The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

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Of Piercing, Opening, of Treachery

LAST TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: The folk of Helevorn agreed to accept a dragon as guardian, and Malhof and Anniavas scared each other.

THIS TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Anniavas, Malhof, and Maedhros return to Himring. Celegorm makes some interesting choices.

Warnings for moderate violence and Anni's usual mental issues.

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The ugly weather showed no sign of abating as they approached Himring.  Although the rain was not heavy, it was persistent, having maintained its constant, steady, icy trickle since the departure from Helevorn.  Malhof, sheltered beneath his heavy coat of fur, seemed unperturbed, and Maedhros merely pulled his cloak tighter about himself, but Anniavas was miserable.  He hated the dim light and the cold dankness of the ambient air. The temperature had been dropping steadily all day, and, worse, in the last half hour, the wind had picked up, lashing the rain into his face.  His ears were freezing and painful, and he kept sneezing.

“I’m never going to be warm again,” he complained to Maedhros, knowing he sounded pitiful and hating it. He pawed at his ears, trying to warm them up, but it only made what had been an incipient headache grow worse.

“Hot springs,” Maedhros said.  “Hot tea.”

“I won’t live till then,” Anniavas retorted, despite the fact that from here he could already see the solid grey walls of Himring rising out of the mixture of white, wet snow and yellow-green grass.  

“You know, I think you might,” Maedhros told him steadily.

“You’ll be sorry when I die.”  Anniavas sniffed and sneezed again.  Malhof wandered over and butted against his head.  “I was not made for this sort of weather.”

Despite all Anniavas’s protests, the fortress grew swiftly larger, and the clouds finally began to part as they rode up, travel-sick, cold, and all too ready to be home. (Was this home?  Was that what this sudden swelling in Anniavas’s chest meant?)

He tried to remember if he had ever had a similar feeling, but the shifting sands of his mind revealed little.  The idea of returning to a place was not something he could find any positive associations for, but that on its own did not really mean much.  He did have a brief sense that maybe he was more used to running from than running to, but before he could look at that in greater detail, it was sucked away. The only thing that remained when he did one final, angry search, was an image of a vine-wrapped tower rising above a dark forest, lined with shining seams of light.  He shook it away again and turned his attention back to Himring.

Watery early-spring sunlight pierced the bottom of the clouds as they arrived, darkening the cloud itself but limning the bottom edge with gold. Striking Himring’s wet cobblestones, the rays littered them for an instant with an illusion of sparkling diamonds.  Maedhros, of course, rode in first and dismounted, Anniavas following close behind with Malhof.  The rest of the warriors trailed behind them.

Maedhros had sent word ahead, so the residents of Himring would be expecting Malhof—for the best, since otherwise riding in with an eight-foot-tall wolf would doubtless have inspired some aggressive responses from the folk of the fortress.  Still, any minute now the welcoming committee would emerge, probably led by Maglor.  Everyone who had been waiting for the lord of Himring’s return would make their presence very clearly known.

“Let me take Malhof to the stables,” Anniavas said quietly.  “To the kennels.  He needs to dry off, and it will be more comfortable there for him until we can figure out what’s keeping him in his current form.”

He received a serious nod in return, and then a tiny, nigh-imperceptible quirk of Maedhros’s lips.  “And you’d rather avoid Maglor’s inevitable over-enthusiastic welcome,” he said shrewdly.

Anniavas sniffed at him, a little thrill running through him, because he was allowed to respond that way, and it was sharply, deliciously joyful. “I have no idea what you mean,” he told Maedhros demurely.

“Of course not.”  Maedhros gave him another nod that Anniavas knew was implicit encouragement. (Not consent: he did not require Maedhros’s consent to take whatever action he felt like.  Somehow that notion still sat oddly on him, and he did not always know how he felt about it.)

“Come on,” he said to Malhof, putting a hand on his neck.  He had been calm the whole journey—apparently it was just Anniavas’s singing voice that caused him to panic.  Anniavas still was not certain how to feel about that, and he had decided this was not the time to think about it.  There was no reason he needed to sing anyway, and his mind would not let him anywhere near his past, so surely it didn’t matter? 

It might not even be his singing voice.  If there was some enchantment woven deep into Malhof’s Song, it was very possible that it might act in a similar way to the artifact in Anniavas’s spine.  Any sufficiently pointed investigation of the Song might have set Malhof off.  It might be that it had nothing to do with Anniavas in specific at all.  It would certainly be easiest to believe that, and, logically, with nothing he could do about it, he might as well.

