High in the Clean Blue Air by StarSpray

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Nineteen

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Everything had been going so well. 

Maglor broke into a run as soon as he made it outside, needing to get away. He did not care where he ended up as long as it was away. He flew down the paths and away past the workshops, out over the streams and past the ponds, through the flowering meadows until, out of breath and shaking, he reached the wooded hills where Finrod had taken him and Celebrimbor a few weeks before. He did not go to the glade where they’d drunk and wept together, instead walking only far enough under the trees to lean against one of them, in the shade and invisible from the house. He leaned his arm on the trunk and his head on his arm, staring down at his right hand. The scars were livid, red and tender as they had not been in years. As they never hurt for more than a moment when something triggered that particular memory, which happened with increasing rareness these days—except now. The terrible agony had faded away but he could still feel his heartbeat in his entire hand. 

“Maglor?” Elrohir had followed. Of course he had. Maglor didn’t know whether he was grateful or not. “What’s the matter with your hand?”

“I don’t know,” Maglor said, after swallowing the instinctive nothing that nearly slipped out first. He turned to lean his back against the tree, allowing Elrohir to take his hand an examine it with a healer’s eyes. He was very careful not to touch the scars. Maglor tipped his head back against the rough bark and tried to focus on the quiet, easy thoughts of the tree, or on the breeze through the branches above, but his head was too full of other noise. 

He’d thought he would have more warning. He’d thought he’d have more time. He had joked about it with Elrond, about escaping through windows from unwanted visitors like Bilbo used to talk about hiding from his rude relations in the Shire.

Fëanor had stepped through the door and it was like the world had stopped. Maglor hadn’t been able to breathe. His hand had started to burn, like the fire of the Silmarils was the fire of his father’s spirit, and he had felt so, so angry. It had burst upon him like a sudden wave and he was still dizzy with it. Still shaking like he’d just come from battle. 

He hated being angry. Anger meant losing control, and from the moment he had begun to understand the power that he held in his voice he had known that for him, losing control could mean anything from a bit of broken glass to someone bleeding. Later in Beleriand he had worked hard to maintain iron control on his voice and on his temper, which was slower than some of his brothers’ but no less potent when it was provoked. Only once in battle had he lost that control, during the Nirnaeth when he’d seen Caranthir cut down by Uldor, and the next thing he’d known Uldor and half his men were dead or dying and everything around them was falling into chaos. He still didn’t know how much of that chaos was his fault. 

And the last time he’d gotten really, truly angry, the last time he’d let that fury out on purpose, tried to use it—well. He hadn’t had the strength to do anything with it, hadn’t even cracked the foundations of Dol Guldur, and he had paid for it dearly afterward. His chest ached for a moment in time with the throbbing in his hand; he closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to find calm. It didn’t work. 

Elrohir had started humming a few bars of a song meant to ease pain, but it made no difference, and he gave up quickly. “Maglor, you need to want me to help you,” he said. 

“It’s fading already,” said Maglor. “You don’t have to—” Elrohir released his hand but only to throw his arms around him instead, holding on so tightly that Maglor had to wonder what his face looked like, how much of his distress could be read there. He wrapped his arms around Elrohir, leaning again against the tree. The bark pressed against his back, against the scars that still criss-crossed the skin there. They were not scars he thought about much, because he couldn’t see them, but sometimes he felt them and remembered everything that had happened all over again. 

He wanted, abruptly, desperately, to be back in Middle-earth, to be on a stretch of stony beach with the waves crashing into the nearby cliffs. He could picture the precise place, grey and wild and beautiful under pale cloudy skies where seagulls circled, the wind strong and with a bite to it and the scent of coming rain, south of Lindon and northwest of the wide floodplains of the mouths of the Brandywine, far away from any cities or villages, unknown to anyone but him. The desire to be there was so strong that it hurt, an ache settling under his ribs like a cat curling up on his lap. 

“What do you need?” Elrohir asked without letting go. 

To find a way back across the Sea. “I don’t know,” Maglor said. 

Movement in the trees caught his eye, and he looked up to see Galadriel; he hadn’t known she was nearby when he’d fled the house. Their eyes met and he let her look, let her see whatever there was to see. Whatever it was she saw, it did not surprise her. She came to join them under the tree. “Perhaps you might think of leaving for your mother’s house earlier than you intended,” she said. 

He couldn’t go to his mother now. And just leaving would feel like running away—which was what he had just done, and which he had no real objection to, except that to run invited the possibility of being chased. It made him feel hunted. “What does he want?”

“To see you,” Galadriel said. 

“It can’t be that simple,” Maglor said. Elrohir eased his grip around Maglor, but did not draw fully back, instead resting his head on Maglor’s shoulder. “It is never that simple with my father,” Maglor said. 

“I don’t think that was always true,” Galadriel said, “and it may not be true now.”

