. Fingon heard her all the same, and as if to calm her, he smiled, radiant and utterly false. There were shadows under his bloodshot eyes, and they dimmed his bright gaze. He looked completely exhausted.

"Thank the One. I feared you had gone and left me here."

She weakly shook her head just once - it hurt too much - and managed to gather some spit to moisten her mouth and form words. "I said I would try. Water - please."

"Maedhros made a tea of asëa leaves. It's cooled by now, but drink carefully."

Fingon fumbled loose a water skin from his belt, uncorked it and carefully set it to her lips, lifting her head with his other hand to let her swallow. The liquid ran down her throat still faintly warm and sweetly floral, like the scent of her wildflower meadow by her parents' house in Mithrim. She felt a measure of strength return; a little of the heat in her skin abated.

"Thank you," she managed at last, after Fingon had coaxed her to drink a little more, but even this little effort had taken so much more strength than she felt she was able to expend. At least the world steadied somewhat around her, and the two Fingons merged into a single man, though he remained inconstant and wavering at the edges.

He carefully kissed her hair, and almost she resented him for it. He had never before treated her like she was fragile, not even when she had complained steadily about her pregnancy and what it did to her body, not even when she was giving birth to Gil-galad, nearly screamed Eithel Sirion into crumbling and threw a vase at Fingon for his part in their son's creation in the worst of labour pangs.

"Try to rest a little more," he murmured into her hair now, his arms around her, helping her sit. "We are planning to ride in a few hours. Maedhros means to join up with the other part of the host; he sent a messenger to have them meet us on the road and is only waiting for his scouts to return before we set out."

"Do I have another option?" she asked. Something bitter and tired had crept into her tone. "Did you find her?"

"Maedhros' thrall? No," Fingon said through thin lips. "She stabbed you with an Enemy-touched knife and escaped. I thought I was losing you and did not pursue her. Do you not remember?"

"I remember - or rather, I feel - that she stabbed me, after all the hurt before. She took me as bait, for the two of you, and once she knew she was overcome…" She sighed deeply, suddenly once again on the verge of tears with the helplessness of the horrific day and night before, the thought that her men might have been hurt because of her. "And she meant to take me into Angband for questioning by Morgoth."

Try as she might to suppress it, her shoulders shook suddenly and another sob forced its way past her lips. Fingon looked stricken, and his hold on her tightened, until another pair of arms came around her as well and Maedhros was there, simply reassuring her by his presence that this could be overcome, that she would not always be so haunted.

"All is well, Alphangil. Cry," Maedhros said, even though his voice cracked. "It will wash out the poison of her deeds."

His words opened the floodgates of tears she had not thought she still had in her. In the end she cried until sobs racked her and her wound began to pain her again, until her aching head began to pound as if Cýronil had once again struck her and if Maedhros and Fingon had not held her upright between them, she would have fallen and fainted.

Eventually, out of the tears and pain, still held by them both, she quieted and slept.

*

"Do you think that she is still in danger?" Fingon asked quietly, once Alphangil's exhausted sobs had died away into silence and her eyes closed. She lay against Fingon's shoulder, by all appearances utterly worn out by her tears. It seemed that he had somehow, perhaps with the coming of daybreak, regained some hope, or found strength enough for denial and ignorance.

Maedhros could not help a sting of longing, but he extricated himself from the tangle of limbs and bodies, carefully withdrawing his hand from Alphangil's. She sighed in her sleep, a sound of protest, and he carefully pulled aside the cut-open fabric revealing her shoulder. The dressing he had put on the wound the night before was soaked, but it did not look like elven blood - far darker, almost approaching the black colouration of orcish blood. The streaks ran across her shoulder halfway up her throat now.

"She still bears this wound, and I fear what happens when this poison - whatever it may be - spreads further through her. It may well be that we may yet lose her. I felt it more strongly last night, and I do not know whether it was my fear or a premonition, but…" Maedhros felt his voice lower even as Fingon's gaze sharpened, suspended between bright hope and the darkness of fear.

"... but?" Fingon coaxed, anxious.

"... I think it was the latter. We may yet lose her," he repeated. "Above all, I would have her be comfortable, as much as we can make her during the journey, in case we do not reach Himring in time."

Fingon shook his head at him. "No," he said tonelessly. "No, I will not allow that, and if you do, then you will see neither hide nor hair of me on the battlefield, nor ever again. There will be no more love between the Sons of Fëanor and the House of Fingolfin."

Pain coiled tight in Maedhros' stomach, dragging his voice down once again into the same dangerously quiet cadence that Fingon had provoked him into once already the day before.

"If I had any choice in this," he said, and felt his eyes brimming with tears and an angry light that he saw reflected in Fingon's widened ones. "If I had any choice at all, do you not think that I would give my own life to preserve hers? Do you not think that I also love her, Your Highness?"

