Northern Stars by Idrils Scribe

Elrohir is in the crow’s nest again. 

His slender shape stands sharply against the blue summer sky, curled up on the small platform high on the main mast. One bare foot dangles over the deadly drop down to the deck, but he pays the height no heed. He wanders lost in memory, with his cheek leaning against the white wood of the mast and his unseeing eyes on the horizon.

Glorfindel rushes down the quarterdeck stairs. He already has a firm hold of the ratlines, ready to swing himself up and into the rigging to fetch his ward, when Galdor’s hand lands on his shoulder. 

A knowing look passes between them, and with a nod Glorfindel restrains his inner mother hen, and releases the ladder. 

Elrohir has had the run of the ship ever since Galdor taught him how to properly climb aloft. If his young passenger yearns for space and sky and the desert wind in his face, the Nemir’s captain will give him the closest thing his ship can offer.

And a fine view Elrohir must have, perched atop the Nemir’s snow-white sails, soaring over the endless expanse of water and light, the salt-scented wind in his face and a cloud of seagulls wheeling at his feet. 

They all hoped that the small measure of freedom would lift Elrohir’s spirits, but instead of singing along with the merry gaggle of sailors reeving the sails, he sits alone and in silence.

 "I can almost see the sun shine through him.” Galdor is not mincing his words, but he is right. 

Elrohir is fading. Thus far his longing for Elladan has kept him alive, but much more of this and they could be sewing him into his shroud before the Nemir makes port.

Glorfindel and Falver, the ship’s surgeon, are doing all they can, but the only remedy that may keep Elrohir’s grief-stricken spirit housed in his body lies in getting him to his own kin, and a healer. Both await him at home, but Imladris is so far away.

“He needs Elrond.” Glorfindel cranes his neck to look at Elrohir. 

“I bid my bird to make haste.” Galdor says. “Pray that it was not waylaid. The Misty Mountains are no place for a seagull.”

They exchange a fearful glance - Galdor’s winged friend may have safely sped from the coasts of Umbar to Imladris, but even with favourable winds the bird will take weeks to deliver its message. And once Elrond hears that his missing son has been found and is headed to the Grey Havens, he must still cross the vastness of Eriador.

Glorfindel turns to the railing and watches a pair of fishing cormorants plunge down from the ship’s yardarms into the sun-speckled waves, and rise once more with writhing silver in their beaks. 

He must not give in to despair, though icy fear gnaws at his heart. 

The day’s beauty seems a mockery. The Nemir is sailing into the Gulf of Lune on a sweet summer wind. On both sides of the ship the green slopes of the Blue Mountains close in like a loving embrace. The cries of the gulls that wheel overhead have the ring of home. Not long now until they reach the Grey Havens, somewhere beyond the shimmering horizon.

Glorfindel dreads the next leg of their journey. Círdan will gladly provide an escort and a string of Lindon’s fastest horses, but the Great East Road across Arnor is long, especially when travelling in easy stages to spare Elrohir’s health. Rushing him to Imladris and Elrond’s care will take a month at the very least. Glorfindel tries not to imagine Elrohir dying halfway, in a rented room at some roadside inn.

To Glorfindel falls the grave decision whether to attempt that perilous trek, or to keep Elrohir in Lindon, where Cirdan’s healers can try their best. Elrond might reach them in time. 

But then, he might not.

“Shall I give it a try?” asks a voice behind them. Calear, too, has a concerned eye on Elrohir. 

Glorfindel turns around to exchange a look with the wounded spy, resting beneath his sailcloth awning. These last calm weeks of their journey have him looking a little better. His bruises have faded, but captivity with the Black Númenóreans of Umbar left him deeply marked. 

Calear’s hands are useless lumps of flesh, invisible beneath bulky splints and propped up on folded blankets against the swelling. Every last bone has been shattered beyond what can be mended aboard ship, or perhaps at all - there has been talk of amputations. 

Calear is old, and strong in body and spirit. Thus far he has maintained his brave and cheerful air, but Glorfindel has heard the surgeon rush to his bedside in the night, when Calear screams at the torturer haunting his dreams. 

“Please, my friend,” Glorfindel sends Calear a fond smile. The Falathrim are loyal and hardy. Despite his gruesome injuries, Calear still looks out for Elrohir.   

“Elrohir!” Calear calls out. 

Up aloft Elrohir’s head shoots up. As he glances down at Calear his sullen expression changes to a kindly smile, and at once he begins to climb down the ratlines. Not as limber as a sailor of the Falas, perhaps, but he is getting the hang of it. 

Elrohir understands well enough that Calear suffered for his sake, and has taken to looking after the wounded man. It is a strange arrangement: between the pair of them Glorfindel cannot say who is saving who. Elrohir is a walking reminder that Calear’s torment was not in vain, and in turn Calear has given Elrohir someone to take care of, a purpose, which is precisely what he needs to hold on. 

Much like his father, Elrohir needs to be needed. Better to give him a worthy task to keep him out of his own head, than Glorfindel hovering like an anxious nursemaid.

“My lad,” Calear says convivially when Elrohir lightly drops down on the deck beside his awning. “Would you fetch my medicine? My wrists ache, and I would not bother Falver.”

The ship’s surgeon is meticulous with Calear’s drugs. Even now she is keeping a keen eye on both her patients from where she sits splicing rope across the deck. She would have seen to Calear’s every need herself, but has agreed to let Elrohir do the work. 

Elrohir disappears down the aftercastle stairs, to the sick bay, and soon emerges bearing a cup with a precisely measured amount of poppy tincture mixed with wine. 

He will make a fine healer one day. He knows not to distress Calear with fussing, which would only remind him of his infirmity. Instead he is gentle, but businesslike when he puts the cup to Calear’s lips and tips it.

Calear raises a hand as if to take the cup, but his fingers are encased in stiff plaster and all he achieves is a jolt of pain so sharp that he cannot keep it off his face. 

“Would you like anything else?” Elrohir asks, very kindly. “A game, perhaps, to take your mind off it?”

The pair have taken to whiling away the long days aboard playing games. First one from Harad that Elrohir knows well, but gradually Calear has called for Elvish ones, and by now he has taught Elrohir a very passable game of chess. 

“Back for another drubbing?” Calear musters a smile that grows even wider when Elrohir mirrors it. “I will gladly give it to you!”

Elrohir keeps that smile as he fetches the chess board and sets it out atop a crate. The game is Galdor’s, carved from walrus ivory with swan-ships in full sail for rooks, the board ringed with lovely lines of inlaid wave crests. At their first game Elrohir marvelled at the small lodestone set into the base of each figurine, holding it fast to the iron chessboard even when the ship is tossed in the worst of weather. He already knows the setup, his gestures measured and efficient as he places the pieces. He gives Calear the advantage of playing white.

“Selling the lion’s skin before it is caught? Mind yourself, old Elf!” Elrohir calls the challenge. He sits cross legged, his hand hovering over the board, ready for Calear to tell him where to move his pieces for him. 

Instead, a silence falls.

Elrohir was speaking Umbarian Adûnaic, as they sometimes do between them. He called Calear ‘Nimir’. The Númenórean word for ‘Elf’ is not an insult, in itself, but Calear has been called that and worse by less kindly voices, and the reminder tips him headlong into horrors past. 

Calear’s eyes go wide and wild, his face a mask of terror, and for a moment he is elsewhere. 

Elrohir is unfazed. He has seen this before, that much is clear. 

“Hey, my friend,” he says in a gentle, almost sing-song voice, switching to his halting Sindarin. “The sun is up and the day is bright. You are in the temple no more.” His hands have stilled in his lap - he knows better than to touch a man in this state.

A long moment passes before Calear shakes his head like a horse beset by flies. “I know.” 

Elrohir has gone pale, and he eyes his friend with knowing concern. “It will pass,” he says. Judging by his calm tone, he finds it nothing out of the ordinary to see a man’s mind so thrown with torture that he thinks himself chained to Melkor’s altar while sitting in broad daylight. “Think of other things, and it will pass.”

Glorfindel tries not to imagine where Elrohir would have gained the experience for such knowing advice. A bleak anger burns in his heart at the Mortals who did that to him. 

He presses down that rage. Vengeance will not help Elrohir, nor Calear. Glorfindel has killed enough Black Númenóreans, two princes among them. It must suffice. 

Instead he watches as both wounded souls straighten their backs, and each makes himself appear merry and composed before the other. 

“Second pawn, two squares,” says Calear, but his mutilated hand twitches in his lap.

Elrohir has managed another smile. He does as he is asked, and pretends not to look. 

Chapter End Notes

Welcome back everyone!
Once more, I'm trying to cure my perfectionism by dropping my usual MO of meticulously planning my stories, and making it up as I go instead. I'm laying down the tracks in front of the train here.
Comments fuel the creative fires. What do you think of the story so far? what do you expect will happen? Any requests/suggestions for future chapters? You’d make my day by dropping me a line!
Updates will happen as I write, mostly on the weekends.
See you soon for the next one,

Behind Elrond’s back the sky brightens over the Tower Hills. The coming dawn fires the Gulf of Lune into a ribbon of molten silver winding through the green land. Before him the coils of the Great East Road weave down to the shimmering waters.

The twelfth sunrise since the coming of the gull. Elbereth, grant me time! 

Does Elrohir still live? Elrond likes to think that he would know it if his son had died. 

His horse stumbles with exhaustion, flecks of lather spattering from the arched neck. A muttered word of comfort, and the bone-weary stallion gives him his last burst of strength. He has ridden horses to death under him before, in the desperate retreat from Eregion, but Valar, it still feels like an ill omen to herald Elrohir’s return with such a sacrifice. He allows the animal to slow a little. 

Around him, his escort changes positions, shifting the foremost spot amongst them to burden all horses equally. These are all old hands, hardened warriors capable of weathering this mad dash across Eriador. 

And hard the road has been. They have ridden by day and by night, taking neither rest nor sleep ever since they galloped from Imladris’ stableyard as if the whips of Morgoth’s Balrogs were behind. They have stopped only to exchange their wearied horses for fresh ones wherever they could get them. Elrond hates to think of the trail of lamed and staggering mounts the company must have left in its wake, all along the Great East Road. It could not be helped. 

One horse only they held onto all the long miles from Imladris, but never rode. Rochael gleams a pale, dappled grey in the twilight. Long has the mare awaited her rider’s return. She will carry Elrohir home.  

At Elrond’s side rides Ardil of Doriath, once Celeborn’s second-in-command. Celebrían sent her most trusted retainer along to aid the retrieval. Grey eyes older than the sun are sharp beneath the hood of his cloak. 

That the old Sinda agreed to travel with Canissë, the captain of Elrond’s Fëanorian guard and notorious kinslayer, speaks to the grim necessity of their errand. A tight cluster of Fëanorian knights follow her. 

Around them ride a handful of hand-picked scouts, hardy Wood-elves from the Valley led by Borndis, their chieftainess. 

A small retinue, only a score altogether, but all are age-old elite warriors, and they make as formidable a fighting force as Arnor has seen since the Last Alliance. It was the only way Elrond dared to carry Vilya from the valley, even into the well-ordered realm of Arnor.

Theirs is a simple disguise: all are dressed alike in grey cloaks. They carry messengers’ bags and emblems so they may cross Arnor’s borders under diplomatic immunity, pretending to rush some urgent dispatch from Imladris to Lindon. No banners, no weapons carried openly. They met no hindrance - King Valandil does not interfere in correspondence between his Elvish neighbours.     

Almost! They are almost there! 

The road rounds the last hillcrest, and below them the twin havens of Mithlond embrace the Firth of Lune like a lacework of sculpted white stone set amidst the green hills. The great shipyards lie dormant still, but the Tower of the Lamp casts its silver beam through the twilight, and high upon its pinnacle flies the Shipwright’s banner. 

A forest of masts rises from the harbour’s mist-cloaked waters. Is Galdor’s Nemir among them? Elrond cannot tell. He senses nothing of Elrohir’s spirit in the sleeping city.

Onward he drives his exhausted company until white city walls loom overhead, their gates of ironclad oak closed for the night. At their approach, the wicket swings open soundlessly, and the Warden of the East Gate steps out onto the road. 

Instead of hailing them she at once sets her silver horn to her lips. From the tower atop the gatehouse another horn rings a bright answer, and the portcullis begins to rise. 

“Lord Elrond, welcome!” The guard seems wholly unsurprised to find the lord of faraway Imladris galloping on her gate at dawn, disguised among a grey-cloaked company. “You are expected on the Quay of Swans!”

Elrond allows his horse to slow to a stagger. Bereft of the steady rhythm of the gallop, he finds himself dazed with exhaustion. “Expected?” he manages.

“The ship lies ready,” she replies in that lilting accent of the Falas, as behind her the great gates swing open. “Lord Círdan sent word of your coming. You are to sail with the tide. Make haste, lord, or you will miss it!”

Elrond touches a hand to his forehead in a gesture of awe and deference to the Valar. Around him, his escort follows suit, even the Fëanorians. Círdan is both Ossë’s friend and Ulmo’s chosen, and his foresight reaches further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth. He must have Seen more than Elrond, or else Galdor has sent further messages. Elrond has no time to stop and wonder which. 

“Onward!” He commands, and rouses his panting horse into a brisk trot. His people fall into line behind him as he plunges into the lantern-lit tunnel behind the gate. 

He navigates the sleeping city with unseeing eyes, winding past shops and store-houses and the soaring stone arches of the Great Market. He knows Mithlond well, even in twilight - she was the High King’s capital for almost an age of the world, and Elrond himself the king’s young herald. 

He grew to manhood walking these white stone avenues, serving both in the High King’s army and on the swan-ships of Círdan’s navy. To ride here once more is a comfort even now, as if Ereinion might come strolling around the corner any moment.  

When they emerge onto the Quay of Swans, the light has turned to the deep red of sunrise, making the quay’s silver lanterns glow pale and strange. Only one ship is moored there, and yet the quay swarms with a crowd of porters and crew, their work-songs bright amidst the cool morning mists that drift up from the water. 

Círdan’s own four-master, the Laegrist, lies ready to set sail, her sails and the white wood of her swan-shaped bow stained scarlet by the coming dawn. 

By the gangplank awaits Círdan himself. The Master of the Havens is dressed in a grey captain’s uniform. He bears a welcoming smile, but there is something of haste in his stance, and his ancient face with the neat silver beard is lined with concern. 

Elrond’s horse has reached the end of its endurance. The poor beast stumbles on the quay’s white flagstones, and with a quick motion he leaps from the saddle before his weight can send the animal down onto its knees. 

“Well met, Lord Shipwright.” Though he staggers with the weight of twelve sleepless nights, Elrond lays a hand against his chest and bows deeply to his elder. “My house owes you great gratitude, not in the least for the welcome we received at your gates, calling unbidden at this strange hour.” 

“Well met, Elrond Peredhel. Timely is your coming.” Círdan’s eyes are keen as stars, and within lies the wisdom of many, many years. “I have been expecting you.” 

“How?” Elrond manages, as behind him his escort dismounts their lathered horses. Grooms in Círdan’s livery step forward to take the poor beasts.

“The Sea tells tales, at times.” Cirdan’s hand lands on Elrond’s shoulder. His forefinger may look bare, but Narya’s heat thrums beneath the touch, and against the dull dark of Elrond's fears, hope kindles once more. Elrond stands up straighter. Then Círdan’s hand closes around his arm, and he finds himself firmly directed to the gangplank. 

“Come, my friend,” Círdan says, open concern in his voice. “We must make the tide if we are to meet the Nemir.”  

At Elrond’s signal Ardil, Borndis, and her people step aboard, welcomed by one of Círdan’s stewards bearing a steaming pitcher of mulled wine.

Elrond turns to follow, when behind his back, he becomes aware of a disturbance. 

Canissë has not moved. 

“Is it allowed, lord?” she asks when Elrond turns to face her, indicating her fellow Fëanorians. 

The proud knight does not look in Círdan’s direction, her eyes downcast to the white flagstones underfoot. 

Only now does Elrond notice: the sea-shanties have fallen silent, replaced with hard stares from both the Laegrist’s crew and the crowd of dockers lining the quay. Clenched jaws, low mutters. Not outright enmity, perhaps, but clear contempt. 

‘Elrond’s pet kinslayers’, the Falathrim call Canissë and her warriors. They are considered the one vice of Eärendil’s beloved son. No Fëanorian has set foot on a swan-ship since the day the truth about Alqualondë first reached the Falas. 

And then came Sirion.

Círdan’s ships were first to reach the carnage. The laments say that the Shipwright dug through the piled corpses with his own hands, desperately seeking Elwing and her sons among them. 

Elrond does not like the thought of leaving half his people behind, but nothing must keep him from Elrohir now. Asking Círdan to suffer a company of kinslayers aboard his own flagship is too much, especially after all he has already done for Elrohir.

“I know your thoughts on the matter, and I will always heed them.” Elrond says to Cìrdan with a nod of deference. “The Fëanorians shall stay behind.” 

Canissë bows and steps back, her face inscrutable. For a moment, Elrond wonders where she will take her people once he has sailed. Few in this city will feed or lodge them. Not for all the silver in Imladris. 

There is one who might. 

“Will you visit her while I am away?” he asks Canissë. “She will expect you. Give her my regards.”

“Aye, lord,” Canissë bows, and makes to turn towards her new errand.

Then Círdan raises his hand, stopping her retreat. “I would not deprive you of your escort, Elrond,” he says after a moment’s thought. “Nor mar your son’s return with ancient bitterness.

If Elrohir dies, he wants me to have my own people around me. The thought hits Elrond like a hammer blow, and for a moment he stands stricken.

“Will Ossë suffer them?” he asks at last. “He might drown us all in his anger.”

Maedhros’ former retainers are banned from Valinor until their new lord brings them across. Any premature attempts at sailing West will end in a watery grave. Like Círdan, Ossë has not forgotten the bloodstained beaches on both sides of the Sea.

“Ossë favours our errand, and he would not sink any ship that carries the Mariner’s son. Or me, for that matter.” Círdan turns to Canissë with a piercing look. “Step aboard, mistress,” he orders her, curt but tolerably polite. “You will only cause my people grief if we let you loiter here.”

