God, I Pity the Violins by StarSpray

---

Chapter 1

---

But the most special are the most lonely
God, I pity the violins
In glass coffins they keep coughing
They've forgotten, forgotten how to sing
- Regina Spektor, "All the Rowboats"

.

Maglor thought at first the dark mass just washed up with the waves was seaweed. But as he drew closer he realized that it was hair—and that hair was attached to a body. He halted, ankle deep in foam, too surprised for a second to do anything but stare. But the moment passed, and he hurried forward to kneel beside the body. It—she, in fact—was emaciated, practically skeletal, naked, and, when he put his fingers to her throat to seek a pulse, cool to the touch. Her eyes were open and staring, but empty. There was no heartbeat. He sighed—but before he could draw his hand away the heart began to beat again beneath his fingertips, and the woman's body jerked, convulsed, and then she started retching up copious amounts of seawater, expelling it from her lungs and also her stomach. Maglor jerked his hand back, lost his balance, and sat down hard in the wet sand. As the woman emptied herself of water he glanced out toward the sea. He had not really expected to see anything, but where the water would have been waist-deep for him he saw the figure of a woman, with sea foam falling around her like pale hair. He scrambled to his feet as the woman advanced, growing out of the water so that she was tall enough to look him in the eye, her own eyes like bright points of light in the flowing water of her body.

"What is the meaning of this, lady?" Maglor asked, gesturing at the woman, who lay still on the beach, but for the strangely steady rise and fall of her chest.

"I do not know," said Lady Uinen. Her expression was difficult to see amid the water, but her voice was clear, and it was troubled. "I do not know the deeps of Middle-earth's waters as well as I did long ago. So much has changed. She has been trapped in an iron casket at the bottom of the sea, drowning and waking, drowning and waking—I do not know what to make of it."

"But—that is impossible, even for one of the Eldar," said Maglor. "And this is a mortal woman—or she should be." For a moment he thought of Sauron, who might have had such a power—but he had fallen so long ago, never to rise again, or so said the Wise. But the Wise had been wrong before…

"That is not my domain, son of Fëanor," said Lady Uinen. "Yet I do not sense any evil sorcery at work. Perhaps Manwë or Mandos know more, but this is a verse in the Music beyond my understanding."

"So you've brought her to me?" Maglor asked.

It seemed to him that Uinen smiled. "Yes." And with that she stepped back and melted into the waves, washing out into the ocean with the tide. As she did Maglor heard her voice echoing up out of the water, singing an ancient song in a language older than time, almost indistinguishable from the music of the sea itself.

Maglor turned back to the woman, who had started to shiver, though she remained unconscious. He sighed, and knelt to pick her up. She weighed no more than a child. His cottage wasn't far, just up a steep hill that overlooked a lonely stretch of beach on the east, and down the other side to a small hamlet on the other, a cluster of quaint houses and little shops, and a post office. It was the sort of place you'd expect to find Miss Marple, although as long as Maglor had lived there, there had been no real crime, and certainly no murders. He was known in the village as a bit of an eccentric recluse, so he was left alone, but treated kindly whenever he had to go into town. He was not quite certain, however, what this small English village would make of a strange woman washed up nearly dead on the shore. Hopefully no one would have to find out.

Safely inside, Maglor took the woman first to the bathroom, where he rinsed the sand and salt off of both of them. Her hair was long and dark and unfortunately tangled into an impossible clump—and falling out anyway, by the handful—so he found a pair of scissors and cut it away. The woman had begun to stir as soon he placed her in the tub, so Maglor hummed lullabies as he washed her, putting power into his voice that he had not used in a very, very long time. The last thing she wanted, probably, was to wake up in the water again. At least this water was warm.

Sufficiently cleaned, Maglor found one of his softest nightshirts for the woman, and bundled her into his bed. She did not stir again, and he left her to get some proper rest while he tried to decide what to next. It was still early in the morning; outside of his kitchen window a robin alighted on a bush that badly needed trimming and sang a few cheerful notes. Maglor whistled back at it, and for a while they were both entertained. When the robin flew away, Maglor turned from the window to take stock of his cupboards and refrigerator. He found that he had the basics needed for chicken soup, by pure chance—he'd gotten a small chicken at the village shop the day before with a vague idea of roasting it. Instead he brought out a pot and set it to boil with some herbs and vegetables, while he tidied up the rest of the small house. He was not usually a messy person, but he did not often have guests and as a result clutter and dust tended to build up without him realizing.

