Pieces of the Stars by Nibeneth

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Chapter 2

The days on the road blended into a haze of gray light and deep shadows. The rain sputtered in and out. Elrond and Elros ate and slept when they were told. They did not cross paths with the orcs again, but Maglor’s host still kept up a swift, silent pace and lit no fires.

At last a structure appeared through the woods: an old stone wall camouflaged by creeping vines. Elrond peered around the riders in front of them to try and get a better look, but they turned a corner and the wall disappeared behind the trees. He began to wonder if he had seen it at all until they turned another corner and it rose up in front of the path once more. He saw a watchtower and a gate of iron-banded wood—both had seen better days.

The riders paused on the road just before the wall. Maglor’s squire Rythredion drew his sword and rapped three times upon his shield. “Open the gate!” he called. “Our lords return home!”

There was an almost hesitant pause. The heavy gate swung open with a groan. A handful of dark-hooded guards stood waiting, along with a small crowd of other elves who had been going about their work: they carried their tools and baskets as if they had not even stopped to drop their loads when they heard the horses.

Maglor trotted his horse through the gates with Elros on his saddle. Just behind him, Maedhros sagged over his pommel, swaying against the rope he’d tied around his waist as he followed. Hestedis went after him, and as the host filed through the gates and into the compound, more elves silently gathered to view the spectacle. They said nothing. Some faces were open in shock, and others were shuttered and turned away when the horses passed. Still others displayed no emotion at all, only the same dull resignation that Elrond recognized in the host that bore them away from Sirion.

The horses followed dirt paths around smoky shops and wood-and-stone houses. There were muddy chicken coops and goat pens, vegetable gardens and strings of grayish laundry trying to dry in the moist air. Everything seemed shabby and sad and slowly losing what little dignity it had left. The great house in the center of the compound was no different, for all it was older and bigger and built entirely in stone. A corner of it was crumbling and the roof was mostly moss. No banners flew from the two small towers on either side of the double doors, which did not match. Some of the windows were boarded up. It looked like a tired, bruised face.

It was in front of the great house that Maglor called the riders to a halt. They had assembled a small crowd already, and more were still coming. He dismounted first and lifted Elros out of the saddle after him, and the others followed. Elrond gave Hestedis the same suspicious glare he’d trained on her constantly since Sirion but allowed her to get him down from the horse without a fuss.

Maedhros, grimacing, reached for his right wrist. He spent a few clumsy moments fumbling with something under his sleeve, and then his black-gloved right hand dropped to the ground with a clunk. Elrond’s eyes popped. Maedhros glanced at him from under his disheveled curtain of hair—he’d been caught staring.

“It’s a prosthesis,” he said bluntly, and wandered off toward the great house, leaving a trail of gear behind him. His squire rolled his eyes and followed, picking up the debris as he went.

The crowd pressed in closer. One woman stepped forward. “Why have so few returned?” she asked. “Where is Amras?”

Maglor’s face was like stone. “My brother is dead.”

“And the others? Are they all dead as well?”

“No. Not all of them.”

More people rushed in with more questions, and Elrond’s head spun in the confusion. Maglor raised his hands and his voice to quell the noise for now. “I will answer you all! Dior’s daughter did possess my father’s Silmaril, but no, we did not reclaim it, even after needless bloodshed!”

A brittle hush fell over the crowd like a collective intake of breath.

A man elbowed his way through the crowd. His face was flushed in obvious anger. “Sirion was… was not Menegroth!” he shouted. “The Sindar were at least capable of a fair fight!”

“She knew of my Oath and ignored my offer of peaceful reconciliation. Tell me, what other choice did I have?” A bitter edge came into Maglor’s voice at that, and he passed his reins to Rythredion before heading into the house, nudging Elrond and Elros along with him. Most of the crowd followed, still demanding answers, but when Elrond glanced back he saw others going their own way, shaking their heads and looking disgusted.

Maglor ushered the boys through a small, dark antechamber. The voices around them melted from the common jargon into rapid, rolling Quenya that they couldn’t follow as the inner doors opened into a large hall filled with red-gold light and deep shadows cast off from the long hearth in the middle of the floor. Someone placed a bowl of soup in Elrond’s hands. He hadn’t realized how cold he was until the warmth started seeping into this fingers, or how hungry he was until he smelled broth and onions.

He and Elros sat at one of the long trestle tables beside the hearth, shoulders touching, and inhaled the soup while Maglor gathered his people. The strange elves shifted around them, peering at them almost as if they were afraid. Elrond and Elros watched them warily but continued eating.

