On Olives and Acceptance by Isilme_among_the_stars  

The year I turned six I lost my first tooth. The very next day a particularly vicious turtle bit Elrond’s toe and refused to let go no matter how loudly he screamed or how fearsomely I scowled with my newly gapped grin. Mother’s casual remarks regarding twin and peredhel growth became anxious debates with the remaining Doriathrim around that time, as the differences between my brother and I began to assert themselves. No one knew quite what to expect of us. Elrond showed no signs of losing any of his teeth, and the few souls brave enough to bring up Eluréd and Elurín swore neither outstripped the other for height, as I began to do with my twin. It was, therefore, also the year that I first learned of my uncles, frozen in time only two years older than I, and my home burned at the same hands that had torched theirs.

Suddenly, I found myself in a world altogether alien. The only familiar thing left to cling to was my brother, and he too was frighteningly changed. Elrond, who had nattered away endlessly since he learned to speak, more often than not in my ear, fell abruptly silent. The brother who had climbed higher than I, strode fearlessly into the foamy breakers to cut me a path, and leaned precariously over estuary waters to pluck wild buckthorn berries while I held fistfuls of his shirt, was gone. My willing partner in mischief had become a cringing, reticent thing, who strayed not a foot from the path our strange and fearsome captors bid us walk. On the long and taxing slog up the Sirion river we traded the delicate flesh of saltwater fish for gamey meats felled along the road, and slept not nestled amid concealing reeds, but bared to the cold stars. In short, the year I turned six, the world as I knew it ended.

That first night, laid to rest in a nest of leaf litter and rough blankets, surrounded by a strew of soldiers who slept with their swords within easy reach, I curled around my brother and wept silent tears until a dreamless sleep took me. Perhaps it was the strange food, perhaps the stench of blood and smoke that we could not rid from our noses. Maybe it was sheer exhaustion. Before the night was through I awoke cold and wet, with a sour smell clinging to my clothes, and Elrond shivering against me, still retching. The thought of waking our captors did not enter our minds, for they were nought but monsters in the dark, and we were terribly afraid. So, with little else to be done, we huddled in the driest corner of the blanket and tried once more to sleep. I patted Elrond on the back as I had seen our mother do, wrinkled my nose against the smell, and, impossibly, dozed until dawn.

Such a fuss was made of us when the sun rose. Maglor scrubbed Elrond and I thoroughly and set us warming naked by the fire while our only clothes dried, and breakfast was prepared. How contrite he was! From the look he wore, one might believe he had personally stuck fingers down my brother’s throat (we did that once, just to find out what would happen, and mother was not pleased with the result). No matter how appealingly Maglor or anyone else coaxed, Elrond pressed his lips closed against all food offered. That was how it started.

Under the hot summer sun I tired quickly, taking two hurried steps for every long stride the proud, dark-haired soldiers surrounding us walked. By noon hunger gnawed at me so fiercely that I neglected to remember the ominous, russet-haired elf offering me handfuls of nuts could not be trusted. I scarfed them down and guzzled every drop of water he dipped from the river with a wooden cup. By noon, with nothing in his belly to sustain him, Elrond’s legs gave out. He had to be carried for the remainder of the day while I continued to scurry alongside, and so too most of the way across the plain. Though he liked it little, and would alternately struggle or loll worryingly still, neither would Elrond accept any food or drink offered him, though sustenance would likely have restored capacity to walk on his own two feet.

On the fourth day we chanced upon a hive of bees mid-morning. I watched sidelong, pretending not to be fascinated as Maglor wafted smoke through the air and sung them drowsy with a droning melody. Before long he emerged with a lumpy comb dripping with sticky amber syrup and not a single sting. Maedhros cradled my sluggish brother, who was by now sleepier than the bees, while Maglor mixed a generous helping of honey into a flask. Meanwhile, I kicked at the muddy roots of an elm. We had reached the outskirts of Taur-im-Duinath by then, and trees abounded once more. Thoughts of climbing into the highest, slenderest branches, where the soldiers would not be able to reach, passed alluringly through my mind while Elrond blinked at me with foggy eyes. Frantic whispers traded between Maglor and Maedhros over my brother’s droopy head did not worry me as they ought. At six I knew nothing of dehydration, nor realised how close to losing my twin I had come. That night I kissed Elrond on the forehead and asked him if the water had been very sweet, and he in turn held my hand and told me the honey tasted different here to the kind bees made at home.

