His Young Son Ereinion by Perching  

Fingon lay on Orodreth’s bed with a hand over his eyes, listening to Orodreth retch into the chamber pot. He was very loud about it, which made Fingon feel like he needed to do it himself. Or maybe that was the horror rising sharp in his throat. Probably it was. That didn’t mean he didn’t yearn for Orodreth to shut up.

Be kind. That’s your husband you’re thinking about. Fingon let out a gasping laugh.

“What,” Orodreth croaked in the most pitiably miserable tone Fingon had heard in a long time. Now was the moment, he thought, for words of reassurance.

“You’re having an awful time, and I’m lying here wishing you would shut up already. Are we not a tender portrait of a married couple?”

Orodreth made no reply. After a moment, Fingon dropped his hand and opened his eyes to find Orodreth looming over him, his yellow hair sticking out in every direction, vomit at the corner of his mouth. Their gazes met. The spark of marriage in Orodreth’s eyes was not somehow doubled, a mercy. But yesterday, Fingon hadn’t been married at all.

Fingon opened his mouth to say something about how lucky they were that face veils were in fashion. Orodreth grabbed Fingon’s wrist. Before Fingon knew it, his palm was pressed against the base of Orodreth’s stomach.

They were wed. No touch between them should feel so strangely intimate, not anymore, but they’d married quite without meaning to in a haze of drink, betraying Orodreth’s wife while they were at it. It was bound to put a damper on things.

Orodreth said nothing. Fingon said, “Um. Orodreth. What—”

Orodreth’s thought touched Fingon’s mind.

Fingon bolted upright. His head spun. Somehow he managed not to cover Orodreth’s lovely sheets with a decidedly less welcome bodily fluid than he’d spilled onto them last night. “Now I feel bad about complaining,” he managed. “Morning sickness already?”

“Don’t be foolish,” Orodreth said. His face spoke of incredulity, then of exasperation: he’d been through this before and knew better than Fingon.

The thought of Finduilas set Fingon’s teeth on edge. He bared them in a smile. “Have you, dear husband, ever heard of a joke?”

Fingon wore last night’s clothes—found, without explanation, in three of the four corners of the room—and one of Orodreth’s lace veils. A precautionary measure, they’d agreed, hoping not to speak to anyone on their way to Fingon’s guest chamber and then on to the stables. They hadn’t made it three steps out of Orodreth’s chamber when Finrod appeared around the corner.

“Brother! Cousin!” he exclaimed, striding towards them at a menacing pace. “Finally awake, I see! Did you spend the night together?”

Fingon’s soul left his body. When he came back to himself, Finrod stood close, a finger touching the bottom of the veil. “—are you wearing?” he was saying. “Is it the light? You drank more heavily last night than I’ve seen from you since Tirion.”

He didn’t know. “The light,” Fingon agreed, coming unsteadily down from his panic, and when his voice rasped, Finrod hummed sympathetically.

“I’m glad you took care of each other. I’m sorry to have left you. Angrod and Aegnor asked me outside to stargaze. Then we somehow spent the entire night talking about assaulting Angband. You understand.”

Fingon didn’t remember them disappearing, but he supposed they must have, because otherwise he wouldn’t have spent the night making the second worst mistake of his life. He nodded sagely. “Oh, yes. I do live with my father.”

Finrod clapped him on the arm. A spike of pain drove itself through Fingon’s head. “You have my condolences. I don’t mean to imply there’s no reason at all to what they say, but in their stubbornness they blind them—”

Orodreth cleared his throat. “Fingon and I are going riding.”

“Are you? While hungover?”

“I’m dying for fresh air,” Fingon said.

“I see. It is a fine day! I’ll come with you.”

“No!” Fingon and Orodreth cried together. Finrod blinked. Fingon wrapped an arm around Orodreth’s waist—no, too romantic—around Orodreth’s shoulders and said, “We want to go alone. I was telling him it’s a shame I know him least well of all his siblings, so we decided to spend more time together.”