Chapter End Notes

Welcome back everyone!
Elrond is having a rough time of it, and so are his guards. Good thing that Círdan is there to help.
This was a tough chapter to write because it introduces a whole new Elvish realm and a bunch of OC's. Of course I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of it!
Is Círdan being kind, or is there some ulterior motive? And what's next for Elrond, Ardil, and the Fëanorians?
A comment will make my day!
See you soon for the next one,
IS

“Ship ahead! Due east, captain!” The lookout’s voice is bright with joy, a world away from when this call last went up.

Glorfindel knows that Elrohir’s eyes are on him, and he makes sure to smile.

Even so, Elrohir’s jaw clenches. He sits cross-legged, his back against the mizzen, with a lapful of coiled hithlain and the gentle northern sun pouring gold over his craggy hair. That morning Galdor set him to unlaying rope for splicing, but now the marlinspike stills in his white-knuckled grip. The red-sailed Corsair ship will haunt him for a long time yet.

Galdor sees it, too. “This one is good news, lad!” he says with a grin, and bends down to relieve Elrohir of both spike and cordage. “Come and see for yourself!”

Galdor leads Elrohir up aloft, to the topmost yard, so he can see the Elf-ship with his own eyes.

Elrohir carefully heaves himself up onto the yard behind Galdor’s loose and easy leap. For a moment he crouches upon it to steady himself, leaning his weight against the mast as the ship heels and the waves roll white-capped far beneath.

A few weeks ago he would have been stuck there, the memory of his plunge into the sea too fresh to dare the walk along the spar. Galdor has been patient, encouraging, and just enough of a playful tease to coax Elrohir into braving the walk, first along the lower yard with canvas strung beneath to catch him if he should fall. It did not take long, and now - be it with great care and no Falathrim flourishes whatsoever - Elrohir follows Galdor down the length of the yard and sits down beside him, winding his toes into the footrope to steady himself there.

Glorfindel pulls himself up the shrouds behind them.The three of them crowd on the narrow yard, and despite everything Glorfindel savours the thrill of riding wind and waves high above the swell.

The summer day is bright as a jewel, with foam flying before the Nemir’s swan-white bow as the hills of Lindon go speeding past. Beneath them the Gulf of Lune spreads like a dancing weave of azure and silver and that deep green of sea-glass. Dolphins leap by ship's bow, greeted like old friends by the crew, and a cloud of white seabirds trails in her wake.

The distant ship is little more than an outline, her proud masts drawn sharply against the sea’s blue shimmer.

Any sea-farer would know that shape, and Glorfindel laughs out loud for the sheer joy of it.

Círdan’s own four-master, the Laegrist, sails tall as white clouds against the sky, the light glinting star-bright off the pale wood of her outstretched wings. 

----

“Ship ahead. Due west, captain!”

Elrond is on the quarterdeck, surrounded by the grey-clad cluster of Círdan’s officers when the call rings down  from the crow’s nest.

“Is it Galdor?” Círdan’s voice is tight with tension.

Silence as the lookout peers into the distance. Only the wind whistles in the rigging.

“Aye sir! It is the Nemir!”

Elrond stills, his hands clutching the mother-of-pearl inlay on the gunwale as he strains himself anew with his attempts to muster Vilya’s power and extend his senses to seek the song of Elrohir’s fëa, somewhere in the far blue distance at the meeting of sea and sky.

Valar, but he is tired!  After finally changing out of his roadstained riding clothes he spent the night tossing in the luxury of a guest cabin without catching true sleep. When restless uncertainty drove him up and out on deck with the sunrise, Círdan insisted on serving him a grilled sea bass that tasted of nothing.

Canissë and her Fëanorians are nowhere to be seen. Círdan summarily confined them to quarters the moment they came aboard. Elrond understands the necessity: many among the crew have lost kin at their hands. Even so, they were assigned but a single windowless cabin to share between them.

None have complained. Their very presence on board is the greatest concession the Shipwright has made since the Last Alliance, and the Fëanorians are wary of showing themselves ungrateful.

Elrond pitied them, when he went to see them in the morning, a circle of pale faces in the oil-lit twilight of their cabin, caught between the wordless loathing of the Falathrim and the misery of their own sea-longing, a knife-sharp yearning whetted by the cry of the trailing gulls, as desperately unfulfilled as ever.

The remainder of his escort is a little more at ease. Ardil, Borndis, and her folk are up on deck. Yesterday they were welcomed among the crew with wine and song, and they spent the night lodged in comfort. Today they stand like a grey-mantled island amidst the smooth flow of shipboard work.

From the corner of his eyes Elrond sees a slender shape lightly gain the quarterdeck stairs to stand beside him at the railing.

“All well, lord?” Even ancient Ardil shows the strain, by the unveiled eagerness in his eyes. “Any sign?”

Elrond battles a spiteful impulse to rebuke the fellow for daring to ask after his private osanwë with his son, even though he has no such thing.

He swallows his anger instead. Before their company rode out, Celebrían named the ancient Sinda Elrohir’s personal guard, and bid him not to let her son from his sight until his safe return to Imladris. Elrond’s choice for the position would have been different, but he let his  distraught wife have her wish.

Ardil is Celeborn’s oldest and most trusted captain, ever since their youth in sunken Beleriand. His loyalty to his lord’s beloved grandson will be absolute, and he has a kind heart, even if his dispatches to Celeborn reveal more of Imladris’ inner workings than Elrond finds comfortable.

“I do not know, Master Ardil,” he says honestly. “Not yet.”

Ardil knows he is pushing his luck. He gives a polite bow, and retreats.

Behind their backs, Círdan has called out orders for yet more sails. Up aloft the crew unfurl the great white sheets, and with a snap and billow the ship leaps westward into foam-flying speed.

Elrond turns around to face the crew once more, and finds pity in their eyes. The tension tightens in his throat until he feels he cannot breathe.

He flees up the shrouds into the rigging, heedless of his stiff muscles’ cry for rest, heaving himself up hand over hand away from their gazes. High up on the topmost yard he can see the white swan-ship at the edge of the bending sea.

He walks out to the yardarm, as sure and steady as if his last commission as shipboard surgeon was but yesterday, and stands holding on to a shroud as the spar bucks underfoot, his eyes on the Nemir.

Is Elrohir on board, or does he remain lost? Is he alive, dying, or Valar forbid, already dead and buried at sea?

He peers into the distance, frantic, but in the shimmering of the western horizon, the lines of the ship’s silhouette reveal nothing.

----

Like a swan soaring into flight, the Laegrist has unfurled her mighty sails to wing towards them. Now the shapes of her pennants can be traced against the sky.

“Look! The Star!” calls someone from one of the mizzen yards.

She has come close enough to discern her colours.

Glorfindel leans forward, hanging from one of the shrouds by one hand, the other shielding his straining eyes from the midday sun.

Atop the Laegrist’s mainmast, Mithlond’s white swan on an azure field cracks in the west wind, but that is not why Galdor is laughing, merry and clear as a silver bell as below them the crew bursts into cheers.

Glorfindel sits awestruck, unable to grasp the reality in front of his eyes.

The foremast flies the device of Imladris. The six-pointed star shimmers silver on midnight blue.

Elrond has come for his son.

This cannot be, and yet somehow, it is. Maybe with Ulmo’s grace Elrond changed himself into a seabird like his mother once did, to speed from Imladris to the Havens on swift white wings.

“Look, Elrohir! The Star of Eärendil! Your father has come!” Galdor throws his arms around Glorfindel and Elrohir both, and for a moment Glorfindel feels only wild joy as he, too, laughs like a man reprieved from the scaffold.

Between them Elrohir sits very still, his eyes fixed on the distant ship. Glorfindel cannot tell what lies behind his eyes.

Galdor only stops laughing long enough to call down to his first mate. “Alphalas! Quickly now, fetch the star and hoist it!”

He needs not say more. Almost a year ago, while they rushed the Nemir to readiness for this perilous quest, Galdor and Alphalas gave thought to packing a pennant with the emblem of Eärendil’s House. Now that Elrond’s son is secured and the journey’s end in sight, they raise it beside the colours of Lindon.

----

Elrond cannot breathe.

The Nemir’s mainmast flies only the Shipwright’s device. The sight of the lone white-and blue pennant hits him like a fist to the face.

Valar, no!

But then, as he looks on, another flag is hoisted. He watches the pennant rise and unfold in the breeze, snapping against the Nemir’s masts.

The Star of Eärendil.

Elrohir.

That distant ship has returned from afar, and it carries his son.

Elrond teeters atop the yard, one hand clenched about a rope, the other hanging by his side, motionless as beneath him the Laegrist explodes into a wild rush of joy.

The ship’s bell bursts into peals of silver laughter, the crew into a deafening chorus of cheers and hurrays. The Falathrim are singing, the warriors of Imladris are a tight knot of embraces. Ardil - Ardil!- scrubs a hand over his eyes.

Elrond does no such thing. He summons Vilya’s power to send his spirit searching across the distance to Elrohir.

And he finds.

It is all he can do not to plummet down from the yard.

Even from here Elrond can feel him like he can sense the sun through closed eyelids.That sweet, longed-for light of Elrohir’s fëa is a beacon against the empty sea.  His son is alive, and he is here.

As the pennant reaches the top of the Nemir’s foremast, across the water rings the silver tolling of her ship’s bell. Galdor and his crew return in triumph, bearing Elrond’s son. 

The bells on both ships are ringing now, their crews singing hymns to Ulmo and Elbereth.

Elrond presses his free hand against his eyes. He must not weep, not even for joy. The long road and his tiredness he must cast behind him, forgotten. Soon he will stand before Elrohir, and he must give whatever his son needs from him. 

Elrohir slowly closes and opens his eyes.

Again. And again.

It makes no difference. The approaching Elf-ship remains sharp and clear as sunlight, a star-bright beacon seen with that strange Elvish sense that is not sight.

The will that guides it seeks him, sends luminous tendrils of awareness reaching out with a fierce and focused hunger.

Elrond’s joy at having found him shines out across the waves like a signal-fire in the night. 

He knows that Elrohir is near - Elrohir could not have hidden himself from that deep-seeing gaze if he had tried.

Elrond’s touch is not foul, nothing like the Demon in the desert, but the Elf-lord blazes with that same inhuman radiance of power. Here is an Elf who could kill the way the Demon did, unleash that same horror and the devouring dark, if he wanted to.

The thought is terrifying, even though some mad, equally hunger-crazed part of Elrohir gives a hard lurch towards that ship, clamouring to leap from the yard and fly across the waves to reach it.

“Elrohir?” Glorfindel’s hand comes down on his shoulder, fingers digging in as if to steady him against a fall.

Elrohir startles and blinks as the world beyond his eyelids comes flooding back, the sharp sunlight and the chill seawind yanking on his tunic, the forlorn cries of the wheeling gulls.

“Are you well? Keep your eyes open, if you can.” Glorfindel leans in, his face a frown of concern. Clearly this was not his first attempt at rousing Elrohir.

How long has he been sitting on the yardarm, blinking like an owl in the daylight? This unseen Elvish sight is perilous - a man might lose himself in it. Or lose his grip. Glorfindel is right: Elrohir is lucky not to find himself splattered to a pulp against the deck far below. 

Glorfindel seems to be thinking along the same line. “Come,” he says, and gently pulls Elrohir towards the shrouds. “Let us climb down and get you ready.”

----

Most of the crew are still singing Ossë’s praises when Glorfindel leads Elrohir to the aftercastle stair, but some of the songs are far more worldly. Thankfully the Sindarin Elrohir has picked up from the crew did not include this particular vocabulary.

They pass a beaming Alphalas, brandishing a hammer and spigot to a chorus of roaring cheers and applause. Galdor has ordered a barrel of Gondorian red brought up from the hold. Like their Silvan cousins, the Falathrim never pass up on an opportunity for wine and song.

Glorfindel politely refuses the offered cups, and steers his ward down the stairs to their cabin.

“Your mother is an artist at the loom,” Glorfindel says as he opens Elrohir’s sea chest. “She made this for you.”

He brings out the finest tunic among the bounty Celebrian sent along for Elrohir, doubtlessly with this day in mind.

Raw silk shimmers in the cabin’s half-light. Celebrían’s dyes have captured that deep blue of a summer dusk, shot through with a shower of silver-threaded stars. With a practised flick he spreads the tunic over the sturdy blanket covering Elrohir’s berth, then bends over the chest once more in search of the matching undertunic and leggings.

When he looks up with more indigo silk spilling from his hands, Elrohir has not moved.

He stands with his back against the door, still in his sea-grey sailor’s clothes, staring at the rich cloth as if it might bite him. It has been long indeed, as Mortals count such things, since he wore anything so fine.

“Your father will sing for joy to see you, even in a beggar’s rags, but there will be a crowd, and Lord Círdan himself among them. You should look the part.”

Glorfindel leaves everything set out on Elrohir’s bed, then turns around, pointedly staring out of the porthole to show he is not looking - the Haradrim ways are not easily forgotten.

A moment’s silence, a deep inhale, and then comes the rustle of fabric.

When Elrohir is finally dressed like an Elf-prince, the sight is joy and sorrow all at once. Glorfindel dearly wishes that he could spare Elrond the way clothes made to Elladan’s measures tend to drape from Elrohir’s shoulders in loose folds.

Elrond’s name is a byword for generosity. The Lord of Imladris lets none go hungry, and the dining hall of the Last Homely House has fed many a lost soul wandering the road. The sight of his own son in this state will be a harsh blow.

The Nemir’s cook has done his all to feed some flesh back onto Elrohir’s bones, but the journey was too short to undo years of hardship.  For the time being, Glorfindel can only take out his knife and hand-punch one more hole into a silver-tooled belt too long for Elrohir’s waist.

Elrohir knows well enough what he looks like. He is clearly nervous, from the way he runs his fingers over the silver-stitched brightness of a tablet-woven cuff.

“Glorfindel …” he asks, looking very young and very lost. “What should I say to him?”

“Sit down,” Glorfindel says, offering Elrohir a stool, and takes up his comb.

“Your father does not expect a formal address,” he says as he runs the carven ivory through Elrohir’s hair with gentle care. The lice are long gone. “He will be beside himself with happiness, no matter what you say. Do not worry yourself about it.”

Elrohir does not answer. Glorfindel cannot see his expression.

His hair is barely jaw length, still too short for braiding. He looks like a Mortal, or else a prisoner newly freed. Neither is far from the truth.

Orcs know the Elvish love of hair, and make sport of roughly shearing their captives. Elrond will think of that the moment he lays eyes on Elrohir’s cropped locks. Yet another sorrow, one Glorfindel will dispel as soon as he can get a private word in. Whatever else may have been done to Elrohir, he did cut his own hair.

For now Glorfindel smooths it  into a gleaming bell of dark silk around Elrohir’s head, and binds it with Elladan’s silver circlet. 

----

The peaceful interlude that was their journey is about to end. Elrohir always knew it could not last, these calm days wrapped in sunlight and the scent of salt.

He must make himself as ready as he might; ready to be whatever Elrond expects from him.

“Stop fussing with it.” Glorfindel gently stills Elrohir’s hand when he reaches for the circlet’s clasp once again. “It looks perfect. See for yourself.”

With a grand flourish, Glorfindel pulls a mirror from his sea-chest. It catches the midday sun that streams in from the porthole, sending golden brightness leaping along their cabin’s white walls.

At that, Elrohir must smile despite everything. He knew of Glorfindel’s peacockish streak - it is not every man who will carry a comb into battle - but an actual mirror is a flamboyance beyond his wildest imagination.

“Here,” Glorfindel holds the handle out for him to take.

Elrohir hesitates. On the mirror’s back gleams a green field of inlaid jade, each blade of grass lovingly rendered, strewn with flowers traced in gold. He has not held so rich a thing since his days in Umbar.

When he turns it over, his reflection in the glass looks pale and stern above the silver-stitched collar of the Elvish tunic. He wonders if Elladan looks like this, then pushes away the thought. Elladan is not on the approaching ship. Elrohir would know it if he was, of that he is sure.

The man staring back at him is a stranger. A blank, unwritten page. He could be anything. An Elf-prince, even.

Umbarian folktales tell of White-fiends stealing babies and leaving changelings in their place. What a strange irony, that he is their changeling, no longer the same child that was taken. There is no telling what this Elf-lord will do when he learns that he has been cheated of the son he sent for.

“Come,” Glorfindel says, putting away the mirror and directing Elrohir to the door as he straightens the cuffs of his own tunic, a much finer one than he used to wear aboard. “We will wait for your father in the great cabin.” 

He holds the door open, his eyes on Elrohir as he waits for him to go first, like an accused man being walked to his trial. 

----

Like a restless hound will weave back and forth through its kennel, Elrond cannot keep from pacing the quarterdeck. Forty years of desperate searching have led to this moment. He tries and fails to summon enough lordly dignity to stand at Círdan’s side as both captains manoeuvre the Laegrist beside the Nemir, gunwale to gunwale so the plank can be laid across.

Galdor and his officers have gathered on the Nemir’s quarterdeck, but Elrohir nor Glorfindel is among them, nor with the throng of singing sailors that labour on deck.

Elrond reaches out, searching, but finds Elrohir’s mind closed.

It cannot be borne.

He withdraws a little, judging the distance. He has done this many times before, both in battle and for the sheer daring enjoyment of it. A few steps backward, a quick dash for speed, one foot pushing himself off against the gunwale, the weightless rush of the leap, and the Nemir’s deck rises up to meet him. He rolls, gains his feet in a single smooth step, and then he is standing on the same ship as Elrohir. 

He pays no heed to Ardil landing on cat’s paws behind him.

The crowd parts for him as he ascends the quarterdeck, wildly looking around as if Elrohir would be hiding behind the main mast.

“Elrond …” Galdor smiles, but something like worry is lodged in the captain’s eyes, and cold fear rushes in like the icy waters of the northern sea.

“Where!?” Elrond utters, frantic. Surely Galdor understands that this is no time for ceremony.

“Come.” Galdor’s hand lands on his shoulder, and down into the aftcastle they go, through the white wooden hallway to the great cabin‘s pearl-studded door that opens slowly, and Elrond would almost shoulder Galdor aside because behind that door is Elrohir.