“And the children? Are we now a prison for infant hostages?” one elf demanded, his voice cutting through the debate.

“Due to a series of misunderstandings at Sirion, the princes have become my responsibility,” he said. “I need someone to act as my herald and arrange a meeting with the High King or his representative in order to reunite them with their people.”

Hestedis huffed. “A series of misunderstandings ,” she mocked under her breath.

Maglor ignored her. “I had intended to make contact with him sooner, but the road was dangerous. It will be safer for them to remain here while we agree on a plan. The sooner I can send someone, the better.”

Dozens of curious eyes turned on the boys. Elros swallowed a spoonful of soup and stared back. Elrond just looked down at his empty bowl. He didn’t say anything, but someone immediately swooped in to refill it as if she had heard his thoughts.

“I only wish to return them,” Maglor reiterated. “What happened at Sirion is already done. At least I can try to prevent more harm.”

There was a long pause filled only with crackling embers and the boys slurping their soup. Maglor remained in the midst of his followers, arms crossed, looking at each of them in turn.

“I will go,” another elf said at last.

“Good,” Maglor said, satisfied. “I will compose a letter. Until you return with word from the king, the princes are my honored guests, and I will see to their needs.”

Maglor proved serious about his promise. At length he extracted himself from more prolonged discussion and took the boys beyond the main hall, where a bedchamber was already prepared for their use. His authoritative demeanor before his people crumbled into self-conscious scrupulosity as he enlisted Rythredion in helping to make the boys comfortable. They unearthed some old chests elsewhere in the great house and brought them back to sort through. There were children’s clothes, but despite the sachets of herbs left between the layers, many of the articles had been ruined by pests.

“There hasn’t been any need for children’s things in this house for centuries,” Maglor said, embarrassed, as he tried to see what could be salvaged. “One of my brothers maintained a trading outpost here, but those days are long gone.” Mouse droppings and insect bites perforated several shirts and trousers, and the toys and games in the other chest fared no better. In the end they found four shirts, two tunics, three pairs of trousers, one winter coat, exactly three socks, and a left sandal in good condition. “That’s a decent start, I suppose. Rythredion, please take all this down to the laundry and see if you can find anything we can take in. They’ll need socks and underwear as well, and nightshirts. The rest of this can go to the tailors’ for quilts if nothing else.”

The toys were also old and beaten, chewed by rodents and missing patches of once-bright paint. There was a wooden cat with wheels instead of legs, boy and girl dolls with faded smocks, interlocking wooden blocks in different shapes, and a small collection of sewn leather balls.

“We can clean them up a bit,” Maglor said hastily when Elros inspected one of the dolls. “There’s a ball-and-cup that just needs a new string, and some soft animals that are missing their stuffing… what do you like to play with?” Elrond shrugged. He looked at Elros, who was already hard at work untangling the boy doll’s curly yarn hair. Maglor wrung his hands. “I forgot completely—your hair! Baths! Rythredion!”

A commotion elsewhere in the house drew Maglor away, leaving Rythredion to oversee the boys’ bath once he returned. They took turns scrubbing off in a low wooden tub with water that was barely lukewarm, shivering in the cool air and trying to get done as soon as possible. Still, it was better with Maglor’s agitation out of the room, and Rythredion was friendly company. When they were clean they put on too-large shirts and sat still while he combed the tangles out of their hair.

“I used to do this for my little brother,” he said. “It’s been some time. Do you want two braids?”

They both nodded. Rythredion braided Elrond’s hair first, smoothing his curls with sweet-smelling oil before making a clean part down the middle and braiding close to his scalp. The squire tied off the braids with pieces of cord and started on Elros’ hair while Elrond went back to examine the toys again.

Elsewhere in the house, the shouting escalated. Something clattered. Elrond and Elros looked up at the door.

“There is no need for you two to worry,” Rythredion said. He rose to his feet. “I’ll be back later! Why don’t you see which toys you like best?”

Elrond and Elros were not confined to their room, but over the next days they spent long hours there anyway. Two dolls, a basket of blocks, a wheeled cat, and a few leather balls became whole worlds, from dark forests to cliffs by the sea to the underground fortresses where dwarves were said to live. High drama played out over whole centuries on the faded rug in front of the fireplace, complete with dragons and fairies and lost love and betrayal and murder and wraiths and storms that took the shape of Elrond pelting Elros’ block castle with balls until Elros tackled him and they resorted to wrestling until one of them bent a finger back and started crying.

