Fractures by Elleth

But when he had drawn forth, as he hoped, the armies of Morgoth in answer, then Fingon should issue forth from the passes of Hithlum; and thus they thought to take the might of Morgoth as between anvil and hammer, and break it to pieces. And the signal for this was to be the firing of a great beacon in Dorthonion. (The Silmarillion, Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad)

*

Dorthonion had become terrible and desolate.

The wintry heathers and pine forests lay still, half-burned and half-choked by the dust blowing in from Anfauglith. The name of Taur-nu-Fuin was a statement of fact more than a disservice. Many trees had withered and twisted in the tainted ash, and there were entire stretches of land that lay under some deeper darkness where they did not linger.

Alphangil shuddered to find that - strange even in winter - there were no birds, nor any small beasts, as their horses made their slow way westward from Himring, but she also shuddered to think what forms they might have been twisted into, those that had not fled. She was tense and jumped at every noise as they set out to different peaks along the southern border to Ladros toward the center of Dorthonion when they found no fitting place for their purpose.

Outriders scouting for enemy activity had declared the land safe for the time being. Those few dark creatures that had crept in far enough from Nan Dungortheb were no true obstacle when they crossed paths, but a retinue kept around them to defend them if necessary. They had kept the host as small as secrecy demanded and security permitted - three companies, thirty-six all in all - selected and outfitted for stealth. Maedhros had declared the matter too important to leave to others who might bring inaccurate information or even seek outright betrayal. It would not be the first time his war plans were hampered by sabotage: Lost shipments of ore for weaponry, one of his tacticians found strangled in her bed and her wife fled, the Naugrim visited by strange messengers promising them wealth and boons if they refused or betrayed their alliance with the Elves… Alphangil could not blame Maedhros for setting forth with those he trusted most: Fingon, her, and a handful of trusted advisors on the war council.

Treason, and fear of treason.

When they reached, after a long slog, an old road, now slippery with frost, muddied and ill-maintained, meandering up toward Orod-na-Thôn, they found it trampled by orcish boots. It was apparent to all of them, however, that the tracks were old, faded under rain and snow. The retinue drew closer regardless, and Alphangil spotted more than one hand going to sword and bow, among them one woman who seemed to have been assigned to Alphangil as a special protector, because she had been close to her the entire ride and now came even nearer. Alphangil refused to let it rankle her and swallowed down a complaint to Maedhros.

Once they had reached a rocky plateau under the summit, Maedhros turned to Fingon and Alphangil. "Would this be the right place for the beacon?" he asked. None of their other spots had proven suitable. Orod-na-Thôn was the last, lest they meant to announce the beginning of the battle from Anfauglith itself.

"The road is easily defensible, and there is enough wood around to gather for the beacon," Fingon judged. He looked at the map Maedhros' second had ready, tracing with a finger where there could be watchposts.

Alphangil took the spyglass Maedhros offered her and turned westward and a little north until the towers of her home appeared, light stone against the darker rock of the Ered Wethrin in the distance, small as a child's toy. "Eithel Sirion is visible from here," she said. "We are high enough, and if this can be fortified, yes. This should do."

She passed the glass to Fingon, who confirmed it with a huffed noise betraying his impatience and dislike of being out in the cold. "Finally. I can see it. And I know that the mountain is visible from our towers. This ought to be the place."

Maedhros smiled grimly, turning north and returning the spyglass to his belt. "And he will be able to see it, too."

It needed only unaided elven sight to make out the peaks of Thangorodrim across the desolation that had once been lively, bustling Ard-galen, now stretching dirt-grey with frost under a sky of leaden cloud.

"When the day comes, he will bite," Fingon said. He sounded joyful but defiant at the prospect. "And we will smite his armies as a hammer that strikes an anvil and avenge the fallen of the Dagor Bragollach, and Beleriand will be free of him." He stretched his fist northward.

Alphangil coaxed him to open his clenched hand and tangled her fingers with his until he lowered his arm again and let the challenge pass. She willed herself to be the steadying presence he needed, even if it meant gainsaying Fingon's notions of triumph.

"If all goes well," she counselled. "It is one thing to defeat his armies, another to defeat Morgoth himself."

Her husband was not deterred, frowning now at her caution. "Do you think the power he expends in such a battle will return to him? He is sending his creatures far and wide through the Northlands and seeks to control them with his will," Fingon countered. "If both are one and we destroy enough of them, will we not then weaken him?"

It had been an argument they had often had in the war councils.

Alphangil sighed and stepped back, remembering how her own people had tried to resist Morgoth even before the Noldor arrived. She recalled also how Maedhros had despaired after the council the day they had decided to wage this fifth great battle, then unsure and shaken. Now, clad in armour and standing on a height in full sight of Morgoth, he held himself straight as a steel blade, his grey eyes hard and brittle as flint.

Maedhros nodded. "We already determined that. Creatures made by him are bound to his will, as the Naugrim say they were bound to Aulë's in their beginning. They have no true will of their own. And those who were not made but corrupted by him - his will dwells ever upon them, to control what freedom of will they have. I have known his will on me, and it is terrible beyond speaking. Even the Orcs, I believe, though evil, would rather depart from him and do their own evil work than be compelled to do his bidding when forced so. Killing his armies - it will hurt him as though through ten-thousand stings, each one sapping a little of his power, and we must fight as though that is enough."

"That day will come - our day will come," Fingon said again, slinging an arm around Maedhros' hips, now an identical picture of determination. His eyes shone, and a momentary finger of sunlight from the sky fell onto his silver crown and the golden bands in his hair; then he tilted his head back and let the light play over his face.

Alphangil stepped back further. The clouds rippled in the sky and the light vanished. She could not help but feel that it was a portent, but one that she could not read clearly - something good turning to evil, the words of the Prophecy of the North coming true at last?

To evil end all things shall turn that begin well.

"We should go," she called when the moment had passed. An unrest was on her mind that she could not explain. Her two men did not seem to hear.

The look Fingon and Maedhros gave each other was a familiar one, but this high and open was no place for them to show forth the love that bound both of them and united them in the purpose to make their war a triumph more than a necessity. She did not often feel as though the three of them were not of one mind, that they did not respect her thoughts and fears, but with a cold wind picking up and blowing their hair back, red and black mingled, she could not help a shudder.

She could not help feeling out of place in their unity, but at the very least they heeded her when she called for them a third time.

They departed quickly and silently, down the mountain and into the cover of red pines standing like a dark hall with many pillars around them. The needles on the ground swallowed the hoofbeats of their horses. There was no wind. Once, a jay startled up crying into the sky above the frozen forest, but they encountered no other sound by bird or beast until the early winter nightfall, and did not speak.

Just after the darkness had begun to descend on them, they came to an abandoned village of Men, deserted during the Bragollach, where they had rested on the way toward Orod-na-Thôn already. Some were sent out to make the place safe, and the rest began to set up camp. Alphangil felt bone-weary and worked herself out of her chainmail shirt, laying it aside by her bedroll before stretching out for a rest. Fingon had set up his bed and then gone to tend to Pilin. Maedhros kept him company.

The attack came out of the gathering dark.

The Orcs must have been waiting in the hollowed-out houses, either so well-hidden that they had not been seen, or there was treachery at work: one of Morgoth's spies in the host of Maedhros, placed carefully onto a game board and moved toward the right place and the right time to strike.

Alphangil realized she had guessed right when she found the edge of an elven blade at her throat and a voice hissing in her ear to warn her against screaming out. The same woman who had kept close to her. It now became terribly clear why.

With the knife pressing into her skin, Alphangil remembered the woman's name: Cýronil, one of Maedhros' people, a former thrall who had alleged to have escaped Angband. They had spoken before, on Himring. Could it be? Alphangil knew that Cýronil had undergone questioning that would break and reveal anyone who did not hold good intentions before being taken into Maedhros' service, or so the rumor went openly around Himring.

She did not doubt Maedhros capable of it, but it seemed that Morgoth had found ways to circumvent Maedhros' caution and steel his thralls into resistance.

Against her pounding heart, telling her to get loose and run, Alphangil forced herself to breathe, and to think. They were in the thick of a throng of fifty or more Orcs surrounding them, in the center of the fighting. She would not make it far.

Their surprise attack had left the elven host in chaos, struggling to form ranks, Maedhros unhorsed and Fingon trying to wrest Pilin back under control; even a warhorse of Rochallor's line was startled by the sudden onslaught out of nightfall. Neither of them had yet noticed her. One of Maedhros' soldiers spotted her and she saw his eyes widen in horror, but the Orcs swept between them and the soldier went down under an onslaught of blows before he could so much as cry out.