Home. The meaning of the word had changed while I was busy forcing my shrieking legs to keep moving, so that no one would threaten to carry me as they did Elrond. Once I had groaned at the word, for it signalled the end of a day’s adventure. Home, spoken in mother’s no-nonsense tone as she retrieved us from one of the many caregivers we had accrued over the years, went hand in hand with being dragged inside perforce for dinner, or bed. Home was once solid and comforting, if sometimes unwanted. Now it became an untouchable thing, existing only in a bubble in time, preserved like a set of sketched or painted scenes. Home did not live or breathe anymore. It was static and unreachable. I could not climb inside of it, nor wrap myself in its warmth.

“Elrond,” I cried from under a scratchy blanket that smelled of horse. It was the night before we crossed the Gelion, and the river’s rushing song teased me cruelly with this unwelcome fact. “I want to go home.”

A slew of words, all that I wished might still be, spewed forth: how I longed for our own familiar bed, for mother to gleefully plunk me into a soapy bath as she used when I wriggled away (we were so filthy by then), and for the soft, patched quilt she used to tuck us under when the nights were cold (the few blankets spared for us itched terribly). Elrond only stared as if he had no clue of what I spoke. As sobs convulsed through my chest and I tried desperately to list anything he might remember with fondness, my brother became deathly pale and turned away. His body was so stiff when I curled around it. That was, I think, when I first realised that something was very wrong. The next time I brought up our home, Elrond brought up what little dinner he had managed to swallow, and that scared me enough to stop talking about it altogether.

Crossing into Ossiriand changed little, except to collapse our world, which no longer ranged across new horizons, but became a small and bounded thing. We lived our new lives in the space between campfire, stream, and a perimeter guard of tall trees. By this time Maglor had gotten it into his head he should act as a father to us, which seemed to consist chiefly of overprotection, and an excess of touch, to which neither of us responded well. I wanted badly to be held, but the last person I wished to embrace was he. When he drew near my heart thundered like waves pounding against the shore in a storm, and my legs itched to run. They did so often, for frequently Maglor would grab our hands, either to lead where he wanted us to follow, or to teach us something he deemed we should know. It mattered not that he had been nothing but kind since we turned east. I feared him viscerally. Worst of all were evenings. My skin crawled as he scrubbed me clean, and I watched Elrond stiffen and shiver under his hands, even though the water was never cold.

When deemed too tired to remain around the fire of a night, it was he who settled Elrond and I to bed. No longer did we sleep surrounded by a scattering of soldiers and their arms, for with the crossing into Ossiriand came tents, and it was Maglor’s we were expected to share. Knots that had worked themselves permanently into my gut invited frantic and bloodied dreams after dark. Frequently their gory visions ravaged my sleep, and seemed to plague my brother equally as often. If I stayed quiet no one would try to soothe me, and it was better that way, at least in the beginning. But Elrond, whether he woke properly or not, would whimper and scream. Caught in Maglor’s embrace, all attempt at comfort provoked further distress. This did not stop our captor-turned-caregiver persisting alone through the dread reaches of night. My brother wailed endlessly through those awful hours. Perhaps all Fëanorians are as bull-headed as they say. Maglor was certainly persistent beyond the point of reason. All of us were, more often than not, tired and fractious in those days.

It was into this snarled mess that Enedlas dropped one morning, swinging down from a branch as Elrond pushed stodgy porridge around his bowl with a spoon, and Maglor watched with pursed lips. I had long since finished mine.

“These little ones are too quiet, Maglor,” Enedlas chastised in his mild way. “Do you not know how to waken children’s laughter?”

Red-eyed and yawning, Maglor soon agreed to him minding us for the morning. Thus Elrond was liberated from his cooled, unenticing breakfast and we gained a suite of willing caregivers. It has always been the way of Sindar and Laiquendi to raise their children in community. So too with Men. All sorts had watched over us in the havens; Man and Elda, highborn and low. In fact, it had been the poet Dírhaval who extricated my brother’s toe from the turtle’s jaws, then startled laughter from him afterward, composing a preposterous lay on the spot. That day Enedlas coaxed mirth from us for the first time in months. How we cackled at the darting squirrels! who began even as summer wound to a close, to hoard nuts against the scarcity of winter.