Finrod blinked again and looked between them. Orodreth put on a transparently false smile. But Finrod said, “A fine idea! I’m glad. I’ll go bother Galadriel, then.”

As he walked off in the other direction, Fingon sagged into Orodreth’s side. With a strangled noise, Orodreth pushed him off.

Neither of them could stand the force of a trot, so they guided their horses at a walk towards the eastern bridge off Tol Sirion. Fingon looked out at the mountains, at the sun riding high over them, at Sirion running swift through the valley. Spring flowers bloomed among the grasses. The baby would be born in spring.

“So we’re in agreement,” Orodreth said. “You’ll go to my cabin in the foothills. When I can no longer hide the pregnancy, I’ll join you. Some months later, you’ll emerge from the wilderness having eloped with a Grey-elf who tragically died and left you with the baby.”

Fingon brought his horse to a halt and tried to remember what exactly had been said as they’d dressed. Had Orodreth been talking about the baby when Fingon grabbed his chin and wiped his mouth with the hem of a tunic? What about when Fingon laid his aching head against the cool stone wall and stopped listening?

Now, he said, “I thought you were going to take the baby.”

Orodreth stared. “How would I take the baby?”

“Go to Dorthonion at once. Explain to your wife what happened, and tell everyone else the baby’s hers.” Fingon paused. “Or do you plan to keep this from even her?”

“Even her? I plan to keep this from her most of all! Would you have her wake up beside me every morning knowing what I’ve done, have her raise a child knowing it a bastard?”

Fingon flinched. Bastard was a word Fëanor had coined, one Fingon hadn’t heard in centuries. He had a vision of himself as Indis, of the baby—his child—as Fingolfin if Fingolfin had been the result of an even more unfortunate situation. “I wouldn’t,” he said, though not for the sake of Orodreth or his wife. “I’ll take the baby.”

Orodreth nodded. Fingon squeezed his legs to prompt his horse into motion and started sorting people. Did this make Finduilas Fëanor? Orodreth would not be happy to hear that comparison. Fingon said, “Will it work? Your wife and daughter can’t be planning to visit their family forever.”

“Long enough,” Orodreth said, and Fingon thought he heard bitterness there.

He remembered Orodreth the night before, exquisite in his gown of gold and evening blue, his eyes sparkling like stars—and his mood terrible. His wife and daughter had run off to Dorthonion after some quarrel with him, leaving Fingon to ply him with copious amounts of wine so he didn’t bring down the mood of the party.

Fingon’s memories blurred after that. He remembered, in some unmoored snatch of time, sitting with his legs over Orodreth’s lap and his arms around Orodreth’s neck. “Why’d you get this hair and not me?” he’d said and pressed his face into it to smell it. “I adore it. I want it.” He’d bitten it, then stopped because it turned out that was weird and unpleasant. “Honestly. Dark hair everywhere. Your wife takes you for granted.”

Later, lying half naked in Orodreth’s bed, Fingon had said, “If we made a baby, d’you think it’d have your hair?”

The water in Fingon’s stomach shifted. Without ceremony, he slid off his horse, put one hand on the ground while he kept the other on the reins, and threw up into the grass.

Orodreth came and held back his hair. It was a kindness, Fingon thought dizzily, that he hadn’t afforded Orodreth.

The cabin had a bed built for two and a trundle bed underneath it. Fingon slept in the trundle bed. He washed his own clothes in a nearby stream, tended a garden and hunted for food, played a harp at night when he grew lonely. A few times, he went down to a small village of Men and traded for cloth or spices he couldn’t grow himself. They knew him as Finweg, the Noldo who lived in the woods.

“Finweg!” was the first word out of Orodreth’s mouth when he arrived one autumn evening. Fingon offered a hand, and Orodreth took it as he dismounted his horse. “You couldn’t have chosen anything more subtle?”

“It’s a pleasure to see you, too,” Fingon said. “As for Finweg, if you know about him, you’re not being subtle yourself.”