As he gathered up notebooks and scraps of paper off of the floor in the parlor, his thoughts kept circling back to what Uinen had said of the strange woman. Not that she seemed unable to die—but that she had been trapped at the bottom of the sea in an iron casket. It sounded familiar, though he couldn't think of where he had heard of such a thing before. Who would do something like that, and why? Maglor sat back on his heels and sighed, looking up and out of the window. A few stray tendrils of ivy were starting to creep over the glass. His garden needed tidying even more badly than his house.

That thought reminded him that he had a patch of athelas growing somewhere out there, no doubt going as wild as the ivy and the honeysuckle. He set the pile of notebooks on the sofa by the window, caught the other papers that tried to slide off as a result, and then made his way back to the kitchen to put a kettle on. On his way outside he stopped to peer in at the woman. She hadn't moved; somehow her color had improved, and she looked a little less like she would perish at any moment. But he did not even have to try that hard to sense that her mind was deeply troubled and her spirit wounded.

The athelas was indeed thriving, its long leaves waving gently in the breeze coming off of the sea. A few rabbits scampered out of Maglor's way, vanishing beneath it, as he approached. He picked a few leaves and paused a moment to crush one in his hand to inhale the scent. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, smelling sweet grass and fresh wind off of snowy mountains—the smell of the wide plains of Lothlann and Ard-galen, in those glorious days of long ago when the Siege of Angband had held.

Maglor opened his eyes, feeling steadier, and looked out over the ocean. Clouds were gathering; the sky and the sea were both slate-grey, the latter flecked with the white tips of choppy waves. He saw a few fishing boats out in the distance, and did not envy the fishermen such a day. It was likely to rain before long, and the breeze kept changing, unsure of which direction it wanted to blow. He picked a few more leaves and retreated inside. The house smelled like chicken and rosemary, itself a comforting scent. The kettle was also boiling, so Maglor took a bowl of the water to the bedroom, where the woman still lay deeply asleep, caught in a torrent of dreams. He set the bowl down beside the bed, bruised a few athelas leaves, and dropped them into the steaming water. The scent that arose was not unlike what he had smelled out in the garden—open plains and clean air.

Sitting down beside the bed, Maglor regarded the woman. Her breathing had evened out a little more, and the pinched expression was gone from her face. He reached out his thought to touch hers, hoping to learn at the very least what her name was, and what language she spoke. He was not prepared for the flood of memory that spilled over—hundreds and hundreds of years' worth, of battles and death and life and joy and sorrow and rage. Her name was Quynh, and she had been born in what was now Vietnam. As for language—what languages she did not speak would be a shorter list, although no dialect was newer than what had been spoken in the sixteenth century. Her strange inability to die had begun far away from the Atlantic Ocean, and had spanned far more years than Maglor had been prepared to guess. And through it all there were three others, immortal as she was, who appeared again and again. Two men, always together—and another woman, with pale skin and dark hair and a wicked grin. Her name more than any other thought passed through Quynh's mind, and thus through Maglor's. Andromache.

And all of the pain and fear of six hundred years of drowning over and over and over again had been distilled into anguished rage that colored everything else. Maglor withdrew from Quynh's mind feeling as though he were drowning himself. And all this was while she was under the calming and healing influence of athelas.

He left her to sleep and went to check the soup. As he chopped carrots and celery he caught himself wondering what sorts of weapons he had in the house, and whether he should hide his kitchen knives. But that was ridiculous. A warrior like Quynh could turn anything into a weapon—she herself was a weapon, if it came to it.

She woke with a start when he brought a mug of broth into her sometime later. It was the middle of the afternoon by then, and the rain had arrived, pattering on the windows and pooling on the garden paths. Her hand shot out and gripped Maglor's arm with surprising strength, enough to leave bruises before he could move back. Her voice was barely audible, a painful rasp from a throat that had done nothing but gargle seawater for centuries, but she croaked questions and curses as she struggled to rise out of the blankets.

