The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

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Lordship

LAST TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Fingon tried to settle everyone's nerves, Dernodhos took Anniavas to a hot tub, and last we heard, Fingon and Celegorm were dueling...

THIS TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Anniavas races to find Maedhros as Fingon and Celegorm square off; later on, Maedhros and Anniavas have a complicated emotional conversation at a funeral.

Chapter warnings: Themes of death and grief, questions of afterlife, belonging, and personhood

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The sparring ground was packed.  The contrast of the physical comfort of the hot springs with the physical discomfort of damp hair and being squashed between Dernodhos and Echeleb in the midst of a silent, worried crowd had Anniavas even more off-kilter than he would be from the situation alone.  Or maybe not.  The situation would have been more than enough to render him hideously off-kilter.

“Why did Lord Celegorm challenge Lord Fingon?” he hissed to Echeleb again.  “Are you sure I can’t get them to stop?”

“Don’t even try it, you fool,” Echeleb retorted in a low voice.  “Besides, Lord Celegorm didn’t challenge Lord Fingon.  Lord Fingon challenged him.”

Worse and worse.  The crowd parted at both ends to let Lords Celegorm and Fingon enter the arena.  Neither was heavily armored; both of them wore only a simple leather jerkin.  But both carried swords.  Lord Fingon—the person to whom Anniavas owed his name—stood there in so little protection that the wind caught his gold-threaded black braids and flung them about.  He seemed calm and ready, a sturdy warrior, but Anniavas had seen calm and ready warriors before, had seen them standing one instant and on the ground in a bloody heap the next—incarnates were fragile, he knew this—

“Why would he do that?” Anniavas asked frantically, voice climbing, as if by understanding the situation, he could rewrite it, reshape it into something less horrifying.

“They were fighting, I think.  Eirien said Lord Fingon had come back from talking to you looking like a thundercloud and gone to speak with Lord Maedhros again.  After that, I don’t know, except that Lisgloth talked to Hemmoril, and she said that Lord Fingon found Lord Celegorm in the stables while they were mucking out the stalls, and they got in a shouting match, and somehow it ended with Lord Fingon shouting, ‘You want to be king so badly? Fight me, and the crown goes the winner.’”

Anniavas thought he might throw up.  “He didn’t,” he hissed.

“I don’t know.” Echeleb crossed their arms.  “They’re Noldor.  I don’t understand the Noldor.  All of them are insane.”

“What did Maedhros say?” Anniavas demanded.  Lord Celegorm bared his teeth like a wild thing, drawing his sword, taking a few test swings in the air.

Echeleb paused.  “I don’t know,” they said, but the pause had been too long.

“No one has told him, have they,” Anniavas exclaimed in stunned horror.

“Everything will be fine, this sort of duel isn’t unusual.”

“Like this? With weapons? With the High King?” demanded Anniavas.

“Lord Maglor commanded that his brother not be disturbed, as he needs to heal,” Echeleb said.  “The order came directly from Hemmoril.  And frankly I doubt Lord Fingon wants him to know either.”

“I need to go,” Anniavas said.

Echeleb gave him an uncertain look, but he was already pushing his way past them.  “Lord Maglor—”

“I have given no oaths,” snarled Anniavas.  “Not the least at your insistence.  Lord Maedhros deserves to know.”

Dernodhos put a hand on Echeleb’s shoulder, and Echeleb paused, then stood aside.  “I still don’t recommend it,” they said. Behind them, Dernodhos grinned, wide and bright.  Anniavas was halfway through the crowd before he realized that if this was not, strictly speaking, being disobedient, it was at least the next thing over from it.

Navigating through the crush and press of bodies was difficult, particularly with his limited field of vision, but he was determined and was aware that most incarnates moved in response to an elbow in strategic locations, often quickly enough that he could be past before anyone remonstrated or asked him what the fuck he thought he was about.

The crowd roared.  The sound of steel on steel rang through the courtyard.  Anniavas swore, and ran.

There would be guards on Maedhros’s room.  No fool would leave the Lord of Himring unguarded in the aftermath of such a healing.  Unfortunately, that meant a detour to the greenhouse, but he knew all the routes to and from the greenhouse better than any others across the fortress anyway.  He ran.  There would be no time to boil the water, but with luck, it wouldn’t matter.