Trying to escape now wouldn't do her any good; the next unfortunate swing of an orcish blade would end her. Better to bide her time. If they had wanted to kill her, Cýronil would have already had ample chance to simply slit her throat, but had not done so; she was grasping Alphangil's braid now, wrapped it around her hand tightly like a leash and kept pulling her further back. The roots of her hair stung and terror took her breath away, especially when Cýronil scattered the last remaining doubt by calling out something guttural that could only be Orcish.

A line of Orcs broke away from the fighting and made a ring around the two women, shields up in defense. More followed the further they withdrew, and finally Alphangil saw Fingon glance up, a spatter of black blood across his face. His eyes found hers for a glimpse only, just before she was dragged around the edge of a war-ruined house, inside through a broken wall, and down into a cellar that lay half-open to the sky.

A skeleton - no larger than a child, no larger than Gil-galad was now - lay down there, still grasping a spear from a lost last stand. Alphangil fought back a noise of despair thinking that this might be her son, or that she would die or be taken and leave him motherless, Fingon widowed and alone with only Maedhros for scarce comfort. She did not think that Maedhros would welcome it any longer either, now that they had grown closer, now that they had become three. If they still were. If the war was not fracturing them.

Around another crumbled wall loomed the opening of a crude tunnel. That explained, then, how the attack had been staged so quickly and stealthily, especially with a traitor in their midst.

Alphangil was dragged into the deeper dark in a stinking press of orcish bodies, heard them grunt something she could not understand, heard Cýronil laugh. A blow to the head from behind had her knees buckle. The roots of her hair pulled and stung. Spots of light bloomed up in the dark before her eyes, but she would not yet surrender.

Another blow came. The light took her, and then the darkness did.

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Fingon was frantic and all Maedhros could do to physically restrain him from getting back on his horse was to wrap his arms around him and hold him back. There were pine needles caught in his braids and his armour and surcoat were smeared with dirt, having been wrestled to the ground in the attack, although his skill with his blade had saved him from a worse fate.

The Orcs had scattered as quickly as they had come. His soldiers had been overcome by the onrush and several of them lay slain or so wounded that they would not live to see the morning, but Maedhros, after briefly paying his respects to them in thought, willed down the pain in his heart, left it to his people to make order, and nearly pushed Fingon down to sit on the bedroll he'd spread out on the ground before the attack. Alphangil's pack lay scattered around her own bedroll, next to it.

"Think!" Maedhros said and recoiled from himself when it came out sounding more like a snarl. He forced his voice into a gentler tone. "Think. Please. You say you saw her being dragged away alive. They are baiting you - if you rush out into the dark after them, no doubt that is what they intend, and they will take you also."

He locked away the words that wanted out, but it seemed Fingon understood him regardless, the hidden meaning in them. And then where would that leave the Noldor without their High King? Where would that leave me and Alphangil, or Gil-galad? Would you make the same mistake as your father? Would you make the same mistake I made? But this was not a time to be selfish, so he swallowed the words down and Fingon did not answer. His face was so drawn and miserable that his cheekbones stood out like they were cut from metal and his teeth pressed together so hard that they would grind glass back to sand; his fingers clawed into the chainmail covering Maedhros' forearm, which was wrapping around his chest and holding him fast.

His eyes were over-bright with worry. "I cannot hear her - I cannot reach her, Maitimo," he said in response, and Maedhros' heart tore at the desperation in his voice, at the unintentional slip into Quenya. "I will kill all of them in recompense for all the hurt they will do her. Each one, singly."

"Not singly," Maedhros replied. "But first we need to find her. Listen to me." His voice dropped to a whisper, said directly into Fingon's ear. "I swear on the love I bear you and the love I bear her that we shall find Alphangil alive and bring her home."

Fingon shuddered under him, but finally his grasp of Maedhros' arm relaxed, and he let some of the tension go from his body. "We will find her alive and bring her home. If we do not - " and his voice began shaking again, "- then Morgoth shall have a battle more dire than anything that you and I have envisioned, and sooner, and I will not stop until he has set me captive or has fallen under my blade."

Maedhros pulled him back to his feet and rested his hand on Fingon's shoulder. "Our blades." He took up a skin of watered wine from among Fingon's provisions and pressed it into his hand. "Stay here and drink something. It will calm you. I will order my people and then we will begin the search. This is unkind ground, they cannot yet have gone far."

Fingon nodded numbly, and Maedhros pulled himself up taller before striding toward the wounded, wishing briefly that they had taken his Master Healer as she had asked, but he had left Idhlinn at Himring to prepare more stores for the war, in spite of her protests that she would be more useful on the road if they were attacked.

He resolved to listen to her the next time she said something of the sort, though it was an annoyingly Vanyarin trait - or perhaps a trait of those who had both Vanyarin and Noldorin descent - shared in some measure only by the few who remained of the House of Finarfin. It was a fact that she was often right. Now he approached Hwestonnen, who had come on the journey as his second-in-command because he knew Dorthonion well, having dwelt there during the Long Peace as an emissary to Angrod and Aegnor. He was the lord of the House of the Pine, a tall man who almost rivalled Maedhros himself in height, with dark brown hair and a stark, stern face that now seemed troubled and too pale in the darkness.

"What news?" Maedhros asked. Hwestonnen was unusually diligent and by his instincts someone perhaps more suited to Caranthir's people. He had already named and numbered the five dead and eighteen wounded, another three of whom would likely pass to Mandos soon. He sought to press a paper into Maedhros' hand with their names and ranks, but Maedhros rebuffed him with the question that he always dreaded most, even in the face of such heavy losses. At least the losses were certain.

"Were any but Queen Alphangil taken, are any others missing?"

"Only one, my lord," Hwestonnen answered, drawing himself up straighter as if he meant to voice his suspicion but dared not, knowing his own lord's history. "Cýronil, a former thrall."

"I hear you," Maedhros said curtly. "Not taken. And not former."

Hwestonnen nodded. "She volunteered to search the northeast of the village before we made camp the first time we passed through, as well as now - the direction the Orcs came from, and we had one of the wounded report that he saw her take the Queen away in the same direction."

Hwestonnen fell into step beside him as Maedhros strode through the makeshift ward that was being set up by those of his soldiers who had some aptitude in healing. He was as eager as Fingon to be gone, but he needed to hear it confirmed and learn if any of them knew more. Hwestonnen pointed him toward the right place, only for them to find a corpse.

The young man who had seen Alphangil taken was the sixth dead of the night; his life's blood had pulsed out of the deep slash in his thigh before the wound could be staunched and pooled into the frozen ground under him. Maedhros bent down and closed the dead soldier's eyes. "His name - Faelond, is it, of my Third Infantry?"

"Yes, my lord," Hwestonnen confirmed. "It honours him that you know your people so well."

"No less than the due for those who fight and die for me. A king is he that knows his own, for how else could he hold them?"

Hwestonnen inclined his head.

They found few people who reported that they had seen Alphangil being taken; most had been too busy defending themselves and the people around them to take much care of what happened on the outskirts of the battle, but all who had seen her agreed with Fingon's account that Alphangil had been alive until she was taken from view.

If it had been intended to demoralize or enrage them, Maedhros reasoned with himself and against the mounting pressure behind his eyes, they would have slain her in sight and full attention of all. With Cýronil holding her knife to Alphangil's throat, they could have done so without leaving time enough for a rescue. Their secrecy suggested a more nefarious purpose.

Maedhros had the village searched. The tracks split, the scouts reported upon their return - some went into a tunnel in one of the nearby houses, where the entire Orc-host had come from, but now others moved back northwest with speed. In the trample of footprints, they could not make out any possible elven tracks, not of Cýronil nor of Alphangil. They could not say where they had gone. He sent a pair of scouts into the tunnel after them.

Bent over a map with Hwestonnen and Fingon, Maedhros traced a finger down the most likely route for the host travelling out in the open, downward over the least steep slopes into Anfauglith.

"Do you think they have her?" Fingon asked. He had calmed down, though he still was restless and when he was not pacing tried to sink himself into ósanwë often, testing the bond that connected him and Alphangil, and snapping out with despair in his eyes when he could not find her mind or glean a response from her.

"No, or I would have sent people to follow them as well," Maedhros answered. "They are a distraction, a means to have us spread ourselves thin and make any counter less effective, much less a rescue. We wait until my scouts return from the tunnel, and go after that group, as soon as we know it can be done safely and stealthily. I fear for Alphangil if we cannot take them at unawares. You should not try to reach out for her - we are too close to the Enemy here, and what would you do if he came into your mind?"

"Waiting, waiting!" Fingon snarled. "I have heard nothing of Morgoth, and cannot even feel her mind - how can you be so calm when we are running out of time? How can you be so certain she is even still alive?"

