Enemies to Sons by eris_of_imladris

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Meeting the Boys

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The tent flap opened to reveal a young soldier, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open silently.

“Are we under attack?” one of the lieutenants asked, turning away from the king.

The soldier stayed silent for several moments before he blurted out, “They… they are alive!”

“Who is alive?” the lieutenant barked. “Speak clearly!”

“The boys… Elwing’s boys,” the soldier said, and a hush fell over the war tent. Only the whistle of the wind penetrated the deep silence.

“That is nonsense, they died nearly ninety years ago,” Gil-galad eventually said. The thought still kept him up at night sometimes, wondering how the two little boys had died. His own slowness in reaching Sirion had doomed them – what chance did six-year-olds have against the most fearsome fighters on Arda? – and he still thought of them sometimes, wondering what they had looked like, whether they were buried in proper graves.

“Our scouts say it is them,” the soldier stammered. “Apparently, they introduced themselves as Elrond and Elros.”

“It is a trap,” Gil-galad said quickly, not allowing himself to even feel a spark of hope. “Search them, they will have weapons – and whatever they try to claim, do not let them into this camp without my express permission.”

The soldier nodded and scurried away, and while the lieutenant tried to return to the scouts’ reports, Gil-galad’s attention was far away. He knew better than to hope. Hope never came of anything here, not when there was no guarantee of survival from one day to the next. He had long ago given up on keeping all of his people alive, but he knew better than to let someone with malicious intent into the camp on just their word.

But what if these boys really were Elwing’s sons? he wondered. They would be his family, princes in their own right, not to mention that the refugees from Sirion would be delighted to see them alive, especially after they hosted a memorial for the young lives lost. None of them had seen the boys die – but then again, none of them had questioned the deaths, which only made the sudden reappearance more questionable.

Trying to push his hopes aside, he strode out of the tent. “I will question them myself,” he said, and told the scouts to lead him to where the boys were. He would need to be strong for this, leaving his doubts aside. Leave it to the Fëanorians to make him question his failures.

Looking up, he saw several of his scouts keeping two figures at a respectable distance from the camp. He dared to get closer, even against the protest of his own guards, because the curiosity was beginning to get to him, and there were enough of his soldiers to kill the intruders if they attacked first. In the meantime, though, he would form his own conclusions.

At the age of ninety – if these were even the boys, Gil-galad stipulated again – they were tall and dark-haired, dressed in practical clothes for traveling, yet each boy had braided hair in a noble style, one that Gil-galad knew all too well. Neither had weapons, but one looked distressed as the guards searched his saddlebags, only to find several days’ worth of dried meat and berries and what looked like a folded piece of parchment, a map perhaps.

“Who are you?” he asked in Sindarin – what would be the boys’ native tongue, if it were truly them – when he got close enough, and both boys looked up at him and bowed deeply.

“I am Elrond, and this is my brother Elros,” said the boy on the left, whose braid was windswept but not picked at, unlike the other boy, who was picking at the leather tie in his hair.

“And why should I believe you?” Gil-galad said in a stern tone that usually worked on people.

“Why would we lie?” he replied.

“I can think of half a dozen reasons right now, but I would prefer you tell me,” Gil-galad answered. “Why are you using the names Elrond and Elros?” Even speaking the names felt like sacrilege – until just a few moments before, they were certain to be names of the dead. If he found these boys were simple tricksters using their names in vain, he would be far harsher.

“Because those are our names,” the other boy interjected, taking his fingers out of his braid. “What other names should we use?”

“Very well, two can play at this game. If you are Elros as you say you are, how did you survive the fall of Sirion, and where have you been ever since?” Careful to give no details about the lives of the refugees, and trying to remember as many details as he could about Sirion, he prepared to listen intently.

“We were with a nanny when the sons of Fëanor attacked,” he answered promptly. “We knew nothing of what had happened, but when Maedhros and Maglor made their way to our room, they killed our nanny as we hid under the table.”

“I hid under the table. And this one,” the one who claimed to be Elrond chimed in, pointing at his brother, “jumped out and tried to attack Maedhros with a knife our nanny had used to put jam on our bread.”

“And Maedhros… allowed this?” Gil-galad asked, too surprised by the ludicrous story to ask for more factual details.

“He stopped and looked down at Elros, but he did not attack. And then Maglor knelt down and asked us for our names.”

“And he never once thought to use the sons of the ones who stole his silmaril as ransom?”

