Clear Pebbles of the Rain by StarSpray

Eleven

The days passed, and Maglor slowly began to venture out of his room on his own, learning the ways of the house and of the gardens immediately surrounding it. In time, perhaps, he would explore the other paths that meandered through the rest of the valley, through its flowering meadows and shady woods. Sometimes he met Elladan or Elrohir, or both, and they walked with him, telling him more of the valley, showing him the forges and workshops, and other places of interest. Often Elrond appeared to walk with him. He spoke less than his sons, offering quiet companionship rather than chatter. Often he twisted the ring on his finger as he walked, seemingly without realizing that he was doing it—not Vilya, but his golden wedding band. Celebrían must have been much on his mind—and not for any joyful reasons. Maglor wished he were not the cause.

He also found himself wishing that he had gotten to meet her, the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn who had won Elrond’s heart. He wished that he had not stayed away, and had come seeking Imladris years and years ago. Maglor had thought himself, if not happy, at least content in his solitary exile. He had had his music and the company of the Sea and of the birds that sometimes brought him news. If he had wished for more—well, that had not been possible.

Except that it had been, if only he had let himself hope for it.

Elrond did not speak again of attempting to restore Maglor’s voice, though Maglor knew that he was spending a great deal of time in the library. Perhaps someone else had suffered the same affliction. Maglor hoped, if there had been someone, for their sake that it had been cured—though he rather suspected that if there was a cure it was not to be found on these shores.

He found himself down by the river more often than not, watching it rush on by over the rocky bed. The current was too strong in most places for wading or fishing, but he saw others sitting by the banks or walking along them, talking and laughing or gathering flowers. Maglor found a place a little ways downstream from the bridge where a few large rocks jutted out into the water, providing a good place to sit, or to lay down as he often did, stretched out on his stomach with the sun warm on his back as he trailed his fingers in the water, feeling the tug of the current. He listened hard, searching for the music that he’d once known as well as he knew his own self, but all he heard was the rush of the water, and the wind in the grass behind him.

On one sunny afternoon there was a sudden shout and a splash from upstream. Maglor raised his head to see a small dark head bob up out of the water, drifting quickly away from the slender bridge. Whoever it was made a valiant effort to swim to the shore, but the current was just too strong, and bore them swiftly down toward Maglor. He reached out as they drew nearer, and managed to grab a flailing wrist. Somehow he managed to pull them out of the water without falling in himself—he could have done it so easily at one time, but he was far from having regained his former strength—and Maglor found himself more or less drenched, and sitting on the rock with a child: a boy of ten or eleven, with bedraggled curls and grass stains on his trousers and bare feet.

Once he’d gotten his breath back the boy laughed, and looked up at Maglor with an impish grin. “Thank you!”

“Estel!” Gilraen appeared at the top of the bank. Her expression of fear turned to one of exasperation when she saw that the child was safe and out of the water. Her fists went to her hips, and to his own surprise Maglor found himself almost ready to laugh at the look on poor Estel’s face. “What did you think you were doing? This is the third time you’ve fallen—”

“Crossing the bridge!” Estel replied. “I’m all right, Naneth.”

“You’re going to catch a horrible cold if you don’t come get out of those wet clothes right now. And I told you not to bother Maglor!”

“I’m not!” Estel protested. He got to his feet and grimaced at Maglor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fall in the river, I promise!” And with that he scampered up the bank to follow Gilraen back to the house, presumably to find dry clothes. Maglor stayed where he was. The sun was warm, and would soon dry him. He leaned back on his elbows and tilted his head back, watching a few puffy clouds drift by overhead. He did not think Estel had been in any real danger, now that the shock of the incident was fading. The river widened and slowed a little in a place just within sight downstream of Maglor’s rock, and he thought that Estel, evidently a capable swimmer, could have gotten himself to shore there. But the water was quite cold, having begun as snow far above in the mountains. He tilted his head farther back, just glimpsing the cloud-wreathed peaks behind him.

He lay down fully and closed his eyes against the bright sunshine, and listened to the birds and the wind in the grass, and the rush of water before him. There was music all around him, but try as he might he could not hear it. On the other side of the bridge a group of Elves burst into merry song, laughing and tra la la lally-ing.