"You are anxious, and she is likely unconscious - and if she were awake, as afraid as you are. Believe me, if she had died you would know," Maedhros tried to calm him. "Grandfather spoke at times about how it felt when my grandmother passed to Mandos, and he described a pain like no other that moment." He did not say that he was not calm, only knew that he had, through painful experience in the dungeons of Angband, learned to control himself.

Fingon's lips were pressed into thin lines. "To you perhaps. To us he mostly spoke of his happiness with grandmother Indis, never of the shadows that came before. But I have heard and seen enough to know that you speak true. I crossed the Ice and saw Elenwë fall, and we all fought battles here and saw spouses separated by ill chance. Regardless, that is not a comfort. I need to know that she is well. How can you be so calm?!"

Maedhros eventually dismissed Hwestonnen when the conversation veered into the private, ordering him to make ready, and rolled the maps back into their protective leather tube, then pulled Fingon into one of the houses. In the privacy of the sheltering walls, he pulled Fingon close and kissed him deeply, brushing his thumb over Fingon's cheek.

"How can I be calm when one I love is taken?" Maedhros asked, picking up the thread of the conversation that had dropped away. "And how, when I see the other one I love - you - as you are now?"

Fingon laughed against his lips, a watery, upset sound now that they were alone. "My mind gives me only this thought: Finding her - not in pursuit, but too late. Finding her as I found you, hanging from the same shackle on the same wall of Thangorodrim - and me, calling and calling until it is clear that no eagle will come for her rescue, and my only way of saving her is to - " his voice faltered, but Maedhros knew what he thought. He himself had begged for his death that day.

"We will not let that happen," he could only say against the burn of bile in his throat and the despair that threatened to swallow him as much as it had taken Fingon.

Outside the house it was almost daylight.

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A sharp prickle in her hands and fingers woke Alphangil, and the chafing of ropes against her wrists.

Her consciousness followed the sensation like a beacon out of the dark. Keeping her eyes closed, she could feel the sockets of her shoulders protesting; her arms were stretched above her head. Her dignity momentarily took offense at being strung up like a piece of game, half-slumped among what seemed to be twisted roots, and half suspended from a low branch, the rough bark of a pine tree against her back, but she knew that dignity was a concern she could not afford. With anger and fury trapped behind her teeth, she concentrated inward instead - had they hurt her any worse than this?

She felt ice cold, from the tips of her bloodless fingers to her toes. Her head ached with a dull pulse of pain and at the back of her skull were damp, bruised spots of blood growing crusty in her hair where they'd struck her, those two blows. In spite of the darkness that had engulfed her, her memory was clear: She could not forget the icy edge of steel against her throat, the tunnel and then the sudden darkness - and Fingon's terror-widened eyes.

She gathered her resolve and finally opened her own eyes, wincing and blinking against what must be daylight. It stabbed into her eyes with force and she closed them again quickly - it was so bright that it was hard to make anything out clearly, but she could recall enough. Winter sunlight, dark shades on the ground in the mouth of a cave where they sheltered - the Orcs. Not far away, unbothered by the daylight, sat Cýronil, dragging a whetstone along the blade of her dagger with slow, deliberate precision. On her head lay, crooked and mocking, Alphangil's circlet of office, silver with a blue stone in its center.

She re-opened her eyes with more care and caution.

Cýronil hadn't noticed that Alphangil was awake yet, and Alphangil intended to make the most of the moment's respite, turning her head only slightly so her cheek rested against the rough bark of the tree she was tied to. She could smell the sap running underneath, and something half-burned, could hear the tree's whisper - something of small comfort, nothing of help for getting loose. On Alphangil's left, the pine had been scorched. No wonder that it was no kinder, it was badly hurt - worse than she was.

And only feet from her, she realized, snapping her eyes open wider, began the ashy sands of Anfauglith. Without looking, she knew Thangorodrim loomed in the distance, and her stomach dropped, realizing that only nightfall stood between her and a march into certain doom. Frightening, but not yet so real that she would allow terror to cow her.

Yet.

She cast around for others, flickering her eyes this way and that, to the scattering of trees burned and unburned around the clearing, to patches of dead heather in the field of boulders around her that might have once toppled down the slopes to form some rudimentary defenses, the opening of the tunnel - and found no one of Maedhros' host.

She had not expected Fingon or Maedhros to lie captive - both such prolific fighters that Orcs fell before them like leaves, but had hoped perhaps to see a warrior or two who might have experience in escaping their bonds and help her not only get free, but overpower at least Cýronil. She'd have to bide her time, if she had any time left.

The sun, she determined finally, considering where they must be, with the highlands vaulting up southward, on her right, stood east and too high for the early hours - it was perhaps midmorning. As they were nearly at Anfauglith, perhaps they'd come through the tunnel in the cellar into caves that spat them out here. They must have marched swiftly for half the night at least, now insisting on their own rest. Unless Morgoth stretched out his hand and cast them a shadow, the Orcs would not go far in daylight, least of all across open terrain.

This far north, that meant she had maybe four or five hours to rest and to think of a plan until the early dark of winter rolled in. She moved her feet, finding them unbound, for good measure, curling her toes into her boots and, stretching them out again, shifted her legs fraction by fraction until she could push herself into something resembling a sitting position.

Alphangil bit down on the inside of her cheek against the nausea that vaulted up like a wave, but the eruption of pain in her head made her groan.

The sharp shhhrk of the whetstone across Cýronil's knife stopped.

"Ah, the little princess is finally back with us," she said in a low voice, rasping out laughter. Alphangil did not think that she had ever heard her speak unguarded before the evening, and her un-altered voice was all that she had expected of a former thrall - no, a thrall still, and a traitor - low and rough, and a perpetual edge of tears and screams that lived in it.

Like Maedhros', she thought, had he not healed as best he might. Or, perhaps, learned to pretend just as Cýronil had while they had talked on Himring.

"High Queen," Alphangil corrected through a mouthful of anger that got the better of her for a moment, then she inwardly scolded herself for a fool. Fingon's temper was rubbing off on her.

"I know, and all the better for me." Cýronil righted the circlet on her head, sheathed her dagger and moved in on her. "You do want to shut your mouth, Your Highness, however. I do not have any problem cutting out your tongue if you annoy me, if you scream or make any noise. You'd not be the first."

"What, Morgoth does not want me to sing all I know of the councils that are being taken?"

"Morgoth has other means of learning those things from you. All he demanded was that I bring you alive. He never so much as breathed the word 'unharmed'."

A frisson of fear passed through Alphangil. She allowed it, embraced it, and let it go, although now that her captor moved closer, the eyes trained on her - a once-lovely Noldorin blue under a shock of light brown hair now streaked with grey - were the most disquieting thing about her. No flicker of the light of the stars in them, and with a name like hers, Alphangil did not think that she had been born in the Blessed Realm, so there was no light of the Trees either. And there, as in her voice, was a terror that Cýronil's nonchalance failed to hide, the look of a haunted person, a fleeing animal brought to bay by the hounds of its hunters.

"I pity you," Alphangil said softly. "Perhaps more than I fear you."

In a flash, those eyes hardened like a starless nightfall, and the pommel of Cýronil's dagger, etched with the Fëanorian star, cracked across her face. Alphangil felt her nose fracture. Blood gushed hot and salty over her lips and down the back of her throat. She spluttered and choked, and spat out what she could. The pain bloomed up a moment after, once more chasing black spots over her vision.

She leaned back against the tree, gasping for breath and blinking the unbidden tears away. This was nothing. Nothing to what she knew by now Maedhros had endured in his captivity, and the thought gave her strength to keep speaking.

"What else, then." Alphangil spat out another mouthful of blood that was coagulating in her throat. "He could have taken any of Maedhros' allies. Why all this for me. I may be Queen, but it is Fingon who rules the Noldor."

Cýronil laughed, wiping a smear of blood off the dagger's hilt on her shirt.

"I'd say that that would be a typical question for a Noldo, but I know that you're a Dark Elf. Except of course that you've thrown in your lot with them and become like them - just as arrogant and just as stupid to never see past your own reflection. The trap was not only for you, although you make beautiful bait for them, and quite a lovely treat on your own - but if we are very very lucky, we'll be bringing home three birds for the price of one, or demoralize two of them so much that they will abandon their war games and remove to the south. It's such a little thing to not throw their lives away… but they didn't see reason for an even greater reward after we dangled him from the Mountain, so I would not hold my breath that they would give up their plans for the likes of you. Once the gates close behind you, it's farewell to your husband dear and his bed-companion."

