High in the Clean Blue Air by StarSpray

---

Three

---

When Maglor made his way back down to the deck, Daeron was nowhere to be seen. It was something of a relief, though he knew he’d have to endure more too-keen looks and most likely more questions. He went towards the prow of the ship where he found Círdan leaning over the railing to speak to a figure in the water—a figure of water, with hair like streaming foam, keeping pace with the ship with ease. He stopped, and Uinen looked back at him and smiled, eyes glinting like stars before she said one last thing to Círdan and slipped away, dissolving like sea foam beneath the surface of the water. 

“I did not mean to interrupt,” Maglor said when Círdan beckoned him forward. 

“You did not. The lady has a fondness for you and your singing.” Círdan looked at him, his own eyes nearly as keen as Lady Uinen’s, with the light of ancient starlight in them. “Would you sing for us today, or tonight?”

“Yes, of course.” He summoned a smile. “It would not do to disappoint Lady Uinen.”

He remained at the prow as Círdan went back to the helm. Behind him elves walked or sat scattered across the deck; sailors climbed through the rigging to adjust the sails, singing lilting shanties and laughing with one another. The melancholy of departure had faded into the cheerfulness of the journey, and the eager anticipation of what they would find at its end. Maglor leaned on the rail and watched the water foam about the ship as it cut through the waves. He imagined what lay beneath the waves, the shattered remnants of Beleriand. He thought of the Gap and of Ard Galen, a sea unto itself of green grass and a rainbow of flowers, rippling in the wind, trembling under the hooves of their horses as they had raced one another, or charged into battle when the orcs crept down out of the north. He thought of Doriath, where Daeron had for so long made his music in glades of niphredil and hemlock umbels as Lúthien danced beneath the stars, and of the misty lands of Hithlum and the highlands of Dorthonion where his cousins had dwelled…

All of those lands were ruined and left behind so long ago, but it still felt strange to think that he passed above them again, with miles of ocean in between. Fish now made their home in the caves of Menegroth, and whales swam where once eagles had flown. One such whale surfaced quite close to the ship, shooting its spray high into the air. One large dark eye regarded Maglor for a moment before the great creature sank again beneath the surface. Some distance away another breached, leaping almost fully into the air before crashing back down with a great splash, to the delight of the other elves aboard the ship. 

After a time someone else came to stand beside Maglor. It was Elrohir, and he leaned on the railing too, and against Maglor. He had been very quiet ever since they had left Rivendell. “What are you thinking of?” Maglor asked. 

“Of my mother.” Elrohir did not raise his gaze from the water, and his hair fell forward, half-hiding his face from view. Maglor recognized that instinct, it being one he shared, and he did not move to brush it out of the way. It had been Elrohir who had first told Maglor of Celebrían and of her torment in the Misty Mountains. It had been a shorter ordeal than Maglor’s own, but perhaps the worse for it, and she had not been able to remain in Middle-earth. Maglor had seen how that weighed upon Elrond, and in turn upon their children. Arwen had wept bitter tears the day before they had arrived in Minas Tirith, grieving her mother’s absence on her wedding day.

“I do not doubt that she will be waiting for you on the quay,” Maglor said quietly. “Healed and whole again.” Elrohir nodded, and tried to smile, but could not quite manage it. “And your father will be beside her.”

“Yes, I know. But it still seems—here we are on the ship and it still seems like a dream, like I’ll wake up in my own bed at home and it will still be sometime far in the future.” Maglor hummed quiet agreement. He still could not quite believe it either. “Who do you hope to see at the harbor?”

“Elrond,” Maglor said.

“Is it really hope if you know that he’ll be there?” Elrohir asked. “Is there no one else?”

He thought of his brothers, and his parents… “Perhaps…perhaps my mother,” he admitted quietly. “But I do not expect it.” He’d attempted to write to her a few times since he’d sent that letter with Galadriel, but all of them had ended up scribbled over and in the fire. He had had better luck in writing to Elrond, but he’d never been a great correspondent. Elrond’s children had all been much more prolific; Maglor knew for a fact there was a chest full of letters collected over the years from Aragorn and Arwen, and even their children, written over the course of many years and finally ready to be delivered. 