"It's all right," Maglor said, as he caught her and pressed her back onto the pillows. "It's all right, Quynh. You're safe. I won't hurt you." She collapsed back when her strength ran out, panting, and he crushed another athelas leaf into the still-warm bowl of water. As the scent filled the room he began to sing, and after fighting it for several minutes, Quynh's eyes drifted closed, and she sank back into deep sleep. Only then did he leave to fetch an instrument, grabbing the first one he found in his music room. It took a bit of fiddling to match the songs he wanted to play to the strings of a guitar, but he managed it, seating himself on the floor as he strummed. The songs were for rest, and for healing of both body and mind; he had learned them long ago in his Tree-lit youth in the Gardens of Lórien, and when he closed his eyes he could see the red poppies swaying in the breeze, and the golden light of Laurelin glittering on the streams and ponds, and making the golden flowers of the malinornë trees glow. Whether the power in the songs was enough to help Quynh, he could not say. Time would tell.

By the time darkness fell Maglor was exhausted; it had been years beyond count since he had put forth that much power into his music; it was like flexing a muscle that had been left to atrophy. He left Quynh to sleep—hopefully a deep, restful sleep that would last at least through the night—and retreated to the kitchen. He ate some soup and put the rest away, and then made himself some tea and went to his study. Out of idle curiosity, because the name was faintly familiar, he opened up the Internet and searched for Andromache, and then the names Andromache and Quynh together. He found no useful results. Then he abandoned their names and searched for the story of a witch tossed into the sea in an iron coffin, and he did find that, though it was a small part of a larger article about the witch trials and the burning of heretics in England, and was noted as apocryphal: many attempts had been made to kill a pair of witches who simply would not die; in an attempt to lessen their combined power one had been locked in an iron maiden and cast into the sea. The fate of the other was unknown. The author of the paper seemed to believe the story was not true, and there were no official records surviving that so much as hinted at it. Well, of course there wouldn't be. Maglor himself had often quietly erased small bits of recorded history in which he played a part that might draw undue attention.

Curiosity satisfied, he turned on the radio and flopped onto the sofa by the window. The quiet strains of Mozart mingled with the steady patter of raindrops on the glass, combining into a soothing lullaby that had him drifting off to sleep.

He woke in the morning to bright sunshine, the rain having passed on during the night. The robin was back, perched in a tree just visible through the window from where Maglor lay on the sofa. He yawned, stretched, and rolled over, half-tempted to go right back to sleep.

The sight of Quynh across the room watching him the way a cat watched potential prey eliminated any desire or ability to return to sleep. Maglor jerked and fell off the sofa, hitting the floor with a thud and a curse. He picked himself up, only to find himself frozen in place with the blade of one of his kitchen knives at his throat. Perhaps he should have hidden them after all. "I have some questions for you," Quynh said into his ear, "and you are going to answer them all truthfully."

"You don't need to threaten me just to ask questions," said Maglor, carefully.

Quynh ignored this. At least her hand holding the knife was steady. "What is this place?" she asked. "Who are you, and why did you bring me here?"

"This place is my house," Maglor said. "I brought you here because I did not want to leave you lying alone out on the beach in the rain."

"Why?" she repeated, pressing the knife harder against his neck. He felt it break the skin, just slightly.

"Because I wanted to help you," Maglor said, and then he moved, bringing his arm up quicker than Quynh could have anticipated and knocking the knife away. It clattered onto the wood floor as he turned. Quynh was reacting by this time and for a brief moment they struggled against one another—but even if Quynh were at her full strength, Maglor was stronger yet, and faster. He pinned Quynh's arms to her sides and held on as she struggled. Only when she stopped, panting, did he let her go. She lunged for the knife, but he was still faster, and snatched it up. "I don't want to hurt you," he said, as she stood in the middle of the room, out of breath and with her hastily-cut hair sticking up at odd angles. "My name is Max," he went on after a moment. It was the name he had been using for most of the twentieth century, mixing and matching various surnames, depending on where he was and how long he intended to stay there. He had been Max Smithson for the last forty, living in this little out-of-the-way cottage outside a little out-of-the-way village. After another short pause he remembered himself and asked, "What is your name?"

