The Stricken Anvil by Adlanth

Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1

 

The light had seared his eyes, he could scarcely see. He walked about half-blind, in a world of shapeless whiteness. My name is Maeglin, he told himself, sharp-glance. A poor jest. He blinked and rubbed his eyes; it did nothing to dispel the veil of mist that had been drawn over him. From time to time images emerged, white on paler white: the walls of Gondolin where they rose over Caragdûr, and the sharp white jut of the King’s Tower, and the slopes of the city, that he had looked on keenly while his father fell; his mother’s face, waxen and damp against her pillow. Then, at length, the veil fell and he could see again.

 

***

 

He had been given his mother’s quarters, and for a while scarcely left them. Somehow his mother herself seemed scarcely gone at all; she had left some of her things behind, carelessly, as if departing on a whim. A cloak of light, white wool, with blue and silver trim; quills and parchments; a bracelet studded with sapphires; a dagger; a longbow, its string loosened. They had been left untouched, waiting for their mistress’s return.

 

The apartments were wide and airy, and even the bed’s draperies had been left open. Wide windows, behind curtains of some loose, gauzy material, opened onto a balcony; and that, perched over the side of the hill, seemed to overhang the valley itself. It made Maeglin dizzy, at first, to look out; he wondered how his mother had ever been able to bear living in Nan Elmoth.

 

His uncle, Turgon, often came to him. Sometimes he looked on him long in silence, but when he spoke he did so gently, kindly, as if Maeglin were a child in need of comfort. When he was gone, Maeglin would find it hard to remember his face. He had dreamt of the king so often - the hero of so many of his mother’s tales, most dearly beloved of her kin. In Maeglin’s imaginings, Turgon had been his mother in male form; but in truth, when Maeglin looked at him, he found little resemblance: Turgon’s face was broad where his mother’s had been long, his lips fuller, his brows heavier, his hair a richer, lighter brown than her near black. Only their eyes, grey tinged with blue, and large, were the same.

 

Idril alone was exactly as he had imagined, and he had imagined nothing precise: only a bright gleam of sunlight, such as rarely fell from among the trees of Nan Elmoth, or something brighter still; a glimpse of golden sun and blue sky - and she was that, and he scarcely dared look at her. The sight of her, only glanced at, when dutifully she came to him with her father, entered his eyes like a beam of light; it cut him open, keen and painful and pleasurable.

 

***

 

It was summer, and the city lay before him. How much time had elapsed since he’d come to Gondolin? It had been midsummer when Eöl had left for Nogrod, and Maeglin had coaxed Aredhel into seeking the sunlight. It seemed to him that months had elapsed, yet (perhaps through some blessing laid upon the valley) it was summer still.

 

In Nan Elmoth, even in summer, sunlight barely reached through the trees; only a close, dank warmth seemed to rise from the soil. Maeglin’s skin had itched under the dark woollen clothes he wore.

 

Here, he raised his eyes to the sun, that hung above the valley. All of its light seemed to be gathered within the circle of the mountains, and held there as if in a cup, reflected off the tall encircling walls of the Echoriath, and the still snowy peaks, and the green land below - all that light, converging on the city, that blazed upon the hill. White, yes - white the walls and white the streets, and the sprays of water that sprang from the fountains - but also, Maeglin realised, of many other colours too… In the gardens of Turgon’s palace the grass burnt green, and many flowers bloomed pink and yellow and red. High in the air Turgon’s banners flapped in the wind, Finwë’s sun and Fingolfin’s, orange and blue and yellow. And it seemed to Maeglin that the hot air was a solid, palpable thing, but lucent as glass, and that it lay over the city like a glaze, and made its many colours all the brighter.

 

He dove into the city. Gar Ainion was where he went first, wandering south. On the Place of Gods there were many statues, strangely shaped: a king and queen wrought of some queer, glittering rock; a wave of grey-blue rock that seemed to rise from the earth; a pillar of black dull stone; a woman kneeling and stooped; a hunter ahorse, half-mingling with his steed; a tree in whose branches, if you looked at them closely, you could discern the shape of a woman; and a smith, with his hammer raised. Maeglin looked at them long and closely, hearing echoes of Aredhel’s tales - but to him the statues yielded none of their secrets, remaining strange and alien to him, though they stood starkly bared in the sunlight. He went on.

