The Kindness of Strangers by Elleth

Chapter 1

The ice piles high at the watermark, almost a wall, up to his knees. Maglor steps over it toward the fisherman and his line bobbing in the tide – he can hear the man's teeth rattle over the cracking of the floes and over the rushing of the waves. The weather is beastly, and it does not take great imagination to understand that it must be worse for a mortal, not merely less used, but less resistant to the cold as a whole. Why he chose this time and spot for fishing - Maglor pulls up the hood of his parka, and calls out a greeting in the language of the land.

"Morning!"

The man pulls in his line – empty – and turns, and the light of his eyes falls onto Maglor, his mouth quirks beneath a thick red beard, and the wind whips around a strand of only slightly darker hair from under the hood of his own jacket. With great, splashing steps that sends the water sluicing from his rubber boots, he wades back ashore and stops next to Maglor, who stands perplexed.

"Morning. So you're awake then, good – I didn't mean to wake you, so I brought a diversion, but it was getting cold." He raises the fishing rod, briefly. "I heard you by the village last night, and knew it couldn't just be anybody. Few people still speak Quenya, fewer still sing it, and no one, I daresay, sings like you. I couldn't help go looking for you."

Maglor can only shake his head. He feels like he has been plunged head-first into the icy water, for the fisher is not simply a mortal – he is an elf. Not one of the Noldor, or not Aman-born, for all that he reminds Maglor of Mahtan – the same twinkle of eyes, the same colour of hair even, if he recalls the image right, and if there is any such comparison to be made between dim morning sun on some mortal shore and the light of Laurelin in full glory.

"Struck mute then, are you? Just as well. One doesn't get to talk to a legend so often, and it's less often that that legend is one's kin."

Maglor shakes his head again, and this time his voice wants out, his frozen tongue loosens. "I have no living kin this side of the sea."

"And I don't suppose you mean America with the other side, do you." The man's laugh is more than a little incredulous, and he eyes Maglor, who shakes his head again.

"How do you know me, and so much about me?" Maglor asks at last. There is no elegance in his words, and his tongue stutters with trepidation, just as his legs twitch with the desire to run even as they root him into place.

"Come back to the village with me and I'll tell you – my car's up by the road, you won't have to walk all the way back there.

"I would rather walk."

"I'm a good driver, there's no need to worry – I know your last run-in landed you in hospital, and just this side of discovery. Modern medicine is pesky that way, they and their detection methods – we're close enough, but there's enough difference to pique anybody's interest. The Denisovans are still causing enough of a stir, and that was a few years ago. I don't want to know what they'd be doing with us. Homo sapiens quendiensis, and it might be Númenor all over again?"

Although the man's manner remains jovial enough, Maglor feels his blood starting to run cool and clear his head – the beginnings of anger, he knows well enough, and for a long time expressed in nothing except song. Not that he has anything more to go with this moment – his pack, holding a pocket knife, lies a distance up the beach behind the dune he'd camped for shelter.

"My son's island," he says through his teeth, "is not a laughing matter. I would thank you not to treat it as such." To his surprise, the man's manner changes into contrite apology, by all appearances genuine.

"Forgive me, it was in poor taste to make a joke from it."

"Who are you?" Maglor asks, permitting only a noncommittal sound toward the apology. It is not a matter he had thought of in a long time, and right now there are more pressing questions at hand.

"Eric Smith these days, Erchir before Sindarin was lost, Erhero before even that, but not even Alina - my wife... Aelinn - still calls me by those names. And you, what is your name now?"

"It still is Max Laurel Harper, if anybody needs to know, but I would thank you to not call me by that name – unlike you I have not let go of my past so far that I have all but become mortal; that name is a necessary choice more than a voluntary one," he says with a sneer that curls his lip. Eric – Erchir – is beginning to grind on his nerves, not because he is unpleasant, quite the contrary – no one has been quite so kind to him for some time, but for someone who knows as much as he does his kindness is remarkable and more than a little unsettling. "My true name is Kanafinwë Makalaurë, as you seem to know – that and all the blood that comes with it."

"I would be surprised if that were not washed away by all the seas you have walked into," Eric replies.

"No. No, it was not, nor would I want it to. Was that the admission that you meant to have, so you can dispose of me now? You may as well do it here rather than stain your home."

Eric snorts, a sound that is almost lost in the wind, almost. "I'm not interested in revenge – I don't mean to make myself a kinslayer, either the figurative or literal sort. You're in no danger with me."

"And I am simply meant to believe a... what are you? Your name was not Noldorin."

"You would call me an Avar, of the Kinn-lai – one of the Tatyarin tribes who did not make the Journey and grew to some wealth and power all the same. My family were metalsmiths and jewellers. That took me west away, and it was love that kept me in Imladris when I was a young man, early in the Third Age."

Maglor closes his eyes. "Imladris," he says, and wills the hollow tone from his voice. "I understand now. But I assure you there is no need to coddle me over some misplaced sentimentality or..."

"That is not it at all. Look at my face; I already told you - we are kin by blood. I studied the genealogies. Your mother's father and mine were cousins, and I count myself glad to have found you at last. Will you come with me? And if you won't stay, fine. We don't have much room, but we have an extra bed and you can at least warm up, have a meal, a shower, a roof above you – weather forecast says there's a winter storm coming that you don't want to stay outside in... and something else that I mean to give to you, that I imagine you must have been missing since your accident – it needed cutting off to save your finger. One of the paramedics recognized you as one of us, took it to herself, and sent it to me for repairs."

Eric motions to the road above the beach, where a silver car is parking. For all of Maglor's misgivings, his left hand curls around his empty right index finger, and stopping only to pick up his pack, he follows Eric to the road, leaving the wall of ice and the shore behind him.

"Why send it to you?" he asks. His anger is vanishing again, leaving him curiously chilled, and his hands beginning to tremble, despite a half-hearted attempt to will it away. Eric looks at him from the side, presses a button on his car keys to unlock the doors, and pushes the passenger door open for Maglor, who stands hesitant.

"It is you whose talents are uncommon in our family, not mine... metalsmith, I already told you. Welding a ring back together is not particularly hard, and I... well," says Eric, waiting for Maglor to sit before he starts the engine, "your son – worried for you. Not out of misplaced sentimentality – you know Elrond was not given to that – but he knew you were still alive, and knowing that some of us would remain, rather than choose to fade into the forests and the wilds as Thranduil and much of his kin did, he gathered us for a meeting the summer before his departure, and asked us to look out for you when we could – and since he had learned of your and my kinship, it just so happened that I became the central figure in that endeavour. We have people in some strategic places, and we try to keep in touch – that's much easier now, with mortal technology, and that is how I know so much about you – although no doubt less than all the things that went unreported. At any rate, we are here not because of you, but for you, if you need us."

"It is both, then – for you in particular, choice and blood," says Maglor after a long silence, although he has not halfway processed the enormity of the new knowledge, with the road rushing away below the car and the landscape white outside the windows. Eric's smile seems to spell out finally, and he gestures ahead. Over the crest of the hill before them, against the slate-grey of the sky, plumes of chimney-smoke are rising, and a moment later Eric's village comes into view, some handfuls of tidy houses strewn across the wintry heath.

Behind them the sea rolls, but for the moment it looks, to Maglor's eyes, infinitely distant.