“It isn’t me that he wants to see.” Maglor felt the telltale burning behind his eyes, and blinked a few times, trying to keep them dry. When he saw his father again he did not want to have been crying. “Not as I am now. He wants what I was then.” An unflinchingly loyal son, who would question nothing and who would do anything—from drawing his sword on a darkened quay to throwing a torch onto a ship—just because his father ordered it. A person he no longer was and would never be again. 

“You don’t know that,” Elrohir said. “It has been a long time, Maglor.”

“Your father followed your wanderings through the tapestries of Mandos. It grieved him deeply to see you walk alone for so long.”

He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. There was a stream nearby and he focused all of his thought upon it, on the music of its waters as they flowed cheerfully down the hill over time-worn stones, caring nothing for the turmoil in any elvish heart. The trees around him were awake, whispering to each other of things so far removed from a son’s hurt and anger at his father that it was as though they lived in another faraway world. It was one he wished he could enter into and never have to think of anything but rich soil and rainfall and the breeze in his hair ever again. 

Finally, he opened his eyes and looked at Galadriel. “Will you counsel me, Cousin?” he asked quietly. “What do you think I should do?”

“I think,” Galadriel said after a few moments, “that you should meet with your father on your own terms, in your own time. It may be best if you left this place…” 

Elrohir protested, “It isn’t right that you should have to leave just because he has come here. This is your home, Maglor, not his.”

“I would have left sooner or later anyway.” Maglor reached up to tug on one of Elrohir’s braids, a silent apology for being at the center of the turmoil that had just descended upon the valley. “And my—he and my uncle need to have it out between them. This is a better place for it than Tirion, and it will go far more smoothly if I am not here.” 

Elrohir sighed, and stepped back. “I’ll go pack your things,” he said, “so you need not go back to the house.”

“Thank you, Elrohir,” Maglor said softly.

Galadriel remained behind when Elrohir departed. “He is right,” she said. “You should not have to leave this place just because Fëanor is here. Elrond will say the same.”

Elrond had promised to keep unwanted visitors away, including Fëanor. It had been easy to laugh about on Tol Eressëa, when Fëanor had been far away and they could pretend he had not even been let out of Mandos yet, when the fear and anger had been only a rolling in his stomach and not something with teeth gnawing on the back of his throat, tasting like bile. But he was here, now, and it would be easiest on everyone if someone left. “And you are right that I should,” Maglor said. “If I do not—I have not been angry like this in a very long time, Galadriel. Not since—not since Dol Guldur.”

“What did you do then?”

“I tried to sing the place down around us,” Maglor said, and there was a strange relief in speaking it aloud. “But I was too far gone by then. Even rage did not give me the strength I needed. I paid for it afterward.” He gestured at his face. Galadriel’s lips pressed together, and he sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Galadriel said. 

“Neither do you. Not to me.” Galadriel had apologized before, long to in Lothlórien, for not acting against Do Guldur sooner. Maglor had not been able to answer her, then. “I never expected anyone to come for me, Galadriel. You did not know I was there. You could not have known.”

“But I should have seen earlier that Saruman’s advice was not what it seemed,” Galadriel said. 

“Not even Gandalf mistrusted him.” Maglor had never met Saruman, in the end—not until that encounter on the road back to Rivendell from Gondor, when he had been a wretched and hateful thing. Maglor had pitied him, as he had pitied the Nazgûl—such a distorted and twisted thing he had become, warped by his own ambitions and the machinations of Sauron—even as he had been repulsed. But if Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf—if all of the wise had trusted him, then he must have fallen very far and had been as good a deceiver as Sauron had once been. No one had seen all the way through Sauron’s deceptions in Eregion, either.

She shook her head. “We all have our regrets, Macalaurë. You have yours, and I have mine—and this is one of them.”

They started the walk back across the valley. Maglor still felt shaky and unsteady, but it was the shakiness of anxiety rather than anger, at least in that moment. He more than half expected to see his father making his own way across the meadows as they emerged from the trees. 

And he was right. Halfway down the hill Maglor saw him coming, and he halted. The anger did not return with as much force as it had when he’d first glimpsed Fëanor’s face, but it was there alongside the fear and the pain and everything else, jagged and sharp. His hand throbbed, and he forced himself to keep walking.

“Macalaurë,” Galadriel said, taking his other hand. “You do not have to do this now.”

“No, I think I do,” Maglor said; he could turn around and vanish into the hills, and his father would not find him if he did not wish to be found—but that would only delay this meeting, and to no good purpose. “I would much rather follow your advice, but maybe it is better—and I expected him to follow, when I came out here. I can lose my temper out here and disturb nothing but the birds and the flowers, and then I can leave him to—I don’t know, whatever it is Fingolfin wants to do.”

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

“No. Thank you.” 