 

It was a market-day, as a helpful passer-by explained as Maeglin went on, walking east. And indeed, though on Gar Ainion it had been quiet, as Maeglin stepped into the Great Market a huge clamour seemed to rise and strike his ears. He reeled, but a moment later realised that it was only the ordinary chatter and noise of the market, such as he’d heard (on a deeper, more gravelly note) in the great underground market halls of Nogrod. Still, Maeglin walked on between the stalls.

 

About him, varying fabrics lay on tables or hung on trestles. Some seemed to Maeglin to be of Sindarin make, woven and sewn so as to resemble leaves or bark or running water; others were adorned with Golodh embroideries. He moved on, and the fabrics gave way to brightly dyed wools; and then the wool to threads. Smells filled the air: faint sheep’s musk, and then, as Maeglin crossed a broader aisle, smells of bread and meat, freshly cooked. There the crowd was thicker; some Elves, too, stopped and turned to look at him with frank or slyer curiosity. They could not have often seen new faces in the city, he supposed, but their gazes made him ill at ease nonetheless. Still, he knew how to conceal his feelings, to craft for himself a mask of cool indifference. He walked on. A plate was proffered, a gift of glazed honey cakes thrust in his face. He stumbled, turned, was jostled aside.

 

But he let the crowd take him where it would. The heat pressed heavily on him. The air was thick with smells: food and flowers and beasts. He saw before him a street that seemed to lead back towards Gar Ainion, but before he’d realised it, found himself walking along a broad street to the south-west. Houses rose about him, their walls high and white and dazzling. Another, lesser market. There they sold well-crafted things, wrought of stone and glass and metal. So many glinting things - the tinkling of bells in the distance, striking one - glistenings and shinings…

 

Suddenly he felt faint, sick with light, as if he had gorged on it, an unwise, ravenous child. He closed his eyes, and was elbowed aside. Beside him he felt the smooth, cool surface of a stone wall in shadow, and leant against it for a while. Then, barely thinking, eyes still shut, he began to walk alongside it, taking small, shuffling steps, till the noise of the market ebbed down behind him.

 

Maeglin opened his eyes again. He was standing in a narrow cobbled street that curved away from the main thoroughfare he’d just left. When he lifted his eyes he saw the houses, two or three storeys high, shine whitely in the sunlight, with roofs of pale stone under the clear sky, but the street itself lay in bluish shadow. He walked on, hoping to find a broader street again - the King’s Way, perhaps?- and so find his way back to the palace. He might have asked which way to go, but saw no-one in the street, and the doors were shut, and nothing stirred behind shuttered window.

 

Then, as the street, in its narrow sinuousness, turned again, he found an arched gate, gaping ahead of him. Beyond it there was a small courtyard, its walls lined with piles of wood, but otherwise empty, and at the back another archway, leading into darkness. He stepped in, and across the courtyard. In the dark beyond the archway he heard distant sounds of clanging and hammering, the rhythmic beating of metal against metal. Maeglin walked on.

 

He took it in: the familiar gloom, the smell of heat, singed leather, burning wood, white-hot metal. The smithy was very large, busy, and shapes went to and fro before him, and moved in the darkness; but he filled his sight with shadow; then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark again, he watched as sparks sprayed from beneath a hammer as it struck.

 

And there, before the furnace, and striking the anvil, was the master smith. Home, thought Maeglin, briefly and wildly. But of course it was not.

 

***

 

Rog, in whose workshop he'd thus entered at unawares, was the finest smith in the city, (Turgon had told him) and his workshop the largest and most renowned. Of course Maeglin would do well to spend his time there, if so he wished. And Rog - Rog of the Hammer of Wrath - was a lord too… That had surprised Maeglin, but Turgon had showed him his council room, a round hall beneath a domed ceiling, and on whose walls the sigils of all ten houses hung, painted on enamelled shields - all ten, and Turgon’s emblem the highest among them, with two more: Idril’s cornflower sigil and Aredhel’s white, set on either side of it. On Rog's shield a stricken anvil was painted.

 

‘Only yours is wanting,’ Turgon had said.

 

Maeglin had smiled slowly, and answered: ‘I am no lord of Gondolin.’

 

‘My sister-son?’ Turgon had said. ‘You must be, in time. You'll need to find an emblem and a name.’

 

‘And followers,’ Maeglin had said. Turgon had nodded, and clapped his shoulder. Afterwards, Maeglin had begun to think of his house. Before he had been his father’s son, with little care for lordship of his own. Not so now.