He regretted the cruelty almost immediately, when he saw how Fingon's face hardened. Had Fingon not been holding Alphangil, Maedhros had no doubt that he would be on his feet and away now to slash his sword senselessly against some rock until it notched and chipped and was ruined.

As it was, he expected Fingon to yell at him once again, to thunder until the air was clear. He was not prepared for Fingon, the man he thought he knew best aside from his brothers, and had chosen to love the most, to slide into the same deep, still cadence Maedhros was using. Shivers raced over his back. He understood, suddenly and viscerally, why his brothers were sometimes terrified of him when he felt forced to lord over them.

It was unsettling. This was Fingon as the calm in the middle of a storm, the deadly center of a battle.

"I love both of you more than life itself. I will give my treasures, my force of arms, my life and the strength of my spirit to you. But if either of you dies and leaves me, I shall never forgive you."

Someone might have struck Maedhros in his stomach and he would have felt no less winded at Fingon's words, and possibly have found it easier to breathe. Fingon's eyes were burning again, again the bright white fire that turned the blue-grey of his irises into sunlit water and cast his face into shadow even in daylight.

The effect was startling, not least, and to his shame - most of all at the words and the conviction and love behind them - Maedhros felt heat pool low in his body, even felt himself harden. If he had ever harboured any doubt before that Fingon was his lover as well as his king by rights, to whom he owed loyalty and fealty, he no longer did.

"Well, have you nothing to say?" Fingon asked, breaking the speechless silence.

Maedhros closed his eyes and willed down the sudden, inappropriate desire, willed his cheeks to stop burning. "Slain ye may be and slain ye shall be, by weapon and by torment and by grief," he echoed a voice from the shores of a dark sea long ago. "Alphangil knew when she married you, and when you brought me into this relationship, that she would enter into this same doom. It is not because of this that I think she may die, but the wound she suffered - it may prove too much even for her. You said before that you were not Mandos, and neither am I. We can make vain promises and hope, or make for Himring with all the speed that we can muster, but that is all."

It was Fingon's turn to fall silent. The light of his eyes flickered. "Then that is what we will do. Pilin is swift and true, and certainly the fastest of the horses here, and the most enduring. Without you or me as a burden, he will make Himring in two days, perhaps one."

"You mean to send her ahead?"

"Is that not her best chance, if speed is of the essence? Is there any other horse here whose line descends from Nahar through Rochallor, and who could keep up with him?"

"If she dies on the road, she dies alone," Maedhros said, aghast even as he understood that Fingon spoke true.

Fingon's hold on Alphangil tightened. "And if she dies with us, she still dies. Is there - do we have any chance that she lives, do you think? If there is, it is a risk I will take. If there is not, I will sit by her and have her comfortable until she passes to Mandos, and not even Morgoth himself will move me."

"She all but promised to hold on and I have known few stronger hearts than hers. And - you brought the Elessar to Himring with you, did you not?" Maedhros asked, only now remembering the green stone in the eagle brooch on Fingon's chest when he had ridden up the long causeway to the keep, a signal from afar that Maedhros had seen blazing even from the walls. "If she lives until she makes it there, Idhlinn will know how to use it. It is the only thing other than the light of the Silmarils that I can imagine will save her, if anything can."

It seemed to Maedhros that Fingon wanted to exhale in relief, and not betray the feeling too soon. Alphangil was in danger of slipping from them still, even with a spot of hope on the far horizon. He held himself perfectly motionless, but his fingers on Alphangil's unhurt shoulder were clenched white.

"I hated you, when you gave us that stone," Fingon admitted. "I shall not be able to take that back; it is past so long now, but - coming to our wedding unannounced after letting our messages go unanswered, and giving us the most valuable jewel in your possession, as if you did not know exactly what that gift meant, and now - " He passed a hand over his eyes.

Maedhros nodded. "I intended both the scandal and the hatred. I thought taking revenge on you and her would make losing you easier for me. I was wrong, but I cannot now feel sorry to have done it, not when it may save her life."

"I am only sorry that, hoping for secrecy, I did not bring it on the road," Fingon replied bitterly. "Then it is decided. Will you make her ready for the journey, while I speak to Pilin?"

Maedhros bent toward him and pressed a quick kiss to Fingon's lips. "So much hatred, and now look at us." He tenderly brushed a fallen strand of hair from her face and took Alphangil from Fingon. Alphangil stirred but did not wake as he laid her back down, and Fingon, lingering and reluctant to go, knelt in the dusk to rest his forehead against Alphangil's for a moment, his eyes closed and face tender.