The world expanded to fit treetops high and green, where our feet trod sturdy boughs, and fresh breezes beckoned us toward the places birds made their nests. Soon it had grown to encompass a patch of bilberries, then of currants, and the slow bend in the river where cattails grew. With Laiquendian children I swam, and dug up roots of those familiar bulrushes to chew when I grew tired. Elrond did neither. He would sit on the bank and stare mournfully across the waters as I splashed, no matter how prettily I begged him to join us.

My twin seemed to shrink as I continued to grow. One wintry night it occurred to me, as we lay abed, and I held his spindly wrist in my hand, that an errant wind might one day bear him away, so thin had he become. And if that should happen, then I would have no one left at all. I was not the only one who feared for him. Maglor clucked and fussed, and tempted Elrond with titbits from precious stocks of sweet foods, to little avail.

“I would eat if I were given honey,” I told him scornfully one frigid afternoon, jealous of the treats he was allowed that I was not, and shivering with cold. We had seemed constantly hungry in the havens, as most small boys do, though there had been no lack of food. Often, in those days, I beheld my brother purple-fingered and stain-lipped from gorging on wild berries; a mirror to my own juice-smeared visage. Never had we managed to ruin our appetites as mother laughingly warned while she took spit-dampened thumbs to our messy cheeks.

Traitorously, glad relief lightened my chest when one evening, his brow knit with frustration, Maglor began to shovel food into Elrond’s slack mouth. Roasted burdock and wild carrot roots disappeared from the bowl as his fingertips held rigid my brother’s jaw. Elrond slumped, bow-backed against one steepled knee, coughing little clouds of steam into the air between swallows. There was nothing to see between the trees where his eyes fixed, and the small noises he made were strange. They were, I think, what caught Maedhros’s attention in the end.

“Káno,” he rebuked, already on his feet to intercept as his own bowl clattered to the ground. “Do you not see what is happening?”

You would think, perhaps, that Elrond should have jumped half a mile at such a noise. I had. Maedhros’s voice was, after all, just as powerful as Maglor’s, if less refined. I peeked out from a large thicket of bracken outside the circle of firelight before it had stopped barking, so fast did I scramble. Yet Elrond neither startled, nor tried to escape. He only doubled over spluttering and coughing as Maedhros rubbed his back.

Maedhros and Maglor argued in harsh whispers that night as we cringed beneath our covers. Elrond pressed so close I could not tell if it were I that trembled or he.

“Was it so wrong? He is desperately thin, and for once he did not fight!” Even furious, Maglor’s voice was smooth. Rarely did he suffer himself to be corrected openly in those days, and of those who tried, the only one to emerge unscathed was Maedhros.

“Of course he did not fight. The boy was frozen! He could hardly have spoken at all, let alone refuse. Surely you recognised that.”

“He is starving himself, Maedhros! What would you have me do?”

“Wait until he is ready to eat!” Maedhros roared. “Do not presume to lecture me on starvation. Had you tried that with me I would have bitten your fingers clean off.”

In the quiet that followed, the two of us shivered ever more violently, though we were not cold.

“You almost did, once,” Maglor said eventually. All the steel had left his voice. He sounded only tired, and afraid, which scared me more than I cared to admit.

“What makes you think it less detestable to inflict such treatment upon a child, simply because they cannot refuse?”

“I do not, but if this continues he will take ill. Eru forbid, what if he should die?”

“It will not come to that,” Maedhros said with a harsh kind of certainty. When he spoke his voice was muffled, just as father’s used to be as he wrapped us in his arms before sailing, and muttered farewells into the crown of mother’s hair. It was strange and uncomfortable for Maedhros’s rumbling voice to evoke that image. So too unnervingly incongruous to realise this forbidding spectre of a man could give comfort, and indeed, appeared genuinely to care for my brother.