 

In the meantime he worked with Rog. There was much of Golodh craft that he wanted to learn. His mother had known little of smithcraft, loving the hunt and woods better in spite of her kin; and though his father had loved the forge (he too an original among his own kin) he had refused to learn any of the skills of the Golodhrim, preferring, if he must at all alter his ways, to be taught by the Naugrim. But Maeglin was eager to learn, hungering for knowledge won in the halls of Aulë himself; and he found that he himself had much to teach. The sword Anguirel, which he’d brought from the halls of his father, amazed Rog and his smiths, but Maeglin lacked the ore to make its like. Galvorn, though, he knew how to forge. He could imagine the wrath of his father upon learning that the Gelydh had learned its making.

 

As for Rog, he was as welcoming as Maeglin might have wished. On that first day when Maeglin had come upon him by chance, he had given him a place among the apprentices, without question, though surely he must have known who Maeglin was - the king’s own nephew. Later, on learning of Maeglin’s skill, he had let him join the more experienced smiths, and have his own anvil, furnace and workbench, and a boy of forty, barely apprenticed, to work the bellows for him and wield his sledgehammer. The child, Maeglin had learned, was a little lordling, the son of Egalmoth of the Heavenly Arch. By night he went about in a cloak all embroidered with stars, and with glistening jewels at his throat and wrist; but in the smithy he worked as hard as the rest, for Rog within his workshop ranked by skill alone, if he ranked at all; and before Maeglin’s coming the boy had worked for the second best of Rog’s smiths, an Elf whose birth was as ignoble as could be.

 

And Rog himself, lord of Gondolin though he was, accorded himself no privileges. A large, broad-shouldered man, he spoke in a surprisingly soft voice, that seemed to come from distant depths; though stooped by his work, he was tall; and though strong, he moved slowly, gently, as if in water. Each and every of his gestures was precise, and he made no useless motion.

 

***

 

Autumn came to Gondolin. Driving rains fell upon the valley, and the streets ran with water. Sometimes, when a lull came on the smithy and its noise quietened somewhat, Maeglin heard the howling of the wind and the lashing of rain on the shutters. On other days the sun shone, though coldly, and the trees in the city and in the valley below seemed as gold as Glingal on the King’s Square.

 

Sometimes, Maeglin would awake, startled out of a dream in which he ran through darkness, and came to a door that he flung open; and there, before the furnace, was a dark silhouette, waiting, hammer raised. In the dream Maeglin did not see his face, but knew that it was his father.

 

***

 

‘The House of the Mole,’ Maeglin declared.

 

Rog, who had been pouring some wine for himself, and water for Maeglin, sat back in his chair. It was the end of the day, and in the smithy behind them only the apprentices could be heard, and faintly, murmuring or whistling between their teeth as they swept the floors and tidied the tools.

 

‘Not the choice I would have expected,’ Rog said. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.

 

‘Isn’t that what your smiths called me?’ (Now Rog’s eyebrows rose, in a slowly dawning show of surprise.) ‘In that Golodh tongue,’ Maeglin went on, ‘thinking I would not understand. Nolpa.’

 

Now Rog smiled frankly. ‘They did not mean ill by it,’ he said. ‘Only they did not know your name, and saw you shunning the light when you first came to us, and then scarcely leaving the smithy till after night had come.’

 

Maeglin shrugged. ‘I shan’t hold that grudge against them. In any case I shall want miners for followers, if they can be persuaded, and the name should please them.’ And let the rest think me a weak and half-blind thing, paddling through the earth. None so keen-eyed as those who stand unseen.

 

‘I bear moles no ill will,’ Rog said. With a twist of his finger he indicated the hall about them. ‘I too like to delve.’

 

Maeglin rose. Indeed, the house of Rog, though part of it was built of white stone aboveground, had also been delved in an outcrop of rock that rose near to the edge of Amon Gwareth, and some of its halls reminded Maeglin of the mansions of Nogrod he had visited with his father. But here the rock had been pierced through, and part of the house, such as the gallery in which they sat now, opened straight onto the valley below, arched windows set in the very cliff side that dropped down to the sward of Tumladen. Maeglin, walking up to one such archway, leaned over the railing, and looked down. In the distance, he could discern some of the villages on the plain, and the roads that led to them, dark brown tracks across the brownish green; perhaps a ox-cart on its way; but for the most part Tumladen was hidden in a veil of drizzle, and the sky was lightless.

 

‘What rotten weather,’ he murmured. It made him uneasy, to see Gondolin so drab. He wondered if his wonder would be dulled so soon, his love die down; when he had lost so much in the conquering.

