The Lands of Weeping and of War by bunn  

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Healing

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Fire flickering, and the long branches of beech-trees outlined dark against a starry sky.  Somewhere a little way away among the trees they could hear was the sound of delighted hounds crunching up the remains of the rabbits and the deer that Elros had not managed to fit into the pan.

Elrond’s best efforts had little effect on Maglor’s fingertips.  “I don’t know why it doesn’t work!” Elrond exclaimed, quietly frustrated, speaking softly so as not to wake their guest, who had fallen asleep beside the fire. “I’ve mended burns before!  Why will it not...”

“You know why,” Maglor said.  He took the hand away from Elrond and pushed it behind his other arm where he did not have to look at it.  “Stupid of me to think it could all be so easily forgiven.  No matter.  You play and sing the melody with Elros, I will harmonise. I still have a voice, so I shall assume I am permitted to use that.”

Elrond looked at him unhappily in the firelight.  “I don’t see why. It’s not as though you’re likely to do it all over again.” 

“A reminder?  You said it yourself; I should remember. And a punishment, surely. Don’t worry about it, Elrond. I’m sure it bothers you more than it bothers me.”

Elrond gave him a very doubtful sideways look. “I find that very unlikely.”

“Well, all right, it bothers me. Probably it should do... But it’s better, honestly.  You, Gil-galad and Elros have taken the fire out of it, even if I can’t manage harpstrings.” He grinned deliberately at Elrond’s serious expression. “I know it’s frustrating, to be young and strong and find that even so there are things that you can’t do. We all have our limits.” 

“None the less,” Elros said, returning from the stream with a kettle filled with water and an annoyed expression. “A burned hand only makes you less able to do anything to make amends with it!  It’s so... impractical.”

“You feel that Varda should have afflicted some less useful body part?” Maglor enquired, and found it was not too much of an effort to sound light-hearted. “Did you have one in mind? If she had burned my toes instead, I would have the perfect excuse to laze about with my feet in the air.”

Elrond’s mouth tugged unwillingly up at the corner very slightly. 

Elros looked at him and smiled. “No!” he said, “I know. Piles.”

“What are piles?” Maglor enquired.

“An affliction of Men,” Elros said, now grinning wickedly, and explained what piles were. 

“And knowing that, you chose the path of Men?” Maglor exclaimed.

“I can’t say it was at the forefront of my mind when I made my choice,” Elros said, and laughed.  “I hope to escape experiencing them personally. But think how much more practical it would be than a burnt hand!  And just as hard to ignore ”

“Yet fearfully undignified,” Maglor agreed readily, since Elrond was now smiling too. “I beseech you not to suggest it to the Valar!”

“That’s a thought,” Elrond said, his eyes narrowing.  “Not that, obviously! But we could ask Ulmo for his help with that hand.”

“Not a good idea,” Maglor said hastily. 

“Why not?  What Varda can do, Ulmo can surely undo. Ulmo has been a good friend to the Noldor.” 

“To your house, not mine. The wrath of the Valar lies on me still, from the West unto the uttermost East.  I am doomed to death’s shadow, and little pity,” Maglor pointed out uncomfortably. There should be a way to put it lightly, but he could not find one. “Not to mention that there is Celebrimbor, and it would be best not to draw attention to him. And Elros, for that matter. Elros has decided to trust the Valar and put himself into their hand; he will need to act like someone they can trust in return. That does not mean special pleading for kinslayers.” 

 

“He’s right,” Elros told his brother reluctantly. “I can’t risk the Isle of Gift for you, Maglor.”

“Of course you can’t. Even if you went to Ulmo alone, Elrond, it would be obvious that Elros was involved.”

“And Gil-galad,” Elrond admitted, and made a face. “And if Ulmo were going to intervene, surely he would have done so... before.”   The image of Maedhros and Maglor, swords drawn and bloody in the great camp beside the Sea, reflected unhappily in Elrond’s mind. 

“They let us fall into the trap we had built for ourselves, Maedhros would say.” Maglor forced  his hand into a fist and felt the pain run up his arm, remembering the Silmaril burning in his hand; remembering that he had chosen to kill so many times over, and his father’s work had known it.  That he had thrown the Silmaril away, and failed his father, too.  And Maedhros.

Elrond laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “That was a stupid idea of mine,” he said carefully. “Forget I mentioned it.” 

He had failed in every other duty, but not with Elrond and Elros.  Not yet.  He took a deep breath, and let his hand relax.

“Perhaps it just needs more time to heal,” Elros suggested. 

“I’m sure you’re right,” Maglor said with determination. “And in the meanwhile I shall count myself fortunate that it is only the one hand, and that Varda is less horribly ingenious than you are, Elros!”

“You should have left me for the orcs,” Elros suggested. A joke with teeth when he had first made it years ago, but not any more. 

“I certainly should,” Maglor agreed. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You needed someone to skin rabbits, so you wouldn’t have to do any work, clearly,” Elrond suggested, managing to sound entirely lighthearted about it.

“That was it, of course. I knew there must have been a good reason! How is the food coming along, O king of cooks?” 

Elros stirred the pan, tasted it, and added a sprinking of salt and spices from his pack: Maglor caught the scent of caraway seeds, and the sharper smell of crushed juniper berries.  

 “I think it needs a little longer,” Elros said. “Let’s wake our guest and do what we can for him while it simmers.” Maglor held the harp out and Elrond took it. 

Iarwain Ben-adar was not sleeping deeply.  He woke as soon as Elros approached, and stared at him blankly for a moment.  “Is it time to eat, oh Elros Half-Elven?” 