Alphangil swallowed her fury and made a noise that she hoped sounded incredulous - they did not know about the three of them, strange as it seemed - and Cýronil glanced at her. "Oh, my love, my Queen, you did not know that your pure, noble, oh-so-kingly husband has been letting Maedhros fuck his arse ever since Valinor?" She mocked. "You're an afterthought at best, but don't cry. We might become fast friends instead. You are very fair, and Morgoth rewards those who do his bidding well… "

As Cýronil moved closer and cupped her cheek in the mockery of a caress, Alphangil forced down the feeling of empty despair that overpowered her disbelief and disgust. She had to trust, at whatever cost, Fingon would shut his love for her away and continue to be the leader the Noldor needed, and not risk countless lives for her single one. She trusted that Maedhros at least would be capable of restraining him - for long enough to wage their war, and perhaps rescue her, if she were still alive then - and if they were.

She did not relish becoming this woman's plaything until then.

Cýronil's touch filled her with disgust, unclean and orcish-seeming under the gentle surface of the gesture. Nonetheless she turned her head into it, closing her eyes and letting the tension go from her body so she hung almost slack in her bonds. Her shoulders and wrists once again protested the weight placed on them, and she could feel her wrists bleed where they broke skin, but perhaps - hopefully -

Cýronil breathed out, very softly. Her fingers ran across Alphangil's face and over her bloodied lips, teasing and pushing inward. Alphangil forced herself not to think of Fingon and Maedhros and their shared tenderness in this moment, and forced herself not to retch.

It was too much. She could not play along and pretend to be seduced by her captor.

When Cýronil had two fingers on her tongue, Alphangil bit down with all the force her jaws could muster.

She heard bones crack, tasted blood that was not her own.

Cýronil shrieked and backhanded her with her left, slamming Alphangil's already-aching head hard into the tree. She let go of the fingers between her teeth. Pain exploded like a star behind her eyes. The world dipped into a storm of brightness. She hung breathless but triumphant in her bonds for a moment.

"I'll throw you to the Orcs!" Cýronil howled. The pressure on Alphangil's shoulders abruptly released as her bonds were cut. Unprepared and unable to catch herself, she crumpled into a heap on the ground, falling against the pine's roots with her head, and her hold on her consciousness became more tenuous still.

She was dragged across the stony soil by what was left of her unravelling braid, scraping her cheek raw and beat helplessly at the air as the cave-mouth, where the Orcs were now startled from their rest, gibbering and grunting, loomed ever closer.

Before they reached it, Alphangil grasped at the one thought her mother had drilled into her since she had been old enough to understand what torture meant, since too many of her kin had returned with scars that were not from battle alone. Do not prolong their games by fighting them. They will at last tire of hurting you if you fail to provide the sport they want.

It was not hard to shut the over-bright world away behind her eyelids, to stop fighting and to plunge into unconsciousness once again. The last thing flashing through her mind before it pulled her into darkness was the image of Maedhros's and Fingon's hair mingling in the wind on the mountain. She only hoped fervently that they would be able to do the right thing, and that her son would not have to grow up any more lonely.

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It was not until after daybreak that the two scouts emerged from the tunnel, looking spent and reporting nothing good.

"It seems that was an escape tunnel for the mortals that lived here. They must have wrought it intentionally confusing to throw any seekers off of the trail of anyone fleeing. It veers down into a cave system, into water and over rocky ground, and that was where we lost them," the woman reported, pushing bright hair back under the dark grey hood she wore. "Even the stones would not tell of their passage - it may be that the Enemy's arm has grown long enough to shield them even there. In other tunnels we found foes - spiders, and worse things that we dared not fight, for the sake of time. I suggested we separate, but now I think my brother had the better idea of it."

Maedhros nodded, heavy-hearted and heartsick, as he listened to his scouts finish their report. "I thank you, Glorloth and Gladhion," he said quietly. "Dismissed."

The siblings bowed and filed out of the house, and Fingon was pacing again. "What now? All your caution gave us was more distance to cross and even less chance of finding Alphangil!"

Maedhros winced. "I know that you are more likely to run heedless into danger than to make a plan and follow it, but only because that was a success once does not mean rushing into the tunnel will bring Alphangil back to us as it brought me back to you rushing into Angband. You were lucky then - and wise to set out to heal the feud, but not cunning. Manwë still pitied us then, that is the only reason you succeeded, or I would long be fodder for the carrion birds of Morgoth, with one of your arrows in my ribcage."

"I AM YOUR KING! YOU WILL -" Fingon thundered, and then halted as if struck by a sudden thought. The volume of his voice dropped only slightly, but a strange, feverish tone bloomed up in it instead. "How can you be sure none of your people - especially the ones delaying us - is another traitor? How can you be certain when you trusted this Cýronil enough to take her into your service?"

Maedhros' tone, too, changed. It softened dangerously. Fury and frustration dragged his voice into a deep, low, threatening cadence, more reminiscent of Maglor than himself. His brothers were rightly terrified of it.

He had never used it with Fingon before.

"Because I interrogated her, personally. It takes one thrall to recognize another," Maedhros said through what he was sure must be thin white lips. He was breathing hard, resting both his stump and his hand on the map table opposite Fingon, their postures mirrored and both of them tense enough to snap. "I failed to realize that she was still under Morgoth's power, but you will be happier not knowing all I do to keep my people safe, to separate those who mean us harm from the ones that do not. But I will vouch with my life for Glorloth and Gladhion. Their parents died defending Himring in the Bragollach and they have no love for the Enemy. You are King, but you do not know my people as I do."

Their eyes met, and Fingon's steely expression softened until he closed his eyes. "I apologize," he said quietly, defeated. "The longer we wait, the more I fear for her. I am King, I am not Mandos to be unmoved."

"I know, and I do not blame you." Maedhros let his voice go gentle, allowing the cracks in it to show. He reached across the table, laying his hand in Fingon's, finding his skin cool and clammy, and looking up found his eyes tired with the lack of rest and the worry gnawing at his mind. He resolved to teach Fingon something of the ways to steel his mind when they had all three returned to Himring, but miles and battle still lay between them and Alphangil's rescue.

"If we cannot find her, then we must pursue the other half of the host and find someone to tell us where she is. Caution is done with. Come."

He spoke to Hwestonnen briefly, outlining his plan to follow the host travelling in the open. From where they were near the center of Dorthonion, the Orcs would not yet have reached Anfauglith; they would have found shelter to wait out the daylight - hopefully in a spot that would allow for a quick, deadly attack leaving no more survivors than they needed to find out about Alphangil's whereabouts.

Maedhros snapped orders for those of his people who were well enough to be mustered and those few who were to remain behind to care for and guard the most wounded. He did not believe in any more targeted attempts, but there might always be another enemy attack, or the denizens of the tunnels coming to the surface sensing easy prey.

With all said and done, Fingon all but raced toward the horses. They were already outfitted, and Pilin was stomping at the earth impatiently, while, more complacent, Maedhros' Nimlach stood quietly. That changed when they began moving - even on the boulder-strewn, uneven ground, Nimlach was both careful and tireless, and Maedhros led the way with ease.

The Orcs moving downslope in their heavy boots had left tracks that even the least experienced tracker would find - a churned-up path of earth, trampled plants and pointlessly hewn branches, and the ground was still groaning where they had passed. It was not long before the groans turned into laments, as Glorloth, riding alongside Maedhros and Fingon, reported.

They were closing in on the Orc-host.

They had flown into gallops over level stretches of ground where the land permitted it, and even on the slopes they made good speed, so that the sun had not long passed noon when Glorloth held up her hand to slow them, slipped from her own horse's back and inspected the track, tipped her head back and breathed deeply of the wind blowing at them.

Then she drew her grey cloak about her and vanished into the underbrush noiselessly, returning only a few moments later, and with hand gestures conveyed, A dale with three steep sides behind those bushes, open to the north. The Orcs are down there: North-east in the shade. The Queen is not with them. Two chieftains.

Maedhros gestured back more laboriously with his left. Archers at the lip of the dell. Cavalry down at the entrance. Stir them up, leave the chieftains alive. I will do the rest.

Fingon smiled as he drew his sword, his eyes bright and hard, and Maedhros' heart seized under his armour. He nodded, resorting to ósanwë for a matter that the rest of the host had no business knowing.

I love you, he said. Be safe. I could not bear losing you any more than I could losing her.

Fingon did not reply in words, but with a warmth that reminded Maedhros of their three joined bodies, and the love that came with it, but all laced with a deep, swift undercurrent of worry that only action kept at bay.

The attack was as swift and as deadly as Maedhros hoped. Fingon had left Pilin behind and fought on foot, and Maedhros, riding into the fray on Nimlach, found his heart nearly stopped to see him in battle. Anairë had been - still was, surely - a dancer of some renown, and Maedhros knew well that Fingon had inherited his mother's grace, but to see it wielded as a weapon nearly deadlier than his longsword never failed to catch his breath with the beauty of it. Even a thick arc of black blood that spattered over Fingon's armour and halfway across his face did nothing to diminish it.

Within minutes only the two chieftains were alive, overcome and tied against a dead tree. Maedhros drew a small knife from a hidden sheath on his thigh and laughed, letting his fear and fury and love for Fingon and Alphangil carry him through this.