Once he was dried, Maglor left the riverside and made his way back to the house. As he stepped inside Estel came barreling down the hall, in clean clothes but evidently determined to dirty them immediately. Maglor stepped aside to avoid being knocked over, and watched Estel disappear around a corner. When he turned back he saw Elrond down the hall, shaking his head as he approached at a more reasonable pace. “He’s just been told there’s a litter of puppies being born in the kennels,” he said to Maglor. “I heard you fished Estel out of the river. Thank you.” Maglor shrugged. “It isn’t how I had hoped you would meet Estel, but I suppose it was going to be something like that, anyway. At least he didn’t fall onto you out of a tree.” Elrond’s voice was warm and fond as he spoke of Estel—a fondness that Maglor recognized, for he’d heard it in his own voice once upon a time when he had spoken of Elrond and Elros. Both of whom he’d had fish out of rivers at that age, come to think of it—though neither incident had been the result of childhood carelessness, and had been much more frightening for everyone. Their world had been a crueler, more dangerous place than this valley.

“I think that I can lift the curse that stole your voice,” Elrond said, his quiet voice startling Maglor out of his thoughts. “I think it should be done outside, in the bright sunshine.” He looked at Maglor, face a mask of calm but with worry behind his eyes. “It does not have to be today. Some might say the best time would be Midsummer’s Day, the longest of the year, but that is several weeks away and I think any sunny afternoon would do, out among the flowers and the trees—as unlike the place where you were hurt as possible.”

To have his voice back—to be able to speak—he could scarcely imagine it, after so long. The last words he had spoken had been broken and pathetic pleas to the servants of the Necromancer when they came with their needles and threads, after he had failed to sing down the foundations of Dol Guldur. He didn’t even know if his tongue could form words anymore. He yearned for his voice but he also feared getting it back. What then? He would still be a broken thing, a musician without his music. A singer with no songs. What would he say when the first request for a song came?

“Maglor?” Elrond laid a hand on his arm. “Do you want this?”

He nodded, though in that moment he wasn’t sure. Silence was perhaps safer. He could withdraw, exist at the edges of life in this valley, rarely noticed but not quite unwelcome. Would that be so terrible? No one would ask him for songs that he did not have. But he could not express any of that to Elrond even if he wanted to. He knew that he should want his voice back, and that all Elrond wanted was to help him.

“Would you like me to try now? It is a good day for it,” Elrond said. But then someone came calling for Elrond for some dispute elsewhere in the valley, and Maglor shook his head. Elrond frowned, but when Maglor shook his head again he relented. “Tomorrow, perhaps,” he said, and after squeezing Maglor’s hand he went to see what the trouble was, and Maglor escaped back to his room.

For a minute he leaned back against the door, staring at the harp that sat by the window, still untouched. He yearned to play, his fingers ached for it, but he couldn ’t bring himself to do it. Fear curled around him like icy chains. If he could not hear Music how could he possibly play it himself? Instead he went to the bookshelf, running his fingers over the book spines until he found one of songs once sung in Valinor. When he opened to a random page he was greeted by Elrond’s writing, neat lines of it, firm and flowing, lovely to look at. When he looked past the writing to the words themselves, he found them unfamiliar. If it was a song from Valinor it was not one he knew—and it was so unfamiliar that he was almost certain that he had never known it. Something like panic threatened to choke him as he made his way to the window seat. What if he had known it, and his forgetting was more complete than he had thought?

But no. He turned back a page to find the name of it and a note concerning its history and author. It had come to Middle-earth with the Armies of the West during the War of Wrath. Findis had written it, and Finarfin had shared it. Maglor touched their names lightly on the page, his aunt and his uncle, arguably the wisest of their generation, and certainly the most fortunate. Then he read the song, and found it to be a lament for Finwë, but not one that was to be sung at gatherings, or before any but the most intimate of audiences. It was a lament written by a grieving daughter for her father. Line after line spoke of him not as a king or a leader but as a doting father and grandfather, who smelled of sawdust and cherry blossoms. Maglor could not imagine how Finarfin had been able even to speak the words for Elrond to record.

