Of Daub and Displacement by Isilme_among_the_stars  

It rains. Endlessly.

All day rain has been beating down on the canvas of the tent, and Elros squishes his chin between his fists and pouts. He kicks his legs, bored. Endlessly he is bored, because the rain will not stop and Maglor will not let us outside with the wet and the chill and the mud. Both of us caught a cold last month and we coughed for weeks, so Maglor does not want to ‘strain our poor lungs’ in the cold, wet air, lest we start hacking up phlegm again. I do not want to repeat the experience either. I have had quite enough of slime shooting from my nose and dripping down my throat. It was disgusting. Elros would risk far worse if it meant he did not have to be this unbearably bored.

An acorn cap bounces off my head. Of course it does, because Elros is bored. So now I am target practice.

“Leave off, Elros!”

I am quite content reading. The book is one from a small collection that Maedhros seems to magic out of nowhere. I have not worked out where he keeps them, but it is not in his tent. This one is about plants. Not the plants that we find in this forest, or the ones I remember from by the sea. The pictures show them all growing in the mountains. I do not know if the information will ever be useful to me, for I do not know if I will ever see such plants, but I like learning about them all the same. And I like making lists of the words I do not know, because later Maglor or Maedhros will teach me what they mean.

Another acorn cap bounces, this time off my knee. So I turn and growl at my brother.

“Elros…” Maglor warns. This is his patient voice that tells us the patience has a limit.

“Why do we have to live in a tent anyway?” Elros sulks.

“The Quendi have always been nomadic,” Maglor says, like he wants Elros to shut up, so he is stopping the conversation before it starts. Elros is meant to be practising tengwar on the wax tablet Maglor has given him, but that was never going to occupy him for long. Maglor is elbow deep in cloth, shifting the fabric around and stretching it over a wooden frame. Elros tore a hole in his cloak two days ago and Maglor is determined to fix it before it ‘falls entirely to pieces’. He doesn’t want Elros’s questions ‘assaulting his ears’, least of all when Elros does not actually want to learn, only to complain.

So Elros sighs, turns away and starts running his fingers down the wall of the tent. Scratching, scratching, scratching. The sound invades my ears. For the love of the great music, I wish he would stop. I am about to tell him to quit it and give him my best glare, but as I fill my lungs, a cold drip of water lands right on top of my head.

“Maglor,” I say.

“Yes, Elrond?” His frustration is barely disguised now. We have interrupted him too many times this afternoon.

“The tent is leaking.”

“Oh, that will not do,” he says, shooing me away from the offending trickle.

A pot is placed there to collect the water, and to keep it from running across the floor. Now there is a plunk, plunk, splash, and I cannot very well tell Manwë to leave off.

When will this rotten downpour stop?

☀︎

“Here it is. What do you think?” Maedhros asks.

I do not think much of it. It is abandoned, for one, and overgrown for another. And I do not know what opinion I am meant to have.

“Great. You want us to live in a ghost village.” Maglor does not like it when Elros is sarcastic like this. He says we are princes, and such behaviour is beneath us. I wonder how we can still be princes when there are no kingdoms left.

“No,” Maedhros corrects my brother. “It is more of a hamlet, and it will hardly be a home for ghosts when many of our people move with us.”

Elros gives him a look that is both doubtful and rude. It is a good thing Maglor is not here. Elros would surely have had an earful by now. Maedhros calls Elros ‘forthright’ and says he will learn when not to speak his mind as he grows. They do not know there is much my brother tells neither of them, only me.

“Besides,” Maedhros adds, ignoring the look, “it is safer if it seems deserted.”

“Which one is ours?” I ask, and he points toward a great tangle of vines.

“That,” Elros says, rolling his eyes, “is a tree.”

Maedhros just smiles like there is some secret he knows and we do not. “Behind the tree, Elros.”

We push through the vines, past the tree that they are climbing, and they flick cold, wet drops onto my cheeks. There is more forest behind them. More trees, more bracken, and more wet. Rain has made the ground boggy, and let all the earth smells out.

“It is a little way still, but if you look in that direction…”

“I see it!” Elros whoops. He likes to be the first to discover things. It is a game we play. Who can spot the first finch, or which of us can hunt out something delicious hidden in the plants. Maedhros calls that foraging. Off my brother runs, toward something half hidden behind trees. I stay where I am, because I do not wish to slip or squelch in the mud that is trying to suck onto my shoes like a hundred hungry leeches. Maybe if Elros cared as much about such things I would not lose so often. Maedhros squeezes me on the shoulder. He knows I hate it when Elros leaves me behind.