“I am sure he did,” the neater-haired boy said, “but he had no way of reaching our parents, nor did they try to reach us. Maglor took us when they fled, and brought us to one of their smaller forts.”

“And then they took care of us,” the other boy interjected.

“Why exactly would Maedhros and Maglor, known murderers, care to spare the children of the woman they came to Sirion to hunt down?”

“I wondered that for a while,” said the one who called himself Elrond. “I did ask Maglor about it, but he never had an answer.”

“So even if all of this is true – and I am far from saying it is – then why are you here now?”

“They had to go,” he replied, his eyes downcast. “They had to go do something. Probably something to do with their Oath, and they wanted to make sure we would be safe. So they sent us here and then they left.”

“You know of their Oath?”

“I know that it caused pain beyond what I could heal, and it made them do things they did not want to do, things they would not have done otherwise. And it is making them do something now that is not safe for us, so we are here.”

“They said you would be safe with me?” This part had puzzled Gil-galad the most so far. If Maedhros and Maglor had indeed kidnapped the children, whether for ransom or some other reason, why leave them here, when their own actions could easily cause the deaths of the boys?

“He said you were a good king, and that we could be useful to you,” said the one who called himself Elros. “Elrond has been learning how to be a healer, and I can fight with either hand.” A shudder ran down Gil-galad’s spine at the thought of these children learning fighting from someone with such a savage goal. Had he taught them about mercy too, or rather, how to lack it?

“We cannot trust them,” his herald said in Quenya, not bothering to keep her stern voice down. “They are traitors.”

“We are not traitors,” the messy-haired boy exclaimed.

“You speak Quenya?” Gil-galad asked, surprised.

“Of course we speak Quenya,” Elros said quickly before Elrond stepped in.

“Maedhros and Maglor taught us how to speak and read the proper way,” Elrond said, and the accent corroborated his words. The boys had learned from Fëanorians, from the way they pronounced their consonants – who could forget Fëanor’s insistence on his idea of proper pronunciation? – and that went along with the stories, although it only made things more confusing. Why would Maedhros and Maglor educate the boys only to leave them?

The horrifying thought arose that perhaps the boys were intended as weapons – Fëanorian loyalists in his camp, taught to sow discord among his troops. But why attack now? Gil-galad wondered. What could they be planning?

Although, he had to admit, he knew Maedhros and Maglor were intelligent, and there were many easier and smarter ways to get revenge on the remaining Noldor, even if they wanted to. And Maedhros, he had heard, had been quite adamant in giving up the throne, and presumably would not want to take it again… not to mention that spending these many years educating a pair of boys instead of hunting the two remaining silmarils still on Arda was not at all a choice they would make lightly. He stayed silent as the soldiers continued going through the boys’ meager belongings.

“No weapons, but there is a letter, my king,” one of the soldiers approached with the parchment taken from the boy with the wilder hair who might have been Elros. “For you.”

The words were written in a slanted hand, and the ink was smudged along the same slant – and yet, the individual letters were formed perfectly. There was no mistaking Maedhros’ handwriting, even without seeing much of it before. The letter was marked for “High King Ereinion Gil-galad, Lord of the Noldor,” and Gil-galad wondered how hard that was to write, for one king who had abdicated his very throne to acknowledge an enemy successor.

The basic story, he could see immediately, matched what the boys had said. Maedhros had taken pity on the young children and raised them with Maglor, and from the details he provided about their interests and capabilities, it was clear that Maedhros knew them well. If they were actors, they must have done an incredibly good job rehearsing, he realized.

He continued to scan the letter, stopping to scoff at an absurd suggestion for Elrond to help with healing or battle strategy, as if he needed sabotage in either area. The end seemed sincere, but he had a hard time picturing Maedhros begging – or having mercy on small children, no matter the circumstances. But the fact remained that they spoke Quenya in the Fëanorian way, something no one in Sirion would have taught them, and between that and the stories and the letter, Gil-galad was having a hard time finding reasons to not believe their identities.

And regardless, even if they were clever imposters, he could not leave the boys to fend for themselves. They were still children, and if Maedhros was counting on that as his weakness, he would have to think of a way to counteract it. But nothing could make him go against his nature, even if that meant sparing the soldiers to keep the boys safe. It would be a small sacrifice to make for the lives of two who he had thought were dead for years.

“Get them something to eat,” he commanded, and he stood his ground even when his herald spluttered that he was falling into a trap. “We will keep them under strict watch,” he told her when the boys followed the soldiers to the very outskirts of the camp. “Nothing that they threaten will come to pass.”