Maglor had never been able to write such a song, not for Finwë, or for any of his fallen kin—his father, his cousins, his uncle and his brothers. They had died one by one, and he had tried to compose something, anything , but the words had never come. He’d poured his grief into other songs about other things, finding refuge in metaphor and in symbol, in the rain and in the waves and in the flames, but it hadn’t helped in the end. Not really.

He let the book fall shut, leaning back and gazing out of the window at the river. At times it felt like all his life had been spent in mourning, and yet the grief still felt sharp and new. His grandfather’s was the worst in many ways—he had led their people to Valinor to escape exactly the horror that had killed him in the end. And when that end had come he had stood alone.

Maglor took a breath and picked up the book again, this time turning to the beginning. He wondered a little that such a private song would be written down at all. The first page of the book answered the question: this was not a book that Elrond had just pulled from a shelf in his library. He had copied out the songs for Maglor, some that Maglor knew and others that he did not, that Elrond had learned from the Noldor and the Vanyar during and just after the War of Wrath.

There is one written by your aunt Findis that Finarfin shared with me, particularly. He did not say so but I think he hoped it would make its way to you.

He paged through the rest of the book, lingering on the songs that he knew, glad that he had not forgotten everything . None were songs that he had written. Perhaps those were in another volume somewhere on his shelf; he did not care to go look. In the end he returned the song for Finwë, looking at the musical notations beside the words, but they held little meaning for him. They should not have. They were in a mode that he had made—he remembered the making of it, the satisfaction in perfecting it. He’d shown it to his father first, because it was a sort of alphabet, and though Fëanor had not made a great study of music, he had always loved new language. But its meanings were lost to him now, just like the look of delighted pride on his father’s face was shrouded in the smoke and darkness that came after.

Night came, and Maglor could not sleep. Elves were outside singing in the gardens, but that was not what kept him awake. Since coming to Rivendell the ghosts in his mind had quieted, had disappeared, but now when he glanced into the dark corners of his room he glimpsed them, the faces of his brothers, there and gone again. When he rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow, closing his eyes, he just saw them more clearly.

Finally, before dawn, he gave up and rolled out of bed, slipping into yesterday’s clothes and then out of the window. He dropped lightly to the ground and looked up. The moon had set, and clouds had moved in, partly covering the stars. He started to walk without any clear idea of where he wanted to go. The path led him away from the house and the gardens, up the valley until the darkness of the woods closed around him. The air was thick with the scent of the pine that grew thickly there, branches reaching out to tangle together and cover the sky.

The ghosts came out of the shadows again. Maglor stopped and let them pace around him. It occurred to him that his fears of being turned away from Mandos would apply to them, too, and he had the thought that they were not ghosts out of his own mind at all, that they were in truth the Houseless spirits of his brothers, following him still after all this time.

He dismissed that thought as soon as it came. Galadriel would not have allowed such things into her realm, nor Elrond into his. More likely he had gone at least a little mad in the dungeons of Dol Guldur, when the nightmarish faces of his brothers, smoke-wreathed and blood-spattered, had been his only companions. He watched them now pass him by beneath the trees, Ambarussa always together, and Curufin with his lips curled in the sneer that had been ever present in his last days. Celegorm with his teeth bared in a snarl. Caranthir quiet and withdrawn, as he had been ever since the Dagor Bragollach when Thargelion had burned. He and Maglor had mourned together for their lost lands, he for his mountain keep and Maglor for the wide plains.

Maedhros remained in the corner of his vision; Maglor did not turn to look at him. He walked on up the path until he came to a place where the pine trees opened up a little, and an enormous old oak tree stood, last year’s leaves a bronze carpet over its roots, and the new year’s growth thick overhead. Maglor climbed it and found a place high in its branches where he could sit comfortably and watch the sky brighten slowly with the morning. The clouds had thickened, so it was a pale dawn, promising rain later. Maglor let his head drop back against the trunk as the birds all around him woke up to sing their morning songs. The valley was soon full of their voices. Maglor remained in the tree, sitting very still. Birds fluttered about, perching and flying. Squirrels came, chasing each other up and down the branches. None paid him any mind. The air was warm, and the shadows were brightening. Maglor could at last close his eyes in peace.