“It is no grand example of Noldorin architecture,” he says, “but will do for us for the time being.”

Well, anything is better than a leaky tent.

☀︎

Maglor is humming.

We have only just begun putting things inside and already he is humming. Maglor does this when he is busy, making the same notes loop over and again. Sometimes hearing it makes me feel warm and happy. Sometimes, like today, it makes me crazy. At least here I can get a wall between us, so the sound is not right in my ear. And I know when he comes up behind me.

“This room,” he says, “I thought could be for you and your brother.”

The house is big. It is the kind made by plastering mud over woven sticks, then painting that with lime and oxblood, which makes the walls a dull kind of pink. There is one large room with two smaller at one end, and another on the side so that the house looks like a lambë¹ with its tail cut short.

Maglor laughs at the look I give him, but I don’t know what is funny. What will Elros and I do with a room of our own? We have never had one before. Maybe Maglor jests. Always we have shared Maglor’s tent, and on bad nights Maedhros takes me to his.

“Yes, you will have a room to yourselves!” He smiles and lets a load of blankets spill from his arms to the floor. They are the ones I sleep under. “Will this one suit you and Elros, do you think?”

This morning Maedhros magicked his books out of their hiding place and put them in the lambë-tail room. The big room is for everyone and the two that are left are the same, so it is a stupid question. Why does he ask it? Maedhros would probably say Maglor is ‘being polite’. I know it is rude to answer ‘no’, and saying nothing is no better.

“Yes, I think so,” I say, then remember to add “thank you” to be polite.

It is almost true. Maglor’s tent feels like a huge cloak wrapped around me, warm and safe. Being in Maedhros’s feels like hiding behind the shield he keeps in one corner. But this whole house feels rough and hard, and I don’t like that much. This room has a big window and its wooden shutters are open. I can see branches swaying on their trees through it, and I do like that. Here is where I will read, on the wide sill where the light comes in.

Maglor has many smiles. This is a real one; the pleased kind, I think. “Very well,” he says. “You had best start fetching your things.”

When Elros and I jostle along with our collections of forest findings, and our spare clothes, he tells me, “you know they put poo in the walls?”

“Yuck! You’re making that up. I do not want to live in a poo house.”

He stops walking and looks at me funny. “It’s true. Our home was made that way too. Don’t you remember?”

I do not, but I say nothing because Elros gets sad when I forget things about the havens. I forget more than I remember.

“It doesn’t smell! Not after it dries,” he tells me.

How would he know, anyway? I roll my eyes because I am sure he is trying to catch me out. Later I feel bad for doing so because he was right. The mixture Annuiloth squelches into bare patches, where the wall has crumbled, does have goat dung in it. Many of the old soldiers are busy fixing buildings in the hamlet today. Maybe our old house needed patching too.

☀︎

Elros kicks his legs against the chair, bored again. Having a chair inside is new. Well, new to us. The chair is old. Furniture was left in the house and most of it is still usable, or will be, Maglor tells us ‘with a little care’. Elros sighs and rolls a stylus along the table.

We have been left in the big room to occupy ourselves with something ‘quiet and out of the way’. Maglor is busy fetching the big pot from our last campsite so he can make dinner while Maedhros tries to order the house.

“Can we go outside?” Elros calls out.

Maedhros has just walked past with his writing box balanced atop a leather saddle bag. “Yes, but do not stray more than a hundred yards from the house. And mind you are not a hindrance.”

Elros grabs my hand and pulls me out the door. “Come on,” he says.

Outside, adults are busy finishing jobs in the last of the sun’s light, but none are nearby, so it will be easy to do as Maedhros bids. Elros has not thought to go far anyway. He wishes to go up. There is a twisted, old oak right next to the house and he tugs me toward it. Enedlas taught us there are many good things to be found in trees. I wonder what we will see in this oak’s branches. I will look for squirrel holes and woodpeckers.

Elros is halfway to the top by the time I am on the first branch. He is not really looking, only moving, moving, moving. Leaves come fluttering down onto my head where his scrambling feet knock them loose. I wish he would take more care, because I do not like being showered with dried leaves.