His lips moved, but Maedhros could not make out what Fingon said to her, and thought that perhaps he should not witness it. As if Fingon had caught a sense of the thought as Maedhros made to turn away, his hand shot out and grasped Maedhros' sleeve, pulling him down toward the two of them.

He followed easily, led to Alphangil's side. Amid the devastation, it felt right, as little had ever felt right.

"You belong here as well," Fingon said softly, almost reverently. "Whatever happens, we are three."

*

She knew before waking fully that the fingers on her wound, changing the poultice of asëa and re-dressing it, were those of Maedhros. Her nose throbbed and she could taste blood in the back of her throat again, but it no longer smarted as painfully as before, with bone and cartilage smashed out of place. She touched the swollen area around the root of it with her left and hissed softly through her teeth.

"I finally convinced Fingon to set it while you were unconscious, and he did well. You will barely know it was broken once it is healed," he explained, and returned to her shoulder wound.

She tried to tell him to stop, that there was no use for false pretense of her survival, and no sense in using up valuable healing herbs on a dying woman, but her cried-out voice once again refused to rise above the faintest whisper and her swollen eyelids refused to lift fully.

She laid her good hand on his instead, and he stopped immediately, bending down to peer at her anxiously. For the moment her half-lidded view of the world was clear, but the daylight once again hurt her eyes like the pressure of dull needles in her skull.

She could feel the corruption all the more clearly now. It had reached her heart, pumping away stubbornly, but with difficulty. Breathing had become a chore. She tried to speak once more, and finally managed enough strength to lift her voice enough to make it audible. "Don't. I'm as good as gone."

"You said you would try, and my heart will not allow for anything else," Maedhros replied, stern and clipped, as always when he refused to show that something pained him. She knew him that well. "I must hold you to those words, and offer you this hope: We mean to send you to Himring. Pilin will bear you and my healers know how to work the Elessar to save you. Idhlinn used it to help me heal after Fingon brought me to Mithrim, and before that, when my mother gave birth to the twins - that was why my father made it."

She knew better by then than to shake her head; it would only make the pain and dizziness worse. "No promise, nor oath," she reminded him. "My word will not be enough - this darkness is stronger than I."

Unbidden, tears sprang to her eyes once again, pooled over. She did not want to die. Maedhros wiped them away and kissed her face; his lips were soft but the voice in her ears rough with unshed tears of his own.

"You are not wrong to fear the night. You may not come back to the light again in this life, for all we have is a desperate attempt, a last best hope, and even that is far from us. But you may prove stronger than you think and come to the morning at last. Will you try? We will follow as swiftly as we are able."

"... alone?" Fear welled up in her mind like a dark, inexorable wave in her, whirled through and dragged her under. Without Fingon, without Maedhros, without anyone to draw strength or comfort from, who would pull her back from the dark brink that she found herself standing on?

"... please. No. Come - come with me." Her left hand caught Maedhros' tunic and clenched, even though her grip was weak and her wrist hurt more the tighter she held onto him.

He gently prised her hand away with no more difficulty than if she were a child, and curled his long fingers over her palm, lifting it to his mouth and pressing another kiss to it. A sob worked its way up her throat. "Please - I need you, both. Do not send me to die alone, do not, do not…"

The icy darkness clawed into her in response, a living, growing, chuckling thing. She sobbed, trying to break free of Maedhros, to what use or effect she did not know.

Maedhros contained her struggle easily, and began to sing under his breath into her ear. She did not know the song or understand many of the Quenya words, but she could tell it was a lullaby, and with his eyes shining even in the daylight, it must be one that held some power - something that Maglor had taught him? What for? -

But though unwilling, the torrent rush of fear in her mind calmed a little.

"We must send you, if you are to live."

Maedhros smoothed back her hair, tied off the bandage and tugged the cut tunic into place so that the blankets she was wrapped in covered it, a cocoon that protected her much as it trapped her. He shoved a bundle wrapped in cloth deep into the folds of the blankets. "For Idhlinn, so she will know what happened to you. I wrote to her, and she may need the dagger as well."

Once again he helped her sit, cradling her against himself before seeing whether Alphangil would be capable of sitting on her own. She did not find it in her to keep herself upright, instead sagging against his chest with an exhausted sigh. He said, "You will need some strength for the journey. I found you lembas, and more of the asëa tea."

"I cannot eat," she protested. Her stomach closed up at the mere thought. "But I will drink." Maedhros set the water skin to her lips, and the same floral taste as before washed away some of the parchedness and the taste of blood, ash and sulfur on her tongue. She sighed, weary from something that should go as unthinking as swallowing some liquid, which sloshed around in her stomach unpleasantly.

After, Maedhros nudged a corner of Lembas against her lips. "Please, try a little, at least. You know well how it nourishes. After all, you made it."