“We are. We sought out no one, but we met a Man on the road talking about how he’d never met an Elf from across the Sea until Finweg, who lived alone in the woods, a bit of an odd sort, really, but did we know him? We said it was rude to assume all of us knew each other, and that was that. But it might not have been.”

Fingon said, “We?”

Orodreth grimaced. “Don’t be angry.”

There was movement in the trees. When Fingon looked, Finrod was riding past the treeline, his mouth set in a grim line. “Cousin.”

“Oh,” Fingon said, “and here you are complaining about Finweg.”

Orodreth sat on the bed and did the talking. Finrod stalked around the cabin peering at things, and if he meant to intimidate Fingon with the performance, he was succeeding. The joke was on him, though. All driving Fingon into a corner did was make him more likely to bite.

Fingon had these thoughts while sullenly dropping vegetables into a pot over the fire. Orodreth was saying, “...so you can see how there was no convincing him to leave for Nargothrond after that. Eventually he got it out of me.”

“What do you mean he got it out of you?” Fingon said.

“I suspected. It only took asking,” Finrod said.

Fingon turned. “Did it only take asking to implicate me as well?”

“Well,” Finrod said. “Yes.”

“Orodreth.”

Finrod stepped in front of Orodreth. “He won’t be apologizing for it, and neither will I. I’m his brother and his lord. I ought to know.”

Fingon stood. “Who else, then, will you decide ought to know? My father? Our people? Shall we expect a visit from Angrod or—”

“Enough,” Finrod said. “There will be no visits from Angrod or anyone else. Unlike him, I don’t let slip a secret out of anger! I’m only here to help.”

Fingon searched Finrod’s eyes. Finrod said, “I don’t keep it for your sake, you understand, but I’ve never been unhappy when what’s best for our people is best for you.”

“You’re not even telling Orodreth’s wife?”

“Especially not Orodreth’s wife!”

Wilting from relief, Fingon went to sit beside Orodreth. Orodreth patted his back. “No need to worry. Nobody else is going to know you knocked up your cousin. I should’ve led with that, huh?”

“You’re being nicer about this than you were,” Fingon said.

“Because I’ve had time to process that I drunkenly married my cousin and made a baby with him in a night that will haunt me for the rest of my life, not least because I’ve broken my marriage vows and made the dubious decision to go to elaborate lengths to hide it from my wife. Also, I’m not hungover.”

They stared at each other. Fingon considered that the right thing to do was certainly to tell Orodreth’s wife, that someone like Angrod would do it. He considered that, inexplicably, he’d never been able to remember her name. She wasn’t quite a person to him like Orodreth was.

Before he could examine that one, Finrod said, “Your vegetables are burning.” Fingon lunged across the room.

After dinner, they readied for bed. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Finrod said as he sat down on the bed. Orodreth settled behind him and began to braid his hair for sleep. “Someone’s got to explain to everyone else why two of our princes have run off—to separate locations, mind you—and don’t plan to return for months. But I’ll visit when I can. Probably often. It’ll be a relief to get away from all that talk of assaulting Angband!”

Fingon tied off his own hair and said, “You really are against it.”

Finrod quirked an eyebrow. “And I thought I had an ally in you, Fingon. Are you for it?”

“I don’t know,” Fingon said, the first time he’d been honest about it to anyone except his father. “I understand that we’re happy as we are, that going to war would put that at risk. But one way or another, the war will come. Shall we hand Morgoth the first strike?”

Finrod didn’t answer for a moment. “I think I would agree with you,” he said at last, “if I thought the war could be won.”

“Finrod,” Fingon said, helpless.

“Who’s talking about assaulting Angband now?” Orodreth said.

That put an end to the conversation. Fingon climbed under the covers of the trundle bed while Finrod and Orodreth lay down next to each other. Finrod blew out a candle.

A minute later, his hand touched Fingon’s. “What?” Fingon said, twitching.

“You and Orodreth shouldn’t have done what you did”—Fingon snorted—“but I know what it’s like. When I met Balan—Bëor, as you know him—I was fascinated by him, and he by me. His wife had passed, which gave us some excuse, but if Men meet each other again after death, I don’t imagine she’s happy with him.” Finrod paused. “It’s strange to say, but I think I was attracted by the fact that it was something he could teach me. There were few such things, but there were a few, and his years with his wife had—”

“Elbereth’s stars, Finrod,” Orodreth groaned.

