Dancing In The Dark by Grundy

---

Let It Burn

Not sure if this hits the 'murder' square or not in Taboo bingo - that depends on whether or not you subscribe to Fëanor burning his youngest son intentionally or accidentally.

Which is of course to say that they're talking Losgar in this chapter.

---

It took Artanis most of the night to finish telling him all he could stand to know and she could bear to tell about the Ice, including how she came to make the journey in the first place despite Maitimo’s command that she remain with her father.

It did not surprise Curufinwë that his youngest uncle had come to the same conclusion as Artanis: Fëanaro was not a king he could follow. The surprise was that his youngest cousin had continued to Beleriand all the same, though that she wished to be more than merely ‘the princess Artanis Arafinwiel’ in Tirion was not the shock to him it might be to some.

She smiled wryly as she caught sight of the rising sun.

“Appropriate, I suppose, given that we reached Beleriand with the first sunrise,” she said.

One who didn’t know her well might think she was amused.

“Your turn now, cousin,” she said, turning expectant eyes on him. “You spoke of knowing each other’s experiences.”

“Ask,” he bade her, though his mouth went dry at the thought.

His cousins have never asked, not a single one of them, even though it’s the only question he would have thought worth asking. But they never have.

“How could you, Curvo?” she demanded flatly, the question blunt as a fist and only marginally less painful.

Having demanded she finally say the words that ought by rights to have been thrown at him years ago, he owed Artë a better answer than ‘I don’t know’. He didn’t dare shrug, or try to tell her that he could barely explain it to himself most days.

“Atar ordered us to burn the boats,” he said, trying to look at her, but failing. He winced as he remembered that to the Lindar – and to the granddaughter of Olwë their king – they were ships, not boats. “I don’t think there’s a one of us who didn’t remember you fighting with him, or how he looked when he spoke of it afterwards, and think I am not Artanis.”

“How flattering,” she said, with a withering glare.

“He almost killed you,” Curufinwë explained, remembering vividly his panic as he’d tried to find his oldest brother, the only one who might be able to safely intervene. “And he was used to defiance from you! You never obeyed as others did. He marched to his tune, you to yours, and occasionally it chanced that your scores happened not to clash. But we were his sons, and he would not tolerate from us what you could get away with.”

As the baby. As the girl. As the one to whom the rules did not apply.

She looked thoughtful.

“Someone dared it,” she said quietly.

“Telvo did,” he agreed dully. “Though he argued before the order to burn the ships. He was asleep when we started setting fire to them. By then, standing aside was the best any of us could muster, and only Maitimo at that.”

“Umbarto,” she corrected, with a note in her voice that raised the hair on the back of his neck. She sounded eerily like his mother, though the timbre of their voices had never been alike that he had noted. “His name is Umbarto, and true-named was he.”

He tried to look her in the eye then, but found her looking right through him. Whatever she was seeing was no longer here and now. He wasn’t sure the flames in her eyes were only those of the swanships, and he dropped his own gaze at once. If it was the future she was seeing, he did not want to know.

He waited patiently until the foresight passed, leaving her once again Artanis.

“Sorry,” she muttered, sounding slightly embarrassed. “That hasn’t happened for a while. Queen Melian has been a good teacher, and a great mentor. But sometimes…”

She shook her head.

“It is not even useful,” she continued, more herself with each word. “Visions are poor guides of what will actually come to pass, and one can go mad trying to choose a course based on Seeing.”

She focused on him, sharply this time.

“Maitimo stood aside?”

He blinked in surprise.

She had known that, surely?

He was certain he had told Finno, in those first miserable days after Maitimo had been returned, when they weren’t sure if he would survive. It had been as much penance as inadequate comfort, to let Finno know he hadn’t wasted his gallantry on a completely unworthy object, at a time when it was thought Maitimo might yet have the indecency to die despite it all.

“He would have no part in it,” he said. “He had argued the ships must be sent back as soon as possible to bring the rest of you, and was adamant that we should discuss the order of transport, who should be brought over first. Did you not know?”

She shook her head.

“No. How would I? None of you would speak of it when we first arrived, must less explain why Ambarussa was only one now- and less than one at that.”

It took him a minute to parse her words, and to remember that for her and Irissë, it had been common to refer to both twins by the same name as their mother had originally intended. The youngest Finwions had always known which Ambarussa they spoke of or to, even if no one other than the four of them understood.

It took him somewhat longer to understand how bewildering it must have been for the child who took after her grandmother Indis the most to be around Pityo, who has not been the same since losing his twin.

“What do you hear when you’re near him now?” he asked suddenly, wondering how it’s never occurred to him before now.

She frowned.

“Echoes,” she said slowly. “Echoes, and anger, and things that might be true, or might be just things people say, or maybe things he only imagined.”

He looked at her expectantly but she shook her head.

“I can’t understand them if he doesn’t,” she said irritably. “I don’t think his fëa is entirely there anymore.”

He was as surprised as she was that he heard the silent and I don’t see how you expect that it would be!

He nodded, and his shoulders sagged under the weight of old guilt.

“You spoke of screams on the Ice. If it is any comfort to you, or justice perhaps, we heard screams also, and they are a sound I would not wish on anyone, nor the feeling that goes with them, asking yourself if you’ve just killed your own brother.”

She was so still she might have been made of ice in that moment, and he was shocked to see horror in her eyes. This was not new. This could not be new to her – but it somehow was.

“You… burned him?” she whispered in disbelief.

Had she genuinely not known any of it?

But he’s never lied to her before, and he didn’t dare start now.

“I don’t know if I cast the torch onto the ship he was on or not, but if I did not, one of us surely did,” he said heavily. “It can be counted no less my doing than theirs. Yes, we burned him.”

And then he remembered how she could be ignorant of it.

