Chapter Text
“What ails you?” Curufin asked.
He had taken one of Celegorm’s hands in both of his and Celegorm could feel that they were warm and gritty with the work of the forge. “You’re not yourself.”
Celegorm saw his hand inside of Curufin’s, a pale stone braced by firm copper on either side. That hand would never tell that he was the son of brazen Nerdanel. The wan, white spirit of Miriel had passed under one generation and appeared in the next, over the thread again.
“There’s nothing to say,” he said, and took his hand away.
It had taken Curufin some courage to ask at all, and that in itself made Celegorm testy. It was not the place of a younger brother to ask such a gentle question, with such kind consideration, and Celegorm disliked reversals such as those.
“What is it?” Curufin asked again, the fingers of one rejected hand curling in. “Do not think to hide it from me. I see through you, and will know if you speak false to me.”
Curufin did not see through him. But figuratively, his metaphor was apt enough. Curufin had sensed the depth of Celegorm’s discontent and would only be satisfied if he revealed a weapon enough to make that hole. “I am disquieted by our guest,” he said.
“Thingol’s daughter,” Curufin knew. “You need not tell me more; I know you love her.”
The heaven-touched princess had come to Nargothrond on bloodied feet a fortnight past, when the moon was new, and King Orodreth had taken her in. She had revealed that she was the very daughter of Doriath that the son of Barahir had sought, who had stolen Finrod Felagund from his kingdom to fulfill his mad oath. That incident had been working rather well for the sons of Feanor, that was, until Luthien revealed the terrible news that had brought her sprinting bloody to the hidden kingdom: she had found gentle Beren and bold Felagund both dead at the hands of Sauron the Necromancer. In her anguish she had banished him from Ennor, but as he vanished he had cast some curse on her, which now kept her in its strange chains.
Since then for two weeks she had slept often, and often cried out in her sleep, and when waking was lost and strange, foreboding when she spoke, making predictions without warning. She had spoken only once directly to Celegorm, and it was to tell him that she saw the eternal darkness gathered over his head, like descending night.
What had then struck him with love? Not grief or melancholy, and not mere beautiful form, though that would be what he let others believe. She was beautiful, a beauty like a bird lifting from a branch, or the sound of waters over stone, the thoughtless, stunning, and feral beauty of the wild world that could not be imitated by artifice. In it was the same power to entrance that nature always had, the glory of the golden sunset, the arresting splendor of the moon.
He was not the only one entranced by her. That could be said to be a condition of having eyes to behold her. Yet he was the one too restless to sleep, too bitter to enjoy his meat. He felt no better than a moth.
The death of Finrod did not rest easy on him either, as much as it benefitted him. Nargothrond was divided; her people had traveled thirty years across the grinding ice, but now one could not know for sure whether any man would follow Finarfin’s son or Feanor’s once he was called. Orodreth knew that so many would rise to Celegorm’s command that he dared not make one himself, and instead sat bowered in his own chambers, where he sequestered the recovering princess.
That surely sat ill with Celegorm, because though Orodreth’s stanch defendants would extoll his virtues, he did not believe any man was virtuous under enough temptation, just like no wolf followed its summer code of honor in bleak winter. The temptation of the maia princess in his rooms would be too much for him, and it would prove too much for Orodreth, once he finished his little dance of self-denial and propriety. His kind were so proud of their ability to dance it, yet it ended in bed anyway, as all such dances.
So Celegorm watched the every touch of Orodreth’s hand on Luthien’s wrist as he took her to and from dinner, her bowed and vulnerable with grief. (Or the Princess Finduilas, who attended her as often as her father, though with maiden awe and deference.) Celegorm even tried to convince himself he was only envious, hungry for what this petty king appeared to have. Yet even when he tried to convince himself that his whole desires were grim and unwholesome, in moments when he spied Luthien’s starlight eyes looking into the distant future he found himself feeling unaccountably lost and naked, outside himself, as thought a gentle hand had stripped him of clothes and fashion and seeming and made him young again, and wild.