Instead he stops, and breathes, and straightens himself to look composed and calm, a gentle manner and a smile on his face before he crosses the threshold from the dark hallway into the light of the cabin.

Elrohir has risen from his chair at the table, Glorfindel at his shoulder. He is wearing the tunic Celebrían has woven for him. He has his mother’s eyes, and his brother’s way of standing, and his fëa is very nearly flown to Mandos.

“Elrohir.” Elrond keeps the terror off his face as he says his son’s name and comes to him smiling. 

Glorfindel was born and raised at grander courts than Elrond’s, at ease amidst pomp and power the way a fish never notices the water around it. Only now does he realise that to Elrohir it must feel like drowning. 

It is too late to avert the disaster. He can only watch it unfold. 

In the dim hallway behind Elrond’s back, the first Imladrian face Glorfindel sees is Ardil. Before Elrohir disappeared, Celeborn’s man was already the prime candidate to be named as his personal guard. Celebrían must now have granted him the position, and Ardil clearly means to begin his task without delay. At once his eyes alight on Elrohir, and widen at the state of him. Next his gaze meets Glorfindel’s. A quick salute, then Ardil takes hold of the door and deftly closes it behind Elrond, shielding his lords from prying eyes. Doubtless he is taking a guard’s stance before the door. 

Elrond and Elrohir are oblivious. 

Elrond steps forward with open arms. “Elrohir…” Such hope, such profound longing lies within that name. 

‘My lord.” Elrohir folds in half as if struck. His knees thump against the floorboards as he kneels, head bowed and eyes lowered as if his own father is a tyrant of Black Númenor. 

Such stunned sorrow in Elrond’s eyes. 

For a single heartbeat the cabin is silent, and the pair stand still as graven marble: the towering lord, the kneeling boy. 

The next, Elrond sinks to his knees so they are level once more. 

“You need not kneel before me, my son,” despite everything, Elrond’s voice is gentle. “Will you not look at me?” 

There is no power beneath the words, no force or binding in their weave, but Elrohir’s chin whips up as if Elrond has commanded him in Valarin. His eyes are guarded. 

Elrond no longer presumes to embrace, but offers his hand, which Elrohir takes with caution, as if Elrond might strike him. 

Elrond rises and pulls him to his feet. “You need not kneel,” he says once more as he leads Elrohir to a chair at the table, and motions for him to sit. Elrohir drops into it at once. Slowly as were he soothing a frightened animal, Elrond pulls out the chair beside him, and sits. 

With his son seated, Elrond takes a moment to look him over with a healer’s sharp-eyed gaze. 

Glorfindel sees him note Elrohir’s illness, mark his fading for the enemy against which Elrond must now do battle.   

“Do not be afraid,” Elrond says, smiling, though he looks like he has not slept in a month. “I have searched for you all this time, and longed to have you home, and now you have come back to me at last. You will receive nothing but good from me.”  

Now that Glorfindel sees them side by side for the first time he notes the resemblance, the familiar lines of Elrond’s face returning in Elrohir’s. He has Celebrían’s eyes, but the shape of his bones is all Elrond. 

Elrohir looks stunned, adrift. Lost for words, he makes another half-bow, lays his open hand against his chest in a Númenórean gesture of deference. He does not smile.

Elrond manages to do so, calm and kind. He rises, turns to the sideboard, where he fills two of Galdor’s mother-of-pearl cups from a decanter of Gondorian red. His hands do not shake. 

Elrohir remains at the table, watching his father with his body turned sideways as if he is trying to present a smaller target, or is about to dash for the door. Elrond hands him the wine with an inviting gesture. 

Elrohir takes it from him with both hands and another half-bow, as Númenórean court protocol dictates. Elrond suffers the obeisance without flinching, pours for himself, then sits down beside him. 

Glorfindel draws back until his back is against the wall, and waits. He is intruding on a private moment, but someone must be here to step in if Elrohir should make a run for it.

Only then does Elrond utter the words that must have burned on his lips ever since he set foot in this cabin. “I want you to know that we never stopped searching for you.” 

Glorfindel breathes a sigh of relief. It is vital that Elrohir knows this, that he understands that whatever horrors he has suffered, Elrond never abandoned him to them. Somehow, that should matter. 

“Please …” Elrond’s voice nearly breaks, but he soldiers on, “do not be afraid.”

Only when Elrond is finished does Glorfindel realise that he is speaking Haradi. Haltingly and with a strange accent, but perfectly understandable. For a moment he is utterly baffled at how Elrond might have acquired so exotic a language. Then he understands: Ruhiren of Arnor. Elrond must have taken the poor wretch under his wing. 

Elrohir’s eyes widen at hearing familiar words fall from the mouth of one so strange to him. He sits stunned into silence, panic fluttering behind his eyes as he grapples for the right answer to give this Elf-lord begging him for the one thing he cannot manage.

Elrond knows it. “You and I know so little about each other,” he says, switching back to Sindarin. “Shall we talk? You may ask me any question, and I shall answer.”

Silence descends, and for a single terrifying moment Glorfindel is convinced Elrohir will back away from his own father as if Elrond is a rearing snake. He does not think Elrond could bear it.

Elrohir seems moved to pity, because he will not take his eyes off Elrond, but he does uncoil himself and sits straight-backed. His hands unfold from their clutch on the undrunk cup, and rest on his legs, as if he is about to bow once more. 

“My lord …” he begins, in painstaking Sindarin, his voice hoarse with nerves. He dares not look Elrond in the eye. 

Elrond leans forward, listening intently.

“I humbly beg a boon, lord.” Elrohir takes courage. “The crew call you the world’s greatest healer. Among them is a man named Calear. He was wounded while protecting me.” He launches into his final plea with the courage of the desperate. “Will you not heal him, for my sake? I shall give you in return whatever you desire.”

“Elrohir …” Elrond pauses, swallows, takes Elrohir’s hand once more. Elrohir lets him. “You need not humble yourself, nor barter or beg for my help. I will aid you in all ways, whenever I can.” Elrond manages a smile. “Calear I have known for many years, and I shall gladly tend to him and any other wounded. For his part in your return, I will reward him and name him a friend of our House forever.”

“I thank you,” Elrohir says, relief open in his face. Elrond’s words have melted something.

Glorfindel looks at Elrond, and sees the father’s pride bloom. 

“You are a faithful friend,” Elrond says, “I will see Calear soon. May I look at you first? I would like to know that you are well.”

----

Elrohir dares to let his eyes dart up for a glance at Elrond’s face. Thus far, he has kept his gaze fixed on the Elf-lord’s silver cloak-pin.

He is Elven-fair indeed. Handsome as an antique Númenórean marble, and wholly ageless. Save for the depth of that inhuman gaze, this man might be twenty-five, or forty. By now Elrohir understands well enough that Elrond is nowhere near forty. 

He is Elrond’s kinsman, without a trace of doubt. His face shares that same fine-cut delicacy, those same sea-grey eyes that stared back at him from Glorfindel’s mirror. 

He does not know yet if there are any other resemblances. 

Elrond raises a hand to cup Elrohir’s face, and for a moment Elrohir battles an insane urge to wrench his head back like a head shy horse. He sits very still instead, and lets Elrond’s mind touch his. 

Like Glorfindel’s golden presence, but not at all the same. With Glorfindel, touching their minds took some effort on Elrohir’s part. Elrond’s flows into his own smooth as a sheet of water, their closeness the most natural thing. The touch eases a yearning he had not consciously perceived. 

Elrond has but to look at Elrohir to see most of what he truly is. Those strange eyes pierce him down to his very core, deeper than even the Demon, but Elrohir feels none of that horrid loathing, the urge to hide and shutter and scour himself clean of that lingering touch. 

Somehow he does not mind sitting here in this quiet cabin with Elrond, and letting himself be seen.

Elrond looks, hums a few sad and soft notes, words in a language Elrohir does not know. 

And then, he gives . 

Strength like liquid light pours forth from Elrond’s spirit, moulding itself to Elrohir, filling him like water fills a cup, if water were made of living warmth, sweet and bright and thrumming with joy all at once. It quells some ravenous thirst within him. 

Elrohir gasps, but it seems he has lost even the capacity for fear. If this is White-fiend sorcery, he is lost. He can no more refuse than he can stop himself from drawing his next breath. 

At once, his breathing eases, the scar in his palm and the many old injuries all over his body cease their relentless drone of ever-present pain. The sunlight falling through the portholes seems more radiant, the scent of the wine in his cup sweeter and more appealing, the song of wind and waves more joyful. 

“What are you doing!?” he manages, when he has steadied himself against the sheer brightness of it all.

----

Elrond cannot answer him at first. Flickers of light dart before his eyes as he steadies himself against a wave of vertigo.  

A swift motion, and Glorfindel is at his elbow, holding him up. Elrohir would take fright indeed if Elrond were to fall down at his feet. He breathes deeply until the cabin no longer spins and the haze fades from his sight. He withheld nothing as he poured his own strength into Elrohir’s wounds, and now he pays. 

A small price, for the way Elrohir’s breathing calms, his lungs eased from some old hurt, and for the colour that sits brighter on his hollow cheeks.

He still looks as bad as Elrond feared, from Ruhiren’s grim tales of Harad. Scarred, battered, his body in pain even now. Old war wounds. Elrond might heal them, if only he could touch Elrohir without terrifying him. Grief and loss have cut a gaping rift to his spirit, and that hurt was taken not long ago. 

And beneath it all lurks something darker. Elrohir did not learn the rigours of Númenórean court etiquette from the Haradrim. Something lies half-buried there, some unspoken horror he desperately tries to forget. Chained monsters rattle their shackles in locked rooms beneath the surface of his mind. They will not stay bound forever.

Oh, child.

Elrond has to let go of him, and the moment he lowers his hand he misses the touch. His son’s skin warm and solid against his palm made it easier to grasp that he is truly here.

“I poured my spirit into yours,” he manages by way of explanation, “so it grows stronger and more tethered to your body.” 

As I should have done every day of the past forty years.

Elrohir is keen-eyed. He will know a lie, even by omission, and so Elrond gives him nothing but the unvarnished truth. “You are ill. Enough so that I fear you may die without such healing.” 

“I am not ill,” says the wounded child before him, and Elrond can almost see the thinning tethers that keep his spirit from winging to Námo’s hand like a homing hawk.

“Men do not die of grief,” he says, kindly, “but Elves do. I am a healer, and I know fading when I see it. Believe me, you are close.” 

Elrohir shudders. He has seen that grey road through the shadowed vale, down to the Doomsman’s doors. How far did he walk it, before Glorfindel called him back? 

“What will you do?” Elrohir asks, afraid even now. 

Hold you, if I may. Make you feel safe. Heal your spirit and your body. Turn you around on this dark road you walk, the one that leads to Mandos, so that your face is to life and light once more. 

“I will bring you home,” Elrond says instead. “To Elladan.”

At that, a fleeting spark of joy crosses Elrohir’s face. There is hope, still. 

Elrond watches his wounded son. Healing him will be a long work. Love and gentle care, safety enough for many nights of restful sleep. And food to nourish both spirit and body.

He will begin at once.

“Your mother gave me this. She baked it for you.” 

From the folds of his tunic he retrieves Celebrían’s gift. She wrapped the lembas for Elrohir in silver mallorn leaves, bound with hand-spun hithlain, and the knots bear her seal pressed into snow-white wax.  

Elrond handles the bundle with reverent care when he breaks the seals, releasing the scent of a sun-warmed field of waving grain. The wafers inside are golden and fragrant. The hallowed art of their making, from the ear to the wafer, was handed down to Celebrían by Galadriel, and through her by Melian Herself. Within lies Her blessing. Elrond can only hope that it will be enough.

He spreads the package open on the table. “She would be glad if you ate some. It will give you strength.” He smiles, and presses a wafer into Elrohir’s hand. 

----

Elrohir has no memory of his mother. 

Not even her face. Nothing beyond the barest recollection of the safety of her arms. He used to cry for her long ago, but even then he knew well enough that she would not come. He has not dwelled on her for many years. 

Her returned ghost has hovered over him ever since he boarded the Nemir, set free by the tales from Glorfindel and the crew. 

Her unseen hand is in the very clothes on his back. Elrohir knows little of needle-arts, only enough to mend his own things when the seams give out, but even he can tell that every last piece inside the Elvish sea-chest is a labour of love.  

Many hours of work must have gone into the weaving of such cloth, soft as down-feathers but sturdy as wool, and yet more into the garments’ making: every collar embroidered in flawless geometries of leaves and stars, each seam perfectly felled so that even next to the skin there is not a single raw edge to be found. 

Celebrían has laboured at her loom thinking of him, and meanwhile he could not bring her face to his mind if someone ordered him with a blade to his throat. 

Elrohir says none of that when he accepts the offered bread with a polite bow, but Elrond knows. His mind’s touch is gentler now, less desperate. He does not look, but only offers a memory, a much-cherished image.

Two people sit by a campfire, washed by the golden light of a setting sun, the sky spanning wide and bright above the white-capped mountains at their back. Elladan turns a spitted hare over a bed of coals. His companion is a silver-haired Elf-woman, her face turned away to listen to something Elladan said. Then Celebrían turns to look at him, and smiles. 

Elrohir’s heart aches inside his chest, torn by a harsh and sudden longing. He never wanted anything so desperately as he now wants to be wherever that little camp may lie. He would not impose - he can hunt his own meat, if need be. He only wants to sit beside them and listen to their voices as they talk.

“This was last spring, when we went hunting in the high meadows.” Elrond smiles, but something of sadness lingers in his eyes. “I will take you to them soon.”

----

“How was this done?”

Elrond asks because he must know, even if the question itself brings his patient more pain. 

Calear’s broken hands lie bare before him on the table. There is no possible chance that these injuries were taken in battle. Torture wounds both body and spirit, and its marks are clear on Calear. 

Calear does not need to speak. The memory overwhelms him, and Elrond sees. 

Falver’s hands close around Calear’s shoulders, her singing gentle as rainfall. Even now, Elrond admires his old teacher’s skill with Song. Elrohir, too, bears the signs of her art. 

“Can you heal me?” Calear asks when he surfaces, his gaze on the sickbay’s starred ceiling overhead. 

Galdor and Círdan sit on either side of him, and to their credit neither averts their eyes from the ruin of his unwrapped hands. 

Elrond remembers subtle arts he has not plied for half an age, shattered bones held together with cunning scaffolds of mithril wrought by the Mírdain. The skill of making such devices may have died with Celebrimbor. 

Unless another smith can be found. 

Even then it will require much from both healer and patient. And he must husband his strength for Elrohir. 

But Elrond has taken Estë’s oath, and his debt to Calear is great indeed. That, and he remembers his son’s eyes wide with fear of him, which he braved to request only this.

“I will try,” Elrond says, and sees all in the room breathe with relief. “I will need supplies, and craftspeople to work them to my designs.”

“All that can be found in Lindon is yours.” Círdan says. “And what we lack, the Nemir will fetch from the ends of the earth.”

Elrond nods, his eyes still on Calear. “You are wounded in spirit, as well as body. You may not be able to withstand the procedure. You may die…” he lets his voice falter for a moment. “The safer choice is to amputate both hands. The surgery is far less arduous, and you will heal quickly.”

He sees the blood drain from Círdan’s face. 

Calear is not at all surprised. “I appreciate the offer, lord healer,” he says with a rictus grin, “but I choose the hard way.”

“Evening, lord.” The cook gives Elrond a look of compassion as he steps out with Elrohir’s plate, his delicious seared yellowfin barely touched. The great cabin’s pearl-inlaid door clicks closed behind him. 

Beyond the windows, dusk spans over the rushing waves. The oil-lamps fill the cabin with a golden glow that plays gently along the carven wave-crests lining the smooth curves of the walls. Snags of song drift down from the deck, where the crew celebrate their victorious return with wine and great merriment under the summer stars.

For the first time today, Elrond finds himself alone and unwatched. He drops his face into his hands and allows his stinging eyes to fall closed. 

Clearly Elrohir’s experience with handling princes never included sharing a table with one. Skittish as a wild bird, he ate next to nothing in Elrond’s presence and spoke even less, until Glorfindel ended the ordeal by taking him to their cabin in an attempt to get him to sleep. 

Elrond had not the heart to demand that Elrohir leave the familiarity of the Nemir and her crew to share his state cabin aboard the Laegrist . He has suffered too much strangeness as it is. 

Wooden walls are thin, and from the adjacent cabin he can hear soft voices. Elrohir’s accented Sindarin weaves through Glorfindel’s melodious baritone. Elrohir sounds distressed, Glorfindel soothing. About what, Elrond can guess. 

Then Elrohir falls quiet. Glorfindel begins a low, soft song. The Lay of Leithian, judging by the melody. Bitter, and yet fitting. It hurts to see another as his son’s confidant and carer, but for the time being it cannot be helped. 

Elrohir was exhausted, and it is not long before Glorfindel’s song winds down. The door’s soft click heralds his return. 

Elrond opens his eyes and sits up straight. He catches a glimpse of a slender shape in the hallway as Ardil settles into standing guard before Elrohir’s door, before Glorfindel closes the great cabin’s door behind him.

“Elrond …” Glorfindel hesitates.

Elrond eyes his master-at-arms, the strong lines of his face a play of light and shadow in the wavering lamplight. Glorfindel is an Elf-lord of Aman. His endurance and mastery of his renewed body is near unto one of the Ainur, but now those shining eyes carry the faintest of shadows beneath them. He looks drained by great effort, body and spirit. Clearly he has poured much of himself into Elrohir. 

Glorfindel’s eyes are guarded as he watches Elrond for signs of displeasure. He does not smile. 

Sometimes matters are … complicated, between them. As the Elder King’s emissary, Glorfindel is Elrond’s one true peer in Imladris, and his elder, while at the same time he is a member of Elrond’s household. They both dance around the unspoken hierarchical complexities. 

Then understanding strikes Elrond. Glorfindel is wary of having displeased him with this obvious closeness to Elrohir. A closeness Elrond desperately wants and cannot have.

This cannot stand. Elrond rises to embrace the man who willingly went into darkness and brought out his son. 

“Thank you, my friend.” Elrond should say much more, words of eternal gratitude and friendship, of heaped honours and rich rewards, but those will come later.