He found a cracked mug, flung some tea leaves in and filled it with water, then bolted for the central compound.  He had to slow down as he came near, because his lungs were displaying their common but unhelpful tendency to burn, pistoning the air in and out, and making it far too obvious that he was in a tearing rush.  He paused for an instant at the end of the corridor to pull himself together, wrapping the cloak of an unhurried, unworried servant around his shoulders.  He let his eyes fall to the mug, carrying it as if it were hot, took a deep breath, and headed for the door of Maedhros’s chamber.

He expected questions.  He told himself a hurried story as he went, a message sent, a request—he had to hope that there would be space in the guards’ day for a message to have emerged before they arrived or while they were distracted, somehow.  But he reached the door, and one of the guards looked at him and smiled.  “It’s okay, he’s awake,” she said, and stepped aside.

This is terrible security, Anniavas wanted to say, but complaining about it would be foolish in the extreme right now.  Instead, he managed to smile back and slip back and inside.

The chamber was not large, although it was somewhat more richly furnished than the one where Anniavas had recuperated.  The walls were covered in tapestries surprisingly threadbare despite the preserving spells shimmering in their every thread, and the bottom of one of them was ragged and blackened as if with the touch of fire, not dissimilar to the blanket/memory that Dernodhos had offered him a few days ago.  There was a bookshelf flush with the right wall, piled with tomes, scrolls, and loose papers.  The bed, at least, was appropriately luxurious, probably even large enough for two to share.  Maedhros was sitting in it, chest bandaged, reading something in a ledger.  He looked up when Anniavas hurried in.

“What is it?” he asked, brown eyes flickering up and down Anniavas’s form.

“Fingon and Celegorm are fighting,” Anniavas blurted.

“What.”  

Before he could explain further, Maedhros was already rising from the bed.  “My robe,” he said, indicating a piece of cloth flung over the back of a chair by the bed.  “Help me secure it.”

“Of course.”  Anniavas set the mug down on the bookcase and hurried to his side.

“What happened?” Maedhros asked as Anniavas held up the robe for him to slip over his shoulders and then hurried to his front to secure the ties.

“I don’t know.  Someone told me Lord Fingon challenged Lord Celegorm, said if he wanted to be king so badly—”

Maedhros said something extremely obscene in Orcish.  “That’s good enough.  Come on.”

His hand fell for an instant on Anniavas’s shoulder, steering him towards the door, and Anniavas nearly lost his balance at the unexpected warmth of the touch.  Some incomprehensible feeling rushed like a wind up his body and left him trembling.  Then the touch was gone, and they were passing between the guards, both of whom immediately began trying to protest.

“Not now,” Maedhros said flatly, striding down the corridor almost faster than Anniavas could run.

When they reached the yard, the crowd parted instantly around Maedhros, and Anniavas followed determinedly in the wake.  They heard another clash of steel, a wordless shout—so at least they weren’t too late—and then they were at the edge.

As the sparring ground became visible, so too did Lords Fingon and Celegorm, both grim and sweating.  Celegorm’s sword was raised and he was diving forward, right at Fingon.  A bubble of air caught in the center of Anniavas’s chest.  He raised his hands as if there was something he could do, and a white chill of agony swept down along his back.  

For an instant, it was a tableau: Finno, standing straight as an arrow, broad blue-clad shoulders tight with tension, the sunlight catching pink-gold in the ribbons of his black braids.  He looked more like a king than anyone Anniavas had ever seen.  Then Celegorm’s sword came down, and Fingon sidestepped, graceful as a dancer, a balletic whirl of black braids and blue cloak.  His elbow impacted the back of Celegorm’s neck with a heavy thud, and Celegorm pitched forward to land on his hands and knees with the point of Fingon’s sword resting on his spine.

“Yield,” Fingon ordered firmly.