Curufin waited through Celegorm gritting his teeth for an actual reply, which was, “There’s nothing to gain from discussing it.”
“Then let’s not,” Curufin replied, but nowhere in his firm voice was a hint of submission. “Let us arrange it instead.”
Celegorm looked deliberately away from his headstrong younger brother. “I have said I will not discuss it.”
“And I won’t. I will arrange it.”
“It cannot be.”
“And why not? She is a maiden unwed and you a man unmarried. She loved, but unwisely, and besides the man is gone. Moreover with Luthien not just this kingdom but many might be ours, with rival houses wedded and diverse aims finally directed at the winning of Beleriand. Idleness and charity have given half the land to Thingol, who does not defend it, and half to Fingon, who does not appreciate it. Let us do better.”
He should have known that that was how the situation looked from Curufin’s point of view. “You might marry her yourself,” he said, “since you sound so keen on it.”
“Do not mock me. I am already married, would I be or not. Nor would I take that which you desired,” he said, and he sounded even to Celegorm’s hunter’s ears perfectly sincere.
Sometimes, though an ocean separated him from the boy he once was, Curufin could still act like him. Sweet, anxious for the happiness and approval of others, and so sensitive that he sometimes had to remove himself to another room to cry. Like all such boys he had discovered eventually that becoming angry instead would earn him less shame and embarrassment.
Celegorm extended a hand to him, but not all the way. He let a few curled fingers gesture as if he would tap his chin, but he did not. “She does not desire me in return.”
“She is grieving. She will not desire anyone. She beds only with Princess Finduilas, where I presume they shed delicate tears and sigh together. But I will tell you what she does desire: the silmarils.”
Celegorm paused, and thought. “She desired one as her bride-price.”
“And might still. But more importantly, that bride-price was set by her father. He would have to go back on his word to not accept it now.”
“And did you find one this afternoon while out walking, then?”
“No, but hearken to this: that she alone, though a mere maiden, banished Morgoth’s lieutenant from this land. What might be done with our focus and her force? I say this: win her, and with her hand we win the silmarils and Thingol with them.”
“But we are back to the beginning: win her. How am I to do that, her without any eyes for me and besides locked in Orodreth’s rooms, where he might chastely gaze upon her, as we wholly trust him to do without any oversight?”
“Leave this also to me,” said Curufin, and did not elaborate.
Celegorm saw steely resolve in his silver eyes, but like a shield they did not reveal anything beneath. Whatever he plotted, Celegorm knew he could not do, and even if he did, it would not accomplish his aims. “Then,” he finally said, “if you make it possible, then I will do it.”
–
Celegorm had been a prince. When his name had been Prince Celegorm, he had been a different man indeed.
In undying Aman the lines between mortal and immortal had been thin, and his apprenticeship to the Hunter, the Vala Orome, had been accepted among elvenkind as both possible and desirable. The Valar had favorite elves; they judged them by their skill and beauty, compared them as if paintings, and taught those with innate talent skills of shaping and naming.
Though some chose only a very few and very select, Celegorm had never been Orome’s only apprentice. The great Hunter needed an entourage, a whole company to ride behind him, to loose arrows and hounds at the bodies of the rebel spirits that had followed Morgoth. To that end Orome taught his followers how to harm maiar and how to hold such weapons as could harm them.
In Celegorm’s memory those weapons were bone-white, and hot to hold, like they trapped the heat of the forge that made them. He once had arrows tipped with that light, but when he tried to remember them, it was as though their radiance burned away their exact shape in his memory. But he could remember the radiance, and could recognize it if he saw it again. In Huan a smoldering remnant remained; in the daughter of Melian, it was surpassing bright.
The only way to harm a maia was to unweave them, to pick at the threads behind them. Not their body, not their spirit. Past those. Behind them. Celegorm had learned how to see that place, though usually one of them had to be present with him for him to find the way to see it. He could remember pulling a divinity-tipped arrow from his ivory quiver and nocking it, and aiming at the face of a fell spirit, and opening his eyes until he saw the substance behind the spirit, of the spirit, the weaving of the world, and could aim into it and pierce it.