“Hey, watch out,” I complain, picking one out of my hair.

He calls down, “sorry!” and starts crawling along a branch. Of course he does, because Elros is ‘full of adventure’. Maedhros says so in a voice that I have not figured out whether is good or bad. I am quite happy in the tree, but Elros is not. By the time I have reached his branch, he has dropped onto the roof. I wish he were not so determined to leave me behind.

Elros wobbles a little as he lands. No such mistakes are made by the Laiquendi children we play with. They always land perfectly. Nor do they get sick with snotty noses. That is the Mannish side of us coming through, Maglor says. I wonder if there is any good that comes of being Mannish, or if it is all illness and bad balance. My brother grins at me, triumphant, and then he steps back onto a patch of leaves and loses his balance again. The shingles have to be very steep for the rain to roll off the roof. Elros slides down the side and falls.

☀︎

I am crying and Elros is not, and that is scary and wrong. Maedhros pushes our books and writing things off the table with the back of his arm as he lays Elros on it. They all clatter to the floor.

“Elrond, look at me,” Maglor says. He has me in his arms, and for once I am glad of it. I don’t want to look, so I put my head against his neck and nod instead to show I am listening.

“This is very important, love. Did you brother lose consciousness?”

I don’t know what that word means. I cannot answer. I keep crying and Maglor keeps asking.

“Did he seem to sleep? Did he hit his head?”

My words come out sounding kind of wet. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t see. Elros blinked at me owlishly when I finally managed to reach the ground. It was hard to climb down. My hands were shaking.

“Shh, shh. You’ve done well, Elrond-mell ². Just tell me what you do remember, alright?”

But I cannot do that either, even though I can still see it in my head.

Elros moans, and then shrieks when Maedhros touches his arm, and Maglor’s grip goes a little loose around me. When he kisses the top of my head, I think the kiss is more for him than it is for me. Screams are not normally good, except for when a baby is newly born, but Maglor seems to think it hopeful now. Maybe this is somehow like birth? Though I don’t know how, except for the blood. There is blood when babies and animals are born, and there is blood all over Elros.

“The branches scratched you badly, Elerosseya³.” Maedhros is talking in his soft voice. The one he uses at night when I am scared. “It will sting, but I must check.”

Now Elros is crying too as Maedhros dabs and peers at his cheek, his legs, his arms, and his tummy. Then he looks for a long time into my brother’s eyes, and Elros tries to look back at Maedhros through his tears. His bottom lip is wobbling. It does that when he is very scared.

“It is only your arm we need worry about, Elerosseya,” Maedhros says. “The rest are merely scrapes.”

That does not cheer either of us. Elros’s scrapes do not look ‘merely’ anything. They are very angry and red.

Beside me, the rough, mean walls are starting to feel very close. Maglor smells like sweat, the air smells like copper and I can taste salt. Worse, slime is sliding down my throat and blocking my nose, and it is hard to breathe. Inside me, my stomach starts to flop around like a fish.

“I will find Annuiloth,” Maglor says, and he is walking toward the door.

I am glad that he takes me with him. Outside the air is cold and smells wet, like more rain will come soon. I feel better, out here. It makes me guilty though, feeling better, when I think of Elros, hurt and stuck inside with Maedhros all by himself.

☀︎

Annuiloth is good at setting bones. Maglor tells me that she has set his arm no less than three times.

“It need only have been two had you not rushed off to battle again so soon,” she says.

“Was there a choice?” Maglor asks. He does not seem to think there was.

“It was his shield arm,” she explains, but that does not help me understand any better.

Elros’s arm does not need to be set. Annuiloth says it is a fracture, and that the bone has broken a little, but is still in one piece. This does not save him from having to wear a splint for weeks, to keep his arm still and safe while the bone heals.

My brother is sitting up now, and he taps his heel lazily against one of the chair’s legs. Beating, beating, beating. Elros is like himself again. He looks too white, and too slumped, but he is doing normal Elros things, so I am not worried any more.

“You put your hand out to break your fall?” Annuiloth asks Elros. She is holding his arm very, very gently and showing him where the bone has cracked. It is swollen and bruised just there, like a tiny mole has pushed up a hill under his skin instead of the earth. When I lean over to get a better look, Maglor helps by stepping closer. He has not put me down. I think this is because I cannot get in the way if I am stuck to him like a barnacle to a ship.

