Not Too Far by grey_gazania

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Not Too Far

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FA 504

 

“There’s the beak, Celebrimbor, see?” Ereiniel said, tracing a line in the sky with her finger. “And the wing over there.”

 

“I see it,” I said. My cousin and I were lying on a woolen blanket spread out in one of the fields, staring up at the stars overhead. Ereiniel was naming some of the ancient constellations of the Northern Sindar for me – the old star pictures she’d learned from Annael, the ones that had predated the return of the Noldor. They were strange to me – the carp, the heron, the beehive, the boat – but interesting all the same.

 

Curufin and Celegorm had had little to do with the Sindar after we left Mithrim when I was small, so until my arrival on Balar, my only real experience with them had been meeting some of the Nandor during occasional visits to my youngest uncles in Ossiriand. The lives of the elves of Hithlum and the Falas were uncharted territory.

 

Luckily, I had a guide, and so far I’d managed to avoid making any major missteps.

 

At first, I had acceded to Ereiniel’s overtures of friendship purely because, with her openness and earnestness, refusing would have felt like kicking a puppy. But as time went on, I found that I genuinely enjoyed my younger cousin’s company. I’d had cousins of my own generation before, of course – Idril and Finduilas – but Turgon in his anger at my family had seen to it that Idril and I spent as little time together as possible, and Finduilas had had her own friends, her own circle of kin. She’d been kind enough to me, but we’d never been close.

 

Ereiniel, though, was easy to talk to, understanding and intelligent and – most important of all – trustworthy. She wasn’t given to gossip, and the contents of our private conversations had never leaked to outside ears.

 

Occasionally, though, she asked uncomfortable questions. Like now.

 

“Do you miss him?” she said, turning her head towards me.

 

“Who?” I asked, though I suspected that I already knew the answer.

 

“Curufin.”

 

I crossed my arms behind my head, more to give myself time to think than to make myself comfortable. “Sometimes,” I admitted, staring up at the sky without really seeing it. “He was my father. He raised me. He taught me my craft. He loved me. But he also did something terrible.” With a halfhearted shrug, I said, “It’s complicated. Why do you ask?”

 

Ereiniel had turned her gaze back to the stars, and she didn’t look at me as she said, “I found out something about my father. Something he did that was wrong, that hurt my mother a lot. I mean, it’s not on the level of what Curufin did, or the Kinslaying. No one died. It’s more…personal, I guess. I’ve just been wondering about…how you keep loving someone when you know they made bad choices. Choices that caused people to suffer.” She shifted on the blanket, bending her knees, and said, “I mean, it’s like you said. He was my father. He loved me. He raised me the best he could. But he did something that left my mother with a lot of pain.”

 

I wondered what Fingon possibly could have done. Clearly my cousin wasn’t referring to the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, but she seemed reluctant to state whatever was bothering her outright.

 

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, not sure what else I could say.

 

But she shook her head. “I don’t think my mother would want me to go into any detail,” she said, with an apologetic grimace. “I just thought you’d be the best person to ask. You’ve got some experience in this area, you know?”

 

“Experience,” I repeated. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“I know what you mean,” I agreed. “Though honestly, I miss some of my uncles more than I miss my father. Knowing that I was cutting myself off from them, too, even though they’d had no hand in Finrod’s death – that was a hard decision.”

 

Thinking of my fourth uncle in particular, so dark and quiet, I said, “I miss Caranthir the most. I guess that might sound odd; I know he has a reputation for being harsh. And he doesn’t really like people all that much, it’s true. But he always made space for me. I never felt like I was distracting him from important matters. And we didn’t always talk when we were together, but the silence was a comfortable kind of silence. I always felt like he understood me without me having to explain anything.”

 

With Maedhros, I had often felt like a distraction; my oldest uncle was our leader, focused with single-minded determination on the efforts to defeat Morgoth. He’d been loving, but after his torment on Thangorodrim it had become a distant, hands-off sort of love.

 

Maglor liked to spoil me when I was small, but as I had grown older, I’d come to realize that my second uncle was a little self-absorbed, as performers and great artists could sometimes be – much like my own father, really. It made him hard to talk to about more serious matters.