Glorfindel pulls him in eagerly, his relief open in his mind. His grip is solid, strong with a swordsman’s muscle. 

“Thank you,” Elrond says once more. “For everything.”

“I reckon this is not how you imagined this day,” Glorfindel says as he steps back, still unsure of Elrond’s approval.

“My imagination ran to far worse things.” Elrond breathes. “Tell me all of it, if you will.”

“Would you not rather sleep? That was a hard journey you made.”

“I have made worse ones for lesser causes.” Elrond softens his eagerness with a smile. “I would know everything before he wakes tomorrow, so I may take better care of him.”

He turns to stand before the stern windows. From here he can see the Laegrist’s aftercastle. The waves below are flecked with golden light spilling from her great cabin, where no doubt at this very moment Galdor is giving his report to Círdan. 

“Let me ease the task for us both,” he says, lifting a cut-glass bottle from its protective box on the sideboard. “I rushed to Círdan’s gates with naught but a pack of waybread, but he brought his best single malt.” 

----

Glorfindel lowers himself into a chair at the table, and hesitates. Where to begin? What does one say? 

I found your son about to throw himself at a Ringwraith, which I chased. Not a week passed before he got himself trampled by a mûmak instead. After that I dragged him through the worst dregs of Black Númenor in a guise of glamour, but he leapt into the sea like his grandmother did, and was lifted up by Ossë’s own hand - no, his tentacle.

He suppresses a hysterical laugh, and watches Elrond pour two tumblers and set out a treat. Círdan’s cook remembers Glorfindel’s tastes from his days in Lindon, and sent over a platter of paper-thin slices of smoked salmon to go with the liquor. Clearly this is Círdan’s own tableware: silver-grey Lindon porcelain fine enough to let the light fall through to the table below, painted with elegant leaping dolphins in shades of indigo. 

“Thank you,” Glorfindel smiles, and lifts a salty bite. The salmon melts in his mouth, the comforting taste of the North. A smooth sip of whisky washes it down. He has delivered mission reports in worse circumstances. “It is a long tale indeed, a night’s worth at least, and not all of it easy to hear.”

He looks at Elrond, and finds him determined. Blue shadows pool beneath his eyes, and he has that waxy look that means he fretted through the night instead of getting the sleep he desperately needs after that mad ride he made. Elrohir takes after his father, in that respect. Glorfindel makes a note to intervene.

“Some of it I have already heard from Master Ruhiren,” Elrond says. “Elrohir returns from a dark place indeed.”

“Not all darkness,” Glorfindel leans back, glass in hand, and settles in, “but more of it than even Ruhiren knew.” He wonders what became of the wretched Mortal. A question for another day. 

Elrond and he have developed a comfortable osanwë between them over the long years. It lessens the need for speech. Glorfindel takes a deep breath. Elrond ’s deep-seeing eyes are on him, his mind close to his. Glorfindel willingly opens himself, so Elrond may see what he has seen.

The Haradrim and their war-ravaged desert. Amuk, their formidable general, who chose to let Glorfindel live, and who led him to Elrohir. 

“A good thing that Amuk introduced me. Elrohir did not know me, at first. He would never have trusted me otherwise.” 

Glorfindel does not say that Elrohir would have killed him. How to explain the terror of that war against impossible odds, the cruelty in its ever-present darkness? 

Then Elrond’s eyes meet his, all pain, and Glorfindel realises that Elrond knows. It is what Beleriand had become towards the end. Elrond would have given anything to spare his own child from it. 

“Elrohir led me to a place in the heart of the desert. A lone mountain amidst the dune-sea, and within it a cave. It should have been empty, but fear smothered it.”

Elrond’s eyes are glued to Glorfindel’s face. Glorfindel says it at once, without embellishment. 

“A Ringwraith. The Captain of the Nine himself. He lay in wait for Elrohir, expecting him to bring only Mortal companions, and easily capture him. ”

Even here, a world away and deep in Ulmo’s realm, his words darken the lamplit room.  

“Valar!” Elrond’s face drains of all colour, and he clutches the armrest of his chair. 

He remembers the Nazgûl well indeed. Mordor drove that home.

“So they haunt the world still! That is what I felt in Elrohir: the Black Breath. A terrible wound.” Elrond swallows. “Elrohir is brave to face such a foe.”

Glorfindel wishes he could allow the distraught father the joy of his son’s valour, unmarred by the bitterness of Elrohir’s impossible quest. 

“The courage of despair,” he says instead. “The war went ill for the Haradrim, and Elrohir had resigned himself to death in battle. It seemed better to him than being captured by Umbar.”  

“Oh, child…” Elrond somehow keeps himself from going to Elrohir. Opening the door would startle him badly. Instead he turns to the wall behind which Elrohir sleeps, and lays his hand against the polished oak as if he might touch his son through the planks. 

Glorfindel gives him a moment to steady himself before he shares their desperate battle in the cave, light against dark, and how in the end he maimed and chased the Nazgûl.

“He knows Elrohir’s name, but I also reminded him of mine.”

Elrond turns back to him, his eyes gleaming. “A deed worthy of song, my friend. I thank you.”

“I could not kill him,” Glorfindel says ruefully. “He fled, but he clings to his miserable half-life still, and his hatred of your House has only grown deeper. He will return to seek vengeance.”

He fortifies himself against the knowledge with another draught of peaty liquor. 

“Elrohir fears him greatly. This was not their first encounter. Judging by his nightmares, he has not told me the worst of it yet. I did what I could, but those foul dreams poison what peaceful nights he has, and he suffers terribly from them.”

“No more,” Elrond says, with dogged determination. Elrohir’s sleep will be guarded. 

They are silent, for a time, listening to the slow and regular breaths behind the wall, the lapping waves of Elrohir’s slumbering mind. Dreamless, for the time being. 

Then Glorfindel gently lays the enormity of it on the table between them, ugly and bare. 

“The implications … It is as you feared.” Glorfindel used to debate Elrond on this, ever the optimist. Now Elrond’s grim predictions prove true.

“And bitter it is,” Elrond says as he folds back into his chair, mournfully and without a trace of smugness. “If the Nine still haunt the world, Sauron’s Rings endure. They draw their power from him. He is neither dead nor vanquished.” 

Elrond raises his eyes to Glorfindel’s face. “Does Galdor know?”

Glorfindel looks him in the eye. Divulging such weighty intelligence to the Falathrim captain was a daring call, but he made it, and now he must account for it. 

“Galdor was at Barad-dûr. He remembers the Black Breath well enough. He knew what he was seeing the moment he laid eyes on Elrohir. I did not insult him by denying it.” He pauses. “Others aboard are as keen-eyed, and more inclined to wagging their tongues. There is no hope of holding back the news once these ships make port.”

Elrond breathes in deeply through his nose, then drinks another mouthful of whisky. “Círdan is being told as we speak. He will be dismayed.”

“Aye.” Glorfindel remembers Círdan’s anger when Elrond did not force Isildur to destroy the One, that fateful day on the slopes of Orodruin. 

Elrond rubs his red-rimmed eyes. “The White Council must meet.”

Hosting a conclave of crowned heads will take much of Elrond’s time. Círdan, King Amroth of Lórien, Celeborn and Galadriel, and King Thranduil of Eryn Galen all must be invited and received with proper honours before the ill news can be broken. 

And then there are the Mortal kings. Valandil of Arnor is Isildur’s heir, and Elrond’s closest neighbour, upon whose good will much of Imladris’ trade depends. Valandil should hear of Sauron’s resurrection from Elrond’s own mouth before the news makes its way to Fornost through other channels. And proud Cemendur of Gondor, whose southern borders look out upon the shadowed desert. 

Glorfindel sees Elrond blanch at the realisation: rallying yet another alliance against Sauron will call him away from Imladris, from the son who needs him so sorely. 

He thinks for a moment, then says, “you should not leave Elrohir while he is ill. Not unless Sauron himself marches forth and attempts to ford the Bruinen.”

Elrond grimaces. “Sauron’s plans are unripe yet. We will not see him move again for many years. The Ringwraith cost him the element of surprise when he revealed himself to you. A grave mistake. Sauron will make him rue it. He will not make another, but when his time comes he will strike.”

Even now, confronted with the worst, Elrond remains a master tactician.

“We will be ready.” Glorfindel says nothing more, but his mind is whirring with calculations. 

He must field more knights skilled in Song, and procure the steel for their armour. More archers, more warhorses, more well-forged pikes and the infantry to wield them. Strengthen the wandering companies that gather news from abroad. Find the silver to pay for all of it. Thank Aulë that Erestor’s clever trade levies have Imladris’ coffers brimming. He will begin as soon as they get home.

“Celeborn and Galadriel are doubtlessly on their way to Imladris, if they have not arrived yet.” Elrond takes hope. “We might as well inform them of the return of the Dark Lord. Galadriel can take charge. Surely Finarfin’s daughter is an acceptable head of the council.” 

“Thranduil has little love for her,” Glorfindel states the painfully obvious.

“Nor for me, so it makes little difference.” Elrond sighs. “Thranduil Oropherion will never forget the Dagorlad. He values Celeborn as an old compatriot, so he might be less sharp-tongued with Galadriel than me.” 

Elrond swirls the remnant of his whisky around in his glass, somberly watching the amber liquid. “When Sauron moves, he will do it in the East. We must mend fences with Thranduil, Glorfindel. At any cost. ” 

He throws back the glass' entire contents, and briefly closes his eyes when the burn of the alcohol hits him. When he opens them once more, his gaze finds Glorfindel’s. “Celeborn must be our peacemaker. He alone can make Thranduil see reason.”

Elrond the inveterate statesman, already scheming. Glorfindel smiles. It is only the barest outline, but they have a plan of action.

Elrond looks wan with exhaustion, but this is not the end of Glorfindel’s tale, not by far. 

“Eat.” He rises to place the platter of salmon before Elrond. “And drink.” He sets another glass down, this one heavily watered. 

Elrond does without protest. Feeding sickly Peredhel is Glorfindel’s specialty, of late. 

Song and raucous laughter drift down from the celebration on deck. A lively jig. Alphalas has broken out her fiddle, it seems. Beyond the wall Elrohir turns over, sighs, then sleeps on. 

Only when Elrond’s plate is half-empty and Glorfindel has poured himself another two fingers of whisky - neat - does he soldier on. 

Hamalan. The way Elrohir’s smile reached his eyes when she spoke. 

Elrond pales, but dares not interrupt the tale. 

Glorfindel shows him the great battle of the Haradrim against the Black Númenóreans. The steel-clad might of their marching legions. The gold-plated Mûmak bearing their general, a Prince of Umbar. 

The Haradrim camelry charge, brave and bright against overwhelming numbers. 

Hamalan’s death. Elrohir’s blind rage. His mad leap, bringing down the prince's brocaded  pavilion. His fall. 

Elrond sits frozen, his face a study in misery. 

Glorfindel is brief about his own part in making short work of the prince’s bodyguards, then the man himself. His search through the pavilion’s wreckage, pulling Elrohir out from beneath the splintered beams.  

He tries to hide the terrible wounds he tended, but Elrond demands to see every last miserable moment of it.  His healer’s hands ball in his lap. He will feel for the scar first thing tomorrow, if Elrohir allows it, to make sure it no longer pains him. Glorfindel knows for a fact that it does.

Glorfindel does not hide Elrohir’s grief when at last he rose from his sickbed. His mad insistence that they find Hamalan. Their fly-ridden search through the scattered charnel of the battlefield. The state of her when they finally did. 

“He loved her.” Elrond says it with terror in his eyes when he sees Glorfindel’s recollection of Elrohir kneeling before the Mortal woman’s cairn, his forehead leaning against the rough pile of red desert rocks as he sang her dirge. 

What memories of lost Elros are now flashing before Elrond’s eyes? 

Glorfindel wants to shake him, point out that Elrohir is not Elros. Elros’ Mortal love shared his long life and bore him children, while Elrohir’s died like a flower crushed before its bloom.

“He did not wed her,” Glorfindel says instead. “He did not choose the Gift of Men.”

“Not yet,” Elrond says only, and swallows the tears that shine in his eyes.

Glorfindel tries not to imagine that possibility, but he has seen Ereinion draw his last breath in Elrond’s arms. The king was burned and battered, grimed in the stirred mud of the battlefield. 

Elrohir would die in bed, the empty house of his body whole and lovingly tended, but Glorfindel’s memory readily supplies the image of Elrond’s face slack with sorrow as he rocked Ereinion’s corpse against him. Elrohir will be worse, still.

Glorfindel may offer so little comfort. The Choice of the Peredhel  looms over Elrond’s House like a shadow. Mortals leave the cares of their short lives behind as they pass beyond Arda, while memory eternal with all its griefs is the fate of the Elves. Will Elrohir choose to set down that burden and join her beyond the circles of the world? 

Glorfindel cannot say.

Elrohir has not Sung since Hamalan's dirge, save when Calear guilted him into it. Something has broken inside him, and Glorfindel knows not how to mend it. 

“He does not want to die,” he says matter-of-factly. “He fought hard enough, then and later.”

He looks at Elrond's glass, and decides against pouring him another. He will need a clear head in the morning. He has another swig of his own before he speaks of their secretive journey through Umbar to their rendez-vous with the Nemir . 

Yet another horror Glorfindel wishes he could spare Elrond, but the cruelty of he Black Númenóreans cannot be hidden. The dreadful city of Pellardur with its market where speaking people, Children of Ilúvatar, are bought and sold like cattle. The chains and bloody lash-marks and the weeping wails of those torn from their loved ones. The looming Temple of Melkor, smoke spiralling from the great louver that gapes in its dome of blackened silver. 

“Not the temple,” he reassures when Elrond goes pale with dread at the thought of his son chained to Morgoth’s altar. “Not the temple, though I think Elrohir passed through a similar foul auction shortly after he was taken, then served for some years as a thrall. Forgive him his fear of you, Elrond. That dreadful land is where they beat it into him.” 

Elrond’s gaze grows hard. “Has he told you what happened?”

Glorfindel swallows at the thought. “I have not been able to piece together the tale. I did not press him with questions while the answers were not needed yet.”

“We must ask him soon.” Elrond says. “Though I am loath to dig up yet more old sorrow. Others await as eagerly as we did.” 

“I know not how Elrohir will react,” Glorfindel says. “He is … unmoored. May I be there when you ask him? It would be easier on him, I believe.”

“That, and you wish to hear this firsthand.” Elrond gives him a knowing look.

There lies an old sorrow of Glorfindel’s, a debt not yet paid, and he means to settle it. “Elrohir’s guards were under my command,” he replies, firmly. “I owe their kin some answers.”

Elrond nods. 

Glorfindel goes on with his tale, watching as the moonlight that pours in through the window turns the sea outside to silver glass. 

He shows Elrond their meeting with the Nemir. The red-sailed ship giving chase. 

Elrohir’s terror when Glorfindel pressed him about the prize on his head. 

“He killed the emperor. He was not yet forty, and he killed the emperor. ” Elrond repeats it mechanically, the weight of the words sinking in. “How?”

“I do not know,” Glorfindel says. “When I asked him he was distraught, and begged me not to make him speak of it. It was the one small mercy I could grant him at the time.”

He sees Elrond mark it. Yet another foul wound to be cleansed and closed.

On Glorfindel goes. The Prince of Pellardur. Calear’s torment. Glorfindel walking across the plank. The Nemir’s losing battle against war-fire and overwhelming numbers. 

Elrohir’s climb aloft, his mad leap from ship to ship, his act of foolish bravery, offering himself as bait to save Glorfindel. 

“Praise Elbereth!” Elrond smiles, hope suddenly returning to his eyes. 

Glorfindel falls quiet, amazed. 

“Can you not see it?" Elrond's expression has thawed into open joy. "This is not the deed of a man indifferent to life. Elrohir cares so deeply for you. He remembers how to love, and there lies our hope! We must fill his heart, until despair is driven out.”

Elrond’s smile falters when Glorfindel tells of Elrohir’s plunge into the sea. The grief over his loss driving the Elves through that bitter battle that followed. 

Glorfindel shows Elrond Prince Bawbuthôr’s death, but skims over Elrohir’s last rites. Elrond does not weep, but it is a near thing.

Ossë raising the drowned. Elrohir’s slack body dredged up from the deep. Glorfindel giving Elrohir his breath. That long night spent at his bedside. 

And then, the aftermath - Calear and Elrohir, two battered souls holding each other up on the journey home. 

Silence falls as they both sit with their thoughts, quiet before the work ahead. Something slow and soft in a minor key filters down from the deck, a voice bright with sorrow lamenting those lost in long-ago wars.

Beyond the windows, the stars have run their bright arc across the sky. The moon is setting into the waves in a long runnel of silver. Soon Eärendil’s bowsprit will cleave the darkness and herald the coming day.

“Thank you,” Elrond says at last. “Thank you, my friend. For everything.”

“All gladly done.” Glorfindel pauses, swallows. He has been meaning to say this for a long time. “Thank you. For Elrohir, for trusting me with him.” 

He cannot put words to so profound a love for a child who is not even his by blood, but Elrond knows. 

They both think of that icy winter morning when Elrond placed a swaddled newborn in Glorfindel’s arms, careful as if Elrohir was made of spun glass. The twins were tiny, even for Elf-babes. He remembers his alarm at seeing how close Elrohir came to fitting within the sword-calloused length of his palm. Glorfindel was afraid that day. Afraid of not being enough. 

Then Elrohir was taken, and he knew his failure for a fact. 

Glorfindel is not one for self-pity. He mastered its siren-song long ago, but Elrond Peredhel can somehow look at him, and see his heart. 

“His loss was not your doing,” Elrond says softly. 

“I am the captain of the guard.” Glorfindel states the simple truth.

“I never laid it at your door,” Elrond says once more, like he did so many times. “Neither will Elrohir, when he hears the tale.” Elrond turns to look at him. “You were always worthy, and now you have proven it once more.” 

Glorfindel smiles. Here is Elrond Peredhel. His great heart, his deeply generous ability to see the absolute best in his people. 

Only then does the full weight of Elrond’s exhaustion strike him. His pale skin is waxy over his sharp cheekbones, and shadows pool blue beneath his eyes.