When Elrond began shortly after to clutch at his belly and sob, it was Maedhros who ducked quietly into the tent, took Elrond into the circle of his arms and sat with him in the corner, rubbing his stomach until his cries softened into weak groans. Distrustful still, I watched until my eyelids became too heavy to keep their wary guard, and fluttered closed against my will. Maedhros remained when I woke, his disconcerting gaze fixed unblinking on me as Elrond, slack-jawed and deeply asleep, snored quietly against his shoulder. I stared back with as defiant a look as I could muster, and thought I saw the edge of his lip curl into a faintly amused grin.

☀︎

The forests of Ossiriand grew quiet in winter. Few travelled far if it could be helped. Even our jaunts with the Laiquendi became few and far between. When spring came, and Enedlas reappeared in his usual nonchalant fashion I realised how keenly such diversions had been missed.

“Do not tell me you have forgotten how to feed children too?” he chided Maglor as our guardian prodded the gutted remains of the last night’s fire back to life. “This one is far too thin. Did you let him hibernate all winter, like a torpid bear?”

“If you think you can do better,” Maglor challenged, “please be my guest.”

By then I had learned to discern the tension in such casual replies, though it was not until much later I understood the concern hidden within. The tone used was the very same Maglor would later employ when we asked after Maedhros’s conspicuous absences, or odd turns. On the whole I was rather glad to escape his dubious mood when Enedlas took Maglor’s words as permission to lead us away.

All around us the world re-awakened. So unsettling and strange did this feel when part of my heart gasped through death rattles at the same time. Something in me still clung to the havens, and the ghost of my dauntless twin, forever lost. That perishing scrap knew its days numbered. Even so, the curiosity of two small boys, who had once spent hours perfecting moorhen cries, was not entirely lost. With great delight we were shown the wonders of a forest in spring, and it was a balm to us both; from crocuses pushing out of the sleeping soil, unfurling their violet petals, to streams swollen with snowmelt. The greatest wonder of the day however, was the most innocuous. There had appeared in the small store of provisions Enedlas kept by his shelter, several earthenware jars, tightly sealed with wax stoppers. Perhaps the mesmerising patterns worked into their surface awoke the Noldo in me. Nought does it seem to matter how little their blood factors into ones ancestry, the inheritance of that people’s temperament has ever been stubbornly persistent. I could not help but stare.

“Ah, do you like them? Our brothers to the south, in the far reaches of Taur-im-Duinath and beyond make them, down where great sea serpents stalk the waters of the peninsula. Perhaps that is where the idea for such elaborate patterns comes.”

Enedlas was eager to explain the techniques used to create such work, since the craft was one his people also practised. I was more interested in the sea monsters. “Are there really great snakes living in the ocean?”

“You tell me, mariner’s son!” he laughed, eyes crinkling at the sides. It was an afterthought, almost forgone, to show us what was kept inside.

Olives are a strange fruit, are they not? Plucked raw from the branch one finds their firm, bitter flesh shrivels the tongue. Yet, soaked long in brine they become a rare delight. I do not know who first thought to try it, nor if they were Man or Elda, for that piece of lore, like many such innocuous slivers of history, has been lost to time, but I am grateful to that nameless creature. Later, during Númenor’s inaugural autumn, when I first saw plump green fruits purpling on the trees and recognised them for what they were, I knelt at the base of the nearest trunk and wept. At six, not knowing what to expect, I wrinkled my face in surprise.

“It is salty!” I cried as Enedlas popped a little dark fruit into my mouth. I almost spat it out, so shocked was I by the taste.

“What kind of fruit is salty?” asked Elrond with a suspicious frown, his curiosity piqued.

It was the most interest he had shown in food, of any kind, since the day our home had burned, and Enedlas capitalised on it with a sagacity I can only admire in retrospect. He shrugged and said with idle-seeming innocence, “you shall have to try it and find out.”

My brother projects very well the image of a perfect Sinda, composed and judicious, but I can assure you he is endowed in equal share with Noldorin temper, just as I. Curiosity won out. After but a few moments of scrutiny, Elrond held out a hand into which Enedlas dutifully placed an olive. Several more soon followed when it eventuated the first was enjoyed immensely.

“No more, I think,” Enedlas warned after he had eaten a dozen, “for your belly is already stretched and it will ache otherwise.”

Elrond, as usual, had consumed less than half the quantity of breakfast I had, and although that was not long ago, my belly already began to rumble, so it seemed to me an exceedingly odd thing for him to say. Imagine my surprise to find my brother nodding along sagely and rubbing his belly as if he were indeed already uncomfortably full. He looked quite forlorn.