There was a pause, a moment of blank white silence.  Celegorm’s knuckles tightened on the pommel of his sword, then released, and he dipped his head.  “High king,” he whispered, his voice still quite audible in the dead waiting silence. Fingon stooped for an instant so that his mouth was level with Celegorm’s ear, his lips forming words, and Celegorm gave a ragged sob, bent his head, and let his sword go entirely to cover his face with his hands.  

Lord Fingon straightened up and sheathed his sword.  Then he turned, pulling himself into that easy, straight-backed position again.  His eyes came to rest on Maedhros, and for one instant, a crooked, rueful little grin appeared on his lips.  Then his face smoothed out into the calm confident countenance of the king.  The crowd roared with wild approval.

Anniavas took a gasping, ragged breath.  His legs felt like water, and a line of numbness surrounded by exquisite pain traced his spine, but Finno was safe.  Finno was safe.  Abruptly, he could not be here anymore, surrounded by hundreds of souls, all breathing, thinking, disagreeing, existing—it seemed to press in against him on all sides.  No one was looking at him, at least.  He backed away from Maedhros, from Fingon, who was starting to stride in this direction, shaded his eye as if someone might be able to catch him that way, and turned and almost ran, not stopping until he had reached the quiet of the greenhouse, where he sank down on the pallet and tried to get the world to go away.

* * *

The flames rose high into the night sky, until they broke off from the top of the pyre as tiny embers dancing ever upward.  Anniavas watched them go, a steady stream of them, wondering if the souls of the dead followed them.  They had lost three of the folk of Himring in the disastrous battle, and now that it was certain that the lord himself would not be following them, they were being laid to rest properly.  For two of them—Noldorin ex-thralls who had been sworn to Maedhros—this meant a pyre.  For the last—a Silvan maiden named Rovaloth whom Echeleb had known well—it meant a burial at dawn with a rowan tree planted above the grave.

“There is no room inside Himring for a burial like that,” Echeleb had explained.  “It is good that so few died.  Many of my people have had to be cremated because it is the swiftest way to ensure neither soul nor body is taken by the Enemy, but because we did not lose many, there is time to do the ritual to ensure that the rowan roots properly and protects her until she can flower.”

“Flower?” Anniavas had asked uncomfortably as they worked together in the tea garden.

“My people do not believe in the Halls of Mandos, as the Noldor do.  When we die, our bodies return to the earth, and our fëar merge with the spirits of the trees that we nourish.”  They were weeping, tears streaming in an unsteady flood down their face, but their voice was steady.  “I am glad for Rovaloth that she will be able to join the trees.  It is terribly rare now in Beleriand.”  

Anniavas wanted to ask what happened to the spirits of the Silvan Elves who could not join the trees, but he was not sure it was an appropriate time for the question, and he only sat and blinked stupidly at Echeleb, who gave him a slightly painful smile, as if they knew he didn’t know what to say.  “The important thing is that we’re in Himring,” they said.  “Our souls cannot be bound to servitude like those poor thralls who are still captive in Angband.”

At this, Anniavas’s mind brought up the image of the revenant he had fought.  There had been a soul bound into that, a dead soul, perhaps that of an Elf, perhaps as cold as Anniavas was when he ran afoul of the artifact sunk into his spine.  He shuddered.  “Can they be freed?” he asked in a low voice.  Then, before Echeleb had a chance to answer, “Of course—if the stitches are cut or unstitched.”

Echeleb gave him a curious look.  “The usual remedy is fire,” they said.

Fire would work as well, Anniavas supposed, although it was hard to call fire hot enough that it would surely burn through every touch of spellwork.  It certainly had the advantage that the fire-wielder didn’t have to know where the vital stitch lay.  “Um.  Hemmoril’s wife,” he said awkwardly, thinking of the little blade that had saved Maedhros.  He didn’t know what had happened to it.  “Was she…?”

“Hemmoril’s one of Maglor’s folk,” Echeleb said, with a shrug.  “Noldorin, from Valinor. I don’t know.  She might not even have died in Beleriand.  Some of them died earlier, I think.”

Now, watching the flames of the funeral pyre licking upwards, Anniavas thought of the marks of fire on the hilt of the blade.  She had probably died in Beleriand.  Maybe she had been cremated, in a ceremony like this one.  What had Hemmoril felt—was it all grief, or was there that same queer relief that Echeleb seemed to feel—that idea that at least the death had been clean?