Findarato had not wanted his baby sister anywhere near them, even before Finno brought Maitimo back. She had been sent to her great-uncle in Doriath as soon as Angarato had returned with the news of Elwë’s kingdom, and they had not seen hide nor hair of her until the Mereth Aderthad. Even then, her brothers had contrived to keep her either near to themselves, or with Nolofinwë and Irissë, or among the Green-elves who had come from Ossiriand, and found the hair of the Finarfinions fascinating – in short, anywhere but around her Fëanorion cousins.

She had made the journey back to Doriath with Thingol’s messengers Mablung and Daeron immediately after, and this was the first he had seen her since then.

She sat silent for some time, until finally he was forced to speak.

“You do not even say ‘poor Ambarussa’?” he asked warily, worried what was going on in that golden head.

She shook her head, and there was sadness in every line of her body.

“No, for I fear in time I may come to regard him as the lucky one,” she replied gravely. “He knew nothing of the perils or horrors of Beleriand, and the only treason of kin he experienced was that of Fëanaro. We shall see worse before the Doom extracts its last drop of vengeance from us.”

“You said yourself that foresight is a dangerous guide,” he pointed out, trying to give her some hope, however small.

“True. Let us speak of it no more,” she replied, clearly ready enough to leave her dark forebodings aside.

“Is there anything else you would know, before we come to Ivrin?” he asked. “I would preserve that place as one of happiness, not associated with old hurts and pains.”
She frowned.

“How came Maitimo into Morgoth’s power in the first place?” she asked. “I know it was said that he feigned to treat with him, and yet..”

“And yet you cannot see Maitimo as one who would use guile against even so false a foe?” Curufinwë asked reluctantly.

That he could well understand, for Artanis was young enough that Maitimo’s presence had been a promise of absolute safety until Alqualondë. He had never done worse than tease the young ones in the gentlest possible way, and all of them from Makalaurë on down had preferred him to Fëanaro or their own fathers for bumped elbows and skinned knees – and often for hurt feelings as well, for they had the utmost certainty of sympathy and hugs and most likely also a cookie or sweet to soothe away any trouble in their young hearts. They had trusted him with everything.

His oldest brother had been all their father could have been, had Fëanaro been less brilliant with things and more so with people.

Which, in hindsight, made him the perfect target for Morgoth.

He was selfishly glad he had not been at close hand to see the tears he was certain must have ensued when the two girls found out Maitimo was a prisoner of the Enemy, much less help curb the no doubt rash attempts at action on Irissë’s part.

Though it might have been interesting to hear what Artë thought. Artanis had always been the thinker of the group.

Now she frowned.

“No, Maitimo is a practiced enough politician that I am sure he can be crafty at need,” she told him. “But I would have expected that he would have known better than to try to outwit the one who was underhanded enough that he fooled both Fëanaro and the Valar themselves.”

“He didn’t fool Atar!” Curufinwë retorted irritably. “He knew Morgoth coveted the Silmarils, and sent him packing.”

“Curvo,” she said with a reproachful look, “I do not deny that your father had no difficulty telling Morgoth to begone and darken his doorstep no more. But it is one thing to know that he coveted the jewels, and another to have worked out what he intended. Can you honestly say your father did? For it looks to me rather as if Fëanaro played right into his hands.”

He tried not to glare at her, because the brat is right – as usual. If Fëanaro had taken his precious gems with him to that dratted festival instead of locking them away in Formenos, Morgoth could never have stolen them – not with all the Valar present. Their grandfather might not have been killed.

And everything after that might never have happened.

It is not only visions of the future one can go mad from.

Cleaning up your atar’s messes for him again, he heard Silmë say, plain as day.

She’d said it often enough in both Tirion and Formenos, for as his father’s preoccupation with his jewels and his half-brother’s suspected plots had grown, it had increasingly been left to his sons to smooth over the ruffled feathers and try to patch up the outrage or hurt of those he had clashed with – including the rest of their family.

Except that this time it was not Anairë’s hurt at her husband being slighted yet again to salve Fëanaro’s ego, or Indis’ patient disappointment at yet another overture of peace rejected, or even Eärwen’s fury spilling over because her children were every bit as much princes of the Noldor as her law-brother’s, and it was not their fault that the language of their father’s people had shifted by the time of their begetting.

It was all of that and more. It was a trail of death and destruction that stretched from Losgar north to the Ice and across it, all the way back down Araman to Alqualondë.

And Fëanaro was not there to be troubled by any of it.

Better things to do as usual, Silmë sniffed. I should dearly like to see your father, just once, have to face up to what he’s done.

So would he. But there was no compelling the dead to do anything, and he could not imagine that Namo would have better luck than anyone else who had ever tried to make Finwë’s eldest son see something he did not wish to bother himself with.

Then again, perhaps Namo had gotten the singular joy of chucking Curufinwë Fëanaro out into the Everlasting Darkness for his failure to hold to his Oath. It felt almost traitorous to think such things, but at the same time, it was hard to believe that the man he’d followed across the Sea was the same one he’d idolized as a child.

There was a reason you wanted to raise your son differently, Silmë pointed out.

That was something else he didn’t wish to think on. The longer their sojourn in Beleriand, the more intensely he regretted bringing Tyelpë – he wished there was any way to undo it, to yield to his wife’s wisdom however belatedly and return his son to the safety of Tirion. Better the son of a Kinslayer there than one of the Doomed here. And he should not have left Silmë alone…

He sighed, and began to pack his things for the day’s hike.

“Whatever Atar did or didn’t do helps us not now,” he said. “We are here and must make the best of it.”

“Indeed,” Artanis replied, handing him a bit of toasted waybread for breakfast. “We will find what good there is to be had, and hold onto it for however long it lasts.”

Short a time as that may be, he thought.