The hounds were returning from a hunt when they arrived in the kennels, and Limral broke away from the mass of them, howling and barking at the top of her lungs, her tail lashing wildly in greeting.  Anniavas opened his arms, and she bounded over and stood up on her back legs.  He bent down so she could get her paws on his shoulders, and she yipped and started washing his face, then fell back down and rolled over on her back, demanding a belly rub.

“Who’s my best girl?” Anniavas croaked, because for some reason, it was difficult to talk.  He squatted, rubbing her soft belly in great sweeping arcs.  She yipped again, twisting her hindquarters around with excitement.  She was so ridiculous-looking that he had to laugh, and she was too excited to stay on her back for long, quickly rolling upright and giving him a pleading play-bow.

“All right, all right, let me just find your rope—”

He got up and turned, only to see Lord Celegorm staring at Malhof as if poleaxed.  Malhof, for his turn, stood braced, all four paws against the ground, body language—defensive but not exactly afraid.  His ears were back, the ruff on the back of his neck standing up, but he wasn’t snarling.  His tail was a little above the midline, a cautious kind of confidence but not the full confidence of a high-held tail.

“Lord Celegorm,” Anniavas said hurriedly.  “This is—”

“Findárato.”

A Quenya name, Anniavas noted first.  Then, someone that Celegorm knew, then—as he took it apart and ran it through the likeliest transliteration from Quenya to Sindarin—for one brief moment he had the oddest image of an open door, with sunlight streaming into a dark place, a figure backlit against it, and a voice raised—in song—

Finrod.

Finrod Felagund, his mind supplied easily, sorting bland information apart from any memories associated with it, the once-king of Nargothrond.  Something had happened to him.  It had something to do with why Celegorm and Curufin were here, at Himring, but Anniavas had not asked anyone more than that, because, for one thing, Maedhros clearly did not like to talk about it, and, for another, it occupied a particularly strange and difficult place in his mind.

He did not know why, but he shied away from the thought of—of Nargothrond—and the places nearby.  There was a knot, like a hard knot of scar tissue, in his mind.  Like all his memories, it was all sealed away beneath the chill of the artifact, but thinking too hard about

what Finrod Felagund, a name spoken in a last extremis, had done at Tol im Gaurhoth

what Lúthien Tinuviel had done

made his heart beat like a frightened rabbit, a drumming noise sounding in his ears.  He was back with Malhof (Finrod Felagund) beneath the dark earth while something great and merciless stalked the two of them, and Anniavas felt sorry and gave himself up to lead it away (maybe it’s your turn to be saved)—

Fuck.

Anniavas had his hand pressed to his mouth.  Celegorm was running, clumsy but swift, out the other end of the stables.  Malhof still stood in that confused position, and Limral was whining, low and perturbed, padding back and forth between him and Anniavas.

Sort.  Prioritize.  Move.

Celegorm could not be the first priority: he could run faster than Anniavas and thus the only way Anniavas could intercede with him would be to identify where he would end up.  Maedhros needed to know who Malhof was—if Celegorm was correct, Anniavas pointed out cautiously to himself—so, correction: Maedhros needed to know what had happened.  Limral needed to be comforted.  Malhof needed to be comforted.  These last two should take first place, then Maedhros, then—Celegorm.  Thus, the next action:

“Hush, little one, it’s all right.”  He knelt on the straw-covered floor, reaching a hand out to her.  She butted against it sadly, and he made another series of soothing noises until her concern began to die down.  As he did so, he became aware of a nervous blast of warm air down the back of his neck, and he reached behind himself to sink his hand into Malhof’s tangled fur.

The prioritization was evidently working well.  “It’s all right,” Anniavas repeated, and Malhof pressed his nose down Anniavas’s neck, then padded around to sniff Limral in a rather subdued manner.  She perked up at the interest—she was usually willing to play almost regardless of the circumstance.

(How could this be Finrod Felagund?)

(How could he be trapped this way?)

Anniavas’s muscles were protesting as he got slowly to his feet.  His heart persisted in thudding unpleasantly, and it suddenly occurred to him that his initial assessment of the situation had been missing something.  Maedhros might not want him to go after Celegorm to begin with.  But Anniavas could handle Celegorm, had handled him well before.  He was not one of the Fëanorion brothers with their messy interpersonal dynamics.  And Maedhros had not known that Malhof was Finrod Felagund any more than Anniavas had known it, for over a week now.  Delaying the revelation by a few hours would do nothing.