The palm my brother shows her is criss-crossed with scratches, but all of the blood is gone. Maedhros wiped it away while we were fetching Annuiloth. There was not so very much, he said, it only seemed so because it had spread over many scrapes. Most of them look very raw and pink now, the colour of a cat’s nose, and some are already crusting over to make scabs.

“Well, that was very clever,” Annuiloth tells Elros. “It saved your head.”

What I think is clever is the wooden thing that Annuiloth puts on Elros’s arm. It has two pieces that are fixed together almost like a forked branch, and it will keep his elbow bent and his arm still. Around it goes soft strips of linen. I think I would like to do that one day: fix hurts with cleverness and cloth.

☀︎

I am not allowed to lay next to Elros in case I knock his arm. Even if I am on the side that is not hurt, and promise not to wriggle or touch him at all, I am still not allowed. This is not fair. He is my brother and he is hurt and it is my job to look after him. Maglor says that I can look after him best by letting him rest by himself, but Maglor does not know the secret pattern we squeeze into each other’s hands at night so that everything will be alright.

“Stop worrying about Elros. I know you are,” Maedhros tells me. “Maglor is not going to let anything happen to him, I promise.”

We are laying on Maglor’s bed in the room where he has dumped his things. The bed smells just like the tent and feels safe, but the room is strange. All of the shapes of it are different, and the shadows are wrong.

“But what if he cannot sleep? Elros doesn’t sleep without me,” I protest.

“He is tired enough to sleep through an orc raid tonight.”

“But what if it hurts too much?”

“Then Maglor will give him willow tea, and if that fails he can always nap tomorrow,” Maedhros reasons.

“What if I cannot sleep?” This happens a lot, and willow tea cannot fix it.

Maedhros shifts his arm so that I can push against his side without being trapped there.

“Then we will do as we always do. You will be safe and well too, Elenya⁴,” he promises.

☀︎

In the middle of the night I wake and am not where I am supposed to be. There are no canvas walls, but strange solid things. I am in two places. In one place it is warm and I can hear whispery sounds like rushes in the wind and the rumble of the distant sea. In this place the soft quilts on top of me are madder red and woad blue and I do not have to look to know that. They are meant to smell of soapwort and pennyroyal, but in the second place the quilt smells like lemon balm, and if I open my eyes it will be brown. There are whispery sounds in this place too, but they are different, like the little slips leaves make against each other as rain patters through the trees.

The two places are not allowed to be together like this. I scream.

Then Maedhros lifts me onto his chest, and he smells like mint, and I remember exactly where I am. Next, I remember this is where I am meant to be now.

☀︎

Elros sits inside all day and does not want to do anything except moan. His arm hurts. His skin hurts. His head hurts. I ask Maedhros if this means he did hit his head like Maglor worried, but he says he does not think so. It is just a ‘simple, garden-variety headache’, whatever that means.

“Do you want to go outside for a while Elrond-mell?” Maglor asks after Elros has grumbled at my reading to him out of the plant book yet again. “The rain has stopped, and Enedlas will be glad of your help digging up winter roots.”

Sometimes we really do help him dig up turnips, beets and wild carrots. Sometimes we play in the mud and Enedlas grins down at his hands while he digs, and I know his grin is for us. There are worms in the soft earth, and he holds them gently in his large hand and tips them into our small ones and we watch them squirm, pink and wriggly and flecked with dirt. I enjoy all these things, but I do not want to do any of them without Elros. It would feel strange. So instead I wander over to Maedhros’s room where he is arranging his things.

“Can I help?” I ask.

Maedhros looks up at me like his thoughts are very busy and he must keep thinking them for a while before he can even hear my question.

“Ah, perhaps you can put these on the shelf, Elenya?”

There is a stack of books to Maedhros’s right and he waves his arm over them. They are all ‘practical’. Maglor tells us how in Tirion, where he used to live, there were books full of music and poetry, and books elves wrote to tell other elves what they thought or supposed about something, not just what they knew. All of these books are knowing books. I try to make an order for them because I know Maedhros will like that. There are some about plants, like I have been reading, and these I put first. There are others with instructions or recipes for just about everything we might need, from medicines to the glue Enedlas makes from animal skins. These I put next, with the medicine book next to the ones about plants, because most medicines are made from plants. Then I come to a book with nothing written on the outside, and have to open it to find out what it is about.