 

Behind him Rog spoke.

 

‘You mourn the sunlight after all, nolpa?’ Maeglin turned about without answering. Rog sat looking at him, smiling still. ‘Then you have heard nothing of our autumn festivals. We console ourselves well for the loss of heat and sun. With wine, mead and meats, and Salgant’s harp and Ecthelion’s flutes…’

 

‘I thought your festivals were for summer.’

 

‘And for autumn, and winter, and spring also. All occasions suit us.’

 

There was such warmth in Rog’s voice at that moment that Maeglin, had he been a different man, might have smiled in answer. Behind him a gust of wind, blowing through the open archways of the gallery, caught at Maeglin’s black, unbound hair, and tossed it about his head. As Maeglin stood, considering Rog, the smith’s expression shifted again.

 

‘You look so like your mother,’ Rog murmured. ‘Even like – like Arakáno.’

 

‘Do I?’

 

‘Yes. It is a wonder your uncle can look at you and not weep.’

 

‘Yet the king loves me well, I think.’

 

‘Yes,’ said Rog. He sighed, and looked away. Maeglin had spoken coldly. ‘Forgive me. I believe he is fond of you, as - as am I. He always wanted a son, after all. Not that he does not love Idril above all else, but… he and his lady wanted more, I believe. Yet you were won at so high a price.’ He paused awhile, still not meeting Maeglin’s eyes. ‘Your mother was very dear to him, as well you know. Now he must love you both for himself and for her sake.’

 

‘If Turgon loves me for my mother,’ Maeglin said, ‘then he must loathe me for my father.’

 

Rog looked up. Then he was at Maeglin’s side by the window, having moved, not quickly, but somehow so smoothly that Maeglin had not marked his movement, had not recoiled. A prey tricked by a gentle hunter.

 

‘Speak not so,’ Rog said. ‘Forgive me again.’

 

Then his hands were about Maeglin’s. Such large hands. They were wide, calloused, knotted, the fingers long and powerful. And yet chary of their strength. Glancing down, he noticed for the first time the whitened scars that wound about Rog’s hands, wrists, that criss-crossed that leathered skin and disappeared beneath his sleeves. He wondered at them, for he had not known Rog to be a clumsy craftsman.

 

Rog’s hands fell from his. Maeglin looked into his eyes. Then Rog seemed to open before him, his mind sliced by the sharpness of Maeglin’s glance and gaping. A moment later Rog had turned aside, but Maeglin had seen enough.

 

Desire, Maeglin thought, and felt a fool for not having understood sooner. Such a thing had so rarely been directed at him – to the best of his knowledge. He hardly knew what to make of it.

 

***

 

And yet he spent no less time with Rog, and rather more. At the autumn festival, two of Rog’s workers, come to the end of their apprenticeship, were married, and left the smithy to work together in the plain. ‘A waste of your talents,’ Rog had said to them, ‘to go shoe farmers’ horses and hammer their ploughs.’ But he had blessed them all the same, and bidden them farewell, and Maeglin then had all but moved into their quarters, though he often returned to the palace to see his uncle.

 

He had not spoken with Rog again in that fashion, since that encounter. Whatever Rog meant he left unsaid, and Maeglin was grateful for it. He had himself come to close to unveiling himself, and felt uneasy at the thought. Still - still - he remained with Rog. It was easier to spend his time in the smithy thus, rather than brave the icy, sometimes perilously slippery streets of Gondolin, where it was so much colder than it had ever been in Nan Elmoth, the wind blowing fiercely across the valley from the peaks of the Echoriath (so he told himself).

 

He made plans for his own house, Bar-en-Dold, with the help of Rog. Meanwhile he burrowed ever deeper into the halls of Rog, those underground, barely lit halls of stone, where hammers rang as they struck the anvils, far from the sunlight. Burrowing, or ensnared? He remembered his mother’s tales: how she had been drawn by a glimpse of light. How the dark had closed about her.

 

***

 

Snow had fallen on Gondolin. That morning, when Maeglin had looked outside his window, he’d seen the plain wholly smothered in white, and the sky low, pale grey, and the air milky with mist and still falling, fine snowflakes. The valley had seemed to him to be more enclosed, more isolated from the world than ever before.