More often than not, their games culminated in the girl doll leaping off the top of a block castle or the wheeled cat capturing both dolls and rolling away into the dark gap under the bed.

Eleven people left the compound overnight. Within a week, the population had dropped by a third.

Most packed up their horses and left without saying anything. Others took nothing but what they could carry, leaving their crafts and tools behind. The others only realized the baker had gone when no smoke rose from her ovens one morning. The herbalist and one of the healers had at least warned Osgardir before they left him to care for the compound’s health alone, a fact he bitterly reported to Maglor the morning after their departure. A goatherd distributed his flock among the others before he left, and a carpenter took only her garden, which she had carefully uprooted and replanted in boxes in the back of her wagon. Each left their sword at the front door of the great house.

From the snatches of conversation that Elrond and Elros overheard, no one who left had hesitated to make their decision once they had heard about Sirion. Those who remained did not try to stop them.

Maglor let them play as much as they liked—if they were playing, they weren’t distracting him from keeping social order from collapsing as more and more of his people took their leave. Occasionally they grew bored of their toys and left their room to wander and eavesdrop, but these expeditions often left them with more questions than answers. They loitered in the shadows when Maglor dictated a letter for his herald to carry to the king. Its content was much the same as it had been on the road: I have taken the twin princes into my household for safekeeping, and I wish to return them to their people. I ask nothing but your cooperation…

“Maybe you should mention how you were going to leave them in the ruins until your mad brother caught wind of it,” Hestedis sniped from the doorway where she leaned with crossed arms.

A wrinkle of distaste appeared at the corner of Maglor’s mouth. “Why did you even stay?”

She departed without saying anything.

The next morning, the messenger rode into the forest, bound for the house of the king.

Daily life in Maglor’s custody felt like nothing more than filling time until the next sundown, and then doing the same thing when morning broke the next day. Until the messenger returned with the king’s response, there was nothing terribly important to do.

The elves who followed the dispossessed brothers seemed to follow the same mundane pattern of work and rest, sustaining themselves by rote with nothing obvious to look forward to. They acted as if they were part of a story that had ended a long time ago: leftover characters forgotten once the fire was out and the storyteller had gone to bed. The Noldor majority among them spoke loudly and with many gestures, and they argued constantly, mostly about how labor and resources would be divided now, but also apparently about everything else they could think of. Elrond and Elros heard their names often, and the names of their parents. It died down a little during mealtimes, when the household gathered around a table near the hearth and generally restricted their conversation to shop talk.

Elrond and Elros sat at table with the rest of the household. They ate plain, repetitive meals: cooked grain, meatballs, mushrooms, steamed greens, flatbread, goat cheese. Elrond had a growing list of foods he didn’t like and passed spoonfuls to the dogs when he could get away with it. Elros tried to help himself to more honey than porridge, but was usually caught red-handed and sticky-mouthed.

The household always set an extra place at the head of the table, but it always stood empty.

“Who’s going to sit there?” Elrond asked after he realized no one ever sat there.

“Maedhros, if he chooses to join us,” Maglor said.

“He probably won’t,” added Hestedis.

“Still, he is the lord of our house, and leaving him a space at the head of the table is an appropriate courtesy,” Maglor continued, apparently ignoring the touch of scorn in his captain’s voice.

Maedhros may have been the lord of their house, but their followers looked to Maglor for leadership. Maedhros himself rarely emerged from his chambers. He drank almost constantly. In the small hours of the morning he could sometimes be heard yelling and flipping his furniture over, and Maglor would have dark circles under his eyes when the sun came up and the boys emerged from their room. The rest of the time, Maedhros slept during the day or wandered the halls by himself, saying nothing. The others regarded him with a mixture of pity and frustration, and Elrond and Elros didn’t usually see him.

The messenger returned alone and empty-handed.

“The orcs have camps all across southern Beleriand,” he reported grimly in the main hall. “All through the forest and beyond the rivers. I don’t know why—it would be some of their tribal war games, but either way, all roads are impassable. I do not think it wise to attempt contact again until they have moved on.”

Maglor sighed, frustrated, and tugged at his hair. “They never would have dared come this far south in our day. Did you at least hear anything of the king’s people? Any rumors?”

“None.”

“They could be preparing an attack on Balar,” Maedhros mumbled over his cup. “The Enemy will win by sheer numbers.”

Maglor cut him off with a sweep of his hand. “No! Orcs do not muster themselves for anything more than scavenging, and the Enemy does not muster them unless rising to our challenge. The king should know better than to challenge him.”