“We shall make an agreement,” Enedlas bargained, looking kindly upon his long face. “Should you try but a little of the food Maglor gives you each mealtime, I will let you have this whole jar. But you must make them last. Eat only a few at a time. Do you agree?”

When Elrond tottered back into our camp, staggering under the weight of a load far bigger than anyone in the havens would have let us carry, and Maglor hurried to relieve him of the burden, Enedlas tutted good naturedly.

“Those are for Elrond’s keeping,” he said, winking as Maglor raised an eyebrow. “He will manage. Just you watch.”

My brother was made keeper of the olives without question, though Maglor clearly had many. From the tension in his jaw I thought it hurt him to bite them back, yet trust to the green elf’s wisdom he did. Soon the jar had pride of place beside our bed, where small treasures we accrued (colourful feathers, interesting shaped stones, and the like) were kept. The obvious problem with this arrangement was that neither alone, nor with my help, could Elrond manage to loosen the stopper, tightly sealed as it was. It therefore became common to see him disappear into Maglor’s tent, emerge holding the ungainly thing precariously in spindly arms, and plunk it down in front of Maedhros, who would dole out a few without needing to be asked.

One morning, as he often did, Maglor stood kneading dough for bread on a heavy wooden board, while nearby Elrond scowled as if the dough had personally offended him. Perhaps he believed it had, seeing as he would be required to eat it later. Meal times continued to be a fraught affair. Maglor near breathed down Elrond’s neck as he pointedly ate as little and as slowly as possible. Maedhros, in turn, scrutinised Maglor with a caustic expression, and I hastened to finish my portion so as to escape that mutinous tableau as quickly as possible. As I watched Elrond stare down the dough, dread percolated and grew until his expression slackened into something vague and piteous. It was this countenance, thankfully, that Maglor beheld as he swiped hair from his face, leaving a streak of flour across his brow.

“Would you like to help, Elrond?” he offered kindly, rather than castigating him for impertinence, as he might have had he caught the previous expression.

Having been startled by the question, Elrond shook his head as his attention faded back toward the present. It seemed more of a confused waggle than a refusal to me, but Maglor treated it as such.

“No?” he said. “No matter. When I was a child, bread-making fell to the women of the house, while men saw to the rest of the cooking. My mother, however, was wise, and knew that I wished to master the harp I had been gifted. So she set me to kneading, knowing it would strengthen my fingers ‘til I could pluck the strings well. Soon, I even grew to enjoy it.”

While I pretended I cared not for his activity, or family stories, and scratched at the dirt with a long stick, Elrond stared intently at the proceedings, transfixed by the continual fold and press of dough beneath Maglor’s nimble fingers. And Maglor, who had come to understand us better by this time, watched Elrond with a shrewd expression.

“I enjoy it still, for it is calming. See? My hands find a rhythm that lets my mind wander,” he explained. “Besides, it is much harder for my brother.”

“Hey!” came the indignant response from Maedhros, who, though out of sight, was quite clearly within earshot, much to Maglor’s amusement. The fond grin softening his features emboldened Elrond perhaps, for he found the courage to speak, which remained a rare thing with anyone apart from myself.

“What is it you think of?” he asked in a small voice.

“Music, most often,” Maglor told him.

Truly bored with this turn in conversation (I had learned by now that Maglor could prattle endlessly about arpeggios and counter melodies), I adjusted the grip on the stick in my hand and began idly shaping ‘El’ in the loose soil. Over and again I rubbed at the writing with my toes, erasing then reinscribing it. If I did not finish the word it could be any of our names: Elrond’s, mine, or mother’s. In this suspended state the letters were full of possibility, able to be completed, or not, as I wished. If I focussed carefully enough, I could conjure mother and the havens so in my mind, and take comfort in the pretence of a home to return to, making this new reality into a strange interlude. I was deep in such thoughts when Maedhros startled me.

“Good, but you must widen lambë and round her tail,” he judged, peering over my shoulder. I had not heard him walk over. Maedhros’s talent for inconspicuity was as proficient as any Laiquendi’s, and this, coupled with the vague sense of menace I felt in his presence, continued to disconcert me.