The weapons he had now were not like that, and could harm the spirit as easily as they could cut a hole through time. Sometimes, without warning, he could suddenly see the way to make such a wound again, but was powerless despite that to do so. So he used words, steel, and men to fight for him, and each tool despite its keenness felt as blunt as a punch, and each act of war as brutal as holding a man down and squeezing the life out of him through his neck. He was praised for it no matter how it felt for him, called a prince by those loyal and great and terrible by those who hated him, and he did it for a cause he knew was just, and let how it felt to him morph and change and sour and delight as it would.
–
“I tell you the truth,” said Curufin. “Minas Tirith is empty, its master banished by Princess Luthien, and in hunting them we believe that its wolves and werewolves and shades are fled and scattered. What was once your seat waits only for you to reclaim it, and the body of your brother buried in it. Why will you not ride to secure it? Why leave him to rot in it?”
“Because that is madness,” Orodreth replied firmly. “The tower may have been unguarded a day, but it is fully within the Enemy’s territory now that Ard-Galen is no more and Dorthonion claimed. By now it is surely swarmed again by the Enemy’s fiends. Even to get there we risk losing many men.”
“As ever, Orodreth, you think like a hare and may defend your own house that way,” Curufin replied icily, “or might not.”
“Watch your tongue.”
“I do watch, and you would be served to do so as well,” continued Curufin, so unabashed and unafraid that no real king would tolerate it. “The Enemy creeps forward nightly, closer and closer still. Waiting earns us nothing but the territory we defend being slowly chipped away, and you will not even turn your eyes outside these halls to heed it. Did you walk the Helcaraxe for the freedom to sit inside your room with the doors locked and fear to travel the world outside?”
Orodreth stood.
Curufin stood his ground also, unmoving, except for the arch of his black eyebrows.
“I see you have no such fear,” Orodreth finally said. “Go you, then, and recapture Minas Tirith, if you believe it will be no hard task. And bring me my brother, and the princess her lost Beren, and then for all I care have the fortress and Tol Sirion around it and all its lands as your own, and defend Beleriand from there as our friends and allies, since you claim that is what drives you.”
Celegorm knew that Curufin’s frozen smile did not mask fear or discontent. Rather, he was controlling his face so that he did not smile wider, like a snake upon finding a nest of hen’s eggs. “I will do all these things, and gladly,” said he, and left to muster his men.
–
“Well, congratulations,” Celegorm said, all but throwing the saddle onto his own horse. “You are now prince of Tol Sirion if you can manage it, but we ride from Nargothrond and take all those who side with us and against Orodreth away, leaving Luthien in his control.”
“Nonsense. You are prince of Tol Sirion; you’ll need a power base. And Luthien can live closer to her own people if we go there.”
“Fantastic. Has your head split in half?”
“I knew Orodreth was not going to ride to battle himself. He’s a coward, and losing Finrod has him depressed, which is even worse. I suppose I would have been pleased if he actually decided to get off his ass and ride out, but this is what I expected.”
“Minas Tirith is not empty,” Celegorm argued. “At least, we have no proof it is.”
“I don’t expect that either. I believe that it was briefly empty, when Luthien harrowed it, but by now it is surely full up with whatever scum would let its cursed stones shelter them. No, actually taking the fortress would be a fight. Perhaps a fight we could win, and I would welcome that twist of fate too.”
“...And if we don’t?” Celegorm asked warningly.
Curufin laughed. While his voice was not and had never been exact, his laugh was such a plaster cast of their dead father’s that he could not cackle at a jest without freezing the listener’s blood solid. “I would surprise you with the rest! As I said, I will arrange it all.”
Celegorm detested again this reversal of roled he had unwittingly choreographed. Now instead of leading he was stuck following, a position he had not put himself into willingly except for two he had consented to call Lord. (Once the Hunter; once his father.) He reminded himself that the consent he had given to Curufin was conditional. If he could fix the meal, Celegorm would eat it.
If not, he was going to hold the little bastard’s head under a river for as long as it took him to become afraid that he actually would kill him.