“But you’re not married,” Fingon said.

“I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because marriage among Men is a social institution in mimicry of the biological institution of Elves. They have no actual biological equivalent. We never exchanged blessings, but even if we had… who knows if an Elf could ever marry a Man in truth?”

“Huh,” Fingon said. When Finrod said no more, he rolled over. He dreamt of Hador Lórindol’s excellent hair.

In the spring, Orodreth gave birth. It was an easy birth, he said afterwards, though to Fingon it didn’t seem so. The baby cried. Fingon cried, too, holding him, until Orodreth said, “Fingon,” and Fingon laid him on Orodreth’s chest.

When dawn arrived some hours later, they lay together in the bed, Orodreth still clutching the baby close. He’d barely let go since he’d first laid hold of him, but Fingon didn’t mind. It wouldn’t be long before Orodreth would never have the chance to hold him again.

Fingon’s breath caught. He looked into Orodreth’s exhausted face and thought it was the second most beautiful face he’d ever seen.

“What’s the father-name?” Orodreth said.

“He’ll have two father-names, won’t he?”

“I’m your soon-to-be-tragically-dead Grey-elven wife. What’s the father-name?”

Fingon looked at the squinty little face, which just beat out Orodreth’s for the most beautiful he’d ever seen. The baby’s hair had turned out dark, which didn’t work with the name Fingon had had in his head for months, but it hardly mattered. “Artanáro,” he said, noble fire. “After you, Artaresto.”

“A good name,” Orodreth said. “I’m glad.”

“Did you doubt me?”

“I did, Finweg.”

Fingon laughed.

“For the mother-name, Ereinion. After us.”

Not Aranion, son of a king, but Ereinion, son of kings. Others would think of Finwë, of Fingolfin, but Fingon would know the truth. He pushed himself up to kiss Orodreth’s brow. Orodreth shuddered under his touch, blinking hard. Fingon wiped a tear out from under his eye.

“He won’t know me,” Orodreth said. “My son, my—”

“Shush,” Fingon said and kissed him again. “Shush. You’re exhausted, darling. It’s time for you to sleep.”

At the height of summer, Fingon rode into Barad Eithel. “My lord!” a servant exclaimed as he strode through the halls with a screaming Ereinion. “Your father is in a meeting with the Lord Maedhros. Shall I inform him of your arrival?”

“Maedhros!” Fingon said before his mind turned to the matter at hand. He was dead on his feet, and Ereinion needed to be changed and fed. Fingolfin being busy gave him time to regroup. “Don’t inform him. Bring a cradle to my chamber.”

He regrouped. When Ereinion was asleep in the cradle, Fingon thought to go to the door and ask a servant to fetch Fingolfin and Maedhros, but instead he fell asleep.

He woke fully clothed on top of the covers with no sense of how much time had passed. “Findekáno?” Maedhros said, hovering on the threshold of the chamber.

Fingon sat up. “Russandol.”

“I’ve come ahead of your father. The servant who told me you were here made it clear you didn’t want him informed of your presence—and said it quite purposefully within his earshot! I thought you might want advance warning.”

Had Fingon said that? His memory of it was already a haze. “Thank you, but I only meant I didn’t want his meeting to be interrupted.”

“You should’ve interrupted it.” Maedhros stepped fully inside. “I think we—”

Maedhros stopped. Fingon followed his gaze to the cradle, which had been hidden from him by the bed until he’d stepped forward. He looked back to find Maedhros striding towards him. Maedhros grabbed his chin and looked into his eyes. “Don’t tell me.”

Fingon swatted at Maedhros’s arm. When Maedhros gave him back the use of his jaw, he said, “Yes. That’s my son.”