She glared at him, hands opening and closing into fists. It was a little absurd, Maglor thought, as he stood poised to move or block whatever she might try to do. From the outside, he thought, it was an absurd situation. In a fight Maglor was stronger and faster, but Quynh had more recent experience (which was remarkable in itself given how long she had been at the bottom of the ocean), and she could fight like she had nothing to fear—because she would always be able to get back up, while he may not.

It almost seemed like she wanted a fight. "Please," Maglor said, holding up his free hand, palm out, "I am no jailer. If you want to leave you can. The door is just down the hall. Though someone will likely call the authorities if you go out dressed as you are." This seemed to startle Quynh out of whatever rage she was in, and she looked down at herself, barefoot and clad in a too-big nightshirt. "I made soup yesterday. Did you find the bowl I left for you?" Quynh looked up again, her expression wary but her stance relaxing a little, and she nodded. "There's more in the kitchen. Or I can fix up something else. I meant to bake some more bread today, but if you stab me while I'm kneading the dough I'm afraid it will ruin the taste." This startled her into laughter—a short bark of it, but enough to break the remaining tension. Maglor released a small sigh of relief.

"Quynh," she said, at last. "My name is Quynh."

"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Quynh," said Maglor. "I'm going to make some breakfast."

As it turned out, Maglor had forgotten to pick up eggs when last at the shop, so he dug out some oatmeal, and put on the kettle for tea. While he cut bread for toast he pretended not to notice Quynh examining everything in his kitchen, even as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She did not stop moving around the room until he placed a bowl of oatmeal on the table for her, alongside the cartons of blueberries and raspberries, and the cream. "Where is this place?" she asked, as he set his own bowl down.

"Southern England. A bit south and west of Dover," Maglor said. "Just far enough to be too out-of-the-way for tourists to stop in very often."

Quynh ate as though—well, as though she hadn't had a proper meal in five hundred years. Maglor got her seconds, and while he was fixing another pot of tea he quietly poured the extra boiling water over another few athelas leaves, so their fresh clear fragrance filled the kitchen. At the very least they settled his own nerves.

"You haven't asked me where I came from," Quynh said, as she watched him return to the table. She reminded him again of a cat, though at the moment she was not hunting.

"Would you answer me if I did?" he replied. She frowned at him, and did not answer. "Is there somewhere you wish to go? Or someone I can help you find?" She hesitated, but shook her head. "Well, if there is you only need to ask."

She fell silent, and remained so as she watched him clean up the breakfast dishes, and then as she followed him back to the bedroom, where he dug through a chest of clothes looking for something that might even come close to fitting her. He didn't find anything, of course; Quynh was barely half his size. Just some old clothes he thought that, with enough time, he could take apart and fashion into a couple of dresses or skirts. But that would take time, particularly since he'd lost his old sewing machine at some point in the last decade and had not bothered to replace it.

Finally, Maglor sat back on his heels and looked at Quynh, who was perched on the bed. "I'm afraid I don't have any proper clothing for you," he said. "I can take a guess at your size and pick up a few things from the shop in town, and after that you can go try things on yourself."

Quynh tilted her head. "Are there not tailors and seamstresses?"

"Most clothes are mass-produced, and most people just make do with the best fit they can find," Maglor said.

"What do you do?" Quynh asked.

"I make my own clothes, mostly," said Maglor. It was almost entirely out of millennia of habit, but also, "I'm so tall, it's very difficult to find anything off the rack." He closed the chest and got to his feet. "Will you be all right alone while I walk down to the shop?"

"Of course," she said sharply. No doubt she would search the whole house thoroughly. Maglor tried to think if he had anything he didn't want her to discover, but nothing sprang to mind. It was absurd, the two of them standing there trying to keep nearly the same secret from the other, and he trying not to let on that he already knew Quynh's. But he couldn't laugh about it until he was out of the house, walking down the lane toward the village.

As he stepped out of the gate the sound of excited barking erupted in the bushes just across the way. A moment later a small splotchy brown and white dog leaped out of the grass to jump up to plant muddy paws on Maglor's knees. "Good morning, Norindo," he said, crouching to scratch the dog behind the ears. "I hope you weren't out in the rain all night." Norindo was a stray who, while very friendly and seemingly fond of Maglor, refused to come inside. His fur was damp and becoming matted, and one of these days Maglor was going to have to make a real concerted effort to get Norindo properly groomed—and to the vet, while he was at it.