"Do you recognize me?" he asked in Orcish, and removed his helm to let his hair fall free. He did not hide the fact that he had been forced to learn the language in Angband, but still saw his people wince. It was unlovely, he knew, and unpleasant to speak it, in a way that left his throat sore afterward. But at this moment, ordering Maglor to practice it with him even after his captivity, and to have his people bring him Orcs to interrogate instead of slaying them right away, served him well, and he could not bring himself to regret it.

The chieftains exchanged glances, but did not reply. Maedhros pressed himself against the larger one of them bodily, towering over the crooked creature with its grey-mottled skin. It stank of piss and Maedhros could hear more liquid trickle over the pocked metal of its armour.

"I asked whether you recognized me."

The other chieftain, paler and more elf-like in its complexion, something that might once have been the honey-gold skin of a Vanya, was the one to reply. "We recognize you! Who wouldn't! Red Lamp-Eye the Defiant, the one the Master put on the Mountain because he could not break you! They still sing about you!"

He spoke with something like awe. The chieftain laughed a horrible, gurgling, orcish laugh and Maedhros had to force himself to keep a mask of ice in place, to let nothing of his nausea reach his eyes. Behind him, he knew Fingon hovered. He did not understand Orcish and did not know what was said, and Maedhros did not relish the thought of Fingon seeing this side of him, the side that he had had to permit to survive in Angband.

"If you want to go back to sing of me with your misshapen brood, you will tell me what I will ask you now. You will tell me true, or I will carve a piece off of your companion and feed it to you. Do you understand?"

The Orc said nothing.

Maedhros strode over to the other Orc. The smell of piss was stronger now, but he did not let that deter him. A swipe of the small knife, and the grey orc's ear came away, black blood steaming in the icy day, leaving him snarling and biting at the air. Maedhros raised it to his own lips and tore into the frayed tip of it, keeping eye-contact with his captive, and forced a piece of cartilage down his own throat in spite of the disgust that made him want to retch miserably. He knew if he let anything show, that he had lost.

He grasped the other Orc's jaw and forced it open. "Fingon," he said, holding the severed ear between his teeth, remembering only after addressing him to speak Sindarin. "He is eager for a taste. Feed him."

Fingon took the ear from Maedhros lips and stuffed it into the orc's forced-open mouth, then Maedhros forced it shut again. "Chew," he said in Orcish. "Swallow. Do you understand."

The Orc snarled, but did as he was ordered. The ear made terrible sounds between his teeth, and a side-glance at Fingon revealed an aghast expression on his beautiful face that almost made Maedhros abandon the entire endeavour. Only knowing that if he stopped now, they would never learn where Alphangil was kept, let him carry on.

"I asked whether you understood."

"I understand!" the Orc snarled in response. "I'll talk, Master damn you!"

"He already damned me, or you would be mercifully dead now," Maedhros replied, and did not add, And I as well. "Where is the High Queen of the Noldor whom you took?"

"We didn't!"

Again, Maedhros strode to the grey Orc. "What shall it be this time, do you think?" He deliberated for a moment. "Something softer." He stabbed down at the Orc's mouth and sliced across, and coming away with no more effort than tearing a piece of paper, the grey Orc's lower lip fell into Maedhros hand. The wounded Orc screamed, openly weeping now, with filth and abuse thrown in.

Maedhros ignored him, turning back to the first one.

"Then who did, and where is she." He gestured to Fingon, and once again the same thing repeated. Fingon, now with orcish blood on his hands that he wiped on his armour without speaking, but clearly churning with conflicted emotion, fed the Orc his companion's lip and Maedhros held his jaw shut until after he'd swallowed so he would not spit it out again.

Someone in Maedhros' host was noisily sick and the Orc laughed again, this time spiteful. "Weaklings. You'll not get her back and I'll get to boast."

"Are you so hungry that you would have me take that one apart entirely? Speak!"

The Orc did not reply.

The game repeated a third time. Maedhros did not ask Fingon then, instead spearing the second Orc's eyeball on his knife and showing it to the first one slowly. His companion had stopped snarling and hung limp in his bonds. Maedhros only turned when he heard the sound of a knife being drawn and just in time saw how Fingon cut the second's chieftain's throat, then turned away with a hard look on his face.

Perhaps it was the threat of death that finally moved the Orc to speak.

"West! West and a bit north of here!" he finally shrieked, now sounding panicked. "That's where the tunnel opens up into a dried-up tarn at the edge of the Ash Plain. We'd join up there tonight and march for home. That's all I know!"

Maedhros shook the eyeball from his knife and ground it under his boot, then yanked the knife across his Orc's throat as well. He gurgled briefly, then silence fell.

"West and north along the edge of Anfauglith, a dried-up tarn and a cave." Maedhros announced to the host, in his mind's eye recalling a probable place from the maps he had stared at for far too long, and once more reminding himself that he needed to speak Sindarin for them to understand. His throat already hurt. Then he took Nimlach's reins and swung himself into the saddle.

"We ride! To the High Queen!"

"To the High Queen!"

Maedhros's heart burned, and as he glanced to Fingon racing beside him still on Pilin, he could see an answering white fire and tears in his eyes, his look stubbornly ahead.

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When Alphangil forced her eyes to open, a rattish-looking Orc was glaring down at her, far too close for comfort. Her scraped-up cheek stung where it had struck her to rouse her out of what she thought must have already been the edge of wakefulness, although with the mosaic of different pains that her body was, this hardly mattered.

Alphangil breathed down the terror at the cat-green eyes boring into her own, tried not to smell the creature's stench of corruption, the odour of decaying meat and rotten teeth from its mouth. She lay near to a fire, and the Orc's breath mingling with the putrid smoke of whatever refuse were burning took her breath away entirely. Had her stomach not been utterly empty, she would have retched.

The Orc grinned at her, showing all its teeth, and in strange Sindarin said "Hairyours, so soft…" Its hands ran through her mussed hair with something like appreciation, if Orcs could show that. Its own strands were greasy and unkempt, black like her own, but patchy, ragged and flecked with flakes of dead skin.

Alphangil said nothing, remembering her mother's advice.

The Orc drew a knife and pulled up a fistful of hers, half-lifting her off the rocky ground she lay on. It hacked away at her hair and nicked her scalp, and Alphangil bore it stoically. She gritted her teeth and curled her numb fingers into her palms but didn't give it the satisfaction of another reaction. Hair would regrow.

The rest of the hair came loose, some ripping out by the root and some tearing under the knife. She bit back a whimper. The Orc dropped her unceremoniously and marched away with its prize, and through another explosion of pain in her already-hurting head, another sting through the broken bones of her nose, she saw it present her hair to the other Orcs who lounged around the cave, who laughed like bones grinding when the thing began to braid her hair into its own, preening. Another came, regarding her with perhaps similar intent, pulling up another fistful of her hair, but it didn't seem to find her hair as appealing and simply levelled an iron-shod boot into her ribs with something like boredom.

She wheezed for breath and pressed her face into the sharply-stinking ground, littered with bat guano, trying to find whether the orc had broken her bones - only bruised, she determined after a while. She had been lucky.

When the shocks of pain had abated back into thrums that at least allowed her to breathe more calmly, she cast around for Cýronil. The thrall was silhouetted against the sky at the mouth of the cave, and Alphangil wished herself back to the tree where she had been captive before. At least Cýronil had left her alone - for the most part. Now she seemed preoccupied with something: she looked up at the sky, turned this way and that, clearly seeking, called something to the Orcs, and disappeared from Alphangil's view.

Startled, Alphangil realized that the world outside the cave was growing dark. It couldn't be long before they'd take her and move on, but something had seemed strange: Had it been her imagination, or had Cýronil sounded nervous and annoyed, even though Alphangil did not speak the language and could discern nothing of the meaning?

She sucked in a painful breath and then another, and tested her bonds, now that she had a chance to. After being cut free of the tree, she'd been tied again. This time she lay on her side on the ground with her hands and feet in terribly tight ropes connected behind her back in a way that forced her body into a precarious, obscene arch. She didn't know how long she'd been lying unconscious like that before startling back awake, but the fact that dark was falling and the way her muscles ached made her think it must have been longer than just a little while.

She lay still and concentrated on breathing, ignored how parched her mouth was, and kept her eyes trained on the cave entrance until exhaustion had her lose focus. Cýronil reappeared eventually, melting out of the swift winter darkness that had now fallen for good. Cýronil's path led her straight to the fire, warming her hands - her right wrapped in rags torn from her cloak and splinted with sticks, Alphangil was gratified to see, even if she still remembered the horrible sound of cracking bones in her mouth and the bitter taste of Cýronil's blood.