“Why not?” Elrohir asked. “Will Lady Uinen not take word ahead of us to Eressëa?”

“Doubtless. But you forget how I left that land. It was not—I have no reason to expect any particular welcome from anyone except Elrond, and perhaps Galadriel.”

“Not even your own mother?” Elrohir looked at him askance, distracted from his own distress for a moment by exasperation with Maglor. It was familiar, that exasperation. He often found himself on its receiving end from both twins. Usually there was good reason for it, when he got caught up in shadowy thoughts and needless melancholy, but now he just shrugged. He truly did not know. That sort of hope was still beyond him. “What of your brothers?” Elrohir asked. “Or your father?”

“No!” Maglor surprised even himself by the vehemence in his voice. Elrohir blinked, and Maglor gripped the railing with both hands, though the edges of it were sanded to a round and silky smoothness that did little to ground him. “I do not think he will be there,” he said when he’d mastered himself again. “Nor do I wish it.” He let his own hair fall forward, shielding his face from whatever look Elrohir was giving him now. “And my brothers…they may not even have been released from Mandos. They or Fëanor. I suppose if anyone were to come to greet me it would be Finrod.” They had been friends, once upon a time, and if anyone would forgive him all his past deeds it was Finrod, the most openhearted of their kin. 

“Mm.” Elrohir bumped his shoulder into Maglor’s. “I think you underestimate how many people care for you, as usual,” he said. 

“You forget again—”

“I have not forgotten. But it has been a very long time, even for the Eldar, and I thought that it was all forgiven long ago after the War of Wrath when so many Exiles returned home.”

“Some of us didn’t,” Maglor murmured. He himself had not been there to accept or decline the invitation to repentance and homecoming—but the final theft of the Silmarils, he thought, had been answer enough to that. He looked down at his palm, still scored with the scars of it. Beside him Elrohir sighed, and though he couldn’t see Maglor knew that he was rolling his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know. Truly, I am not trying to be difficult. But one people reconciling with another is one thing. More personal wrongs—those are something else altogether. I am not worried about being dragged before the Valar to answer for all my crimes, but that does not mean there are many even among my own kin who eagerly await my return. Elrond will be there, and that is enough.”

“Very well.” Elrohir looped his arm through Maglor’s and leaned on his shoulder again. “I would be very glad if you remained with our household.”

“I have no other plans,” Maglor said. 

“Will you keep up your wandering?”

“Probably. I’ve never been content to stay still for too long—even when I was young—and I am curious to see what has changed and what has stayed the same; but I am in no hurry to go off on some long journey into the wilds, don’t worry.”

“Good.”

“None of us need hurry for anything,” Maglor murmured, as he watched the horizon. He remembered being told as a child and as a youth that he did not need to always be moving, that he could spend a year or a decade or a century studying one single thing or staying in one place and it would not matter, because he would still have all the rest of time to do everything else. It had not been true, in the end. Even as he spoke the words Maglor knew that he did not really believe them now, in the deepest parts of his heart. He had learned of fear and of danger and of endings too well, and even in Imladris there had been the constant awareness of darkness gathering outside of the valley. 

Maybe he would do well to visit Lórien, where Estë gave the gift of rest and healing, and Irmo brought peace to dreaming. He had other places to visit first—the Noldor and the Teleri were long reconciled now it was true, but he owed it to Olwë and to Elwing and to whoever led the Sindar now, and Turgon and the remnants of the Gondolindrim, to at least take a knee and try to apologize. No verses, no laments. Just plain words. Someone needed to, on behalf of his house, if his brothers did indeed still reside in Mandos—and even if they did not, he needed to for himself. But after all of that…perhaps he would emerge from sleep among Irmo’s poppies able to grasp at hope again. 