Maedhros closed his eyes and dragged in a breath. Then he went to the cradle to crouch over Ereinion. As Fingon watched, he lifted Ereinion up into his arms. Fingon tensed, waiting for the cry of a baby who’d only ever known three people being picked up by a stranger, but Ereinion just gurgled as Maedhros stepped around the room with him.

Fingon did not relax. “I can feel you panicking from here,” Maedhros said. “I do know how to handle children. And yes, I have done it since I lost my hand!”

He was teasing, and Fingon knew it was meant to calm him. Fingon said, “I’m sorry. It’s just. If you give him back in anything less than perfect condition, I will kill you.”

Maedhros smiled. “He is yours.” He came to sit by Fingon on the bed. “Is this better?”

“A little,” Fingon said. What he wanted was for Ereinion to be in his arms, but he wasn’t about to pry him out of Maedhros’s when he seemed so content there. “What are you doing so far from your favorite frigid hill?”

“Your father summoned me. He wanted to discuss an assault on the Enemy.”

“Ah,” Fingon said. “Yes. What have you said to him?”

“That I’m reluctant and my brothers even more so. That it’s nigh impossible for me to wrangle them when my heart isn’t in it, but that if he ordered it, I would do it.” Maedhros paused. “I suspect this isn’t the first time you’ve heard about the idea.”

“No.”

“And?”

Fingon looked at Ereinion falling asleep in Maedhros’s arms. He’d barely thought of it since the birth. There hadn’t been time. He found that he didn’t need any time to know his heart, though it had changed. “I’m against it. I will not bring war to my son.”

“What happened?” Maedhros said.

Fingon almost told him.

It was Maedhros, after all. He wasn’t Angrod or Aegnor, around whom Fingon would keep mum forever for Orodreth’s sake. He wasn’t Fingolfin, who had a responsibility as High King to ensure his heir didn’t embarrass him. But Fingon thought of Orodreth making two into three, of what it would mean to make three into four. If the story he and Orodreth had woven was to be the truth, Fingon had to act like it.

“I took a Sindarin wife. She tragically died.” Fingon blinked. “I mean. She died.”

Maedhros turned towards Fingon, his gray eyes dark with concern. Fingon didn’t cringe from it. Good, he made himself think for the sake of Orodreth’s heartbreak.

“Oh, Findekáno,” Maedhros said. “I’m—”

The door opened. Fingolfin walked in. “No,” he said in tones of great horror.

Fingon turned to him. Since neither Turgon nor Idril were here to object, he said, “Congratulations, Atya. You’re a grandfather. Meet Ereinion.”

“Ereinion,” Fingolfin said in greater tones of greater horror. “I’m not surprised when my son does something foolish, but I expected better of you, Maitimo.”

“Excuse me?” Fingon said.

“To marry Findekáno and have a child with him when you are well aware—”

“Excuse me!” Fingon threw out his hands to Maedhros. “Give me back my son!”

Ereinion began to cry. Maedhros shoved him into Fingon’s arms and backed away. Fingon rocked Ereinion and cooed and said his mother was a nice Sinda, wasn’t she, didn’t he remember. She had long golden hair and a thin face that rarely smiled and she loved Ereinion very much.

“Golden hair?” Maedhros said.

“She was quite special that way, but you know what she didn’t have? A single strand of red!”

“Oh,” Fingolfin said. “Hmm. Ah.”

“Russandol’s not even married!”

“There are ways to hide that.”

Fingon did not exclaim, There are? When Fingolfin came close, he curled around Ereinion but allowed Fingolfin to touch a finger to Ereinion’s tiny fist. “I jumped to conclusions. I’m sorry,” Fingolfin said.

Fingon tried to be generous. If he’d walked in on himself and Maedhros sitting close together, himself with the spark of marriage in his eyes and Maedhros holding a baby, what might he have thought?

Not that he and Maedhros were wed! Fingolfin had been listening to too much gossip.

But then again.

Fingon sighed and looked into the eyes of his son, which were Orodreth’s eyes. “Really, Atya. What do you think of me? I may be foolish enough to elope, but with my own cousin? That’s a step too far.”

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