But that would have to wait. Maglor rose again, and Norindo raced around his feet as he walked the rest of the way to the village. It was still fairly early, and it was quiet in the little second-hand clothing shop. "Good morning," said the young woman at the till. "Let me know if you need help finding anything."

"Thanks," said Maglor, as he scanned the signs hanging over the different sections. The woman's section was the largest, to his relief, and he picked out a variety of styles, since he had absolutely know idea what Quynh might like, and probably Quynh didn't either, since her ideas of fashion were at least five hundred years out of date. He felt only a little awkward approaching the till, but the young woman didn't comment on anything but the weather.

He ran a few other errands, while he was there, since when he had last gotten groceries he had been getting them for only one person. Norindo romped about his feet between shops, and made friends with a lab outside of the post office. Once they returned home, though, he disappeared into the garden in spite of Maglor attempting to coax him inside with treats. The dog knew that way led to a bath, Maglor was sure of it. He sighed and gave up for the time being.

His house looked almost exactly the same as it had when he'd left, except that it had the feeling of things being just slightly off. Quynh had been very careful in her rummaging, it seemed. He found her in the music room, perched on the piano bench and frowning at the music on the stand. "Here are some clothes," he said, holding out the bag. She took it and peered inside, both wary and skeptical. "Do you play?" he asked, nodding to the piano. Mostly it was just for something to say.

Quynh shook her head. "Do you…play all of these?" she asked, glancing around at the various instruments around the room.

"Yes. I'm a musician by trade."

Quynh disappeared into the bedroom to try on the clothes, and Maglor made a quick circuit around his house to make sure that nothing important, or sharp, had gone missing. Nothing had, so he went outside into the garden, where Norindo had stopped his running about and was flopped onto a patch of grass in the bright sunshine. He lifted his head and thumped his tail when he saw Maglor, but did not get up. Maglor put his hands on his hips and surveyed the garden. He wasn't really sure why Quynh's arrival made him want to put it in order, but he wasn't going to fight the urge while it lasted. The only problem was knowing where to start.

By the time Quynh reemerged from the house, clad in a skirt and blouse and a pair of sandals, Maglor was well into clearing out the herb beds of weeds. Norindo jumped up and went to sniff at her feet and then to lick her hand, which seemed to startle her out of whatever thoughts had been circling in her mind. She sat down on the grass and scratched him behind the ears.

The next few days passed in relative peace. Quynh was finding her feet, gradually, and while she learned how to use things like the television and refrigerator (and, memorably, the toaster), Maglor cleared out the garden, section by section. Nights were more difficult. Quynh would not have slept at all if Maglor had not gotten out his harp every evening to play the lullabies out of Lórien, and more often than not she woke screaming or cursing in the middle of the night. Or Maglor would peer into the room to check on her and find her curled up on the side of the bed by the window, staring out at the ocean.

Four days into the arrangement, Maglor drove them both into Dover to find a proper department store so Quynh could have a say in her own wardrobe. She spent the drive clutching the door handle with white knuckles and gritted teeth, and the rest of it trying to pretend that she wasn't completely out of her depth—so it wasn't as pleasant an outing as Maglor might have hoped, but at least they got clothing that she liked and that fit, and no one ended up punched or stabbed or flung out of the car. And he was able to introduce her to ice cream, which seemed to more or less make up for all the stressful parts.

Norindo wandered in and out of the garden all the while, napping in the sunshine while Maglor tackled a new patch of weeds, or sniffing about the fence posts while he reorganized the herbs or plotted out how to arrange a bed of snapdragons and gardenias. They seemed to be settling into a more or less peaceful routine, and so Maglor made the mistake of letting his guard down—and so he didn't turn around when he heard Quynh come outside, and then go back in, only to come back out again a moment later. He did feel a prickle on the back of his neck, however, and when he turned it was to see Quynh with a knife in her hand. Maglor moved just in time to avoid a blade in his neck or chest—it was the same knife she'd used before, even—and instead received only a gash across his upper arm, the pain like a line of fire over his skin. Quynh seemed to pause as the blood welled up, but Maglor was not about to let her try anything else, so he lunged—and she reacted, moving more quickly than she had the first night he'd had to wrestle a blade from her, and certainly more quickly than he had expected.