(And perhaps Anniavas was desperate to fix something, anything.  Perhaps, more than anything, there was something lurking in his mind that told him that this problem in specific was his responsibility to fix, even beneath that firm and icy wall that kept his past at bay.)

* * *

Celegorm had not bothered to try to hide his trail—he had left footprints in the wet snow and mud of the courtyard and then the inverse of them, in moisture and mud, on the stones of several corridors leading towards a disused room near the armory.  Anniavas tried the door and found it unlocked.  Inside, Celegorm  was standing at the narrow window, braced against the sill and staring out.

“Lord Celegorm,” Anniavas said softly.  There was no response, no change in the tension resting in those muscled shoulders.  It would be foolish to interrupt him too suddenly, and Anniavas knocked against the wood of the now-open door to announce his presence. Still nothing.

Taking a deep breath, Anniavas tiptoed into the room.  The smell of the kennels still hung around Celegorm, and Anniavas’s old fear ambushed him, coiling cold in the base of his stomach.  He stumbled slightly—and Celegorm whirled, eyes blazing.

Instinctively, Anniavas halted, frozen, but that was a mistake—he saw it immediately.  The barely-contained rage in Celegorm’s face only blazed hotter.

“You are not prey,” he snarled, and then he was crossing the room, and Anniavas was moving, but not fast enough, not fast enough in a body that had trouble standing up straight at the best of times, that wobbled on just two legs—it was infuriating, because he could see everything happening so slowly, but he seemed to be frozen—

Celegorm’s fist reeling back, as he approached in a queer set of still images, the white fire in his eyes blazing untamed, then the pain blossomed in Anniavas’s cheek, and his vision went black—he heard the sound of a blow, felt his knees giving out, then he was fetched up against the wall, pain writing itself through his back, looking up at Celegorm, breathing heavily and staring down at him.

“Oh, fuck,” Celegorm said.  “Oh, fuck, fuck.”  His eyes were blown wide, the fire dying.  He was trembling.

There was blood on Anniavas’s tongue.  His mouth was stinging.  He winced, reaching up to test the injury.  His cheek was bruised, and his upper lip was torn and bleeding, but his teeth were all intact—it had not been a hard blow.  His mind could not tell him why Celegorm had reacted this way to learning that Finrod was alive, but the knotting of his stomach and the physical tightness in his chest and shoulders told him that he ought to have expected it.  It had something to do with Sauron, his mind produced, accelerating suddenly—that scar tissue, that central knot, tied up around Nargothrond and Finrod and his own lost memories—it had something to do with Sauron and Celegorm knew it, so Celegorm did not trust him.  It made sense.

“I’m sorry,” he said, attempting to find a reassuring intonation.  “I wanted to see that you were all right.  Your reaction was intense.  I did not mean to intrude.”

Celegorm’s eyes widened, and he made a choked noise that Anniavas could not parse.

“Oh, fucking hell,” he said with a wild laugh, and then, before Anniavas could even move from his uncomfortable position, he had kicked open the window and was clambering out.  Anniavas heard him swear again as he landed awkwardly on the other side—it was ground level, which suggested Celegorm’s clumsiness was related to his emotional state—and then heard his footsteps pounding away towards the other side of Himring.

Exhausted, Anniavas pressed his face into his hands.  Priorities, his mind said miserably.  Priority one had succeeded.  Priority two had failed.  This meant that his third priority, which should have been his second, was going to fail as well, but he could not avoid it.  He was going to have to explain everything to Maedhros, and it was going to be excruciating.

* * *

Maedhros wanted a cup of tea, which was certainly Anniavas’s fault.  Not because he was particular distressed—if anything, he had found the journey back quite relaxing—but because the combination of tea and the tea garden now felt like home in a way few places did.  Anywhere private with Fingon, of course, but other than that, nearly all his options had been lost long ago.

Before getting the tea, though, he needed to check in on any messages that had come for him while they had been at Lake Helevorn.  Maglor was more than competent to handle the majority of his correspondence, but there were several tricky pieces of attempted diplomacy going on right now and any of that would have been left for his return.