I have seen maps before, but not like this. They are drawn with inks of all different colours, not just the smokey black Maedhros makes from oak galls. The pages are very busy with details. Blue is for water, even though most of the rivers and streams I have seen look green or brown really, or sometimes white if they are very quick and noisy. On some maps red lines carve up the land and names are written inside the shapes they make. Some of the names have been neatly crossed out. I wonder why. There is a page that has a lot of blue on one side, which must be the ocean, and I trace my finger along the thin spidery lines of blue that collect themselves into one thick line, which I suppose is a river.

“I wish you had not opened that, Elenya,” Maedhros tells me, and I jump because he is looking right over my shoulder and I had not heard him.

It is pointless asking why. I can ask Maglor the ‘why’ of things, and he will tell me more often than not, but if Maedhros is going to explain something he will do it without me asking, and no amount of asking will make him otherwise. So instead I say, “where is this?”

“That,” he tells me, pointing to the great blue space, “is Belegaer, and this up here, Nevrast, is where your great-grandfather held territory, before Gondolin was built.”

His finger is much higher on the page than mine is. I like knowing more about my family, but I wish he had told me about that spidery water too. Before I can ask, Maedhros closes the book with a soft thunk.

“I think that is enough for today. Let us go find Enedlas. He offered to take you out foraging.”

It is harder to say no to Maedhros than it is to Maglor. He does not give me a choice when he does not mean for me to have one. Reluctantly, I go, and even though Enedlas is funny and shows me new, wonderful things as he always does, and even though his youngest cousins, who Elros and I play with often, come too, I am terribly lonely.

☀︎

That night I dream about rivers running down to the ocean. Their waters are the light, bright blue of the ink on the map, not the deep green or brown that rivers ought to be, and their surface is like paper. I fly like an eagle above, watching them wriggle as snakes do through gold and green, and hide for a while beneath a great, spiky, dark forest. The ocean, when I see it, looks like it goes on for pages and pages and pages, and a whole book would not be enough for it to fill. Then I plunge down where the river opens like fingers at the end of an arm and I splash beneath the water. Suddenly it is brown, and murky and filled with silt and slime. I cannot breathe but still I am trying to shout for my brother and I am reaching out my arm toward the light where it shines through amber.

When I wake I am screaming his name and trying to tear myself away from Maedhros’s arms. Elros is already scrambling through the doorway and taking my hand with his good one and telling me, “Naneth got you, remember? It’s alright. Naneth got you.”

Our dreams tangle together sometimes. I feel bad because I have woken him and he came so fast when I called that the scabs on his knees are cracked and bleeding again. Even worse, I do not remember.

The next night Maglor lets us sleep in the same room, and puts his bed roll between ours to stop our bodies tangling together while we sleep, which they often do.

☀︎

“Can we make a map?” Elros asks Maglor over porridge one morning.

Though he says his arm does not ache much, Maglor will not let him outside often, because Maglor does not think my brother can keep from running and climbing and ‘what if you fall, Elros? Then it will hurt!’. Ever since I told him about the book of maps, Elros has been as curious as me, but Maedhros will not let either of us look.

“No,” Maglor says, covering a yawn with his hand.

“Why not?” Elros asks.

“Because, my dear,” Maglor explains in his very reasonable voice, “we do not have the paper for it.”

He is being extra patient because of Elros’s arm. My brother has realised this, of course, and ‘tries his luck’ with questions a lot.

“What if I do it without paper?”

“If you can think of a way to do it without paper, Elros-mell, that does not consume anything else we need for other uses, and can be cleaned away at the end, then you can make your map.” Maglor looks at him over the top of his mug as if he is trying to decide how likely Elros is to ‘cause mischief’.

Elros smiles his best well-behaved smile like he intends to be as good as Lady Elbereth herself. He thinks if he is ‘obedient’ then Maglor will let him out of ‘house jail’ sooner, you see. Neither of us mean to make any trouble. We really don’t.

Elros runs a piece of charcoal along one edge of the table, squeaking the whole way. “This is the sea,” he says.

“The sea is not straight like that,” I point out.