Anniavas did not understand.  The only information his mind offered on funerary customs was the rather cursory piece of information that Orcs preferred their bodies to be devoured, but he did not seem to know why.  Thralls, of course, were expected to obey in life or in death, without much difference.  Anniavas himself did not even have a fleeting instant of a memory of himself in the context of grief or mourning, or even in the context of considering his own death.

No: that was not true.  It was the very first memory he had of this life.  He remembered running, terrified, knowing that his death stalked him.  But he had only known that he deserved it, that it was a just punishment, and he had fled from it nonetheless.  He had been filled with a sort of numb, impossible terror, but no idea of a custom or a tradition that he might look to for hope.  For the first time, it occurred to him how alone his lack of memory had left him.  He wished he had a clue, any clue, as to what people he had belonged to, before.

He was so wrapped up in his wistful thoughts that he failed to notice anything else, and he jerked in surprise when someone said his name.  Then he felt foolish, because the lord of Himring was eight feet tall, and how had he missed his approach?

“Anniavas,” Maedhros said again, calm and still. 

“My—lord of Himring.”  He bowed low.

“Don’t,” Maedhros said.  “I wanted to thank you.”

This should not, perhaps, have been unexpected.  He had saved Maedhros’s life, or at least helped save it.  But Anniavas felt very queer about it, all the same.  Why should someone thank you for doing your duty? remarked his mind, in an arch and slightly brittle way that Anniavas found himself recognizing as a kind of misdirection.  It wasn’t his duty, he realized, after a moment’s thought, because he had not sworn fealty to the lord of Himring.  Perhaps thanks were appropriate, but he still felt uncomfortable.  He could not remember, and no part of his mind could offer, a memory or even a suggestion of how to gracefully receive such a precious thing.

Instead, he stood there mutely and looked up at Maedhros, in the eerie glow of the pyre.  That slim, noble face, shadowed with scars, seemed for an instant, very familiar.  “I feel as if I know you from long ago,” he whispered, and then bit his tongue.  Surely that was not the correct response.

Maedhros’s graven-stone countenance as ever betrayed nothing.  He paused, perhaps thoughtfully, then spoke, “There are many mysteries in Middle Earth,” he said simply.  Then, turning his face away to regard the pyre, “Lord Fingon tells me you took no harm from my loss of control during the surgery.”

The image of Maedhros’s enraged face filled Anniavas’s memory, and he shook it away.  “No harm,” he whispered.

Those brown eyes flickered sideways towards him.  “I frightened you.  I’m sorry.”

This was true and not-true, at the same time.  Some part of Anniavas still felt as if he had been seeing someone else, not Maedhros at all.  He looked away, wondering why it felt easier not to make eye contact.  Incarnates expected eye contact, as he understood it; it was how they connected with one another.  On the other hand, it was a clear demonstration of the hierarchy into which all living things were bound, and Anniavas was beginning to wonder if that hierarchy was as beneficial as he always seemed to have supposed.  Perhaps knowing he could look away from Maedhros meant that he knew he could hide from that truth for a little while, although he still knew full-well that he must pursue an oath of fealty.

“I don’t know if you frightened me,” he said eventually.  “I am beginning to think there are some things I—do not understand as well as I thought I did.”

Maedhros hummed quietly.  “I’m still sorry for lunging at you.  I am grateful to you—for saving my life and for coming to get me when Finno and Turko were fighting.”

Again, Anniavas did not know what to say.  Eventually, he came up with, “I am glad that you are well.”

There was a pause, and then a dry noise that Anniavas eventually worked out was some form of laughter.  He glanced sideways again to see that although Maedhros’s face was expressionless as always, he was rubbing the back of his neck with his hand in a way that probably indicated some sort of embarrassment.  This was complicated, and Anniavas was unsure how to react.

“I am only thinking,” said Maedhros, apparently noticing the scrutiny, “that perhaps I have met the only person in the world as awful at this kind of emotionally-laden conversation as I am.”