“It’s all speculation.” Maedhros drank deeply. “All we know is that we will have to wait. Sent scouts if you must know what they are up to, but it won’t make a difference.”

Elrond and Elros looked at one another but said nothing. They would have to stay here, then, still waiting, still playing with their toys, just passing the time.

Elrond had not realized he could miss the sea until he had been swept away into the deep forest. Between dinners spent slipping his food to the dogs, he found himself craving luminous sea-grapes on a blue-and-white plate, but there was no sea here, only an unending wood and mist-shrouded hills in the distance. His ears rang in the deafening absence of waves upon the cliffs. It kept him up at night, and he often rolled over in bed to find Elros also awake and picking at threadbare patches on their quilt.

“What do you think the king will be like?” Elrond asked him.

Elros shrugged. “I don’t know.”

They were silent for a moment. Elrond had an image in his mind of a figure on a white horse, but he was distant like a statue on a hill. Would he be like Maglor—distracted and anxiously attentive? Would he be warm and bright and easy to love like Father, as little as Elrond remembered him between his voyages? The king’s name demanded respect. Would he truly be as cold as a marble statue?

It would still be temporary, wouldn’t it? Mother would surely return before long, and Father’s ship would come to port amid the sound of their people’s cheers.

That was a comforting thought, and Elrond let its promise carry him to sleep.

Winter came. Morning frost on the windows became sheets of ice where rain had fallen and frozen overnight, and each day the weak pink sunrise that filtered through the trees did less to warm the earth. Snow would have made the world softer, but winter here brought only ice and a deep, damp chill that made every sensation shatter.

Elrond could not remember ever being so cold before. He and Elros huddled close in their bed every night with the blankets pulled up to their ears. Even with a fire on the hearth their noses stung every time they breathed in. As the days grew darker and colder, most of the house moved pallets into the main hall and gathered them around the long hearth where it was warmer and they could save fuel, and nestled between strangers, the boys slept more comfortably than they had since the first frost. During the day they built a tent out of chairs and blankets and took their toys inside to play where it was warm. The adults still went about their work: goats needed to be milked, wood needed to be chopped, and nails needed to be forged. Life, such as it was, continued.

Maglor, Rythredion, and the tailors all brought mountains of sewing to the main hall to work on. Elros had tied a string around the wheeled cat and was running in circles around the hearth with the cat bumping along behind him. Elrond lay in wait under one of the tables. He waited for Elros to approach—when he ran alongside Elrond’s hiding place, Elrond pounced, wrapped his arms around Elros’ legs, and tackled him to the floor in a tangle of patched shoes and oversized coats.

“Elrond! Elros! BOYS!” Maglor barked when they started throwing punches. They stopped. He was still sewing, but with a withering glare in their direction. “Don’t hit each other. Come and sit on the bench.”

Shamefaced, they came around the hearth and scooted onto Maglor’s bench. For a long time they sat silently, swinging their feet and fidgeting, until Maglor spoke again.

“Do you know your numbers?” he asked.

Elros sat up straight. “I can count to a hundred,” he said.

“Really? That’s impressive. Do you know your tengwar?”

“I always forget the ones in the middle,” Elros confessed, wrinkling his nose. “Elrond is better.”

“Do you know the tengwar song?”

“I do,” Elrond said.

“Let’s sing the tengwar song. Elros, just sing as much as you remember.”

The three of them sang the tengwar song. Elros did his best with the ones in the middle, and afterward Maglor had them sing it more slowly to give him more time to remember. His voice was strong and easy to follow, and soon Elros was singing all the tengwar in the right order, and the boys swung their feet in time with the melody as they sang it faster and faster.

It became part of their winter routine. Maglor had them sing the tengwar song, the number song, the Valar song, the song of the Music, and more they didn’t already know. There were songs for history and mathematics and the patterns of nature. When Maglor decided they knew them well enough, he brought out slates and chalk and had them practice their letters and numbers. The lesson-songs stuck in Elrond’s head as the repeated figures and made words on his slate. He could bring the music out into the lines and curves of his name as if making a visual representation of the tunes themselves. Elros did his numbers faster, and when he was done, he drew grotesque monsters slithering out of the edges of the slate to eat them.

Maglor sent another messenger when spring softened the ground and the rivers swelled with meltwater.

Baby goats and fowl appeared, which drew Elrond and Elros’ attention. The greensward behind the great house held a goat pen and a fenced chicken coop beside the kitchen garden, and the two of them spent long hours peering through the slats at hens parading their tiny brown chicks behind them in neat lines and spotted kids bouncing after each other on the grass.