“Tell him what is in your heart, Maglor, and then go find your peace. If he loves you still, he will not try to hold you back.” Galadriel kissed him and released his hand. She passed by Fëanor and they exchanged glances, but if they said anything Maglor did not hear it. He walked to the bottom of the hill and knelt by the bank of the small stream ruining by his feet, and dipped his scarred hand into the cold water. The relief was nearly instant, and he sighed, closing his eyes. The echo of the Music of the World was quiet in this small spill of water, but it was there, and it was an even greater comfort than the cold. 

When he raised his eyes again his father had reached him, standing several paces away just out of reach. His expression was in that moment as blank and inscrutable as the ghost of him had been in Dol Guldur, and the sight of it hurt, like being stabbed with a jagged piece of glass. Maglor rose slowly to his feet. 

“Canafinwë,” his father said finally, voice heavy. Maglor flinched. “Cáno. I—in Mandos, I—”

The sound of his father’s voice made something in him snap. “Don’t speak to me of Mandos.” He heard the power in his voice and felt it hum in the air between them, a threat not yet made manifest. “I don’t care what you did there, or what healing or peace you found.” His voice shook with the strain of not shouting. “I don’t care what happens in Mandos. I have never been there.”

Something flickered across Fëanor’s face, there and gone again before Maglor could see what it was. “Cáno,” he said, so quietly, and Maglor hated that he wanted to run into his arms in that moment, seeking the comfort once found there when he had been small and upset over something that seemed now so insignificant as to be absurd: a scraped knee or a broken toy, or some thoughtless remark by a brother or a cousin. His father had spoken in that same soft way then; he had been big and warm and safe, and he had made all kinds of promises—of love and safety and a swift end to tears and the passing of whatever had caused them. 

And then he had broken every single one of those promises in one fell swoop. They had been overwritten by the Oath, withered like the Trees and burned like the Swanships of Alqualondë and the tapestries of Menegroth.

“Do you know what we did for you?” Maglor asked. “Do you know what we became? Treachery and fear of treachery we were warned about—and it was ours. Our treachery, when we slew our kin and our allies, when we turned into monsters worse than orcs and burned down everything in our path—and it was for nothing.” He thrust out his hand, and his father actually took a step back. “Your Silmaril did that,” Maglor said. “The jewel you prized above every single one of us. Will you slay me now for it, Atar?”

Fëanor’s eyes snapped to his face. “What?”

“Whoso hideth or hoardeth or in hand taketh, finding keepeth or afar casteth. That is what the Oath said, what we all swore. I cast it away; I threw it as hard and as far as I could into the Sea at the end of the world, and I would do it again in a heartbeat! It is the only thing I have ever done that I have never regretted, not even once, while I haunted the mists on the shores like a shadow, dropping vain tears into the Sea.”

His father actually flinched. “Cáno, I never wanted—”

“I don’t care!” Maglor shouted. The air around him shivered with it. “I don’t care what excuses you have now! I know what you wanted then and I know what you did, and I know all that came after, and it is terrible! I haven’t gone back to visit my own mother because I cannot look her in the eye knowing what I have become because I didn’t have the strength to do what I knew was right.”

Fëanor did step forward then, catching Maglor’s arms. “Cáno, your strength is beyond anything I have—”

Maglor jerked back out of his grasp. Fëanor let him. “It was never strength. If you followed me through the tapestries as Grandmother said, you know it wasn’t.” It had never been strength that kept him moving, kept him breathing, and it was not strength now; it was not even anger, really. Oh, the anger was real, and it burned so hot in him in that moment that he was afraid to look down lest he see the grass at his feet smoking and blackening. But the anger would fade; in him it burned hot but never long. When it was gone all he would be left with was fear. Fear of his father’s disappointment, fear of his acceptance. Fear that he had been marked too deep for even Estë to heal the shadows and ghosts that still clung to his heart. Fear that his mother would look at him and see him for what he was instead of the bright and beloved son he had once been.

“What do you want me to say, Cáno?” Fëanor asked. He stood almost as though he was bracing for a fight, or maybe just a blow. He had not yet raised his voice, which was unexpected. Maglor had expected a shouting match, not for his father to just listen. “What do you need me to do?”

“You’ve done enough.” Maglor took a step backward. “I want nothing from you. You made it very clear long ago what we meant to you. Finwë chose you, always, every time, even when he shouldn’t have. In your turn you set the works of your hands above everything, and set us on the road to our own destruction.” He saw the blow land, saw Fëanor’s mouth drop open and tears spring to his eyes. “And that isn’t even the worst—” His voice failed him as the anger drained away all at once, leaving him empty and cold and afraid that if he began to weep he would never be able to stop, until all of him just dissolved into saltwater and sea foam. 

Silence fell between them. There was always birdsong and music in the valley but where they stood it was utterly silent. Even the water at Maglor’s feet had gone quiet. Finally, Fëanor said, in a voice that shook with some emotion Maglor couldn’t identify—it did not seem to be anger, but he had forgotten what Fëanor sounded like otherwise, “What was it, Cáno, the worst thing that I did?”

“You died, Atya.”