To put him at ease, Alphangil opened her lips and broke a few crumbs off of it with her teeth, but as soon as it touched her tongue, the taste felt wrong, poisonous, and made her sick. She forced it back out, coughing, spitting the breadcrumbs into the dust, feeling sorry for it, and for herself. Her head still ached, though the tea had helped a little. All the same, it didn't lift the weakness or the shivers from her.

"It is alright," Maedhros soothed. "I felt much the same when I was made to try solid food again for the first time," he said. "You do not have to be ashamed, but if this is all, we must go now. Fingon is waiting." She did not bother to correct him, that the blessed grain was what ailed her, that the corruption had spread too far in her.

She felt herself being lifted securely in Maedhros' arms, her head supported against his shoulder, and for the first time saw the camp that her rescuers had made - nothing more than a scatter of bedrolls and discarded packs on the ashy ground in the cover of a few walls, a couple of paths trodden through the remnants of the Dagor Bragollach, not even firepits. On the outskirts lay the now only smouldering pile of orc bodies, and nearby, one single body in the dust, covered by a blanket.

"Cýronil?" Alphangil asked, looking in that direction. She wondered - perhaps they would not burn another elf, although she knew that that was how the House of Fëanor honoured its dead. Whether Cýronil would receive that honour - Alphangil did not think so, and on the heels of that thought came the question what they would do with her own body - would Fingon build a cairn for her as her own people did, or would he let Maedhros turn her to ash? She closed her eyes again when the pain from her wound pulsed again, and once again she could hear that dark chuckle as if the weapon had imparted some dark entity into her that was taking possession of her slowly but surely.

"One of my people. Cýronil fled. You are Fingon's entire world - after she hurt you, all he had eyes for was you, not the fight. But we will seek her. Do you have any memory of it?"

"No," she replied weakly, too tired to unravel the confusion of waking, unconsciousness and sleeping, although she remembered the knife piercing her shoulder. "Not anymore, it is dark…" Along with the darkness came more pain, and a fear that if Cýronil lived, she would find her on the road and do what she had intended to begin with, take her to Angband. The edges of her sight dimmed.

"Shh," Maedhros tried to calm her, softly. He held her with his left arm supporting her weight, his right steadying her. He carried her to what might have once been a stone-built stable in this collection of ruins, now roofless and blackened, where the horses were tethered, Pilin among them, and Fingon with him.

"Please. I cannot," she said once again. "Please. Do not make me leave you."

No one made a reply. Perhaps the words had been in her head. Fingon looked up, and even with the darkness sweeping into her vision, she could see how tired and worn he still looked, how pale his face was, and another shiver of pain that made her bite her lip passed through her. He came toward the two of them and wrapped his arms around them both, seeking the most closeness possible.

"Do you wish to die? Then I will not force you to take the road alone, I will let you go to your rest and break my heart," Fingon choked out, sounding close to tears. "But if you wish to live, this is all we can do."

"I wish to live - I will try. But do not blame me if I cannot." She was endlessly tired and wondered if Fingon had even heard the words, faint as they had fallen from her lips.

Something resolute crept into Fingon's voice. "Then we must send you now, and waste no more time." Alphangil found herself lifted from Maedhros to Fingon, who carried her to Pilin. "We must tie you to him," he explained "So you do not fall if you sleep or lose consciousness. Pilin would walk to Himring if I told him, but he must make haste and run the way, so that he cannot keep you safe and seated."

She nodded weakly. At a word from Fingon, Pilin laid down in the dust, and she found herself lifted onto the blue-and-silver saddle blanket laid over his back, leaning forward against Pilin's neck for purchase as best she could. Her arms were laid around his neck and broad strips of soft fabric lashed them together. A rope around her hips also went around his neck, and her feet, when Pilin rose back up, were tied under his belly.

She towered over them now, feeling like a piece of trussed-up game, and wanted to reach out for them, touch them one last time, but she could not.

"Pilin, run as the wind, run as though Oromë had given you wings." He tilted his head back to look at her. "Namárië, my beloved," Fingon said softly to her. "I will see you when we reach Himring."

Once again that utterly false smile, as if, even now, she could not tell. Maedhros said nothing, but she felt his mind brush hers and try to impart a flood of light, a Mingling of the Trees that she had only ever seen in song.

The darkness of the wound rose up once again in her as if in answer, in towering shadow and ruin, and took her down with it. Barely she could feel Pilin begin to move through the mist that shrouded her eyes, the warmth of his coat, the scent that sometimes clung to Fingon when he came in from the stables.

More keenly, she could feel Maedhros, Fingon and the strength she drew from them shrink into the distance, eventually fading and then vanishing entirely like two stars that went out. Her strength, what little she had left, fell down into darkness as Pilin, in his smooth, tireless gait, flew mile after mile eastward, toward Himring.