“What kind of egg did we come from?” Elros asked, brow furrowed in concentration as he studied the chicks. “The eggs only have one baby in them, but we were born at the same time. Did we have two eggs stuck together? Or did we share a big one?”

Maglor emerged from the henhouse with a handful of eggs for the kitchen. “The children of Iluvatar don’t hatch from eggs.”

Elros looked up at him with one skeptical eyebrow raised. “Why not?”

“Well, we are more similar to goats than we are to chickens. We have hair instead of feathers, and our mothers feed us upon milk like mother goats feed their babies.” He pointed out two black-and-white kids suckling and wagging their stubby tails while their mother grazed, unconcerned. “The babies are born from their mothers’ bodies. It is the same for elves and men.”

“I think you’re making that up,” Elros retorted. He turned back to watch the hens and their babies scratch at the dirt for insects.

As the boys spent more time paying attention to the animals and the gardens, they noticed more about how the small society within the compound functioned. Each resident was entitled to an equal ration of grain, after which any surplus was put up against lean years to come. They supplemented this grain with their gardens, animals, and forage, a percentage of which they were obliged to send to the granaries for distribution among the compound. They traded any excess and their crafts amongst themselves. Those who did not produce food made their contribution in other ways—textiles, woodwork, tanning, smithing, hours of labor. All who were able spent a portion of their time standing in defense of the compound, for which they received an additional measure of goods.

Maglor, highly educated as he was, was the primary overseer of the ledgers, along with a number of others who counted bookkeeping among their skills. Elros often abandoned his slate and sidled up to them while they reviewed figures, sitting quietly at the end of the bench so he wouldn’t be told to return to his studies.

“Have you finished your tengwar already?” Maglor would say, turning a withering tutor’s eye on him, and he would slide back to his work.

“I don’t understand most of what they talk about, but it’s interesting anyway,” Elros explained one night when Elrond asked him why he liked listening to them so much.

Elrond frowned up at the bed canopy. “What’s interesting about it?”

“I don’t know. They think of everything, and no one goes without.” He snuggled under the quilt and promptly put his icy feet on Elrond, who yelped and pummeled him, which led to a brief scuffle that left them both overheated and wound-up.

The year grew full and fat with ripening grain and buzzing bees. Elrond and Elros played outside, building castles of sticks and rocks in the courtyard until Maglor found them and brought them back to their lessons.

“I will not send you back to your people ignorant and illiterate,” he said, and watched over them as they grudgingly put their chalk to their slates.

He sent another herald after midsummer. She returned alone, and sooner than anyone expected.

“The settlement at Balar is empty,” she said. “They’re gone. All of them. They just… packed up and left.”

Maglor went pale at the news. “Did they leave any indication where they went?”

“Of course not!”

“Was there any sign of a fight? Any sign of pillage by orcs?”

“No, it is as I said! Everything is just empty!” The messenger spread her hands wide. “It was like they moved out and only left the buildings! I met a band of vagabonds who told me as much, but I paid a small fortune for a ferry out to the island to see for myself. There was no one there.”

“There has to be some way to find out where they went!” Maglor was shouting now, and Elrond and Elros had given up all pretense of working on their lessons.

“I am only a messenger!” She tossed Maglor’s missive, still neatly folded and sealed, onto the table near him. “I’ll take the letter, but I cannot track them when they clearly do not want to be found!” With that she only turned and left the great house.

Maglor started keeping strange hours. His appearance, which had been immaculately neat since their arrival from Sirion, began to degrade into rumpled clothes and uncombed hair. But compared to Maedhros, who looked and smelled like hopeless neglect, Maglor was like a spire struck by lightning, taking all the energy around him and struggling to contain it.

Elrond and Elros often crept out to eavesdrop in the night. Maglor was pacing by the long hearth, and they could see his shadow on the far wall.

“Why did she not come for them? Even now, why does she not search for them? They are her own flesh and blood!”

Maedhros’ shadow, hunched and craggy, lifted his cup to his lips. “You know damn well not to blame her for this.”

Maglor’s desperation spilled over into every aspect of life in his household. Elrond and Elros felt the rush, but for his part Elrond couldn’t say what he was rushing toward. He sang his lessons louder, wrote his letters faster, and played with more exuberance. During a wrestling match with Elros, he hit his chin on the edge of the bedstead. After a whirl of blood and confusion and crying, he found himself getting stitches under his jaw while Elros hovered behind Osgardir, insisting through tears that it was an accident.