“Not quite yet,” Elros said. “We thought we should try to ease your wounds first.”  He poured warm water from the kettle into a bowl and shredded dried leaves onto it: a little of the precious athelas from Valinor, dried flowers of heartsease, and added to it fresh flowers of purple self-heal and the grey-green feathery leaves of yarrow. 

“A kindly thought,” Iarwain said, as the bright scent of the leaves drifted in the steam across the clearing. He looked down at his ruined shoulder and side and shook his great head sadly.  “A terrible thing, the Dark Lord who came from Outside,” he said, his voice filled with grief.  “Very terrible; all he thinks and does and is, and the battle to defeat him a long and bitter one.” 

“It was,” Elrond agreed, sitting down on the grass next to him.  “But he is gone and evil is ended.  Now is the time for healing.”

“No,” Iarwain said shaking his head sadly.  “No, he is not all gone. I can remember the Beginning. I remember the Earth under Darkness when it was fearless; before the first raindrop, before the wind shook the first leaf. They have cast him out, the Singers, what was left of he who was their brother, but he is not gone. The fear remains, hiding in shadow, buried deep or blown as dust upon the wind, but soon enough it will begin to root and grow. He is become part of us.” 

“I hope you’re wrong,” Elros said candidly. “But we shall deal with that when we have to.”  It did not seem to occur to him that very likely he would be gone himself by then.  Maglor could not see Elrond’s face, he had turned away from the firelight. 

Elros wet a cloth and carefully cleaned the skin around the long savage wound with the herb-scented water, as Elrond gently began to play long gentle notes on the small wooden harp, building a web of golden notes that folded around the scent of athelas and woodsmoke, around the firelight and the light of the stars filtering through the leaves from the clear sky above. Elros began to sing, very softly, almost under his breath, a simple crooning song: the kind of thing a mother might sing to her babe to soothe pain, and Elrond’s clear voice joined him. 

Carefully, Maglor wove his own voice through the music in counterpoint, a more complex song to knit the broken flesh and mend cracks in bone.  It had been a long time since he had  sung songs of power together with Elros, and Maglor was surprised to feel how his strength had grown. 

Together, Elrond and Elros were stronger than he was, and both of them had minds more suited to such a task than his.  But experience let him weave their strength into his own purpose. 

It was hardly the first time that he had used the shared strength of others to achieve his ends, Maglor thought. A grief crept into his voice without his meaning it to, for the days when he would have had many voices to call on if he needed them.  Brothers, cousins, his grandfather the King and his father’s strength to lean on, in the days when war had been ancient history, not both habit and shame.

 Another voice joined them, at once bright and merry as a stream in sunlight, and deep as the hidden roots of mountains. It was old, that voice, old and weary with a life that had been impossibly ancient long before the Sun had risen, yet young as new grass bright with dew.  It sang, not in Sindarin, as Maglor, Elros and Elrond were singing, nor in Quenya, nor the tongues of men, but in words that had no meaning that Maglor could understand. Darkness wove through them, and pain and grief, and yet there was a brilliance and joy to them too, like a sapling in spring when the wind moves the new leaves.  

Iarwain Ben-Adar was singing, and his strength was like the mountains. 

It seemed a long time that they sang, and then all at once, with no obvious signal, they knew the song was over, and silence fell, broken only by the crackling of the fire.  

Iarwain got up and stretched, and though he did not seem so tall as he had before, he moved more easily, and he had two arms now. The deerskins he had been wearing had shifted, somehow, so that he was now wearing plain linen, wool and leather: the kind of clothes that Maglor and Elrond were wearing. 

“Many long years have passed since I have sung with the Speaking People under the stars. It still brings me joy.” He fixed Maglor with a piercing blue eye. “I remember him, the kinsman in your song.”

Maglor looked at him in surprise before he worked it out. “You knew my grandfather Finwë?” He had not named him in words, but a spirit of the land might not need them. Maglor was not sure even now if Iarwain was speaking in words, or if he was singing wordlessly, and it was his own field to know such things. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

“I knew him long ago beneath the stars, before he went away across the mountains and the Sea. A joy to meet his grandson now, across the long dark years between.”

“He died,” Maglor said bleakly. “The Enemy came to our house and killed him.” Strange, so very strange, to be bringing that news to anyone ever again, when the whole world knew that his grandfather was dead and how that had forced everything into a different and a crueller shape. 

“He and many others,” Iarwain said. A gleam of a strange smile shone on his face in the firelight.  “But we who are left shall aid one another as the years roll down the Rivers to the Sea, and so the leaves will grow long and green again, and our Enemy be defeated a little more each time.”

“Are you feeling better?” Elrond asked politely.  It was impossible to tell if Iarwain was still wounded or not, for his new clothes seemed to have grown in place quite complete.

“I am feeling better, Elrond who is half a Man and all an Elf, and Elros who is all a Man and half an Elf,” Iarwain said, and laughed so irrepressibly that it was almost impossible not to join in. “But I’m very hungry. And now your friend, the grandson of my friend Finwë there, can help you serve the food.” 

Maglor looked down at his right hand, and realised that the pain that had been numbed by charms but never ended, had entirely vanished. Wondering, he held his hand out to the firelight, and saw that the flesh that had been angry red, distorted and weeping was scarred but dry, and that best of all, his fingertips were whole. He stared for a moment astonished, then made a fist and let the hand fall open, painless. 

He said, wondering, “It seems the spirits of the land are kinder than the stars.”

“The stars are bright and clear, and bitter cold they shine” Iarwain said and laughed. “But Middle-earth is green with leaves, both beautiful and kind”. 

Elrond said to Maglor “See.  There is some advantage to being counted among the Elves of Twilight.” He held out the harp, smiling. 

“Perhaps there is, at that,” Maglor said. “But it is not quite time for the harp yet, I think. Elros! Hand me that spoon.”