 

On reaching the smithy, he found it to almost empty, and cold. Too much snow, one of the smiths told him, making the streets almost impracticable. That should not have hindered work, as Rog’s workers were well able to walk over the snow to work, once the doors were cleared; but a shipment of charcoal, that Rog had been expecting for some days, had failed to come in, which was why the furnaces remained unlit. Only a handful of people were standing around Rog; the rest he had sent home.

 

Maeglin wandered off. Climbing a flight of stairs, then another, he reached one of the windows that opened onto the city. In the distance, to the north, he could see the Turgon’s Tower: a fire burned at its summit, the flame bright and yellow, but the building beneath seemed to lose itself in the snow. Snow had fallen on the gardens also, and the fountains seemed to have stopped.

 

When he went back to the workshop it was altogether empty - save for Rog. Maeglin looked at him with an interrogative eye, but Rog merely shrugged.

 

‘They caught wind of a feast in Duilin’s house,’ he said. ‘Some celebration of the snow: they’ll be singing and playing, and drinking warmed wine and buttered mead. Better that than staying idle here.’

 

‘You haven’t joined them?’

 

‘Me? No! Not that I always dislike a feast but today… today I’d rather air the place, and my mind. But you’re free to join them.’

 

Maeglin shrugged.

 

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with you.’

 

Rog nodded slowly, and smiled.

 

Together they threw open the shutters that separated the gallery from the smithy. Draughts of cold air blew in, sharp and pleasant, even a few snowflakes that melted almost as soon as they touched the stone flags. It was strange, Maeglin thought, having the smithy so open, with only the narrow gallery between it and the valley beyond. The snow was not falling so thickly now, and with his keen glance he could see the plain, and even the mountains beyond.

 

When he turned, he saw the forge as he had rarely seen it, in daylight rather than the glow of the furnaces or the unvarying beams of small Fëanorian lamps, by whose light the steel's heat could best be judged. Now, rayless, diffuse light, emanating from both sky and ground, filled the room, making it seem strange and grey: illuminating ash and dust, and white stone flags, anvils, hammers and tongs. And Rog was standing behind him too, and Maeglin looked at him as he had not before.

 

His tall, muscular body he knew already, and the long, brown hair that fell in a thick braid over his shoulder, and his dark eyes, soft and nearly black. The angles and planes, the architecture of his face, however, were newly revealed. Maeglin looked at the high wall of his brow, and the jut of his nose, the slope of his cheeks. He wore a leather apron over his tunic; but above both, Maeglin saw a space of naked skin, from collarbone to neck. On that tawny skin he saw white lines, as of filigree; and a faintest sheen of sweat, in spite of the cold. Rog’s breast rose and fell. Maeglin, without thinking, stepped forward and touched him.

 

For a while he stayed thus, unmoving, Rog’s skin warm - hot - beneath his fingers. He had never done that before, not touched another in that way. How long was it since he had touched another at all? He remembered Turgon’s hesitant hand on his shoulder, wanting to be warm; and, distant now, his mother’s embraces - his father’s he could not remember at all. But he himself? All of a sudden he felt untouched, lonely, cold, standing in that bare, grey light. Only his fingertips burned where they rested on Rog’s flesh.

 

Then Rog’s fingers closed about his. Maeglin half-expected him to push his hand away. Instead Rog wound his fingers through Maeglin, and, powerfully, but gently, rested his other hand on Maeglin’s shoulder, and pulled him close. Maeglin made some sound in his throat. A moment later, Rog kissed him.

 

For a while Maeglin stood frozen, feeling only Rog’s mouth on his, and the warm, but still, length of his body. But when Rog pulled away to look at him, he leant forwards, and kissed Rog back, though he scarcely knew how. And this time Rog’s body strained against his, and Maeglin, as Rog’s hand tightened at the nape of his neck, felt the other’s chest, and hips, and thighs against his own. For a long while they merely kissed, though from time to time Rog would pause, breathing heavily, but otherwise silent, and look into Maeglin’s face, as though searching for confirmation, or some lost thing. And then his mouth would fall on Maeglin’s again.

 

And Maeglin stood there, revelling in that new thing, and feeling himself stirring, and Rog hardening against him. But in his inexperience he hardly dared move, and only groaned as Rog’s hand left his neck, and travelled along his shoulder, his back, his side - and then dipped between their bodies. For a moment Rog fumbled at his lacings, and Maeglin drew back, self-conscious, to let him work, though Rog’s left hand still firmly gripped his right; but then Rog deftly tugged down his loosened trousers, and his fingers, hot and calloused, wrapped around Maeglin’s shaft - and Maeglin heard himself make a sound, surprised and pleasured and abandoned, that he’d never made before, not even on those nights when he’d taken himself in hand and brought himself pleasure. But he leant forward again, and rested his brow on Rog’s shoulder; then, as a tug of Rog’s hand caused his entire body to tremble, he laid his mouth on Rog’s skin, near that exposed collarbone, kissing and near-biting with each jerk of his hips into Rog’s hand. As he did so, Rog too let out a sound, half-laughter half-groan.