He had a letter from Finno, which made him smile.  His husband’s bold, black handwriting sprang off the page just like him.  Maedhros read a paragraph, mostly sweet nothings and gossip, then put it aside.  He could read the rest later while he was having his cup of tea, as a reward for getting through the rest.  He reached for the next letter, which looked less pleasant—he had little hope of convincing Thingol to join the nascent alliance that he was trying to build to fight Morgoth, but he certainly had to try.  Before he could finish tearing through Thingol’s seal—a songbird in flight with a wreath of thorny roses framing it—someone knocked on his door.  Knocked, and kept on knocking, a light, insistent tapping noise that went on and on.

Frowning, Maedhros went to open the door.  On the other side, Anniavas was standing, still in the act of knocking.  His knuckles went through the space where the closed door had been, and he halted just before lightly striking Maedhros, a slow line worming its way up between his eyebrows.

“Anniavas,” Maedhros said, slow and steady.

He was injured.  There was blood crusted on the side of his mouth, and his lip was beginning to swell.  A line of bruises were blooming dark on his cheek.  Not a devastating injury—a wild strike to the face—but Maedhros was in no mood to see his friend abused within the walls of his own fortress.  “Anniavas, come in.  Will you tell me what happened?”  He only just managed to form the words into a sentence that could not be taken as an order.

Anniavas took a swaying step forward, and then a sob caught in his throat, and, fisting both hands in Maedhros’s shirt front, he buried his face in Maedhros’s chest and began to cry.

“Ah.” Maedhros gathered him up as if he was one of the Ambarussar who had skinned a knee and held him gently.  He cupped the back of Anniavas’s head with his hand, slowly stroking his hair.

“I’m sorry,” Anniavas choked out.  “I’m sorry.”

The apologies were both unnecessary and unwelcome, but Maedhros knew that communicating that would be next to impossible right now.  He had a fragment of a memory of himself on the edge of a thin pallet, face in his hands, apologizing to a shocked silence, for—what?  The red light in the memory suggested it had been in Angband, and Maedhros deliberately tended to avoid those memories.

Don’t be foolish, said a crisp, distant voice in his memory.  I will get you some water.  Maedhros did not even know who he had been apologizing to.

“Let me get you some water,” he said.  “Maybe a cup of tea?”

“I—I ought to—” Anniavas pushed himself backwards.  “My l—” He paused, looking hunted.  Maedhros held himself still.

“Lord of Himring,” Anniavas corrected himself with a sniff, rubbing his sleeve across his face in a useless attempt to clean himself up a little.  His face was swollen, eye still leaking tears, hair rumpled, and the blood of his mouth smeared to the side, and he looked grotesque.  “It’s Finrod,” he said, all in a rush, just as Maedhros was trying to find a compelling argument for that cup of tea.  “Finrod Felagund is Malhof.  Or—Malhof is Finrod Felagund.  I didn’t—know.”

Maedhros stared at him.  Anniavas hugged himself, his right arm flat across his body like an iron bar, a thrall waiting for the whip.

Finrod?  Maedhros’s golden, laughing cousin, who had followed his own oath into a darkness that everyone had believed fatal?  He had left—so Orodreth wrote—a journal and a letter, in which he had made mention of his foresight when he instructed Orodreth not ever to send anyone after him, no matter what hope they thought had been raised.  Finrod?

Abruptly, Maedhros understood.  He blew out his breath in an explosive rush.  “Celegorm hit you.”

Anniavas’s hand clenched, nails digging into his own arm beneath the cloth of his shirt.  “I—should have spoken to you first.  I am sorry.  He ran.”

“Shit,” Maedhros muttered in Orcish.  He looked at Anniavas, who flinched.  “Calm down, you are not responsible for Turko’s terrible behavior.”

“I should have prioritized better,” Anniavas insisted.

“Bullshit,” Maedhros told him, once again in Orcish.  “You’re trying to take responsibility for one of my most notoriously-idiotic brothers. He would have done something stupid regardless of how you arranged your priorities.”

A sag in Anniavas’s shoulders, and a flicker of humor in his good eye, a tiny red ember sparking up suddenly.  It was good to see.  Maedhros did not think he would have seen that six months ago.  Managing a single, soft chuckle, Anniavas said, “A little like trying to keep a puppy from pissing on the rug.”

Maedhros snorted.  “A little.”  Celegorm would slink back with his tail between his legs.  He always did.  The more pertinent question, assuming Celegorm was somehow, impossibly, correct, was: what was to be done about Finrod?

“Where is Malhof?” Maedhros asked.