“What could be emotionally laden about a normal social transaction?” Anniavas asked stiffly.

“A question I ask myself depressingly often.”

Anniavas shuffled his feet, turned himself sideways, and angrily ran a hand through his too-short curls of hair, taken by a desperate frustration and a need to move.  “You must understand more than I do,” he said, helplessly.  “You have—you have memories.  You have experiences.  You have—you have context.”  

“I do,” Maedhros agreed.  “But I know something of what you are going through, I think.  I was very badly injured when I returned from Angband.  Much that I was, was lost.  No, I cannot say I understand what it is like, Anniavas.  But I can at least imagine.”

The fire crackled some more.  Bitter cold ate through Anniavas’s warm cloak, worming into his flesh and drawing forth an abundance of shivers.  He wanted to offer his fealty again, if only to gain a measure of understanding over his queer and impossible-to-categorize relationship with Himring’s lord, but he thought he might not be able to bear it if Maedhros refused again in the wake of this conversation, so he bit down on that and tried a different tack.  “What is it that Lord Celegorm thought I had done wrong?  I understand that you and Lord Fingon do not agree with his actions, but surely by now you must know.”

There was another long pause, but somehow Anniavas understood that Maedhros was considering, trying on for shape different ways of explaining, rather than stalling or preparing a lie.  A tactical riposte, perhaps, or at least a tactical sally into this weighty and wandering conversation.

“He does not trust your knowledge,” Maedhros said eventually.

“My knowledge?” Anniavas said blankly.  “But I don’t know anything.”  He paused, considering.  “I don’t—know how I know anything,” he admitted slowly.  “And without knowing whether I am telling the truth about my memory—yes, I suppose caution might dictate—”

“Absolutely not.” 

Anniavas flinched at the sudden, heavy sound of anger.  His body recognized the threat and instinctively drew in on itself.

“I am not angry at you, Anniavas,” Maedhros said steadily.  When Anniavas looked at him very carefully from beneath his eyelashes, he was turned away, his muscles loose, his shoulders rounded.  “I am not going to hurt you.  I am merely telling you that I will not have you imprisoned for the crime of saving my life and my spirit.”

Strictly speaking, it would be imprisonment out of caution, not in judgement for a crime, but Maedhros’s tone brooked no argument.  Anniavas did not know whether to name this response foolish or kind, both words that did not seem to sit well on the lord of Himring.  Well, perhaps kind.  Anniavas realized, to his horror, that there was a lump in his throat, and he blinked very quickly, hoping that it would look as if he had gotten smoke in his eye.  It was not that the lord of Himring could not be kind, he thought; it was that nowhere in his mind was there a pattern for kindness and lordship at the same time.

“Thank you, Maedhros,” he said, scrubbing a hand across his face and centering himself with a gulping breath.

“You’re welcome.” Another pause.  “Would you be willing to take tea with me again?  I am still supposed to be resting for my injury, and I am—not very good at it. That is a request; it is not an order.”

A request.  It might—it might make Maedhros sad if he treated it as an order.  Once again, Anniavas sorted through the patterns of his mind.  One should not treat one’s lord as if he can make requests of one.

But he is not my lord.  Not yet, anyway.  This felt strange and hollow and confusing—how did one treat a request?  His mind offered up a fragment—

—a voice, saying his name?—

—“[ ] working too hard, as always, come and [ ] with me?”—

That did not help much, though he supposed it must be a sliver of memory of a request.  Instead, he thought of Echeleb asking if he wanted to get dinner.  There had not been a correct answer, he reminded himself, and Dernodhos had elbowed him when he tried to solve it like a problem of the balance of ingredients in one of his teas.  The only answer to a request was what he wanted, which Anniavas was not necessarily very good at assessing, which probably meant that he would have to say n—

A twinge of disappointment?  Was he looking for an excuse to say yes?  Surely that would mean he did want to?  Anniavas shook off his woefully tangled mind and investigated his body, instead: his cheeks and the center of his chest, feeling unusually warm and light, and the corners of his mouth trying to smile.

“Oh!” he said, and the disappointment popped out of existence as noiseless and gentle as a soap bubble.  “Yes, I would—like that.”