“Of course it was, my boy,” the healer said. “Accidents happen. Just be more careful next time.” He tied off the last stitch, washed his hands, offered Elrond a sweet for his bravery, and all was well.

Osgardir usually kept to himself, but he spent a lot of time around the great house that fall. Through eavesdropping, Elrond and Elros gleaned that Maedhros was doing poorly, but they didn’t know what that meant, and no one would tell them.

“I cannot spend this much time watching him when I have the rest of the compound to attend to,” Osgardir finally told Maglor in a tone that brooked no argument. “Not unless you want me to lock him in the infirmary.”

“That will only make him worse, like it always does,” Maglor said. “We are all stretched to our limit. Alagostor is doing the most, but he cannot go without sleep.”

“Set up shifts if you must. Call for me if there is an emergency. Maglor, you know I have no easy cure for him—you’ve know that for a hundred years.” Osgardir hefted his bag over his shoulder. “Elanor extracts, exercise, regular sleep and meals, moderation in drinking… but nothing will help if he is not willing.”

Maglor tried to keep up the boys’ usual schedule as if nothing was wrong. He held them to their lessons and allowed them time to play, but most of his attention was on Maedhros. He never let him out of his sight and tried to keep him within arm’s reach. To Elrond’s eyes, Maedhros didn’t seem like he needed much minding. He only sat, wrapped in a blanket and doing little more than staring at the ceiling, looking just as detached and miserable as he usually did. He had bandages up his right arm and fading bruises all around his neck, but Elrond wasn’t brave enough to ask him what had happened.

Winter came and went. With time, Maedhros returned to his usual routine of solitary drinking and sleeping, and Elrond and Elros moved on to more challenging lessons. They could understand both Sindarin and Quenya but spoke a utilitarian mixture of the two, as was the common practice. They learned to speak properly in both languages and began working on reading and writing with equal precision. Their coats did not hang quite so loosely, and their shoes began to pinch in the toes. Maglor cut the uppers into strips, folded and stitched a small loop into each strip, and threaded long pieces of cord through the loops in a criss-cross pattern.

“There, you can tie them more loosely as your feet grow,” he said. “Of course, you’ll be home by then.”

He did not send another herald as soon as spring came as he had done the previous year. Instead he sent scouts to search for signs of the king’s people—footprints, rumors, graves, wheel-ruts, anything. Some went to the coast. Some went north as far as they could before passing into the Enemy’s lands, and some went beyond the rivers in the east. Maglor instructed them to speak to anyone who would listen. A host of elves leaving their settlement with all their goods and animals was not something that would pass unnoticed, but one by one the scouts returned with nothing more than conflicting hearsay. People were cautious and scarce in these days and none too willing to speak to strangers even if they did know anything.

“What’s going to happen if you can’t find the king?” Elrond asked at the end of a dinner spent listening to the adults trying to decide what to do next.

Maglor closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Irrelevant. I will find a way.”

“But what if you can’t ?”

“Young master, I don’t think that will be our fate.” To Elrond’s surprise, Maglor gave him a tired smile. “It has already taken longer than I had planned. It may still take much longer than I hope, but I will give everything I can. One way or another, even if it isn’t as soon or as easy as we thought, I will get you home.”

Over the summer, Maglor struggled with his plans. There was little to work with: a few leads in the north and east, from sources no one quite trusted. But it was all they had, and he would not sit idle. Just as the leaves began to turn, he asked for volunteers once more. The longer they waited, the colder the trail would become, and if there was a chance that the boys could be returned home soon, they had to take it now. One of his finest hunters rose to the challenge. He would have to track the king’s people in every blade of grass and follow them to the very edges of Beleriand if that was where they had gone, but people did not simply vanish. They had to be out there somewhere.

He did not return when winter’s chill sank into the earth once again.

Green shoots peeked out at the warming sun, and still he did not ride up to the gates, with or without news.

The harvest came in. Elrond and Elros loosened their shoes again. By now they had learned to mend their own socks. The messenger still did not return.

Each day brought the same work, the same lessons, the same uncertainty and the same endless waiting. Elrond and Elros played outside until the days grew too short and cold, and once again they dragged pallets out into the main hall to sleep away as much of winter as they could. Every morning they listened for the messenger’s hoofbeats on the frozen ground outside, and every evening they went to bed wondering when they would do more than wait.

Spring came again. The boys could not mistake the fear and regret in Maglor’s eyes even as he kept his head up, taught them a new lesson-song, and waited along with them.

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