He ignores me and starts drawing rivers. Squeaking, squawking, scratching. I have to cover my ears. There are lines for ‘where the ships came up the river to hide’ and ‘the one Naneth takes us to the sea on’. Then Elros is making smudges for ‘home’ and ‘where we get buckthorn berries’. I add ‘where biting turtles live’. It might not be in the right place, but this does not matter because I remembered something and Elros grins at me really wide. I wonder if the scabs on his cheek and chin will crack open if he does that too much, but they don’t. He is adding ‘crabs’ somewhere by the sea when Maedhros walks in. Maedhros makes a strange face and a very odd noise, and then walks straight out. This is when Maglor sees what we have drawn.

“Oh,” he says, looking at the table. “You had better wipe that away now boys.”

That is when I realise the rivers Elros has drawn look a bit like the spidery ones in Maedhros’s book. I don’t want them to be gone, but we agreed, and we are both trying to be ‘well-behaved’, so I pick up a rag and start wiping.

☀︎

Elros lies closest to the window. He is fast asleep, but keeps whimpering and wriggling, and every time his body moves the linen shifts. Linen rustles against linen loud in my ears, keeping me awake. I wish he could be still, but I suppose it is hard to do when a lump of wood is strapped annoyingly to your arm. I am sandwiched between Maedhros and Maglor. Maedhros must be closest to the door—‘don’t ask’, Maglor says—and it is probably better that way because Elros would rather eat dirt than sleep next to him. He is only here because even with Maglor between us, I have a ‘surprising aptitude’ for ending up on top of Elros without even knowing I am doing it. Maglor sleeps too deeply to stop me, but Maedhros knows whenever I so much as twitch. None of us wish to wake to Elros shrieking in pain and clobbering me over the head again.

Whispers pass over my head; harsh whispers that sound important. But Maglor’s hand is soft and gentle running over my hair, which feels very nice, and I know he and Maedhros cannot be really angry. It is hard to hold onto words as I get sleepier but I hear something about ‘their home’ and ‘should be allowed’ in Maglor’s smooth voice and ‘worse nightmares’ in Maedhros’s rumbling one.

☀︎

“You know what these fish are called, Elros?” Enedlas asks. He has taken us to the slow bend in the river today to catch fish. Elros cannot hold a spear like I can, so he stands on the bank collecting the fluffy parts and dried stalks of cattails, because they will be good for starting fires and fixing roofs. Not all of the houses in the hamlet have shingles like ours.

“Pike?”

“Very good.” Enedlas nods, then he taps me on the shoulder. “Get ready, Elrond. That big one there. Here he comes…”

The water swirling around my ankles is very cold and my feet are uncomfortable, but I do not dare move, even a little bit. My hands are tight on the spear and Enedlas’s hands are warm and firm over mine. The fish’s tail flicks, flashing through the water until it is almost perfectly in front of us. Then, whoosh, the spear flies down and there is a wriggling fish on the end. My heart thumps harder than the fish flaps, but it is a happy, proud kind of thumping.

“A good dinner, do you think?” When Enedlas asks questions like this they are not really questions. He just wants us to know we can be happy or proud or amazed too. He is using his proud voice today, so I nod and my smile is big, because we did something good together.

“Can I touch it?” Elros asks. His feet are dancing, pushing up on his toes. They do that when he is excited.

“On the back here. His teeth are sharp, so keep your fingers away from his mouth!”

While Elros is busy feeling the slimy scales I ask, “Enedlas, why are Maedhros and Maglor upset by maps?”

“Maps? Tell me a little more, hên nín⁵.”

I explain about the charcoal rivers Elros drew on the table and Enedlas starts to look colder than the fish.

☀︎

Because rain has washed away some of the new plaster from the walls, they need to be fixed again. I like how the mud squelches between my fingers when I dig it up.

“Did you know that daub walls are a Mannish invention?” Annuiloth tells me as she rolls a ball of what I suppose must be ‘daub’ and presses it onto the wall. She calls the balls ‘cats’. “We learned the technique from the Edain after they came over the Blue Mountains. It is quite clever, do you think?”

Men could be ill and clumsy, but also clever?

Annuiloth has a warm laugh. It is deep and big, like it comes right from her belly or maybe from the earth beneath her feet. “You look surprised! It is a proud inheritance you have, little one, from all your peoples.”

I am not sure. There are no Men here, just elves. There are Noldor and Laiquendi, but no Sindar. I do not know what Men and Sindar are like, or what they are good at. I cannot remember. It did not used to be hard to know who I was. Now I need Elros and Annuiloth to tell me.

“You doubt it?” She lifts up my chin, muddy fingers and all. Her eyes are very bright. Neither of us worry about the mess.