Glorfindel points at Galdor's bed in the corner of the cabin. “Now sleep,” he commands his liege-lord like he is a child in his charge before he catches himself at the habit. “Elrohir tends to rise with the sun. You have a few hours left.” 

Elrond rushes through a grey hallway. His running feet stir up the dust of ages. 

Doorways gape on either side, rectangles of darkness flashing past. The rooms beyond are full of whispers at the edge of hearing. Elrond does not stop to listen - that way lies madness. 

Ahead, Elrohir’s fleeing shape flickers in and out of sight as he runs past light and shadow. Elrond knows not if Elrohir is running from him, or something else entirely. He dares not look behind, where the whispering dark closes in. 

He is the faster, and with a wild stab of joy he reaches out his hand and grasps the trailing edge of Elrohir’s desert-coloured robe. Elrohir jerks around. His eyes are wide with horror.

When Elrond reaches out a hand to touch him, he shatters. Like ill-fired clay carried from the kiln will crumble in the potter’s hands, Elrohir’s face and form crack into shards and grit that runs through Elrond’s grasping fingers, smudging his face as he weeps.

The world shifts and jerks, and then he remembers his real eyes and opens them. 

Galdor’s great cabin lies pale and silent in the first grey of dawn. Elrond is alone. Glorfindel has gone across to the Laegrist , to join Galdor and Círdan for a nightcap and some diplomacy. 

Elrond sits up and rubs his tear-streaked face. Mortal sleep with its fractured kaleidoscope of disjointed dreams comes upon him but rarely. This night his exhaustion got the better of him. He prays it is just that, naught but the nightly surfacing of his deepest fear, a breaching sea monster rippling the dark waters of the mind. 

Oh Manwë and Varda, let it not be foresight!  

He turns to the stern windows. The gulls have awoken, and over the silver expanse of the firth the light is turning blue. 

He slides from Galdor’s bed and sits for a moment as he feels around in mind.

The ship is quiet. His son is on it. 

He must steady himself against the curve of the hull, dizzy with relief, unable to grasp so good a fortune. 

Then he notices it - Elrohir is awake. 

Elrond touches his mind to Elrohir’s as careful and unobtrusive as a herdsman approaching a wild colt. The outer layers are easily read - blue light shimmering on the waters, the cold of the morning air against his throat, the sea-wind in his face. Elrond does not probe deeper, wary of alarming him. 

He smiles and reaches for his tunic and belt, draped over a chair. He, too, is an early riser, and has always whiled away the blue hours of the morning by himself while Celebrian and Elladan slept until sunrise or far beyond. Perhaps he has found a kindred soul. 

He is already in the galley, watching the cook heft his great copper kettle to pour two cups of tea, when the man asks that simplest of questions. 

Elrond is struck silent. He does not know how Elrohir takes his. Or whether he likes tea at all. 

Such an absurd thing for a father not to know about his own son. He stands there for a moment, and watches confusion and dismay chase each other across the cook’s face as he freezes, kettle in hand. 

Elrond puts a quick end to the poor cook’s apologies, musters a friendly smile, and goes with honey and cream in one cup, plain tea in the other. Elrohir gets to pick.

Up on deck yesterday’s revellers have all found their hammocks. Only the night watch patrols the ship. Ardil lingers on the quarterdeck, his eyes resting on Elrohir. He has not been introduced yet, but is somehow managing to keep an eye on his charge without being noticed, no small feat in narrow shipboard quarters.

Elrohir sits out on the stern deck cross-legged, his back to the mizzen and his eyes on something only he can see, somewhere at the meeting of sea and sky. 

He rises at the sound of Elrond’s approaching footsteps, half-turns, smiling, seemingly expecting Glorfindel. Elrond can tell the moment he realises his mistake. 

Elrohir straightens. Stiffness creeps into his smile and the set of his shoulders. Then, with a measured, polite bow, “good morning.” 

He uses the formal inflection.

Elrond smiles through it. “Good morning.” Informal. “Please, do not bow.”

“As you wish,” Elrohir says. He remains standing, awaiting further orders. 

Elrond motions him back down, sits beside him, and offers him both cups of tea. 

Like a distressed bird, Elrohir’s gaze flicks from one cup to the other, alights on Elrond’s face for the briefest of instants before settling on a point somewhere beneath Elrond’s breastbone. 

He seems to think the choice is some kind of test, which he resolves with a determined hold on the plain one, leaving honey and cream to Elrond.

He does not drink before Elrond has done so. That wooden smile looks pleasant but opaque as a painted effigy on a warrior’s shield. 

Elrond tries to sweeten him with a bowl of little cakes. Círdan’s own bakeress is among the Laegrist’s galley staff, and she baked the crisp little mouthfuls overnight. They are still warm, wafting the scent of honey and spices. The child Elrohir once was would scoff these by the fistload whenever he could get a hold of them, all crumb-speckled smiles. 

This familiar stranger needs to be offered thrice before he politely lifts a single one between thumb and forefinger, slow and guarded as if Elrond is a wild wolf he must approach with careful restraint lest it strike at a rash move. If the taste stirs up any memories, he keeps them off his face.

Elrond has yet more to offer him. He has not handed over these treasures yesterday, only because he feared they would steal the sleep Elrohir so dearly needs. 

Now he passes him the letters from Elladan and Celebrían. The rolls of parchment are still wrapped in their sturdy leather cover, sealed with the star-shaped sigil of Imladris pressed into blue wax .  

“Here. Read them,” Elrond smiles. “They both have much to say to you.”

Elrohir takes the cylinder from him awkwardly, with wide eyes, and cradles it to his chest with one arm, seemingly hesitant to break the seals. 

“Aye, lord.” Elrohir nods. Something like dismay crosses his face before it settles into that vapid smile once more. “May I take them to my cabin?”

Elrond had hoped to be there as he read, to see his true smile at last. Instead he grants his son permission to depart like he would dismiss a company standing at attention, and remains to watch his retreating back.

----

The cabin door snicks closed behind him as the ship’s bell is rung for the day’s first watch. It sounds like a death knell. 

Elrohir looks at the leather tube with dread, knowing what it must contain. 

His fingers are clumsy with fear as he fumbles with the seal, and he has to stop and breathe against his rising panic. He should hold on to his wits. There must exist some path past these treacherous times. Somewhere through the quicksand runs an elusive trail that will lead him out to safety. Only with a cool head will he find it.

Slowly now. Snap the wax seal in two and loosen the silver-grey Elvish cords that so artfully bind the wrapping. What falls into his hand is the best kind of parchment. New, well-tanned calfskin soft as butter. With a sinking heart he unrolls both pieces. 

Númenórean letters dance before his eyes, row upon row as if some strange, impossibly elegant bird has hopped across the vellum. 

He knew this writing once, perhaps, long ago. No more. 

Hoping against hope for some impossible stroke of remembrance, he scans the length of both letters. The first lines must, logically, contain his own name. The last ones that of the writer, be it Elladan or Celebrían. He cannot make out either.

“Read them,” Elrond commanded, his very first order to his returned son. Elrohir must be seen to obey, somehow.

Pretending will not do. Without a doubt Elrond knows exactly what is in these letters, and he is bound to ask after it the moment Elrohir steps out of his cabin. Elrohir has no desire to learn what happens to fools who openly lie to an Elf-lord.

Elrohir has but one hope left: Glorfindel. Too bad he is on the Laegrist .

He thinks for a moment, then dives into his saddlebag. Amuk paid him his fair share in the spoils of war, but compared to all this Elvish wealth his purse is meagre indeed. He lifts an Umbarian silver castar from the leather pouch. He is loath to sacrifice the precious coin, not knowing what needs might lie ahead, but there is nothing else for it. 

The wheat-haired Elf must still linger in the hallway. He has trailed after Elrohir since he set foot on board at Elrond’s side, but there seems little friendship between the two. Elrohir has seen that much. Whoever sent this fellow, it is not Elrond, and Elrohir might exploit that division, whatever its nature.

“Hail, master!” Elrohir whispers into the dark hallway. 

The Elf steps to at once from where he stood, half-hidden in the shadows. It is frightening, the way he seems to spring forth from nothing at all. 

“Well met, Elrohir. My name is Ardil.” The guard has ancient eyes, but his smile is not unfriendly. His Sindarin is strangely accented, archaïc and melodious.

Elrohir motions him inside the cabin. Ardil follows.

“Well met, Master Ardil. Will you run an errand for me?” Elrohir asks in a low tone once the door falls behind them.  

Ardil gives him an inquisitive look. “What errand?” His eyes dart to the letters, lying open atop Elrohir’s sea chest. 

Elrohir swears inwardly, and summons some false bluster from he knows not where. “Head to the Laegrist ,” he says, watching Ardil’s face, “and bring Glorfindel to me. I must talk to him at once, but no one else is to know.”

Especially not the lord. He needs not say it out loud. Ardil understands well enough, of that he is sure. 

Ardil remains silent, waiting for Elrohir to say more, explain himself.  

Elrohir has no intention of doing so. “I will pay you for your trouble.” He produces a conspiratorial smile, letting the castar flicker between his fingers before he takes Ardil’s hand to slip it into his palm.

Ardil clenches his fist before he can slide in the coin. “I will gladly help you, but not for silver.”

For an instant they stand with eyes locked, too close together, while Elrohir imagines the horrifying possibilities of what this Elf might desire in exchange for his silence. Many spring to mind, all deeply unpleasant, and he steels himself against them. He will have to bear them and pay the man’s price, whatever it may be - he is in too deep now.  

Then Ardil steps back far enough that he leaves a foot of empty space between them, and holds up both hands, empty and unthreatening. “I am sworn to defend you, son of Celebrían. I took that oath before one who bears you great love, even if you no longer know it.” 

A pause, a searching look. “If you wish for counsel, I will give it.” Once more Ardil waits, but when Elrohir does not answer, he continues, “and any honourable thing you ask of me, I will do.”

“So you will find Glorfindel?” Elrohir asks, baffled by this unexpected reprieve.

“At once,” Ardil says. A flash of a smile lights his fine-boned Elvish face. “And for free.” 

He reaches for the door, and with only the slightest stirring in the hallway’s shadows, Ardil is gone. 

----

“He ordered me to read these, but I have forgotten the letters. Will you read them to me?” 

Elrohir thrusts Elladan’s letter into Glorfindel’s hands the instant he crosses the cabin’s threshold.

“I have a good head for messages. If you read them out once, I will remember.” He is rattling in Haradi, wide-eyed as if a stalking Nazgûl might leap from the scroll. 

Valar! Glorfindel keeps from wincing. Elrohir’s return proves riddled with pitfalls. He should have foreseen this particular one, and warned Elrond. Too late now. 

Glorfindel lets his eyes skim the letter in his hand, more to give himself time to think than with any intention of reading it, but quickly rolls the vellum closed and hands it back. This is a private thing, not meant for him.  

Elrohir does not take it, but pushes the roll back into his hands. “Please, Glorfindel! He is bound to ask me what was in them!”

“Elrohir …” Glorfindel struggles to sound kind, but determined, “Whatever words your father may have spoken, he did not mean to order . Let us go to him, and ask him to read these letters to you. You need not lie.”

“I do not. He will never ask me if I can read Númenórean, because he already thinks I can. What difference does it make if you teach me now?” 

“Elrohir …” Glorfindel falters. Elrohir is no liar. Even in Harad, Glorfindel has never seen him be anything but forthright. Elrohir likes his debts paid, his truths spoken, his promises fulfilled. To see him reduced to half-lies and deceit is heart-wrenching. 

“At least tell me the sound for each letter?” Elrohir whispers in rapid Haradi, a note of despair to his voice. “I knew them once. They will come back to me.” 

He kneels before his sea chest and bends over Celebrían’s letter resting upon it, his eyes darting back and forth across the calligraphed lines of her love and longing. Clearly he cannot read a word of it.

Glorfindel produces as reassuring a smile as he can manage while he contemplates this quandary. “Why not ask your father’s help?”

Elrohir’s head whips up. He stares as if Glorfindel just suggested that he throw a garden party and cordially invite the Zigûr.  

“Glorfindel, I beg you!” There is genuine panic beneath the words.

Glorfindel sits down, motions for Elrohir to come sit beside him. “Your father is kind. What do you fear he will do?”

Elrohir remains kneeling beside the chest. “What does he do when he is disobeyed?” His voice is hoarse with tension. “Do tell, because I am about to find out!” 

Understanding strikes Glorfindel. 

Umbar.

This is an old lesson, beaten into Elrohir’s bones. The lord is master of all life. His every whim is law. He must be pleased at any cost, or there will be blood. 

This cannot stand.

It comes to him then, what he should do. 

----

“Elrond, a moment please.”

The door to Elrond’s cabin opens before he can knock. “Glorfindel …  What is the matter? Elrohir had you summoned.” Elrond eyes him. “If he needs anything you have but to name it. What ails him?”

“Please come with me.” Glorfindel turns, and without looking back to see Elrond following him, he returns to the cabin where Elrohir seeks shelter from the eyes of his own people, whose ways have escaped him like mist through grasping fingers. 

Elrohir sits on the floor, like the Haradrim do, on the Nemir’s white-scrubbed planks. He has spread the letters out before him, still bent over them in muttering concentration as if literacy might strike him any moment if only he tries hard enough. 

When they enter he startles like a man caught at a crime. 

Elrond shoulders past Glorfindel and sits down beside his son, who bravely keeps himself from shrinking away. 

Glorfindel, too, sits cross-legged on the floor, and for a moment he wants to laugh at the absurdity of the three of them sitting like a gaggle of gossiping Wood-Elves.

Then Elrohir straightens himself. Glorfindel last saw that look of fey resolve on him when he challenged a Prince of Umbar. 

----

“You wished for me to read these messages, but I cannot. I apologise.” Elrohir’s voice comes out steady, but his eyes are wide with fear. “I cannot read Númenórean letters.” His hands clench in his lap, his gaze on the smooth white oak underfoot.

For a moment Elrond wonders at hearing Fëanor’s Tengwar called Númenórean. Then understanding strikes him, and it is all he can do not to weep.

Elrohir bows. Valar in the West, he bows .

It cannot be borne. 

When Elrond reaches for him, there is a horrible split second where Elrohir recoils,  convinced that Elrond means to throttle him. 

The next, Elrond has him in a proper embrace.

Touch renders Elrohir more familiar, less surreal. Elrond leans in, cups the back of his head and strokes the too-short tangle of his hair. It feels warm, and the cut ends are rough against his palm. It will be a while yet, before the length will be enough to wholly pull out the curl. Elrohir sits very still, but his breathing has slowed. 

His presence is easier to contain now that he can be touched. It seems almost believable that Elrohir is truly here, that Elrond is holding him. Ever since the coming of the gull he has walked as in a dream, afraid to even speak Elrohir’s name lest he break the spell and wake up to the familiar dread of emptiness and uncertainty.

This is his son. They are not at home yet, surrounded by the sheltering peace of Imladris, but for now, it is enough.

Elrond sits holding Elrohir for a long time, stroking his hair. Elrohir does not embrace him in return, but neither does he draw back. 

When Elrond opens his eyes, Glorfindel has gone.

“Will you sit with me later today?” Elrond says at last, when they are both upright again. “Your letters should return quickly if we work for some time each day. When we make port I will have school books brought from the city, to help you remember.” He is glad for something to keep Elrohir close, and keep him busy. 

“Thank you,” says Elrohir. His eyes dart to the letters, then quickly back to a point in the air before Elrond’s chest, as if Elrond might take them away if he draws his attention to them.  

“Would you like me to read them to you?”

Elrohir scans his face in search of mockery. When he finds none, he lowers his eyes once more. “Please.”

“Which one would you hear first?”

“Which one is Elladan’s?”

Elrond points, then holds out his hand for Elrohir to pass him the letter. Before handing it to him, Elrohir runs his fingers over the vellum, the touch almost reverent. Elrond recalls Elladan at his writing desk making a similar gesture before the seal went on, in awe of the parchment headed to the hands of his brother. 

Their separation gapes like a wound. This close to Elrohir, Elrond feels the pain of it beneath his own breastbone. A familiar agony.

Not long now, dear one. Let me help you bear it but a little longer. Then never again, I promise. 

Whatever else may come, his sons will be together. He will make sure of it.

Elrond has been a king’s herald. He knows how to read out a letter the proper way: that measured, even tone that lets the reader’s voice disappear so the writer's may be heard. 

He quickly skims the first paragraphs, then recites them from memory so he can raise his eyes to Elrohir’s face, and see the first smile bloom. 

“The Haradrim offer thrice, do they not?” Elrond’s eyes are on Elrohir as he pours two cups of wine. 

Clouds have rolled in, enfolding the Nemir in silvery twilight and rain clattering against the stern windows. Inside the great cabin the lamplight is a pour of warm gold around them. 

Elrond seems to think that something stronger than tea is called for, but surely a carafe of unwatered claret is an unusual schoolroom accessory even for Elves. The rest of his setup on the table seems more commonplace - a neat stack of wax tablets flanked by two styli, a roll of reed paper, an inkstone he must have borrowed from Galdor, carved in the shape of a ray breaching with its wings outstretched. Beside the writing implements sits a plate of sea-green Elvish porcelain, stacked with little cakes.

Elrohir now has enough skill at mind-speech that he can answer Elrond’s question with his thoughts alone, at once a simple yes and the knowledge shown in memory. He nods as well, more out of politeness than necessity.

Elrond’s approval is a bright little burst of radiance. Ever since the Laegrist’s coming, Elrohir is constantly aware of that thread of invisible light spun between them. He feels Elrond’s presence like he feels the sun even through closed eyelids, and Elrond knows the same of him. He should be afraid, and yet somehow there is a strange rightness to it.  

“In the North we do it but once, and you need not refuse unless you truly want none.” Elrond holds out the plate.

Elrohir takes a cake with measured care. Eating in the presence of an Umbarian prince would be a suicidal breach of protocol. He left that court long ago, and still he has to force himself to put the sweet into his mouth and chew it right there at the table, under Elrond’s eyes. His mouth is dry, and he swallows the crumbs too quickly to taste them.

Elrond watches him, but mercifully he does not comment. He waits for Elrohir to wash down the cake with some wine - which is very good, but very strong indeed - then takes one himself and holds out the platter once more.