 

My third uncle, Celegorm…well, my feelings there were a nest of snakes, all tangled up with my feelings towards my father. Celegorm had been the fun uncle – the one who defused things when my father and I butted heads, the one who led me off on the kind of adventures that always made for an entertaining story afterwards. But he had turned Nargothrond against Finrod, sending our cousin to his death. As with Curufin, my feelings about Celegorm were complicated.

 

Amrod and Amras, while not significantly older than me, had always been a little strange, a little fey, a little wild. I’d struggled to understand them, and I believed they’d struggled to understand me in turn.

 

Caranthir, though, had always welcomed my presence. He might not have always known what to say to me, but he’d turned silence into something to share. His silence was the kind that pulled me in, unlike my twin uncles’ silence, which was the kind that pushed me out.

 

And he’d told me the truth about my mother. For that alone, I would have always been grateful.

 

“I can’t imagine what it would be like, having such a large family,” Ereiniel said. “I’ve only ever known my mother’s sister. My father’s siblings are either dead or hidden away.”

 

“I can’t imagine having a family so small,” I said. “Though I always wished I had more cousins. But my aunt Parmë stayed in Aman, and my aunt Melindil drowned crossing the sea. I suppose Amrod or Amras might marry and have children someday, but I wouldn’t know them. Not now that I’ve cut ties with my family.”

 

Some of my regret must have been audible in my voice, because Ereiniel turned to look at me, pinning me down with her sharp gaze, and said, “You did something very difficult and very brave. You stood up for what was right. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m proud to call you my cousin.”

 

I looked away and, quietly, said, “I swore no oath. And I worry where their oath might lead my father and my uncles. Curufin and Celegorm have already done evil deeds in its service, and now that the family is scattered across the east, with no strength to assail Morgoth, I’m afraid that they’ll lose sight of the bigger goal and turn their attention to Lúthien’s Silmaril. I like to think they’d try diplomacy. Maedhros has always been good at that. But if hotter tempers take control…well, I don’t know what will happen.”

 

At my oldest uncle’s name, Ereiniel made a face as though she’d bitten into an unripe persimmon. I knew that she blamed Maedhros for her father's death. It had been the failure of Maedhros’ plan and the faithlessness of his allies that had led to the disaster of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and thus to the death of Fingon at Gothmog’s hands.

 

Privately, I didn't think it was fair to lay all the blame at my uncle's feet. Maedhros had done his best, and he couldn't have known that Uldor would betray him. But I wasn't going to say that to Ereiniel. Grieving people often needed someone to blame, and I knew full well that my cousin was still grieving.

 

“You think they’d try to seize it by force?” she asked me.

 

“I hope not,” I said, feeling something knot in my gut. “I’d hope cooler heads would prevail. But I don't know. Some of my uncles are reckless and temperamental.”

 

Ereiniel pursed her lips. “I hope Dior keeps that in mind. That’s all I can say.”

 

“Me too,” I said softly.

 

I would have liked to see a Silmaril again. I had seen them occasionally in Formenos, of course, but I’d been barely more than a toddler at the time. I wanted to examine one now, as an adult – not because I wanted to possess them, but simply because I wanted to see if I could figure out how Fëanor had made them. My grandfather had been the greatest craftsman of all the Noldor, but if it was up to me – if this war ever ended – I was aiming to become the second-greatest at the very least.

 

It seemed, though, that everyone had their eyes on the Silmarils. First Morgoth had stolen them. Then Beren had been sent on his quest at Thingol’s bidding. Thingol himself had been killed by the dwarves who had coveted the Silmaril retrieved by Beren. Now Dior bore it, and my father and his brothers were surely unhappy about that. They saw the Silmarils as their inheritance. And they were right, at least in my eyes.

 

Fëanor had wrought them. Morgoth had robbed him of them, killing my great-grandfather. Then Fëanor had died. Surely the works of his hands should now belong to his sons. That was only fair. The question was, how far would my father and my uncles go to make that happen?

 

Not too far, I hoped. Not to another Alqualondë. Surely, surely, they would shy away from repeating that horror, I told myself.

 

But all the same, I couldn’t help being afraid.

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Chapter End Notes

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