Seeing no fault in what were most likely laughably deformed scribblings, I squinted up at him in challenge. Ever was he more aloof than his brother, so when Maedhros took the stick in his hand to correct the shape of my latest ‘El’, he took care to hold it well below my own. The courtesy was lost on me. Already I bristled, intending to wrest the stick from his grip, when Elrond, having become tangled in the canvas, burst forth from Maglor’s tent with enough noise to turn all of our attention immediately toward him. In a surprising turn of events, it was not Maedhros he toted the overlarge jar of olives to, but Maglor.

“Would you like one?” he asked, reaching for the jar, only for Elrond to turn it aside, shaking his head. Now, Maglor relished a challenge, just as any good Noldo does. However, having grown rather frustrated with the unfathomable, yet high-stakes puzzle that Elrond had become by this juncture, he sucked in a frustrated breath, and curtly told my brother, “you have a voice, Elrond. I heard it only moments ago. Tell me what you want.”

His voice had been chased away, perhaps, by Maglor’s brusque manner, for my brother only shifted his gaze between the jar and the dough, and did not speak. With a sigh, Maglor took Elrond’s hands with his own and deftly shifted my brother’s slight form in front of his own bulk. Curled together, the heels of their palms massaged the dough as their arms moved in unison. I would have rescued Elrond had he worn the faraway face that scared me so, but as it was, though he held himself stiffer than the board on which they worked, his jaw was set with determination.

“Very good,” Maedhros commented, as I took up the stick again and copied more closely the shapes he had drawn. Over my head he called to Maglor, “we could add some olives to the dough, could we not?”

“Is that what you were trying to tell me?” Maglor asked Elrond rather pointedly. Though he did not like himself thought forceful, neither was Maglor very willing to concede when trying to make a point. Rarely was he cruel or mean-spirited toward me, but I soon found if one tested his will, the tolerant front he maintained so carefully was proved insincere.

“Come on, Káno. Was it not obvious?”

“I want him to say it, Maedhros,” Maglor countered primly. “They are his, after all, and it would not do to take without permission.”

This argument, of course, conveniently eschewed the consent he had failed to seek before snatching Elrond’s hands in the first place, and the mounting heap of similar instances that this morning’s perpetration joined.

“It seems to me he has told you clearly enough.” Maedhros spoke with finality, thus ending the argument.

Eventually, Maglor realised he could not treat Elrond like a set of reigns to be taken in hand whenever he wished to direct him. It took considerably longer for Elrond to give him his trust, just as it took a great deal of time for Maedhros to earn mine.

The bread, as it turned out, was very good. I watched intently as Maedhros, his one hand sheathed in a deerskin glove, drew the lid from a heavy iron pot with a hooked metal pole, then carefully drew the loaf out.

“You must help me slice it, Elrond,” he solicited, as it sat steaming on the board cooling, holding up his truncated right arm by way of explanation.

Curiously, the amputated limb had seemed to present no obstacle in handling the loaf moments before. Perhaps this is why Maglor snorted as if there were some great joke we were missing, though he said nothing as Elrond dutifully sawed great uneven slices, while Maedhros held the loaf steady. For the first time in months he ate a greater share than me. Neither Maedhros nor Maglor protested their lesser portions, even in jest. Nor did they complain later when forced to rub minted oil over Elrond’s belly to soothe his uncomfortably stretched stomach.

“Is he ill?” I asked, climbing onto Maglor’s lap voluntarily for the first time, as I  guardedly watched Elrond receiving Maedhros’s ministrations. Much had changed in nine months. I had learned to take comfort where I could get it, and although I could not yet say I liked Maglor, nor wholly trusted him, I knew with enough confidence that he would not be cruel.

“No dear, Elrond does not ail. All will be well,” he promised, running still-oiled fingers through my hair and idly untangling the knots they found there. Soon it, like Elrond, smelled of mint. The experience was not unlike sitting with one of the Gondolindhrim. They too seemed always to have restless fingers that often played through my hair when I, grown tired of adventure, had curled up yawning in a comfortable lap. He was right. Elrond was more well that day than he had been in months, in truth.