“Here,” he says, with a smile that reaches his eyes. “Redhril makes them. She used to work for a friend of mine before Círdan poached her. My friend was furious . The recipe is her secret, and she has kept it for an age of the world. They really are delicious.”

He is not wrong. Elrohir has another, more slowly. Ginger, cinnamon and honey burst into his mouth. 

Elrond grins conspiratorially as he snatches one more and pushes the plate back towards Elrohir. “Between you and me, I think we can finish the plate.”

Somehow he looks disarming, enough so for Elrohir to chance a third, which he chews with gusto. 

Elrond’s eyes light up. “You and I might learn from each other,” he says, still smiling. “I would like to know more Haradi. My teacher did not speak it well.”

Only one man could have taught Elrond that language, and until recently Elrohir was convinced that he had killed him.

Ruhiren. Eru save the poor fool!  

Elrohir hesitates, breathes in as if to speak, then decides against it, but Elrond is already leaning in to listen. 

“If you please …”  Elrohir waits until Elrond has nodded his permission. “How is Ruhiren?”

Elrond smiles. “Better than he was. His journey north was a hard one. He has been a guest in Imladris since he arrived, and he seems to be on the mend.”

“Thank you for looking after him.” A moment’s hesitation. “I thought he was dead.”

If Elrond knows what befell between Elrohir and Ruhiren, he does not show it. “He sends his greetings. You will see him again when you come home.” He looks at Elrohir, then mercifully changes the subject. “He told me you read and write the letters of the Haradrim?”

“Aye,” Elrohir nods cautiously, unsure if he is about to be scolded. 

“Will you teach me?” Elrond asks, all eagerness. 

“Of course.” Elrohir manages as he tries not to stare in astonishment. Elrond seems in a good mood, and so he dares to ask, “why? No one here uses them.”

“ You are here.” Elrond says decidedly. “Languages shape our minds. They are a way of looking at the world. I would like to understand yours better, and return ours to you.” 

Elrohir shifts beneath the weight of Elrond’s focused attention. He is not used to such a thing spelling anything good. Elrond knows it. With his mind he drapes warmth around Elrohir’s. Somehow, it does not feel like a fly being spun into a web. Elrond’s touch wraps him like a cloak on a cold morning, one he can freely shed whenever he should want to. 

“Which languages do you speak already?” Elrond asks, smiling. 

“Haradi, Adûnaic, some Sindarin, and Khandish,” Elrohir says quickly, hoping that Elrond might see some use for them.

“Khandish?” Elrond is clearly intrigued. “How did you come by it?”

“The tribes of Khand trade silk and gemstones with the Haradrim.” Elrohir keeps his answer concise, but at once Elrond’s curiosity gives a bright little tug at his mind. No force behind it, no demand, but all the more eagerness.   

Elrohir obliges, and for a moment he loses himself in the giving of the memories. Men and camels small as ants as the caravan moves across a vast expanse of emptiness, wide beneath the sky. Lions and great-horned kine and other beasts beyond Western imaginings. A red sunset shimmering with heat. Silver curtains of rain breaking over dusty plains. Songs never heard by Eldar ears. 

Elrond sees through his eyes, and drinks it in like a thirsting man. “I will gladly learn all you wish to tell me,” he says eagerly, “and I will teach you Sindarin, spoken and written.” 

Elrohir nods, but Elrond shows no signs of slowing. “After that you might learn Quenya, the language of some of your kin both in Middle-earth and over the Sea. Vanyarin is Glorfindel’s cradle-tongue. He would enjoy speaking it with you. Then there is the speech of the Dwarves, and many Mannish ones.” 

He lays out the languages as if Elrohir and he are a pair of children at play, trading coloured pebbles. 

“Thank you,” Elrohir says, a little overwhelmed.  

Elrond holds out his cup, sealing their strange bargain with a toast. Elrohir has no choice but to follow suit. The wine tastes of spice and sunlit orchards. It leaves him warm and dizzy, in a pleasant way.

Elrond tops up Elrohir’s cup and feeds him his fourth biscuit before he begins the lesson proper. 

“All these tongues are written in the same letters, the Tengwar. Before you learn them you should know how they came to be.” 

Elrohir sits up straighter. He may have lost his taste for song, but he is a bard still, and he likes few things better than a good story. Glorfindel has told him many, and it seems Elrond is taking up the habit as well. 

“There once lived an Elf named Fëanor. He was the eldest son of a king, a prince of great magnificence, but also a scholar. As a young man he wrote in the old letters, called Sarati, but he was not satisfied. He thought they might be improved.” 

Elrond has a pleasant voice, and he keeps his cadence slow enough that Elrohir can puzzle out the Sindarin sentences as he hears them.  

“Fëanor designed new letters, very clever ones, whose shapes showed the manner of their speaking, so that by seeing the ink on paper one may know how a word will sound, even in a language never heard before. 

“These letters we call the Tengwar, or Fëanorian letters. They were so well-crafted that not only the Elves, but many other kindreds adopted them for their own writing. Some among the Dwarves did, and Men, too. This is how the Tengwar came to Númenor and from there to Umbar, but they are not Númenórean.”

Elrond pauses, to emphasise the point. 

Elrohir feels the tips or his ears go warm with both wine and embarrassment. There will be no more talk of Númenórean letters, that much is clear. 

“Fëanor must be proud,” he blurts out, just to fill the silence.

“He was proud indeed.” Elrond does not smile, but his mind is warm against Elrohir’s. “Fëanor excelled at every art and skill he turned his hand to, and those were many. He was the cleverest, craftiest and fairest of all Elves.” 

Elrond pauses, and his eyes seek Elrohir’s. “Never shall his like be seen again,” he says, and falls silent.

Elrohir breathes in slowly. Here is a challenge. Elrond is dangling the story in front of him like the lure for some skittish animal, drawing him out. Ask or not.

He bites. “What became of him?” 

The sound of Elrohir’s voice brings a smile to Elrond's face. He gives both their cups another generous pour from the carafe. Elrond drinks, and Elrohir must follow. His cheeks glow with it by now, but Elrond seems unaffected. 

“Here,” Elrond’s eyes are merry as he holds out the plate once more. “Nothing like wine and cakes to put some flesh on hungry bones.”

Nothing will do but for Elrohir to have yet another one. At this rate he will end up as fat as an Umbarian priest.

Elrond’s expression grows sterner as he resumes his tale. “Fëanor’s renown made him haughty and pitiless. When he was slighted, he sought vengeance recklessly. Driven by a mad oath he shed innocent blood, and destroyed much that was fair.” A shadow of pain fleets through the weave of Elrond’s mind, but he quickly masters it. 

“In the end, Fëanor rode into battle in a fit of dark rage. None of his people could change his course, be it by counsel or by pleas. He brought too few companions against a foe too great for him. Thus he was slain.”

Elrohir looks aside. “The cleverest of all Elves?” 

Only then does he catch himself. 

That damned wine!  

He forgot who he is speaking to, blurting out wry banter as if this is Glorfindel. The cabin is suddenly airless as the taut focus of danger comes over him. He stills in his chair, ready to dodge in case Elrond means to box his ears for his insolence. 

Elrond only laughs, a silver sound that brightens the cabin. “I did not call him wise.” 

Elrohir’s relief makes him bold. “Did you know Fëanor?” he dares. He must make the most of Elrond’s openness - Glorfindel was rarely this forthcoming with Elrohir’s questions. 

“He died long before I was ever thought of, but I knew two of his sons.” Elrond pauses, but seeing Elrohir’s fascination, he continues. “Maedhros and Maglor were their names. They were once great princes and captains of the Noldor, but by then they had become shadows of their former selves, consumed by their ill deeds in the name of that terrible oath. They came to bad ends.” 

Elrond does not say more, but it is plain to see that the loss grieves him. 

“Apologies. I did not mean to pry.” Elrohir has already begun a deep and formal bow. He stills halfway through when he remembers that Elrond dislikes them. 

Elrond raises his hand, waits, and when Elrohir does not flinch he cups the wine-flushed skin of Elrohir’s cheek. His touch is light and cool, and it brings their minds even closer. The sensation is not unpleasant. 

“You did not pry, Elrohir. Whatever you wish to know, you may ask. I will answer, always.” 

Elrond releases him, takes up a wax tablet and holds out the stylus for Elrohir to take. “Now, will you show me some Haradi?”

----

Glorfindel descends through the foredeck grate, down two decks to the cabin that houses the Laegrists’s brig when Círdan goes pirate-hunting. The ship’s carpenter hung a proper door to replace the usual grid of steel bars, but the iron bolt remains, be it unlocked. When he knocks, the door swings open at once. 

“Welcome, sir!” Canissë gives him a smart salute. 

Glorfindel salutes back, and then he must bow his head to clear the lintel as he steps inside. 

Smells of burned lamp oil and close-quartered bodies stand thick in the windowless, red-lit gloom, but Canissë has shed none of her spit-and-polish style of command. Glorfindel gave his lieutenant the courtesy of advance warning, and now he could eat his dinner off either the floorboards or the rough-hewn planks of the tightly made bunks. 

The Fëanorian guard stands at attention. Their boots gleam, tunic buttons fastened to the throat, not a hair out of place in their perfect regimental braids. They would present their arms, had they been allowed to keep them.

Glorfindel is glad to see them - these are all old and loyal hands, the backbone of Imladris’ armed forces. Elrond and what he carries are well protected. 

Every eye is on him, the silence heavy with tension. It seems the cook’s aides who bring the Fëanorians their hardtack have not deigned to share much news. Glorfindel wishes he had thought of sending someone down here sooner. 

He limits himself to the essence of the matter. “Elrohir took a bad wound in Umbar, but his father has tended him and he seems to be improving.” 

Stern faces break into smiles. 

“Lord Elrond thinks it best that Elrohir remains on the Nemir for the remainder of the journey. The Laegrist is escorting her to the Havens. She will make port tonight.”  

The company all sag a little at the prospect of yet more confinement. Setting the Fëanorians loose on the streets of Mithlond on the wine-soaked night of the Nemir’s triumphant return is asking for a brawl, a beating, or worse.  

Glorfindel is quick to reassure them. “We of Imladris will disembark before that, at the king’s old lodge across the bay. Lord Círdan has loaned us the house for the duration. We will staff and secure it ourselves.” 

Glorfindel can almost hear their collective sigh of relief. 

He turns to Canissë. “You are familiar with the place. Draw up rosters for guards on every entrance and scouts on the perimeter. Lord Elrond is in your hands. Ardil shall take charge of Elrohir.” 

Canissë has been Elrond’s bodyguard ever since his sojourn with the Sons of Fëanor. She is clearly relieved to have him back under her wing.

“Have a care around Elrohir.” Glorfindel has no desire to lay out the list of Elrohir’s many misfortunes, but the guard must have some warning. Ardil handled Elrohir’s strange behaviour with grace, but Glorfindel does not care to repeat the experiment with some hot-tempered Fëanorian swordsman. “Remember that he finds himself among strangers. He recalls nothing of our ways, and he has been ill-treated. Do not give him reason to fear you. Never touch him, not even in jest. When there is trouble, fetch Elrond or me at once.

He needs not elaborate. The Fëanorians are all veterans of the War of the Jewels, and they have seen much sorrow in the evil days.They long ago learned not to startle a newly freed prisoner. Learned the hard way. 

Canissë sends him a look of unveiled concern. Glorfindel knows the tale: that scar running white and jagged down her cheek marks a frenzied jab from Maedros’ bread knife. She would have lost the eye, had Maglor not had the foresight to blunt his brother’s cutlery. 

“The Haradrim are like Wood-elves,” Glorfindel says in an even, conversational tone. “There is always another knife. Elrohir is never unarmed, and when frightened, he will draw. Beware.”

Canissë was already standing at perfect attention, but now her shoulders straighten. Her stony expression does not change. “Where?” 

“Belt, boot, one or both sleeves. More in his bag.” 

“He would surrender them if you ordered it.” Canissë’s tone is soft and low, but her suggestion is no less pressing for it.

“Perhaps. But he would never trust me again.” Glorfindel speaks a painful truth. Elrohir’s faith is gossamer-delicate, so easily lost. “Lord Elrond is trying to have him hand over the weapons willingly, but he needs time.”

“Elrohir could kill someone before that.” Canissë does not mince her words. “One bad dream and he might skewer the night guard.”

Most Elves speak of kinslaying only in euphemism and carefully couched whispers. Not the Fëanorians. Three bloody-handed massacres have rendered the unspeakable almost banal, robbing them of the need to sugarcoat their deeds, or anyone else’s. 

Glorfindel looks her in the eye, unflinching. “Your task is to make sure he does not,” he replies, layering his authority beneath the words. 

“As Lord Elrond commands.” Canissë will do anything for Elrond. Even this.

Glorfindel smiles, deliberately changing the mood to something merrier. “You will soon see the stars again - and then Imladris will show the Falathrim how it is done!” 

“Aye, sir!” fifteen voices boom at once. 

Chapter End Notes

And so Elrohir gets his first lesson, in history rather than reading, but he also learns a thing or two about Elrond. And the Fëanorians can finally look forward to freedom.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about both Elrond's boozy educational methods and the upcoming Fëanorian Liberation. Comments make a writer's day!
See you soon for the next one,
IS