Cýronil noticed her staring and drew the knife she bore, the one she had held to Alphangil's throat the night before, the one she'd broken her nose with. It was long and curved in the style of Himring's smiths, with the Fëanorian star etched into the pommel, beautifully wrought but deadly. She balanced it on the fingertip of her left hand, flicked her wrist, caught it from the air, and tossed.

Alphangil's shoulders screamed as she wrenched herself away with enough force to roll onto her back. The knife stuck, quivering, in the ground where her stomach had been a moment ago. Cýronil laughed and came toward her. She pulled the knife out, polished off the grains of sand from it sensuously with her cloak.

Alphangil glared at her.

Cýronil tossed the knife again, and this time, lying supine with her arms and legs under her, Alphangil was left open and undefended. The attack the night before had not taken place - intentionally so, she thought - until Alphangil had divested herself of her chainmail to sleep easier, when she'd still trusted that there was safety to be found.

The knife pierced through her clothes and into her skin, springing off the bone of her hip. The throw had very little force behind this time and did not penetrate deeply - a wound, certainly, but not a serious one. But with her insides turning to water, Alphangil saw, as the slow torture went on - the knife sticking in the ground by her ear and cutting it, the knife just barely passing her face - that the Orcs were beginning to pay attention to Cýronil's game. There were grunts and cheers when she drew blood, and some had begun toying with their weapons, some whips but mostly their own knives - some of them of Elvish make, but all of them ill-tended and rusted, notched and mean-looking.

"Tell them not to!" Alphangil pleaded. By now her fight was going out of her; she was tense like a bowstring with agony and desperate fear, all her noble convictions of silence gone. At least Cýronil was not an Orc. She at least might still be reasoned with and convinced away from her cruelty.

Cýronil bared her teeth at her. "You should have thought about the consequences of your actions before. I'm only passing time until the rest of the host arrives, and the boys like to play, too. Gets their blood moving for the last leg of the journey. But Angband ordered to bring you in alive, and if I don't, that's on my hide, so don't you worry your pretty head, I won't let them kill you. Only a little fun."

She took up the knife again and this time, instead of tossing it, cut through the tunic, which parted like butter under the blade, and carved, not too deeply, but deep enough to hurt, a large C-tengwa into her skin, half-round bow and downward stem, then reaching for a handful of black ash from the edge of the fire and rubbing it in. "So you don't forget me, if they don't let me have you," Cýronil said, suddenly sounding perversely tender.

She bent to kiss the wound, similar to Alphangil 'kissing better' any little scratch that Gil-galad might incur playing. The thought of her son, so sudden amid the torture, helped Alphangil to keep from shuddering under Cýronil's lips.

She resolved that she would scour this tattoo from her body herself if she had to, she was not going to bear any mark this woman had left on her.

Her captor halted, cocked her head. "One more thing that won't kill you that I won't miss out on. One hand for another."

Cýronil bent down and grasped Alphangil by the shoulders, turning her so she lay prone and her head was pressed once again into the stinking bat guano littering the floor. She could only feel what happened next - Cýronil's heavy war boot ground down onto the palm of her right hand, against the fragile bones there, from fingers down toward the wrist, and shifted her weight onto it. The crushing pressure mounted until it was unbearable.

Bones crushed, snapped and twisted. Alphangil's back screamed to have the weight of another elf concentrated in a single spot, and the cords, already cruelly tight, sliced even deeper into her skin.

She lay wheezing, biting her lips bloody not to scream, and still could not wholly suppress it. And then the pressure crested, vanishing only as Cýronil leapt over Alphangil's head and landed by her face, nearly kicking her boots into her ruined nose. Alphangil's view was a hazy blur of tears with the new pain. Somehow it seemed to re-ignite all the other agonies that she'd already suffered and she could not help weeping openly now.

Cýronil bent down to her, and Alphangil found that over the blood rushing in her ears she sounded far away. "Little princess, this was not even the beginning of what Angband will do to you - I know because they did it to me, and I look forward to seeing you enjoy the same."

Then she sheathed her knife, and straightened up, calling something in Orcish that roused protests in the crowd, and repeated the same thing in a harsher voice.

Knives were sheathed. Through her tears she could see one Orc forcing an erect penis back into its breeches, and snarling at another that made a grab for it. Cýronil had been bluffing: she was not going to let the Orcs torture her. Alphangil felt a new surge of weeping come on, this time of twisted gratitude.

The Orcs began to rouse themselves. The fires were trampled out, cinders kicked into her face that sizzled against her tears, provisions stuffed into bags.

"We're moving on, nevermind the fucking slugs that should have been here by now," Cýronil said to her, her tone now carrying even more of the annoyance Alphangil had marked before. "I don't want to waste any more time."

*

Along the edge of Dorthonion and Anfauglith, running from East to West, lay an ancient Elf-road. It had been beautiful once, during the Long Peace, with flower-studded margins of heather, wild thyme, rattleweed, arnica and waving grasses. Now all was burned and since then, thorny shrubs had come there and reached out for the riders passing in a gallop.

Fingon on Pilin was at the head of the host, and Maedhros let him take the lead. The white stones of the road, covered by dust though they were, sparked against Pilin's hooves every now and then.

Secrecy be damned, speed was of the issue now.

Abandoned, desolate waystations and rest points, sometimes entire towns, loomed out of the dust to the left and right and flew by just as quickly, though not quick enough to keep Maedhros' memories at bay. Elves had lived there once, overrun by the Sudden Flame in a winter not unlike this. He himself had ridden along this road on visits to Eithel Sirion. During the Long Peace, these had not only been military installations so much as fortified civilian towns far enough from the frontlines that he had met the few children living there when he'd passed with a company, staring up bright-eyed and awed at his mail-clad warriors, while people sang at work, fountains splashed in village squares and horses ran along the far pastures.

He tried not to think of what had happened to them all. It became harder as dusk crept in with its ghosts, and they still had not reached their destination. Piercing-bright stars came out, and the Sickle hung high above Angband in the North.

With the stars of the Valacirca bright, Maedhros prayed, in the privacy of his mind, to Varda and all the Valar, one of the few times since the beginnings of his captivity, that they would find Alphangil - more than that, that they would find Alphangil alive.

Once or twice Maedhros spotted how the Fëanorian lamps they carried caught in the eyes of some creature out in the dust - once, a wolf or wild dog that an archer dispatched of without falling back, lest it was a beast out of Angband that would fetch its companions and come in pursuit, and not a stray without a pack.

The elven horses, trained for both speed and endurance, made good time, but even they had their limitations, and they had to slow from gallop to canter, finally into a trot and at last to a walk. He saw Fingon leaning forward whispering in Pilin's ear, and knew he was asking him for more speed, but Pilin snorted and tossed his head, though he quickened his walk a little.

They stopped only once to water the horses when they had worked up a lather of sweat.

"I feel like I have lost both of you," Fingon said with difficulty, stowing Pilin's ration of water away in his packs once the horse was done drinking. "What you did to those Orcs - I cannot forget it."

"I have carried that darkness in me since Angband," Maedhros replied, passing a cloth over Nimlach's sweat-soaked sides. She pushed against him. "And you loved me all the same."

"I had not seen it so closely then."

"I would do more, and worse - for you, for her, and if my Oath compelled me. I pray that it remains asleep."

"I will do much for you, but - at least do not make me complicit in it again," Fingon replied and afterward said nothing else, only giving him a long, wordless look that Maedhros could not read, his mind shut tight. They mounted again soon after and went back on their way. The horses, trusting their riders, went as fast as they still could.

Even though the landscape had changed in the burning, Maedhros thought that it couldn't be long after nightfall that they were approaching their destination - he remembered the outlines of the hills against the sky, the lay of the land, the particular ruined town that they passed. He rode up to Fingon and quietly informed him, and saw his eyes shimmering with exhaustion and worry, though the hard ride had dried his tears.

Still, perhaps with the dark words from before forgiven or overruled by his need for comfort, Fingon leaned in to Maedhros in full sight of the host, and Maedhros gave him a half-embrace on horseback in full sight of them all, whispering, "Soon. Not long now, I promise."

"I will go mad if it is not soon. My sword wants blood and I want my wife. If they harmed even one hair on her head, I shall -" Fingon's voice faltered.

Maedhros could not, in his heart of hearts, find the strength to lie to Fingon. "You shall comfort her - we shall. She will be scared and exhausted, at the very least - they will not have treated her kindly, you know that as well as I do. How much they hurt her I cannot say."

Fingon made a dry, rasping noise in his throat. Maedhros could guess where his mind went - to Thangorodrim, to the state Maedhros himself had been in. He remembered little from that time, passing most of his days and nights in the shackle in a daze near unconsciousness, a brief brightness of Fingon's song and his answer, the pain of losing his hand, and then a long, dark time of nothing, until he woke in a bed in Mithrim with Fingon asleep in a chair beside him.