“In the kennels with Limral and the others,” Anniavas said.  Fear flashed into his gaze again, quickly hidden.  “Should I not have left him there?”

Maedhros shook his head, thoughtfully.  “Just thinking it through.”  It was perhaps not surprising that he had not recognized his cousin; Maglor, Celegorm, and Curufin had all been closer to Finrod than he had, and the osánwë-sense he would have needed to recognize him had been largely eroded in Angband along with his connection to the Song.  Perhaps before, even, at Alqualondë: it had all happened so fast he had no real idea of when he had lost all that he had since the Darkening.  Still, regardless of whose form was hidden behind Malhof’s fur, the first step remained unchanged. They still needed to figure out a way to free him—the only real difference now was that Maedhros would have to write several more letters—more details to Fingon, a letter to Orodreth.  

The more cynical part of Maedhros’s mind wondered—if they could restore Finrod, could it be used to bring Nargothrond on board with the union he was trying to build?  Thus far, Orodreth had rebuffed his overtures, which, unfortunately, Maedhros understood.  But if Finrod was alive—it changed the state of the board.

“This is more complex than just healing a close relative,” Anniavas put in slowly, and Maedhros raised an eyebrow at him.

“It is,” he agreed mildly.  “How did you know?”

“Why else would you need to think it through?”

True.  Once again, Maedhros was struck with Anniavas’s insight.  Only Fingon would have been able to read what he was thinking, and that mostly through his body language and facial expressions.

“As you may be aware, I have been trying to form an alliance to challenge Morgoth,” Maedhros said.

“Of course, lord of Himring—Maedhros.”

Maedhros did not smile, but he did feel the corner of his mouth twitch up a little.  “There are many different kingdoms and settlements scattered across Beleriand, and I believe our best chance would be a unification. However, there are certain tensions.”

Anniavas closed his eye, as he sometimes did before coming up with a piece of information that Maedhros had not known he possessed—that perhaps he had not known he possessed.  From what little he had said on the subject, the inside of his mind was like a great library through which a whirlwind had passed, scattering books and pages all out of order and sweeping some away entirely.  “Doriath views the Noldor with distrust because of the reported conflict at Alqualondë, and it is not known where Gondolin is to be found, though Hithlum, Belegost, and several of the Mannish kingdoms and other settlements no doubt stand ready and eager.  Nargothrond—was ruled by Finrod Felagund before—” He halted and licked his lips.  “In the past, Nargothrond was ruled by Finrod Felagund.  Evidently it is not anymore.”

Conflict.  The word sent a strange shudder through Maedhros.  He had never heard anyone refer to it as other than the Kinslaying.  Perhaps Anniavas was Avari, and had heard the history when he was a captive in Angband.  The expression sat weirdly, sat wrongly, on Maedhros’s shoulders.

We should not have tried to take the boats by force.

But did you mean to kill anyone?

Does it matter what we meant?

He shook it off.  It had been a conflict, as well as a kinslaying.  A conflict did not imply that both sides were equally aggrieved.  “Nargothrond is ruled by Orodreth, now.  But Celegorm and Curufin tried to win its obedience through—well, not quite force, but through replacing Finrod’s rule when he left, and as I understand it, in a somewhat underhanded fashion.”

Nod.  “Ah.  So if Finrod lives, then he is the rightful ruler of Nargothrond?” 

“Yes.  I don’t know that he has any reason to be friendlier to us after Curvo and Turko went and pissed on the rug, as you put it, but it is a change.  It will make a shift.  I know this may sound calculating,” he added awkwardly.  

Anniavas waved his hand dismissively.  “All politics is calculating,” he replied.  “What was the High King doing when he challenged Celegorm to a duel, if not calculating?  If one does not make calculations, one makes mistakes.”

“Mh,” Maedhros responded.  “I’ve never liked it.  But it’s necessary sometimes.  Though some mistakes are inevitable.”

“I guess so,” Anniavas allowed, a little uncomfortably. (Allowing the idea of a mistake to rest in his presence, with visible discomfort—another sign that he had changed since his arrival, Maedhros noted.)

Silence descended.  There was not much else to say, not now.  Celegorm could be chastised later.  Just because Malhof was Finrod did not make it any easier to break the enchantment on him.

“Let’s have a cup of tea,” said Maedhros.

“All right.” Anniavas gave him a soft, eager smile.  “I have a new blend that you never had time to try before we left for Helevorn.”

If there was one thing Maedhros had learned in Angband, it was patience.