The sun sinks away into the West as the Laegrist and the Nemir anchor side by side in the blue twilit bay. The ships’ lanterns throw circles of pale gold upon the waves, and in the eastern sky the first stars begin to blossom.  When Elrond steps on deck, he walks into a dream of the past.  This hunting lodge was once Ereinion’s escape from the burdens of rule. The last High King of the Noldor built his solitary retreat large enough for comfort, but too small to admit the pomp and pageantry of court. The house perches alone on its green peninsula jutting into the Firth of Lindon. A low building of cream-coloured stone, wrapped in cloisters open to the wide sea. The forest of oak and  beech that shelters it from the wind is older than many kingdoms of Men. A scatter of stables and outbuildings lie half-hidden amidst the trees. A footpath winds down to a crescent beach, a pier of white wood, a moored longboat pale in the falling dusk. Light twinkles golden from the house’s windows.  Elrond stands still amidst the shipboard bustle, struck by lingering ghosts. He spent many merry days in this house, chasing hart and boar at Ereinion’s side, first as the king's ward learning statecraft, later as his vice regent. And through all that, as his friend. Ai, such loss! But this is not the time to grieve it.  He has not set foot here since those frenzied days when Ereinion put his affairs in order before setting out from Mithlond’s white gates on that campaign into hell the minstrels would later call the Last Alliance. With the clarity of hindsight, Elrond now sees that Ereinion understood that he would not return. For all Elrond had known, the house had been left to gently crumble back into the forest like so many places haunted by Ereinion’s memory. Erenion must have bequeathed the place to Círdan. The Lord of the Havens prefers to do his hunting by ship, but it seems he nonetheless took a liking to the old lodge, because clearly it has been kept in order.  As one of his many kindnesses to Elrond, Círdan has lent him the house. Elrond is deeply grateful once more. It is a wise choice, allowing him to bring Elrohir to this place of calm solitude. A city full of merry mariners eager to celebrate his return would overwhelm him.   Elrohir looks almost translucent when he appears on deck to say his goodbyes to the crew. Elrond’s touch has borne up his spirit, but it shines through his faded form like a lamp through misted glass. The threads between spirit and body are worn gossamer-thin.  Elrond should be saying his own farewells, but he cannot keep his eyes from straying to his son, as if he might catch Elrohir’s fleeing fëa like a child cups a butterfly in the hollow of its hand, if only he is quick enough.  The crew have gathered on deck to see their passengers off, and the mood is mirthful. Once Elrond and his company disembark they have but a little further to sail to the lamplit quays of Mithlond twinkling across the bay. Home and kin await the heroes’ victorious return.  “This is not farewell!” Círdan laughs with deliberate cheer, seeing Elrohir’s sorrow at yet another parting. “We shall have a feast soon!” Elrohir bows and thanks him with the formal Sindarin turns of phrase he practised so painstakingly. Once he has uttered them, he knows not what to do with such a great lord. Círdan understands, and fills the silence with gracious words of parting and the promise of merry reunions to come.  Galdor’s face is soft with fondness as he lays an arm around Elrohir’s shoulders. Retrieving Elrond’s lost son and bearing him home in triumph is a fine feat for the Nemir’s captain, but Galdor has a genuine care for his young passenger. The feeling is mutual - Elrohir will never forget Galdor’s words and deeds when faced with the Corsairs. He is distraught at the parting. Alphalas encloses him in a rib-cracking hug, which he returns. Elrond does not quite catch what she whispers to him, but for an instant he smiles, a brief flash of real mirth. It makes him look even more like his mother. Elrond wonders if Elrohir’s laugh will sound like Celebrían’s. He does not let himself think that he might never hear it. To Falver, Elrohir bows, and thanks her once more with few words but sincere ones. At the last Elrohir comes to Calear. He does not embrace, probably for fear of jostling Calear’s broken hands, but he speaks to him in soft Adûnaic, and passes him a gift - a flat package wrapped in linen. It rattles when he hands it to Falver, who stands beside her patient. Calear grins and thanks Elrohir with some witty word that returns Elrohir’s smile to his face. Elrond’s eyes meet Glorfindel’s with a look of knowing regret. Elrohir has so little. Ardil unloaded but a single battered saddlebag for him. Among the Haradrim he was fortunate, perhaps, in owning a war camel and the weapons with which to ply his soldiers’ trade. By Elvish standards he has fewer possessions than a wandering Wood-elf. There is no need for him to provide gifts from what meagre belongings he does have, all of them held dear in memory. Elrond will show all the Nemir’s crew his gratitude, Calear especially. Whatever Elrohir just handed to Calear must be some valued item he will come to miss. It is too late to stop him now, and to try would be a blow to his pride.  At last there is nothing left to say, and with clear trepidation Elrohir follows Elrond down the rope ladder into the longboat with the warriors of Imladris. He eyes the Fëanorians warily - to his eyes they are a crowd of grey-cloaked strangers, every last one armed to the teeth, their bright Elvish gazes trained on him. Ardil’s eyes have not left Elrohir, and now he manoeuvres himself onto the bench right behind him. Canissë and one of her Fëanorians make way unasked.  A gentle breeze picks up and ruffles Elrohir’s unbraided hair like playful fingers. The wind carries the scents of Lindon, wholesome as only a land long-beloved by Elves can be. Good dark earth and green things growing and clear streams singing their way down from the mountains to the sea.  Elrohir has lived so long in lands under the press of Shadow woven through the very soil, that he has lost all hope of its lifting. He shows nothing more than a small hitch in his breath, but his eyes widen with the shock of bewildered relief that lights up his spirit.  Elrond wishes he could reassure his son, but in his confusion it is Glorfindel whose gaze Elrohir seeks with his own, and Glorfindel whose easy smile soothes him into stillness once more.  Elrond looks away, pressing down the stab of hurt, but Glorfindel’s eyes are on him at once. No more. Glorfindel’s thought rings calm and clear against his own, his mind wholly made up. Tonight, I will pass him to you.     On the shore, a procession of lanterns moves down the path to the beach, and in the house voices pick up a song of welcome. The oars go down, and behind them the Nemir slowly fades into the falling night. ---- This Elvish land is not like other lands.  With every swish of her white oars, the longboat carries Elrohir deeper into strangeness. Dusk is falling, and yet the fading daylight seems clearer, the first stars bright as silver blossoms overhead, their fire more vivid than he ever saw them even in the desert night. The air is cool and fresh against his face, bearing a green scent of living things.  Somehow it all seems more … alive, and yet unfathomably ancient, years upon years washing over him like the waves wash the white beach ahead.  Sorcery, no doubt.  He should flee, but instead something deep within him, some soul-deep yearning left unsated for so long he grew numb to the pain, now springs to life, roaring for him to leap from the longboat and wade ashore and fall to his knees to press himself against the living earth of this strange land.  He remains seated - the Elves already think him half-mad. Ruining a good pair of boots would convince them he has lost what remains of his marbles. “What is this place?” he whispers to Glorfindel under his breath, his eyes on the apparition on the cliff above them, less of a house than a sculpture of soaring arches winding itself around the trees that grow around and within.   Glorfindel only smiles, and says nothing.  “A hunting lodge,” Elrond answers him instead. “We may use the house until Calear is healed and you are fit to travel.” He points across the darkening waves, where the Nemir is turning her swan-shaped bow towards the lights twinkling across the bay. “The city is but a short sail away. You will see your friends often while we stay here.” Elrohir makes himself smile, but Elrond sees what lies behind.  “What worries you?” he asks, his tone gentle. Elrohir hesitates, but Elrond does not look away. He calmly waits for however long it may take for Elrohir to speak his mind. “Is it enchanted?” Elrohir blurts out. “The house? No,” Elrond replies decidedly. “What you sense is Lindon itself. The Falathrim love their home, and they have lived here for a very long time. Lord Ulmo is their friend, and His blessing, too, rests upon the land. It remains part of Middle-earth, but it is, perhaps, closer to what the world would have been without the Darkness.”  “Is it dangerous?”  “Not to you.” He pauses. “Why do you think so?” Elrohir struggles for words. “It seems … alive.” “Elvish lands have their Song. Imladris is much the same, though less ancient.” Elrond looks sad, somehow. “I hope you will come to love it as you once did, and weave it in with your own Song when you find it again.” Elrohir has heard enough to know that when Elrond says Song , what he means is spell . Nightmarish tales of White-fiends and their sorcerous wiles come roaring back. This Song of his will change me. The thought strikes him with complete certainty, as clear as the stars overhead. Elrond turns to look at him, and with a start he realises that Elrond perceives his mind. Elrond’s mind is gentle against Elrohir’s, but he makes no denial. Would you remain as you are now, torn in two and hurting? You are not meant to feel like this. Behind the thought lies compassion, but eagerness, too.   Elrohir shudders. But the longing - oh, how he has missed these bright stars and the song and the clean light that washes over the land! The rowers bring the boat beside the white wooden pier, and Elrond lightly leaps ashore.  Elrohir follows, but the instant his feet hit the planking the world twists and tilts and he stumbles. The land’s Song surrounds him and fills him and it is at once familiar and wholly unknown, ancient and new-made, and so much . At once Elrond hooks his arm through his as if he is some courtly lady, or an invalid. Too overwhelmed to be offended, he lets himself be led down the pier to the shore. The land, too, sways beneath his feet. “Easy now,” Elrond says, his voice light and calm as he  lowers Elrohir down to the ground. “You have been away for years. You will grow used to it soon.” Elrohir rests his head on his knees and buries his hands in the grass. The last land he touched was some desolate, windswept beach in Umbar. Only now does he understand how choked with shadow that place was. It seems so long ago, as if it happened to somebody else. When the world stops spinning he looks up, and finds Elrond standing before him, his hand outstretched. Elrohir takes it, and is pulled to his feet.  “Welcome home, Elrohir,” Elrond says, and leads him up the path to the house. ---- Elrohir closes his eyes and sinks into hot water up to his neck. Elves are like Umbarians in some ways, and an uncanny skill at building baths is one of them.  The sunken pool with its tiled bench could seat six at the least, but he has been allowed to use it alone, no doubt out of deference to the customs of the Haradrim. The water spouting from a gleaming, fish-shaped tap in the wall is plentiful, clear as a mountain spring and just short of scalding, an almost-painful perfect heat, fresh with the faint pleasant scent of some northern herb he recognizes, but cannot name. The room holds neither hearth nor brazier, but the floor itself radiates a luxurious warmth. Eru knows how they do it, but it sure is nice. Elrohir usually tries not to dwell on the scatter of scars that came to litter his body over the years, but now their constant press of ever-present pain falls silent. He sighs, leans back with his head resting on the perfect slope of the pool’s wide edge, and allows himself to simply float with his thoughts. Whoever owns this house is an important man. The domed bathing chamber is small, but intricate as a jewellery box. Glossy tile mosaics wrap the room in the boughs of a flowering tree, each leaf and blossom perfectly rendered in green and gold. The white doves perched on the branches seem so vivid he can almost hear them coo. Overhead stars of inlaid silver  glisten between the topmost branches, sharp and clear against a sky of deepest indigo. A band of impossibly fine calligraphed Tengwar loops around the entire room, repeating a motif of two entangled letters. He recognizes them now - GG.  Whoever G and G may be, they own riches worthy of the Emperor of Umbar, save that the Emperor would never bathe without more slaves to attend him than could fit inside this room. Elvish magnates must scrub their own backs.    Elrohir scoured himself from head to toe before entering the pool - he knows not who will next use this water once he is done, but he is no boor, to sully it with a year’s worth of dirt. Baths were few and far between in a Haradrim war-band, and soap a distant dream.  Glorfindel’s fondness for the stuff proves a common Elvish trait, rather than a personal peculiarity. Mother-of-pearl boxes fill an entire shelf with various kinds of every possible colour and scent, along with an array of cut-glass vials holding fragrant liquids, the use of which he can only guess at. Something to do with hair, no doubt. Then the thought strikes him.  Hamalan would have loved this.  Elrohir once garrotted a particularly sweet-smelling Umbarian officer, and when he looted the man’s corpse he found a porcelain perfume bottle shaped like a bird in the breast-pocket. She laughed when he gave her the trinket, and said there was no call for the likes of her to smell like an imperial concubine. She did wear it, though, until the very last drop ran out. He recalls the scent - jasmine and roses - as if it were only yesterday.  No. He must not dwell on her. Deep within his chest sits a bottomless lake of grief, and he must not let it rise to the dam that holds back the flood wave, lest it drown him. He allows the rush of biting sorrow to roll over him, breathes, rubs his eyes, and fights it off. It will not do to linger in the bath spilling useless tears over what cannot be changed, and bring some Elvish guard swooping in to check if he has drowned.  He rises, the room’s warm air perfectly pleasant after the hot water, steps onto the heated tiles, and wraps himself in a towel.  The changing room is cool and quiet, tiled in silver-edged waves of sea-green and azure chasing one another across the walls. His clothes have been taken by some silent attendant, and clean ones left in their place.  He dresses himself in the device of Elrond’s house, takes up a comb from the many intricate ones provided, and begins to wrangle his hair into a semblance of Elvish order.  ---- Cirdan’s people have made up Ereinion’s apartment for Elrond.  Glorfindel walks into the many-coloured marvel of the dining room’s frescoes, and for a moment he is dazed with memory. How many evenings did he spend beneath this star-speckled ceiling of arched stone?  Long hours of amicable debate, the Sea singing beyond the open windows as the last High King of the Noldor sat cloistered with his general and his herald, bent over maps and reports and the ledgers of Lindon’s war chest. He loses himself before the windows, staring out at the ever-moving waves. The view has not changed, while the king burned and his realm fell to ruin. He struggles to shake the webs of the past and pull himself back to the here and now.  If Elrohir notices Glorfindel’s absent-mindedness, he does not comment on it. He has eaten little of the delicious welcome dinner, and emerged from the bath in that quiet, almost sullen mood that means he is miserable and desperate to hide it. Glorfindel knows not to ask - questions will only clam him up like an oyster. Elrond knows it, too. “We will sleep here,” he says instead, and opens a side door.  The king’s bedroom lies adjacent. Ereinion’s great mahogany bed remains, but in the corner another bed has been made up for Elrohir. A good setup, both for the healer tending his patient day and night, and the anxious father who needs his child close.  All very kind and well intended, but Elrohir warily eyes the open folding doors that lead to a wide sea view, no doubt seeing how easily a foe might leap through. The king’s lodge was built like a jewel in its setting, open to the sea air and wide views of the beauty around it; not to withstand a siege.  Elrohir found no peace out in the desert, where the Ringwraith haunted the night. Only the certainty that Glorfindel was awake and standing vigil allowed him a few snatches of fitful rest. He grows uneasy when he cannot see the one keeping watch - a soldier’s habit Glorfindel knows all too well.  He turns to Elrohir, eager to interrupt his fretting. “Ardil will be outside. He will guard you well, and there are others, too, beyond sight. Lindon is a safe land. Sleep without fear.” Elrohir can do no such thing, but he is too cowed to protest.  “Goodnight, Glorfindel,” he says, hesitating. “Goodnight, Elrohir.” Glorfindel understands all too well. He must draw back a little, and allow Elrohir to grow closer to his own father. To keep from imposing on the family, Glorfindel offered to head to the city with Círdan, but Elrond was adamant that he come. He is glad to be in the house now. Elrohir looks lost enough already with Glorfindel just down the hallway.  He can hardly bear the thought himself.  He has barely let Elrohir from his sight since their first meeting. He has guarded and guided him by day and watched over his sleep each night, all his will and all his strength consumed by the single task of bringing him home.  Now it is done.  Tonight, for the first time since Glorfindel found him, a world away amidst the desolation of Far Harad, Elrohir and Glorfindel will part. 

It has been long since Elrohir last slept beneath a roof of stone. This one has lofty arches in the shape of branching vines, but the weight of it presses down, cutting him off from the stars. Even in the darkest depths of war he has never been without their comfort. The loss is a jarring ache, like a wound. Aboard the Nemir , Glorfindel would let him spend the night on deck whenever he wanted to.  He does not know if he is allowed to leave this room, and he dares not try. Elrond’s guards have an air of danger about them. Stern and fierce they seem, these Elf-warriors; more fey than the Falathrim, with keen blades and eyes bright with a light that is not wholly of this world. Running afoul of them would be the last thing he ever does.  In the other bed Elrond himself has gone quiet. He lies with open eyes, sunken into that strange Elvish dream-state. Sharing a cabin with Glorfindel taught him that such sleepers -if sleep it can be called- are lightly woken.  No matter. Elrohir knows how to be silent. The windows paint strips of starlight onto the flower-tiled floor. He takes one of the down feather blankets that lie piled on the mattress, drapes it around himself, and sits down within the stripe of silver, his back against a carven pillar. The stones’ chill seeps into his bones, but he has spent nights in worse spots.  The very skies are strange here, so many unfamiliar constellations he can hardly tell which way is north, but from his new vantage point he finds amidst the unknown stars the Resting Lion spanning its slow arc against the sky. The sight brings him the comfort of an old friend returned, if only for a moment. This far north the constellation sits low on the horizon. Soon it will wheel out of sight, so he must not let his eyes stray from it, nor his thoughts.  The dream comes to him regardless. He is alone in the dark, but the night comes alive and it seeks him, ever-hungry. She is screaming, somewhere in the distance, and he knows the dark has taken her, that it will devour her and spit her out a woundless corpse with staring eyes.  The Eye. The Eye. I shall take you to the Eye. The shadows mutter and rave, over and over until those terrible words burn in his mind.  He runs, but the earth is strewn with open-eyed corpses and they grasp for his feet because they do not stay dead and his lungs burn; he must run faster but then he hears her screaming still - she is alive and he must turn back but he cannot, their hands close around his feet, dead hands blue and mottled but moving pull him down to the ground amidst the writhing corpses and her pleas still ring in his ears as he falls  There is not enough breath in his lungs to scream out the horror of it, and when he jerks awake someone is standing in the room.  For a moment of blessed, bone-deep relief he thinks Glorfindel has come. Then he blinks the tears from his eyes.  Elrond . Pure soldiers’ instinct makes him move and make himself presentable. His body seems made of stone as he forces it to rise from the sweat-soaked tangle of the blanket, stand up straight and wipe his face with his sleeve.  It is nothing. He has dreamt this before, this and worse. If only he had a moment where he might slip away in silence and escape into the vast star-brightness of the desert night, to check Ot’s hobbles, bury his hands in the camel’s warm coat, and perhaps fall back asleep a while with the beast’s great grumbling body at his back. Ot and the desert and the bright beloved stars are gone. There is only this stone-roofed room, and Elrond looking pale and probably livid at being shouted awake.  Elrohir tries to hide the thought, but Elrond looks at the rumpled mess he must present as he struggles to pretend that nothing unusual just happened; looks with those eyes that pierce like pale stars, then turns to the wardrobe to lift two cloaks. “Come,” he says only. He hands over one cloak and dons the other, opens the folding door, and steps out into the night.  Outside a clear sky of summer stars spans over the sea. Elrond leads the way to the meadow in front of the house. Elrohir follows in silence, and meanwhile tries to master his breathing.  Elrond motions for him to sit where the greensward slopes down to the cliffside and the wide view across the moonlit firth. The grass is long and soft beneath him, the air rich with the scent of flowering herbs. All around them crickets sing their silver song.  The night is still young, the gentle half-moon barely risen. Across the bay twinkle many lights that must be the Havens. Elrohir can make out the masts of ships moored at the quays. The Nemir must be among them. A stab of longing tears through him.  Elrond sits down beside him. “See the stars, Elrohir, and be at peace.” Elrond’s voice is low and soft, without a trace of anger. “I would stay with you, if you will have me?” Elrohir looks aside, and finds Elrond’s eyes on him. “I do not like to leave you alone.”  Elrohir can only stare. The lord of the house can sit wherever he pleases. Then, because Elrond seems to expect it, he nods. ---- Elrohir has curled up within the wide drape of his cloak, as if trying to disappear from sight like some small hunted animal taking cover. His face is pale above the collar. He has rubbed away the tear-tracks, but his eyes remain red-rimmed. His shock of unbraided hair is a wild tangle. He forgot to straighten it in his frantic rush to tidy himself, because he is still used to wearing it shorn.  He looks so completely lost. His mind is closed, but Elrond has seen enough of the dream to know what harrows him now; how the cruel, cold eyes of the Nazgûl still seeking him in some other, starless night. He longs to embrace his son, wipe his face with a cool cloth, take a comb and brush his hair smooth, then ask for the tale behind the snatches of dream he saw. He could do all that now, he knows. Elrohir would not dare refuse any intimacy Elrond cares to name. Every question he asks will be answered, each horror laid out in minute detail and relived to the very dregs.  All of it would be forced, and false, and bound to injure Elrohir further. And so Elrond must ask nothing at all, until Elrohir is ready to offer freely.  “You are no prisoner,” he says instead, his voice full of a calm he does not feel. “Walk outside and see the stars whenever you want.” Then again, for emphasis. “Always.” “Thank you.” Elrohir says with a half-bow, as if he is being granted a rare and precious boon.  He seems to expect a scolding, and is now cautiously relieved that none is forthcoming. Elrond’s heart contracts in his chest.   He is shaking himself, and folds his hands together beneath his cloak to hide it. The rushed ride from Imladris still burdens him, and he slept too deeply. Startling awake to a scream of terror to find his wounded son shivering on the floor in a desperate bid for a sliver of starlight, like a Wood-elf caught in an Orc den, shocked him to his core. He must be more vigilant. This nightmare fell upon Elrohir’s sleeping mind like a rushing wave and wholly swept him away. The next one will find Elrond in its path. They sit in silence for a time, watching the waves wash back and forth in the firth below. The summer wind murmurs gently in the long grass.   Elrond is at a loss, but then he remembers Glorfindel’s advice. The closest thing to contentment Glorfindel has seen from Elrohir came in the evenings, when Glorfindel would busy his hands with some meaningless little task or other, and meanwhile sing, so Elrohir could fall asleep to the sound of his voice. Elrohir would curl up in his bedroll like a contented cat, and sometimes even smile as his eyes fell closed. “Glorfindel tells me that you like songs," Elrond says. “Would you like to hear one?” Elrohir hesitates. Clearly he would not dream of asking Elrond such a thing.  “I would not trouble-”  “No trouble at all, Elrohir. It has been so long since I could sit with you.” He shows his longing open in his mind.  “Please,” Elrohir says, very carefully.  At that, Elrond lets his smile light up his face and mind. He takes off his cloak and drapes it over the grass against the cold rising from the ground. He motions for Elrohir to lie down on it, which he does at once, wrapping himself in the other cloak. The summer night is balmy, though the dew will bring a chill. Elrond will manage in his nightshirt. Elrohir needs the warmth more than he does.  What should he sing? He thinks for a moment, scrabbling for a song without even a note of sorrow or darkness, then thinks of one he has not sung for an Age or more. A merry Wood-elven ballad, all lightness and laughter, about a thrush and a clever squirrel chattering in a hazel bush. The language is a dialect so ancient even he barely recalls it.  Elrohir could not possibly understand the lines, but the joy of it needs no words. He lies still, his head pillowed on his arm, listening raptly. Glorfindel was right: two verses in, the haunted look lifts from Elrohir’s eyes. By the fifth one his lids blink, lower, then fall closed. His breathing slows and his body slackens into sleep.  Only then does Elrond indulge himself, and reach out a hand to lay it on Elrohir’s head, his fingers softly curled in his hair. He has not seen him sleep yet. He looks frighteningly Mortal, with his eyes closed. Beneath them shadows lie blue as bruises in the twilight.  Now Elrond dares to reach out his mind and give of his own strength, pouring forth the essence of himself. It washes over Elrohir’s battered fëa like clear water raining down upon parched land to soothe the cracked earth. He keeps at it, watching Elrohir’s face ease into peaceful, painless slumber, until bright stains wheel before his eyes and a headache begins to throb behind his temples. It matters not - he will manage.   Meanwhile he keeps singing, verse after verse of thrush and squirrel stealing one another’s nuts in increasingly ridiculous ways, and back to the beginning once the little creatures laugh and make up.  It is good to sit here under the stars beside his sleeping son.  On the third pass his voice grows hoarse. The night wind carries a chill, and he feels his skin break into gooseflesh beneath the thin linen of his nightshirt.  Even as he falters, another voice picks up the song. Ardil must have gone back to the house before approaching them, because he is holding a steaming cup of mulled wine and a grey guardsman’s cloak draped over his arm.  He does not miss a single thrilling note of the thrush’s squabbling as he hands them to Elrond.  Elrond eyes the man, wondering how he knows the words to a song so obscure. Only then does it strike him - the song is one of Elwing’s, and the language is ancient Doriahthrin.  Elrond gestures for Ardil to sit down. He crouches at a respectful distance, still singing, his eyes on Elrohir. Elrond cannot read what lies behind his gaze.  “Thank you,” Elrond says when the song ends, and he means it. He would gladly have kept his night’s vigil over Elrohir in naught but his nightclothes, but he is grateful for the measure of comfort. The wine is hot and well-spiced, and restores him to some semblance of his usual grace.   “He sleeps better like this.” Ardil casts a fearful gaze at Elrohir’s sleeping face. He must have heard him scream.  Irmo have mercy. The whole house did! “The worst is over, I believe.” Elrond reassures him. “Tonight, at least.”  Ardil sags with relief. Stern and obstinate as he is, the old Sinda has genuine care for Celebrían’s children.  “I have not heard that song in many years,” Ardil says, not unkindly. “My mother taught me.” Elrond wonders at how easily those words fall from his lips. My mother. It has been long since he last spoke of Elwing. “It was her favourite, when she was little,” Ardil says, his tone careful, as if expecting rebuke. Elrond almost startles at the realisation. Of course Ardil would know such things about Elwing. Elrond has never thought to ask him.  “I did not know that.” He gives Ardil a tentative smile. This is a time of beginnings. Perhaps Elrohir’s return will mend more than one old fracture in his house. “I know little about her days in Doriath. Perhaps you and I can speak of it, some day?” “Whatever you would have of me, lord, you have but to name.” Ardil says solemnly, and rises to his feet. “And for your son.” “I thank you, Master Ardil.” After a moment’s hesitation, Elrond adds, “I am glad that you are here.” “I, too, am glad to be.” Ardil smiles, bows, and fades into the summer night.