 

But then, just as Maeglin wondered if he’d done wrong, Rog released him and sank to his knees, leaving Maeglin feeling somehow exposed, standing as he did half-naked in the forge, with his prick erect against his stomach. He might have shied away, but Rog caught him by the hips, gentle in spite of his strength, and pushed him backwards till Maeglin was half-sitting on one of the anvils, and then - Maeglin’s hands reaching back to grip the anvil’s horns convulsively - took him in his mouth.

 

He shuddered, and let out another undignified, startled noise. He did not care. His back arched, and he would have thrust himself further still into the soft, warmth of Rog’s mouth, had Rog’s hands not remained firmly on his hips. Instead he lost himself to sensation - at first with his head thrown back, staring unseeing at the ceiling, and then lowering his gaze to shudder anew at the sight of Rog’s dark head between his spread thighs.

 

Then, just as Maeglin, panting and abandoned, began to feel too close, Rog rose, releasing Maeglin’s shaft but soon kissing him again, with bruised and smeared lips this time. And this time his hands tore at Maeglin’s clothing, and Maeglin did the same, fumbling as he pushed aside Rog’s leather apron, then pulled it off, stripped Rog’s shirt from his skin, and slid his hand down to touch Rog as Rog had touched him. He tugged haphazardly at Rog’s hard flesh, but Rog, whose hands had come to rest about Maeglin’s face, and whose eyes stared hard at Maeglin, shuddered all the same. For a while he merely stayed thus, quietly leaning into Maeglin’s clumsy but eager touch, but after a moment he moved again, his hands – smooth as water, for all their calluses, and gentle – trailing over Maeglin’s naked shoulders, and back, and over his buttocks, and into the cleft…

 

Maeglin tensed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now.’ His hand stilled, in some nameless fear, but at once Rog slid his hand up, returning it to Maeglin’s waist. Instead, Rog leant into him, and with his other hand covering Maeglin’s, slid his shaft between Maeglin’s thighs. Maeglin, understanding, tightened his legs about the member that began to slide to and fro against the sensitive skin there. Soon Rog reached up, and took him in hand again, and they began to rut against one another - Maeglin half leaning on the anvil, Rog clasping him with one hand, stroking him with the other. Maeglin’s pleasure grew. His fingers tightened on the anvil.

 

Foul use of a smithy, foul use of the smith’s tools. For a moment Maeglin saw his father, a dark silhouette in the smithy, hammer raised before the anvil; and he felt himself wilt in Rog’s hand. No. Maeglin stared ahead, at the empty smithy, open and wide and full of light - strange and bleak, but sunlight all the same -, and he felt Rog surge against him, and his own thighs tightening around Rog, willing him, and himself, to climax.

 

***

 

Afterwards, they lay on the floor, before the furnace, panting. Rog embraced him from behind, his right arm resting heavily across Maeglin’s waist. Maeglin lay there for a while, half dazed. The stone flags beneath him were cold, but Rog was warm. He drifted into sleep a little while.

 

When he awoke he crawled from beneath Rog’s arm, until Rog stirred and freed him. Maeglin turned, and sat up against the anvil, facing Rog. He wrapped himself awkwardly in Rog’s apron, leather clinging to his sweaty skin, and looked at Rog as he lay there: his powerful chest rising and falling with each breath, his legs haphazardly parted, and the thick, shapely prick, that Maeglin had just felt spilling between his thighs, now limp at his groin.

 

And there, too, they were: the scars that he had glimpsed before, and more. Only those he had first seen were mere scratches compared to what scars marked the rest of Rog’s body. They wound about his torso, broad, jagged bands of white, and down his stomach. There were more about his hips, his thighs, threads and ropes of scars about the strong muscles of his legs. Burn marks splotching the skin of his chest, shoulders, arms.

 

Maeglin looked at each of them, fascinated. Leaning forward, he touched one, tracing it from Rog’s right shoulder, and across his chest, his stomach, to his left hip. Then he traced another, his finger sliding across Rog’s knee, up his inner thigh, and to his cleft. Rog watched him with half-closed eyes, impassive. Maeglin withdrew his hand, laid it on Rog’s thigh. He felt the faintest of tremors beneath his palm.