Elladan came to bring them both back to the rest of the company to eat lunch and tell stories. Most of the elves on the ship were from Mithlond, but a few had come from Ithilien and the Greenwood. It was a merry meal, with much laughter, and afterward there was singing, bright songs of the Woodelves, and older and stranger ones that Daeron had learned in his travels east of Rhûn. He spoke little of himself when asked about his travels, instead telling of cities and realms of both Elves and Men that he had visited, and of the great deeds done in the East in the fight against Sauron, of which those in the West knew little. 

Not unexpectedly, the talk soon turned westward, and Maglor was called upon to sing them songs of the Blessed Realm. Elladan fetched the smaller harp that Maglor had brought. “I will sing you some songs written by Elemmírë of the Vanyar, who was my teacher long ago,” Maglor said as he put his fingers to the strings. It took a few moments for him to recall the melody, for he had sung no songs of the Trees since the Darkening, but he found it and settled into it, playing through the first verse once without singing before starting again and lifting his voice in praise of golden Laurelin as the Sun passed high overhead, bright and warm and yet still only an echo of what had once been. That song passed into a paean to Yavanna Kementári, and as the Sun sank into the west and in the east the Moon rose, he sang of silver Telperion. The song he sang to the stars was still one of Elemmírë’s, but it had been brought to Middle-earth and sung in many tongues of Elves and Men since the exile, and when he began to play everyone joined with him as the stars came out, like a spill of diamonds across the black velvet of the sky. 

As the song faded away, someone asked to hear the Lay of Leithian. Maglor looked at Daeron, who had been watching the sky. “I will sing it,” Daeron said, turning to them with a smile. If it pained him he did not show it. “If Maglor will accompany me.” Maglor bowed his head and began to play. He and Daeron had performed in this way often at the Mereth Aderthad, one of them playing harp or flute while the other sang. 

Maglor remembered being amused at all the talk of Daeron, loremaster of Doriath, accounted the greatest singer of the Eldar in Beleriand. Many jokes had been made comparing the two of them, and everyone seemed to expect him to care. Even Maedhros had teased him, saying he would have no patience for Maglor’s sulking on the way back to Himring if Daeron did indeed prove the mightier. Maglor had only rolled his eyes. He had had his pride, in those days, but it had not been that great. Maglor had wanted to meet him so that they might learn from one another and, perhaps, forge a friendship through their music—meeting someone who had the same passion for it that he did had been his great hope in going to the Mereth Aderthad, and he had not been disappointed, though there had been little chance for that friendship to grow afterward. Certainly not after the truth of Alqualondë came out and Thingol issued his Ban; all hopes of anything more than a brief acquaintance had faded away after that. But it had been wonderful while it had lasted, and it seemed that now they had another chance at being something more than feast-time acquaintances. 

Many other songs were sung after the Leithian. Elladan and Elrohir sang many songs of Rivendell and of the Shire, and Círdan sang of the Sea, his voice clear and bright. The harp was passed around and played by nearly everyone at one point or another, as the ship sailed on. More than once Maglor caught the sound of Uinen’s voice on the breeze, as ancient and ever-changing as the Sea itself, harmonizing with them. 

Maglor slipped away back to the prow once he was sure no one would ask him in particular for another song. He leaned over to watch the water foam about the ship, silver under the starlight and moonlight. When he looked up he saw clouds on the distant horizon, like mountains in the distance. They would sail through rain before too long. He was not very surprised when Daeron came to join him. “I did not know you were a student of Elemmírë,” Daeron said.

“Did you imagine I sprang into being already a master singer?” Maglor asked.

Daeron laughed. “No. I suppose I imagined you had learned at the feet of the Valar.”

“I did learn much from them,” Maglor said, “but that came later. And…” 

“And?” Daeron looked at him. It was hard to see his face behind the shadows of his dark hair. 

“I feel that I learned the most from listening to the Sea,” Maglor said quietly. “But that came much later.” And then he had lost his way in silence and confusion and fear, and only slowly learned how to hear it again, the echoes of that Music that had made the world, and how to weave its lessons into his own voice and his own songs once more. Even now, he was not the singer he had once been. That in itself did not bother him, really, though he missed the ease that came with skill and long practice. It was a little surprising to him that Daeron had not yet commented on it. 