☀︎

“What was our house like?” I whisper to Elros in the dark. “The one by the sea.”

Maglor has given up trying to keep us apart at night ‘for the sake of everyone’s sanity’. Elros’s arm does not hurt much any more, and Maglor has made a thick padding for it with one of my woollen tunics. We are not sure if this is to protect his arm or my head. It does not matter. We are both happy to lay next to each other again.

“It was small,” Elros tells me.

“Did we sleep together like this there too?”

“Yes. Your quilt was red—” he starts.

And I finish, “—and yours was blue, and they smelled of pennyroyal.”

“You remember?”

“Sometimes.” When I think of anything from before, the thoughts are slippery and do not want me to catch them, like fish in the river. Sometimes when I am not trying to think of before it will smack me in the face like I have run straight into the trunk of a tree.

☀︎

We have borrowed two chairs so there are enough at the table for everyone. Enedlas sits in the middle of Elros and I, and in front of him is Maedhros’s book of maps, open wide. He points to a group of lumpy shapes on a double page that shows most of Beleriand. “This is where my people came from. Over these mountains.”

Across the table Maglor smiles and leans in. Next to him, Maedhros looks stiff and does neither. I think he is trying hard not to be ‘forthright’, just as he says Elros will learn to do, because it looks like he is choking on words he will not say.

“This is where you come from.” Maglor points to a place where a river touches the sea. The spidery lines are black on this map, and much smaller. When I look up, Maedhros is sucking in a breath and watching me very closely, with the same kind of eyes Maglor used to make before he started calling for Maedhros when I have bad dreams.

“Where did you come from?” Elros asks.

“Well,” Maglor says. “I have lived here, here, here and here.”

Mithrim, a place with no name between rivers and mountains, Himring and Ossiriand. Two of those places have hills, and I wonder if any of the plants in my book grew there.

“Maedhros?” My voice is very small.

“Yes, Elenya?” His voice is very soft.

“The plants in the book. The campion and s… sax..”

“Saxifrage?”

“Yes, saxifrage. Where do they grow?”

Maedhros makes no noise as he gets up to stand behind me. “Most of the plants in that book are from Himring, for that is where I lived. Some I found in Ered Wethrin and Ard Galen,” he says, leaning over my shoulder to point out each.

On the map the words Ard Galen are neatly crossed out and beside them is written Anfauglith. Why did it change?

“Some I have not seen since Ard Galen burned, for the plants never grew back after. The name was changed then,” Maedhros explains. He is good at knowing what I am thinking sometimes, like I am a book filled with words to be read.

“We all have homes we cannot return to,” Enedlas says. He does not sound as sad about this as Maglor looks. “Yet it does our hearts good to remember them, even so.”

“Wait!” Elros says urgently, because he has just worked something out. “You didn’t always live together?” His voice is so squeaky that Maglor starts to laugh.

“No, Elros-mell. Brothers often do not,” he says, reaching across to ruffle Elros’s hair.

The noise Elros makes then, Maedhros would call ‘indignant’. In a flash he has scrambled over Enedlas to launch himself at me and will not let go. Then everyone is laughing except Elros and me, but it is not the mean sort and before long they are saying kind things to make us feel better.

☀︎

Elros’s arm is finally free of wood and bandage, and he sings more loudly about this than the birds do at dawn. This means we can both run outdoors as much as we like, as long as someone is able to watch over us. Our days are much more normal, which is better for everyone.

“Elrond,” he calls out. Elros is sitting under the oak tree, tossing acorns at me with his newly un-wrapped arm. He says he must get good at aiming with it again. I wish he would aim at something, anything, other than me. “Want to climb a tree?”

I give him my best glare. “Don’t you dare!”

Elros laughs, so I tackle him to the ground and we both roll among the musty leaves and laugh and laugh until neither of us has any breath left.

☀︎☀︎☀︎

1. A lambë is this tengwa.[↑]
2. mell = dear/beloved in Sindarin. Maglor is pretty much calling him “Elrond, dear”[↑]
3. Tacking on a little -ya to the end of someone’s name like this is a form of endearment in Quenya. They’re bilingual in this household, or tent-hold previously.[↑]
4. Elen = star. This nickname follows the endearment pattern as per the above note.[↑]
5. Hên nín = my child in Sindarin[↑]

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