"What are you doing?" Maglor demanded once he had her on the ground, holding her wrists over her head with one hand while she squirmed beneath him, trying in vain to pry her fingers off the knife handle. Her knee collided with his groin and he folded, rolling off of her. She sat up, and instead of attacking him with the knife again she grabbed his sleeve and hanked it up to reveal the wound there, which still bled freely.

"I don't understand," she said, frowning.

"When you cut someone," Maglor gasped, once he could breath again, "they tend to bleed."

"It isn't closed." She prodded at it, and Maglor slapped her hand away.

"Of course not!" He sat up, twisting his arm and craning his neck to get a look at it. "It's going to need stitches."

Quynh sat back on her heels, still frowning. She did not react when Maglor snatched up the knife, getting stiffly to his feet; he left her there in the garden and headed inside to the bathroom.

Under closer inspection the wound was not as bad as he had first thought. It hurt, and hurt worse when he washed it out, but in the end he decided the hassle of stitches wasn't worth it. He taped it shut instead and slapped a large band-aid over it. Emerging from the bathroom he found Quynh in the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel—having washed his blood off of them, presumably. "I don't suppose you'd care to explain what that was all about," he said, when she looked up at him. Her gaze was clear and she seemed lucid enough. "I thought we were past the attempted-murder stage of our acquaintance."

"I wasn't trying to murder you," she said.

"What do you call it, then, coming up behind someone to stab them?"

"I thought you would heal," she said.

Maglor stared at her, and then tried to think of how and when she had realized he was older than he claimed. It was almost a relief, to have their mutual secrets start to unravel. "You mean, like you?" he asked. Her gaze grew sharp and she took a step back, settling into a familiar stance. "You were dead on the beach when I found you," Maglor told her. He went to the cupboard for a glass. "And if I were going to do something about it I would have done it by now. But there must be a better way to discover if someone is like you than by stabbing them."

"I didn't stab you," Quynh muttered, slinking away like a disgruntled cat as Maglor made his way to the sink.

"Only because I moved. And before you decide to repeat the experiment I will tell you now that if killed I will not pop back up again like a jack-in-the-box." He filled the glass with water and drank, wishing he had something stronger in the house.

"Then how can you speak languages that died with their people when the Teutonic Knights turned their attention north of the Holy Land?" Quynh asked, in one such dialect. It was somewhat different than the version Maglor knew, because he had been long gone from the Baltic regions of Europe by the time would-be crusaders had begun to seriously encroach upon it. He hadn't even thought of those people, or the language, in centuries…but there were so many songs and tongues jostling around in his head that perhaps he had been singing one of their songs outside in the garden without realizing. Maglor refilled his glass in order to delay replying—although his reluctance to react was probably confirmation in itself.

Finally, in the same tongue, he said, "Speaking a dead tongue is still no reason to stab someone. You could have just asked." He turned around, sipping his water, and leaned against the counter top. They regarded each other with new wariness. Outside in the distance a dog barked—perhaps Norindo, chasing seagulls on the beach. Finally, Maglor returned to English and said, with a sigh, "I am very old, Quynh. Older than you would believe if I told you."

"You are immortal, then."

"You might say so," Maglor said. "But not as you are."

She regarded him for a moment, and then said, "Why did we never dream of you? Did you dream of us?"

"Why would I dream of you?" Maglor asked. "Or you of me?"

"We all dream of each other, before we meet. Nicolò always said it was destiny."

"As I said, I am not like you," Maglor said after a moment. "You are a mortal who refuses to die, for reasons I cannot begin to understand. I did not become the way I am. It is merely my nature, in the same way it is Norindo's nature to run about on four legs. As for destiny—your friend Nicolò may have been on to something. It is no coincidence that it was my beach that you washed up on, I think." He finished his water and set the glass down. "Since both of us now know the other's secrets, more or less, how about you promise not to try to kill me again, and I will help you start properly learning how to live in the twenty-first century?"

Quynh's grin was sudden and bright. "Deal."