Instead Daeron said, “I can hear it in your voice—the Sea. And I, too, have learned much by listening to the waters of the world.” 

“I hear it in your voice, too,” said Maglor. “The songs of rivers and mountain streams.” He did not say that he’d recognized the song of the Esgalduin when he had finally heard it—muffled though it had been by sorrow and by the midwinter ices—because he had heard the echo of it in Daeron’s voice before. One more little grief to be added to the pile of greater ones that he had been making by then. He caught himself rubbing his thumb over the scars on his hand, and made himself stop. 

Daeron caught that hand and turned it over so the moonlight fell on the scars. “Does it hurt?” he asked. 

“No, except that it aches sometimes.” And on dark nights when shadowy dreams plagued him he woke sometimes with it throbbing, so when he turned on a light he was surprised to find scars there instead of raw and burned skin all over again. Those were bad nights, when the ghosts of his brothers came out of the shadows to stare at him, as they had for years in Dol Guldur. They had retreated for a time, after he had come to Imladris and begun to remake himself, but in the months leading up to their departure for Mithlond he had been dreaming of them again. He thought perhaps he’d left them behind on the shore—but then, it was probably foolish to believe he’d ever be entirely free of nightmares. Daeron released his hand, and Maglor let it fall to his side, gripping the railing with his other hand to stop himself rubbing at the scars again. 

Days passed. The rainclouds passed over them, and broke apart with rainbows arcing over the ship, which, rain-dampened, seemed to sparkle in the sudden beams of sunshine. Most of the days passed in song, and often in laughter, though sometimes in the quiet hours of the night the singing turned melancholy, quiet and somber, for this voyage could never be anything but bittersweet for all of them who had lived so long in Middle-earth—indeed, Maglor was the only one aboard who had not been born there. It was their home, though it was changing in ways that few Elves could stand to witness. Perhaps there would always be Elves in Middle-earth, Maglor thought, but they were a dwindling race now, and someday they would be nothing more than tales told around the fire by the children of Men. Even Arwen’s children’s children would someday forget from whom they were descended. They would forget what the Evening Star had once meant. He looked westward, though it was late enough that Gil-Estel was no longer visible over the horizon.

As he did the wind changed, and he caught a sweet scent on it—the scent of flowers, and of something else fresh and nameless that brought to his mind memories of towering mountains and wide green fields, and bells ringing in Tirion and in Valmar. Maglor stilled, and one by one the others noticed too, and everyone gathered at the prow except for Elladan and Elrohir, who scrambled up the rigging to the crow’s nest. “I see land on the horizon!” Elladan called down. “Mountains!”

“The Pelóri,” Maglor whispered. The moon rode high in the sky overhead, bright and full, and the wind picked up. The sails billowed, and Uinen’s laughter echoed around them as she sped the currents on. Soon those on the deck could see the mountain peaks, too, and they grew and grew—taller even than Maglor remembered, silver in the moonlight. He gripped the railing until his hands ached; Daeron stood on one side of him, Celeborn on the other. No one spoke. 

The moon set behind the mountains, and then the sun rose behind them in the east, leaping out into the sky to illuminate the lands before them, growing steadily larger, all green and gold, and the snowy mountain peaks blushing in the dawn. Someone burst into song, and all around Maglor everyone joined in, a song of praise for the sunrise and hope for joy as they came at last to the end of their journey. He did not sing; he had had no songs for departure, and found now that he had none for arrival, either. 

He was coming home, he tried to tell himself, but the word felt empty and meaningless. It was the land of his birth but it wasn’t home anymore. He had wandered Middle-earth for far longer than he had lived in Valinor, but even there he had never really called any one place his home. Unable to watch the mountains any longer Maglor looked down into the waves, and he saw Uinen there, keeping pace with the ship. She caught his eye and smiled before vanishing beneath the surface, speeding away ahead of them to herald their arrival.