Sunrise flames red and gold upon the guest suite canopy, gilding the embroidered stars of Ereinion’s banner against their sky of indigo velvet. 

Glorfindel remains wide-eyed, staring up from amidst down feather pillows and linen scented with lavender. From the silver birch trailing its leaves beyond the window rings a merry chirrup, the garden’s chorus of robins and finches greeting the dawn. The song holds little comfort. 

Elrohir’s scream still rings in his ears. To make himself stay abed and leave the matter to Elrond was an act of pure will. His eyes sting with sleeplessness. 

When the light turns from gilded fire to soft citrine, the chatter of the grooms drifts up as they lead the horses to pasture. Outside in the courtyard the cook begins her fire-lighting song. Glorfindel sighs, rubs his eyes, and rises. 

He finds the greensward empty. A patch of flattened grass is all that remains of Elrond and Elrohir’s presence. Elrohir slept the night through, but just before sunrise Elrond must have woken him and led him bleary-eyed back to the house, sparing him the pitying looks of the housestaff.   

The scent of clover wafts up as the sun begins to warm the dew-speckled meadow. The sea beyond is a mirror of burnished silver. For a moment he turns back to the house, running his gaze from window to window in search of a glimpse, and at once feels Elrond’s mind against his own. 

Elrohir is well. A flash of mirth flutters beneath the words. Go! We will not perish while you have your day on the town. 

My errand-run, you mean. Glorfindel smiles as he lightly descends the switchbacked path down to the pier, leaping from stone to stone amidst the yellow flowers of saxifrage that sway in the light sea breeze. The boatmen are already rigging the sloop.  

Best of luck, my friend. Elrond’s parting touch is all warmth. Give her my regards.

----

Mithlond wakes wrapped in morning mists, her white towers rising from the golden haze. Across the water drifts the silver song of the bells that signal the opening of the city gates. Glorfindel breathes deeply of the salty sea-air, crisp and wholesome. All peace and Elvish loveliness, a world away from Umbar’s sere and shadowed desert. 

He climbs from the longboat onto the quay’s white flagstones. From here he can see the Nemir . Her familiar silhouette looks strangely barren as a team of carpenters and sailmakers strip her of sails and rigging to begin repairing the damage done by the Umbarian fire-grenades. None of the crew are to be seen - doubtlessly off enjoying their well-earned shore leave. 

Glorfindel wanders the stately squares and avenues in the heart of the city, where flocks of white seabirds swoop from tree to tree while Mithlond’s merchants and craftspeople ply their trades beneath. 

The soaring arches of the Great Market remain as they were in Ereinion’s day, a marvel of white carven marble. The forest of pillars and the fine stone tracery of the ceiling still stand. Light of many colours pours down from great windows of stained glass shaped like roses unfolding. 

The trading floor is rightly called a wonder of the North. In his days as Ereinion’s general, Glorfindel liked to wander here amidst the scents of cedarwood and spices. The king may have fallen, but this place still trades all the goods in Middle-earth. 

The great hall echoes with the calls of sellers hawking their wares and the auctioneer calling out the lots over the rumble and clatter of the working harbour outside. He came too early for his errand, and busies himself strolling the market, wrapped in memory. He stands for a while observing the auctions - vats of Dorwinion wine and Gondorian olive oil, boles of Rhûnian silk, dark ingots of dwarf-mined iron. 

The jeweller’s stands offer coral from southern seas besides amber from the icy Bay of Forochel and opals mined in Khand’s scorching deserts. When he lingers before a glass display-case to admire a matching set of deep-hued sapphires, he finds himself greeted like an old friend. 

Lindon’s gem smiths used to make a small fortune off Glorfindel, in the days when needed to dress for court. These stones would make a fine brooch indeed, but he is in no mood for pageantry today. He takes his leave with no more than a look and a promise to visit again before he returns to Imladris. 

A fruit-importer's wares are a bright splash of colour and scent. Amidst the stacks of lemons and oranges from Gondor his eye falls on a small crate, and he smiles. 

The seller counts his order onto her scales with great precision, then names a hefty price for such exotic goods. Glorfindel gladly parts with the silver. A well-chosen gift is a pleasure to the giver, too, and it is with happy anticipation that he steps back into the open brightness of the square outside, the linen-wrapped package in his satchel, and turns into a side street. 

His destination lies away from the splendour of the Great Market. The dockside quarter is - not shabby, because Círdan cares well for his people - but certainly less ordered than the city’s fancier parts. Every few paces, a flagstone has been lifted from the pavement to make space for climbing roses running up the trellised house fronts. Their sweet scent wars with the racks of drying saltfish and the spice of the smokehouses. 

Those who live here are mostly dockhands and fisherfolk. Even this early, the taverns do a lively trade. Every square is full of awnings with tables underneath where people sit knitting nets. Their merry shanties weave through the streets and always, at every gap between the whitewashed houses, there is a glimpse of the sea.    

Nonetheless, Glorfindel must ask several times before a sour-looking bakeress will give him directions. 

Once he finds the street, the shop sticks out like a sore thumb - from the extravagant masonwork on the facade to the mechanical clock chiming the hour with a chorus of dancing dolphins over the door, and the gold-lettered sign. 

Mistress Netyarë, manufacturer of fine nautical instruments.

And beneath, in smaller letters, 

Purveyor to the Royal Navy.

A silver carillon plays when he pushes open the door. The song is from Eregion. Glorfindel smiles.

The crystal-lit shop is silent. He walks around for a moment, eyeing the wares. Some devices sit in glass display cases, whirring away at whatever their unknown purpose may be. Behind perfectly ground disks of flawless crystal, engraved hands move against gem-inlaid dials indicating numbers that mean nothing to him. Others sit silently on the worktable, their panels lying open to reveal the metal of their inner mysteries. A shelf holds a row of gleaming sextants, each one more intricate and precious than the last.

“Ah, Lord Laurefindelë. Well met!” Netyarë herself bursts through a door in the back of the shop. She hastily lifts the loupe from her eye and leaves it to dangle on its silver chain around her neck. “Be welcome in my house, and my congratulations on your success!”

She looks far better than when he saw her last. Her treelit eyes are bright, and she has regained that brisk efficiency of a master craftswoman.

“Thank you, Mistress Netyarë, and well met! You look well.” It is good to speak the ancient Quenya of his childhood once more without fear of giving offence.

Netyarë shares the sentiment, judging from her wide and warm smile. Unasked, she turns to the door to shift the copper sign outside to ‘closed’, and turns the key. 

“Come into the parlour, lord.” she gestures at a glass-paned side door. “Your errand shall go better over a drink.”

She leads him to the room where she receives her customers. Glorfindel looks around while Netyarë busies herself with a silver samovar on the sideboard. 

A small but rich room with walls covered in frescoed seascapes. Whoever painted them has a fine eye for the art. Waves of green glass sparkle in the painted light of an unseen sun, so real that Glorfindel can almost taste the salt spray on his tongue. A few comfortable chairs stand around a table inlaid with precious woods from every corner of Arda.

He accepts a steaming cup of jasmine tea, brewed in the manner of Tírion. They both pause for a moment to relish the fragrant steam. The aroma is so perfectly delicate that for a single heartbeat, Glorfindel is once again a lanky youth sat at his mother’s table.

“My compliments,” he says when he has shaken off memory’s hold. “I never knew that this quality could be grown in Ennorë.”

“It is imported,” Netyarë says apologetically. “An old lady’s indulgence.”

Glorfindel makes a small half-bow of gratitude. Open trade between Middle-earth and Valinor ceased with the Fall of Númenor. Círdan’s swan-ships carry only passengers across the Straight Road, and they return empty. It seems the crews are allowed some leeway, and the occasional crate of tea from the slopes of Taniquetil finds its way east. Netyarë must have paid a king’s ransom for this taste of home.   

“How are you?” Glorfindel asks after the first delicious sip. 

“Better than I was. This place has done me good.” Netyarë sets down another specialty of Tírion’s tea-houses, a tray of rosewater-scented marzipan cleverly shaped and coloured like the real thing. She certainly looks better than she did in her final days in Imladris, wracked with sea-longing. 

“I am glad to see it,” he smiles, and lifts a sweet from the tray. The scent is an old delight, long forgotten. “You have heard of our return already?” 

She smiles back, but it does not reach her eyes. “The city was at feast all night. Galdor’s crew like a merry do, and they had reason aplenty.” 

Glorfindel knows what tends to happen when the Falathrim get in their cups. “You were not bothered, I hope?”

She takes a long breath through her nose, then sighs, clearly long-suffering. “There is always at least one hothead who feels the need to end their wild night by passing water against my storefront. I pay a lad to scrub the stoop first thing whenever the wine-houses have been lively. It is no matter. Their captains remain eager enough for my wares.” She grins. “I keep myself from etching in the Star.”

Netyarë is one of few Mirdain who survived the Fall of Eregion, and not the least among them. She makes the best ship’s chronometers east of the Sea, compasses that keep true north, and barometers to forecast the mighty storms of the northern seas. The Falathrim may not like their resident Fëanorian, but the quality of her work cannot be argued with. 

“Ah, well,” she laughs a little, and this time those ancient eyes do show a trace of mirth. “You did not come here to hear my troubles with the local carousers. What may I do for you? Surely you do not mean to outfit another expedition?”

“Lord Elrond sends his regards. He needs your services for a patient.” 

Now he has Netyarë’s full attention. Her eyes widen as he explains Calear’s predicament. “Calear is no friend to the Fëanorians. He will not be inclined to accept my help.”

Glorfindel says matter-of-factly, “his choices are either that, or a double amputation.”

“That might do it.” Then, on second thought. “My lord, I will be honest. My expertise lies in sextants and chronometers, not bone-screws. They were Telperinquar’s project, as you may remember.”

“It is said that there were no secrets between you.” He eyes her over the porcelain rim of his cup. “Surely he told you about their making?”

“A few basics, no more. Half-knowledge leads to Melkor, as we smiths say. I would not risk delivering less than perfect work.”

“Imperfect screws are better than none, given what Calear stands to lose.” 

She shakes her head, and behind her eyes is genuine concern. 

“Allow me to explain my situation, lord.”

Glorfindel nods, and leans forward to listen. 

“My welcome among the Falathrim is tenuous at best,” Netyarë turns her empty cup between her hands. “For the time being they still need my services, but they do have instrument-makers of their own. The guild has been taking my work apart for a yén now, and the copies grow better by the year. Calear is something of a local hero. Círdan holds him in high esteem. If I attempt this and it fails, Círdan might decide my presence in Mithlond is no longer required. Where, then, will I go?”

Glorfindel understands, to a point, but still he shakes his head. “ When you succeed, your situation will improve. Elrond has Círdan’s ear. He will see to it.” 

“Lord Elrond will soon return to Imladris, while I must stay.”

“Do not doubt yourself. You remain the finest at your craft.” Glorfindel tries a touch of honey. 

“Thank you,” she says, without a trace of false modesty. Netyarë was once apprenticed to Fëanor himself, and she does not forget it even now. 

He eyes her. “Besides, when did the Mirdain ever back away from a challenge?”

She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms, grief bright in her eyes. “Had we done a little more backing away, Telperinquar and I might now be taking morning tea in his workshop in Ost-in-Edhil.”

“Námo rest him.” Glorfindel says softly.  

“Ai, such fools we were.” She sets down her cup, her eyes on the pattern of red-berried holly branches along the rim. “You warned us against Annatar, and so did Lord Elrond. We did not listen.” 

She laughs bitterly. 

“Look at me now! Telperinquar’s chief counsellor and the first among his Mírdain, reduced to making compasses for a bunch of galled Sea-Elves who piss on my front porch.”

“Come back to Imladris with us,” Glorfindel offers. “Your workshop still stands as you left it.”

Netyarë shakes her head. “Sea-longing is not to be trifled with, my lord. The hidden valley no longer holds any joy for me.” She smiles her sad smile. “Besides, business is better here - not much call for sextants in a mountain stronghold.”

Glorfindel’s eye comes to rest on the painted seascapes surrounding them. “Do you resent your Judgement?”

Netyarë rises, and busies herself at the sideboard, preparing them both another cup. Only when Glorfindel thinks she will refuse to answer, her voice comes soft and low. “I killed but once, where others did so twice, or thrice. A murderer by a lesser degree, but those Teleri are no less dead for it.” 

She turns back to him, cups in hand. Her voice has gone rough, and she blinks. “I wish I could go home to Tírion. I wonder if my house still stands. Those I abandoned in my folly might even deign to take me back.” Her hands shake as she sets down the tea and sits.

Glorfindel reaches across the table and takes her hand in his. “You will see them again, one glad day when the task is done and the debt paid.”

She swallows, then smiles once more, though her eyes remain shiny. “When Elrond sails West in triumph, bearing Sauron’s head on a platter.” A touch of amusement plays in her voice. 

Glorfindel has known her long, and whatever her deeds, she was always a woman of good courage and a glad heart. 

“There will be no actual head, I expect,” he takes up her jest. “He is said to be formless of late.”

Now she is smiling outright. “Pity. I would have liked to sculpt the beheading scene in bronze.” 

“I will commission it from you one day. Make it Noldorin baroque, as outrageous as you can. All involved naked but for a wisp of cloth, and Elrond with muscles like Tulkas.”

At that, she laughs fully at last. They share a moment’s mirth together, but when the laughter dies down, Netyarë does not agree to take on Calear’s screws. 

Glorfindel’s arsenal is not yet spent. He reaches into his satchel and brings out a leather wallet. “I have another task for you, of a more personal nature.”

Netyarë eyes him in confusion when he tips a plain red pebble onto the lacquered tabletop. 

Elrohir’s keepsake from Harad is not much to look at indeed. When Glorfindel asked him for the stone he relinquished it only hesitantly, as if Glorfindel expected a gem, and would toss the thing once he realised his mistake.

“A memento,” he explains, pushing the pebble towards her. “I would like it set in silver meshwork, to be worn as a pendant.”

“Ah.” Netyarë picks it up between her fingers. “The sort a Peredhel prince might wear?”

“Indeed.”

She turns the red sandstone of Harad between her fingers. “How is he?”

Elrohir’s scream still echoes in Glorfindel’s memory. “Wounded,” he says, bluntly. “Grieving. Lost between his old life and the new.”

Her sight is sharp, and she reads with ease the fear behind his words. “Will he live?”

He answers her with the unvarnished truth. “We hope so.”

“May Manwë order it.” Netyarë lays the pebble on the flat of her hand, and falls silent for a moment, thinking. “Lord Elrond has been just to me, and very kind besides,” she says softly. “It is not right that he should worry about anything but his son.” 

She raises her eyes to capture Glorfindel’s gaze. “Tell Calear that I shall make what is required, if he is willing to bear my touch. I will do what I can. Come what may.” She hesitates. “As for the jewel … I will Sing a Song of keeping into the metal, so the stone will last. Perhaps in time the grief may turn to strength.”

“May it be so,” Glorfindel says with another bow. “I thank you, Netyarë.”