He squeezed Fingon's hand and was about to tell him once again that they would find Alphangil, when another rider pushed forward next to them. "My Lord, High King," they said urgently and pointed ahead, where a spot of flickering light was moving across the road, from the opening between two hills and into Anfauglith, where it disappeared from view in between the remnants of yet another cluster of buildings. Another followed, and then furtively, more.

Maedhros dared not hope that finally, finally - "Ghost lights?"

"Torches, I think," Nellómin answered, and they nodded in answer to the question Maedhros had not asked. "We found them."

There was no holding Fingon after that. He spurred Pilin onward with a shout that rang in the ruins and the emptiness, and the entire host sprang after him.

*

At the command of Cýronil, Alphangil found herself lifted and slung over the shoulders of a large, strong orc. She whimpered; every movement jolted not just her head and made her dizzy and nauseous, but also sent new spasms of pain into her mangled hand. It was swelling around the broken bones, she could feel that, and the ropes cut into her flesh now, so much that she wondered how she still had all her limbs.

The thought made her snort in despair.

Her and Maedhros would only have two left hands between them if she survived to lose her now-mangled right, and that would not be enough to keep Fingon satisfied. They'd have to get even more inventive with their mouths and other limbs, she thought and laughed out loud in a strange mixture of despair and elation, wondering if she was in the process of losing her mind entirely, and then groaned, because her laughter sent shocks through her body and even those hurt.

They left the cave with lit torches and began their northward march, their boots hitting paving stones. Alphangil remembered that a road ran there, connecting Eithel Sirion, Himring and Dorthonion, ensuring swift travel and communications between the Noldorin realms of the leaguer, but the Orcs swiftly crossed over into the dust and ruins of Anfauglith instead of marching along it, and made their way north instead. Even in the darkness, Angband loomed black in the distance. It was as if the starlight from the clear, cold sky glanced off of it without a touch to lighten Thangorodrim.

In the distance, a wordless shout, a familiar, beloved voice. Alphangil struggled to look back along the road.

Cold lightstone lanterns, a horn blast, a storm of hoofbeats, veering off the road and closing in on the Orcs swiftly. The Orc carrying her passed behind a low, crumbling wall and her rescuers were hidden from view, cutting off her chance of being found. Alphangil found herself dropped to the ground; the Orc drew its blade and sprang out toward the coming fray. She pressed herself down into a corner, and then Cýronil was there with a drawn knife - not the one she had received from Maedhros, the one she had used for her torture games, nor an orcish one.

This one was small and evil-looking. A cold, dark sheen lay on the edges of the blade in the starlight.

A weapon of the Enemy.

Alphangil had heard of them before - rumored to be carriers of the Enemy's living will, or at the very least some dark, poisonous magic that corrupted those afflicted by it - before inevitably dragging them into death.

Cýronil showed it to Alphangil with relish, and her smile brightened into cruelty.

Cýronil explained, her gloating made urgent by the desire to get away, skittish looks over her shoulder, "You're lucky - it won't be Angband for you after all. You'll wish you were dead before you are, but you'll last a while before darkness takes you."

Hoofbeats. Quieter in the dust than they had been on the road, but closer now.

First shrieks of the Orcs. A trample of running feet, the ringing of swords and music of bowstrings, thuds of bodies falling, quick and merciless.

Fingon screamed her name like a battlecry, and she had never heard a more beautiful sound from his lips and - a shadow with blazing eyes flying over the ruined wall - a black horse and a rider, Fingon shining with white fire, here.

They had found her.

Cýronil slammed the knife home into Alphangil's shoulder to the hilt; then she was gone.

Alphangil screamed. The pain blazed, incandescent, through her entire body. She lay sobbing in her bonds, knowing that Cýronil had spoken true:

Whatever evil was in that blade, it would kill her.

Closing her eyes, she reached her mind out to Fingon, a final farewell. There was a snarled tangle of thought when she brushed against him, tightly wound with worry and flickering with disgust, fear, anxiety.

I will await you in the Blessed Realm, she thought out into it, and felt a blaze in return, a sudden burst of light and focus on her like a desperate sunrise.

No no no no no. Don't you dare! Alphangil!

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Fingon attempted to right himself on Pilin where he'd slumped against his stallion's neck; his hands slipped on the sweat-damp coat and his muscles had lost their strength.

Pilin nickered and danced under him, eager to rejoin the battle, but overcome with the pain radiating into him through Alphangil's ósanwë-message, Fingon found it hard to keep control over his mind and body, much less his horse. He slid from the saddle, trusting that Maedhros' people would not let any of their enemies escape this fight alive.

He stumbled the few steps toward his wife, and the noises from her lips - helpless, uncontrolled and utterly terrified sobbing, the sound of a crying child - broke his heart.

His wife was dying.

He fell to his knees next to her, pulled her onto his lap, glanced over her beloved face, smeared with dried blood from a broken, swollen nose that had left the skin around her eyes blackened, to the cruel bonds they'd forced her into, and cut those free. Her cries mingled with a noise of relief, her back and shoulders sagged and her left arm came around him, clutching at the cloak on his shoulders for dear life. Her right hand she held close against her chest.

A knife protruded from her shoulder. Through the torn tunic she wore, he could see her skin welting up in angry red streaks that were already darkening into something noxious and terrible, and he needed no training as a healer to know that this was no ordinary wound. He wanted to withdraw the knife and use it to slowly cut the Elf who had done this to his wife into pieces, the way Maedhros had done to the Orc. Suddenly, that deed was much easier to understand, and this time he would not show mercy, either.

It would not, he realized, change a single thing. Whatever he did to the thrall, if she were caught —

— Alphangil was dying.

"What do I do?" he asked breathlessly, now on the edge of tears himself, overcome again.

"Nothing, beloved," Alphangil replied, her pained voice on the verge of failing. "Only - please - do not leave me until I go. Take comfort with Maedhros. Raise Gil to remember me. Win your war. And if you are ever forgiven and may return to your Blessed Realm, I will await you. We will show them what blessedness truly means, Maedhros, you, me, the three of us."

Fingon could make no reply. He simply held Alphangil as, exhausted, her eyes slipped closed and her hand fell from his shoulder, and wept as had never thought he might weep, not even left behind in Araman, not on Thorondor's back, when he had not known whether Maedhros would live or die, not even after the Bragollach, when Rochallor had returned alone and he had known that his father was dead.

*

Maedhros found them eventually, dropping to his knees in the dust beside Fingon. The slaying was done, or nearly so, and had ordered his people to gather the Orc corpses into a pyre that would be burned once all they might find valuable had been stripped from them - armour, any worthwhile weaponry, intelligence, coin.

The only one they had not found - and whom he assumed escaped and far away by now - was Cýronil, but Fingon did not need to know that yet.

He was bent nearly double around Alphangil; his hair was falling forward over them both like a curtain.

Quiet, hoarse, desperate weeping came from Fingon. He did not react to Maedhros' touch other than to shrug it off as one might a fly, and did not seem to notice that it was him at all.

"Fingon. Is she alive?" he asked.

"Yet," Fingon answered, finally reacting. "Not for much -" He seemed to understand only when he lifted his head whom he was speaking to and looked at Maedhros from a face stained with tears and Alphangil's dried blood, and Maedhros could not help a startled breath when he saw Alphangil, her torn, bloodied clothing and battered face - though it seemed Fingon's tears had washed some of the blood away.

Fingon's voice took on a desperate quality.

" - not for much longer. She is dying. She is in pain! Your woman stabbed her with this!" he gestured at Alphangil's shoulder, where a knife stuck, between her clavicle and armpit. It was not part of the arsenal that Maedhros' people carried; he himself would never resort to cruel arts to create a blade that did not kill through its edges alone.

He could tell at a glance that he had seen knives of this make before. In Angband they were carried as a reward by those who had rendered Morgoth some great service. Ever so briefly, something dark and insidious flared up in his mind - yet more anger that he had not discerned Cýronil's true intent when she had joined his forces, and a black hatred for her - and himself.

Now he wished for good that Idhlinn were with them. She might be able to heal Alphangil even of this. He had learned only a little from her, finding that healing did not come readily to someone with hands that were stained with elven blood. Idhlinn had been at Alqualondë, but she had not fought, other than to save lives on both sides of the battle, and her coming into Exile had been his mother's request, to help and serve her sons. Her hands were unstained.

She had taught him some field medicine and a few of the methods she had used to help him survive the aftermath of Angband. A little more theory he had learned listening to Inuthind and Idhlinn bicker about and discuss healing methods while he was caught in bed recuperating, as well as through his friendship with Idhlinn. But Maedhros knew nothing about combating weapons of the Enemy - or rather, not of this kind. Orcs often used poison on their blades and arrows, but this was not an Orcish knife - it bore a mark that was darker and more powerful.