 

‘What happened to you?’ Maeglin said.

 

‘I was a captive of Angband.’

 

‘How were you taken?’

 

‘In the battle where my lord Arakáno was slain.’

 

‘And how did you come to be free?’ Rog did not answer. ‘Did you have a beloved friend to sing to you and hack you free?’

 

Rog raised both hands and held them up before Maeglin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My beloved friend was cut down beside me. And I shan’t tell you the tale.’ He seemed oddly without emotion, as though the words he spoke, the horrors it suggested, did not concern him but some distant acquaintance. Is that what his gentleness conceals? Maeglin wondered. Suddenly it seemed - not false, exactly, but deliberate, as if by a surfeit of smoothness he might assuage others' suspicion.

 

Aye – as I shall ever be my uncle's loving and docile nephew.

 

Disturbed by the train of his thoughts, Maeglin spoke glibly next.

 

‘Were you set free by the Enemy, then,?’

 

At once he regretted asking – Rog, after all, had shown him his wounds. And yet – wasn't it a fair question? And Rog merely looked at him levelly.

 

‘No,’ he said. 'This much I swear, though I cannot prove it. All you have is my word.'

 

‘Does my uncle know?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘And was he wise, to take you into the city?’

 

‘Many among his counsellors thought not. But not your uncle. Then I was only...’ (He gestured down at himself.) ‘A clump of scars. A thing, that, even when it had been a man, had failed to save his - Arakáno. But he took me all the same, that creature his brother had left behind. Idril also spoke to defend me. I should be glad to die for these two.’

 

Maeglin was silent for a while. He felt as if Rog expected something from him. Should he have answered: 'And so would I'? But instead he said:

 

’I always wondered at your name,’ he said at last. 'Rauko. I could not understand how an Elf of Valinor might name their child demon.’

 

‘I was never Rauko,’ said Rog. ‘I had another name, once. Some day I might tell you.’

 

Yes, said Maeglin. And someday I might tell you mine.

 

***

 

Later still, Maeglin, lying down again, watched as Rog rose, his naked body limned with light, and went to close the shutters one by one. The darkness enfolded him.

 

***

 

Spring had washed over Gondolin, stripping it of its layer of grey - dead leaves, frozen grass, icy fountains - to reveal the sanguine, lustrous colour beneath. Flowers bloomed on the sward and in the gardens of the city; shocks of green and white and pink sprang up on the trees, when before Belthil and Glingal alone had shone brightly before Turgon’s palace. And the air - the air itself was crisp, and fresh, and full of fragrance - air rich enough to taste. Maeglin, as he made his way through the gardens, half felt like chewing mouthfuls of it. But on himself, he perceived other smells than the clean scent of spring - not flowers but charcoal, and soot, and metal - and beneath it all the smell of Rog, who that same day had pressed him into an alcove not far from the smithy, and wrung a hard kiss from him, with the promise of more.

 

But then Rog himself had urged him to leave the forge for a while. Maeglin had been explaining his plans for his future halls, which he intended to build, along with the a score of metalworkers and miners which, though originally of Rog’s household, had been persuaded to join his. ‘You should see the spot,’ Rog had said, meaning the place on the southernmost part of Amon Gwareth, so far unused save for a sprawling garden, that Turgon had allocated him. And Maeglin, Rog had added, would likely do well to consult with Idril on the subject of his house: for though Turgon had dreamt up most of his fair city, in memory of Tirion upon Tuna, it was his daughter who had the fine, practical mind required for construction, and so had supervised the building of Gondolin’s battlements, stairs and roads. ‘I shall join you soon,’ Rog had added. There was some work that needed finishing.

 

So Maeglin had gone, though now he’d begun to question the wisdom of that choice. The spot he’d seen, but he doubted Idril would have much time to discuss architecture with him. The city seemed to be preparing for a great festival, and the gardens beneath the Lesser Market were swarming with Elves busily setting up trestles and tables, lanterns and garlands, food and drink, on a greater scale than for any feast Maeglin had yet witnessed since coming to Gondolin. When he inquired, a passer-by cast a glance of pity and surprise in his direction, and said: ‘Why, the Gates of Summer, of course.’ But Maeglin had not been there a year ago.