Perhaps it was their saltiness, which harked back to the seaside fare of home (it had been long since we enjoyed the briny delight of freshly boiled crab), or perhaps merely that the olives afforded Elrond agency. Whatever the reason, they proved a much more effective motivator than the honey and dried fruit Maglor favoured as enticement. Though his blanching at food, or refusing more than a few mouthfuls, remained common for some time, Elrond’s stubborn determination to keep his word to Enedlas, and therefore fairly earn possession of the olive jar, held. Gradually, no doubt helped along by Maedhros’s insistence that Maglor cease his pressuring, my brother baulked less, and grew to savour food again. The jar, carefully rationed, lasted most of the spring. By the time it was empty, more often than not, Elrond ate as much as I. As his liveliness returned, my concern diminished, making way for bitterness with its lack. The easiness with which we increasingly found ourselves coursing through our new lives, and the unquestioning way I caught myself accepting this, caused resentment to flow like poison through my veins. My twin did not much like the moods such feelings would inspire in me.

“I am taller than you,” he declared one day as summer neared. I sulked at the base of an ash tree, taking miserly satisfaction in diverting whole columns of ants as I flicked leaves across their path. By then we had turned seven, though neither he nor I could remember our day of begetting, so the milestone had gone by unmarked.

“No, you are not,” I retorted, because I had been taller for most of the previous year.

“I am!” he insisted, and promptly induced Maedhros to mark his height. I watched on suspiciously as charcoal scratched against the upright beam standing in the entrance of Maglor’s tent.

The glare that I directed toward Maedhros as he tried with little success to position me, back straight and head held high, by verbal instruction alone, was perhaps unfair.

“This is stupid,” I complained, frustrated that I could not seem to comply to his satisfaction.

Maedhros eyed me with a cool, authoritative look that communicated quite clearly he saw through my bluster. “I can help,” he offered, “but I will not touch you unless you wish it.”

With jaw clenched tight, because I did not wish to seem eager for his assistance, I agreed with a terse nod.

“I do not wish you ill, Elros. This may not be the home you want for, nor I your father— Elbereth knows I cannot replace them— yet we are family, and I would see you well cared for. You will find helping Maglor and I in this endeavour easier than fighting against us, but regardless of your choice, I will not harm, nor seek to overmaster you.”

Knowing Maedhros, he well understood the irony of those words. Yet, for all that he could be hard and exacting, I had not found him disingenuous. His words, the most he had strung together for my benefit in one instance all year, did more to move my heart toward acceptance than all of Maglor’s paternal gestures.

Elrond was indeed a hair taller than I, and my match for strength beside. Mother need not have worried. It became increasingly apparent as we grew, that twins, even those more akin than divergent as we were, may grow at different rates. I no longer feared a hearty gust of wind may blow my brother away, for even if his mind still wandered frequently to a hazy, far off place, his body was fixed solidly to this earth.

I had come to realise that we, unlike our home, would survive. Maedhros and Maglor did not yet have our affection, nor was our place in Ossiriand rightly one of belonging (those things would come later), but neither was fear a constant companion.

Olives, ever after, have stood as a reminder of our survival, and of the days that moved us from despair toward hope, which is why I will always experience a wave of relief when their salty savour hits my tongue. And I can never pop one into my mouth without thinking of my brother. I do not suppose he has had the fortune of tasting them again, but if he should chance to journey to Númenor one day, we will bake together. King or no, I will dirty my hands and let flour streak my cheeks, and we will stuff our loaves full of olives, and gorge on slices cut thick, spread with lashings of butter. Butter, I shall tell him, though we did not have it then, is a fine addition, and I shall laugh when his satisfaction proves me right.

Chapter End Notes

A great big thank you to everyone from tumblr and The Lost Tales Community who have been so encouraging and showed interest in this story! It has been much appreciated and helped me keep writing through some pretty awful summer weather. 

Elrond and Elros are indeed related to Maedhros and Maglor. First cousins, three times removed in fact. Enedlas “Middle Leaf”, the name for my Green Elven OC, is my own creation. I have worked from the very little attested Nandorin that exists + a borrowed element from Sindarin. While this  <em> should </em> work because it follows the relationship between attested cognates Galadh (S.) and Galad (Nan.), I cannot guarantee that is correct, but it was fun to put together.

As per usual, I would love to hear what you thought.

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