 

A year, Maeglin thought, as the Elf drifted away, arms laden with delicacies piled high on a woven wicker tray. Less than a year ago he had been living in Nan Elmoth still. Not knowing Turgon, or Idril, or Gondolin herself - but shuffling in the gloom, under the shadow of trees so high, so dark, they seemed the entire world. Glancing, with dim curiosity, at the fumbling, secret embraces of his father’s servants, but not knowing Rog’s touch on him and the heat it brought surfacing to his skin. The child of two living parents.

 

Lost in thought, he had almost failed to see Idril, who sat on a bench beneath a hedge, braiding cornflowers into a long blue garland, but raised his eyes in time and stumbled. Instead of the plain white and blue garments she usually wore, she was dressed in a yellow gown embroidered with silver thread, glinting as water in the sunlight, and her long blond hair, usually confined to a single plait, fell unbound and glistening to her shoulders. For a while Maeglin merely looked at her in silence, noting the swift movement of her hands as she worked, but eventually she raised her eyes, dark blue and with a hint of the Tree-light that burned in Turgon and Rog’s eyes, and had burned in Aredhel’s, and she looked at him.

 

‘I - was looking for you’, he said, stammering in the light of her keen eyes. Then he sat down beside her on the bench, as she moved smoothly aside to give him more room.

 

They spoke of his house for a while. Maeglin had spent so much time thinking of it, that the words spilled out of him without thought; Idril listened to him, nodding, and from time to time offering some comment. The sheaf of cornflowers lay across her lap, though still she played with a stalk, twisting it about her finger; and her flaxen hair slid across her bare shoulder as she nodded. Maeglin, though he still spoke, lost himself in noticing her. She is kin to me, he told himself, that creature of sunlight. He had meant it as a warning, and yet the sentence, as it formed in his mind, took on other meanings - as if, by being so near her, he thought he might find his kinship to her, awaken some sunlit part of himself.

 

Without thinking, he raised his hand, and touched the naked skin of her shoulder with a single fingertip.

 

She did not start, merely turned and gazed into his eyes, as though she had expected the touch. But there was no warmth whatever in her eyes. Maeglin felt sick with dread. She knows, he thought, has known since long before I did.

 

There was a sound, a footstep, and Maeglin turned. Rog stood on the garden path. I shall join you soon. He seemed out of place, somehow, standing there in the garden, in the fading, yellow light of evening. But not even he seemed surprised. He turned aside, and walked away.

 

***

 

Maeglin drank. The feast spinned about him, a swirl of singing and dancing. The Gates of Summer: the shortest night of the year, and the wildest. The wine was heady and strong. It took a lot to dull the sharpness of Maeglin’s mind. Which did not deter him.

 

They know, he thought. Knew of some warped part of himself that he scarcely understood. That loved not only Rog but Idril too, foul though that love was.

 

He was pulled to his feet, and into a dance. The maid he clasped smiled at him brightly, and whirled him about; he danced as gracefully as he knew, in spite of the wine, and smiled.

 

That crookedness of his they must have known from the start. Why not - with such a father? The warpedness of the father must resurface in the son.

 

Another drink, a sloshing cupful of mead, snatched from a passing tray, gulped down. The stars shone very brightly above, twinking like so many spearheads.

 

He wondered if Rog would take him again, after this realisation - or confirmation. He felt a sharp pang of despair at the thought of not feeling his touch again. I have lost enough. I did not mean it. But he did.

 

More dancing, more singing, strident to his ears. Where was his uncle? his cousin? Gone, gone- The night.

 

Dawn came, the first warm touches of light upon the sky. A merry crowd swept him into the streets, east along the battlements, and then down the steep flight of stairs to a narrow terrace between the white walls of the city and the dark cliffs of Amon Gwareth. There they waited for the rising of the sun over the mountains. When Maeglin turned to look at the city, the walls seemed to be stained with fire.

 

He left before the sun had risen, leaving the crowd behind him. He stumbled up the stairs, which seemed to move before his eyes, and then along the streets, which seemed to close about him. The Greater Market, and Gar Ainion, and the Lesser Market, the narrow winding alleys… All still in shadow, but he ran, ran.

 

He staggered into the smithy. It was dark, and silent, except for the sound of a single hammer striking. He shuffled forward in the dark, stepping clumsily between anvils and workbenches.

 

And then, before him, the smith was standing. A dark silhouette, his back to Maeglin, his hammer raised.

 

He was waiting for me, Maeglin thought. He was always waiting for me. And he began to tremble in relief.