"It needs to come out," he judged, even knowing how dangerous it would be, in case Cýronil had struck one of the shoulder's arteries. "The longer it can work its evil on her, the more her chances dwindle."

"Did you not hear what I said? She is dying. Maedhros, it does not matter."

"It does matter," he objected, tipping up Fingon's tearstained face to look at him and stroke his cheek.. "Even if - if - she dies, she will be more comfortable until then if we take it out. Wait here." He waited for a spark of recognition, but Fingon only mulishly pulled his head away.

Maedhros sighed and rose. He sent one of his people to bring wood enough for a small fire and went to find a healer's kit. When he crossed paths with Nellómin, finding they had both a kit and a waterskin with them, they handed both over without complaint. They even offered to try and tend to Alphangil, but they were not a healer either, so Maedhros doubted that Fingon, as he was now, would allow anyone else to intrude into perhaps the final night he'd be able to spend with his wife.

Again he wished that Idhlinn were there, or at least that he could wing his thoughts to Himring, but as he'd told Fingon before, he dared not reach out. With Thangorodrim so close and the Shadow so near and heavy, he doubted that ósanwë would be able to reach across the long leagues unnoticed. He had felt the weight of Morgoth's mind on his, and likewise knew of the astounding secrecy and guile that Morgoth was capable of in the realm of thoughts. If Morgoth learned that Maedhros was in reach of his thought, if he found some well-meaning disguise to slip in, the entirety of the war planning would lie open to him.

Even at the risk of Alphangil's life, he could not endanger all the other parties who had sworn themselves to him, Fingon not least. Maedhros closed his eyes, trying to will the pain into submission, at least until it was safe to grieve.

His steps were heavier when he made his way back to Fingon and Alphangil. A small fire was burning there now, a tripod and pan of already-heating water set up. His man had been diligent.

Kneeling at Alphangil's side again, Maedhros began to examine the knife wound, more worried than reassured by Alphangil's lack of reaction - she must be deeply unconscious, and what else was ailing her he could not yet say. He did not want to risk moving her more than he had to to remove her tunic, so he resorted to cutting away a swath of the torn fabric on her shoulder. Around the knife there was only a little blood and it was already crusting into scabs. The way the knife had gone in, it had likely missed any of the large blood vessels. With a breath to steady himself, he reached for the hilt and pulled.

Even through the leather of his glove, he could feel some - presence, perhaps, like the cold that lurked among the stars, but where he expected resistance, the knife came out easily. The wound welled with blood when the blade was gone, but not overmuch - what worried Maedhros more was how dark it ran, and the dark streaks that were exuding from the wound. Wrapping the knife in a cloth, he stored it away. Idhlinn would have to see it.

He rinsed his hand and washed out the wound until Alphangil's blood ran red again, although the marks stretching like evil fingers toward her heart would not vanish. In the healer's kit was a gracious supply of dried asëa herb, enough to make a poultice to pack the wound with, knowing the herb helped against the despair and darkness that the Enemy used as one of his strongest weapons. Then he dressed it, and hoped that it would be enough

"That is done," Maedhros said to Fingon, who had been watching numbly through the procedure, stroking Alphangil's hair. Maedhros was trying to keep his voice level. "We should stay here for the night. Let her rest, let the horses rest, and make all possible speed toward Himring in the morning."

As soon as Maedhros was done with her, Fingon once again folded himself around Alphangil and did not reply. Maedhros took the lack of protest for an affirmative. He shrugged off his coat, heavy and dark, and laid it over Fingon's shoulders and over Alphangil, who had begun shivering but showed no sign of waking. His people needed to know to make camp and to not light the pyre until morning after all. With Alphangil so hurt, he did not want to attract more attention than routing the Orcs might already have done.

Cýronil's absence gnawed at him. He knew that she was valiant enough, or at least had seemed so. She had, even with her shadowed eyes and grey-streaked hair, always been eager to prove herself worthy through her relentless service, to prove that the constant scrutiny she'd found herself under was no longer necessary. Maedhros had eventually believed it, especially when her company leader recommended her and her prowess for surprising techniques and movements in training fights that would make her valuable. Now, looking back, he half expected her to melt out of the darkness and finish what she had begun.

And there was the question how and when she had gotten the knife, whether she had had it at Himring, unnoticed, and what her plan had been altogether, but unless she were captured and interrogated once again - or Alphangil woke to perhaps help them shed light - he did not think he would be able to find answers.

He ran his hand over his eyes, suddenly bone-tired and cold in the winter night without his cloak. His people, all of whom had ridden and fought as hard and fast as he himself, gave no appearance of tiredness, but he supposed he must look it, as he strode through the ash and dust of Anfauglith, stirring it up from the frozen ground in dirty clouds as he walked. They certainly gave him the kind of glances that spoke volumes.

With all settled and a handful of people called aside to tend the horses, wipe them down and see them properly fed and rested, as well as orders for Hwestonnen to draw up a watch schedule and to call on him at daybreak, Maedhros took his and Fingon's bedrolls from Pilin and Nimlach, and went back to Fingon and Alphangil in the corner behind the ruined wall.

Fingon hadn't moved, and on second look he seemed to have fallen asleep in the uncomfortable crouch around his wife, as if that could cocoon her from the outside world or the darkness at work in her own body. Alphangil was lying still again, though when he tenderly took her wounded right hand, he could feel her pulse in the swollen flesh and once again felt cold, livid fury well up in him, knowing that the one who had done this to her - this was Orc-work as much as what he had done earlier this day, but more refined and dangerous than the work of true Orcs - had fled and escaped her due punishment.

He thought he would not have slain Cýronil - not right away. He would have thrown her into Himring's deepest cellar and let her rot until the world's end, sending just enough food and drink to keep her alive, but deprived of company, free air, sun and stars.

Maedhros shook himself out of the dark thoughts. He was not a jailor and would not let the Enemy make him one, however much his creatures deserved it. Himring had been built without dungeons for good reason. He was not Morgoth. Even traitors and enemies should have, at the very least, a quick, clean death.

He stroked Alphangil's broken hand gently, and when she stirred, he touched Fingon to rouse him. He came to and sat up with a startled noise as if out of a deep sleep, and when his eyes lit on Maedhros, still unfocused, the previous empty helplessness crept back into them, his jaw set, and he turned to Alphangil, who was regarding the two of them from half-lidded eyes herself.

"Maedhr-" she began to ask, and then her entire body spasmed and convulsed on Fingon's lap, Alphangil's face a twisted mask of pain and muscles snapped taut to bursting. Fingon, who had had his hands on her shoulders, yanked them away as if stung and his horrified, wide eyes burned into Maedhros; he folded both his hands around Maedhros' left and held it. Fingon's fingernails dug into his flesh, and he didn't protest.

"Don't - don't hold her. Just - let it pass. You had these, after I brought you back," Fingon explained, breathless and horrified, until a moment or two later, Alphangil slacked and relaxed and she breathed out a shaking sob, hiding her face into the cloak Maedhros had laid around them, and another shuddering shiver passed through her before she lay still again.

Maedhros shook his head. Her pulse still beat under his fingers when he sought it, but she was far from well. "We need to dress the rest of her wounds at the very least. If you want to leave - go and see if Pilin needs aught else."

Fingon shook his head vehemently. "I will not leave my wife in her final hours! What has gotten into you?!"

"I apologize." He laid out the healers' kit once again, taking a clean cloth and searched Alphangil's face - she was unconscious again, her skin like clammy wax under his fingers, almost as that of a dead person, except that he could still feel the life in her, even if Fingon had not been wrong: It was fading.

He did not allow himself to dwell on that. He must act as if she had a chance of survival on the long road back to Himring. If he had ever needed estel it was now, and he could not disappoint all three of them by acting as if she had already died.

Maedhros passed the now-wetted cloth to Fingon. "Would you clean her face? Once the rest of the blood is gone, we can try and set her nose."

"Set her - " Fingon took the cloth and began to dab the blood away from her nose and cheeks, revealing scrapes and small pinpoint burns amid her freckles, while Maedhros tried his best to wash the dirt from the wounds ringing her wrists. They went deep in places, and he worried that they might be beyond healing, but after he had carefully rinsed them out, he found an extract of comfrey root in the kit. With Fingon's help, after he had finished the task of cleaning Alphangil's face and simply sat there staring into nothing, Maedhros uncorked it, mixed the liquid with more dried leaves of asëa and dabbed it carefully into the wounds before following up with clean bandages, and repeated the procedure with her maimed right hand as well, where the cuts went even deeper into the swollen flesh, bruising red and purple around the broken bones.

None of her bones, luckily, had broken the skin, or he would have feared infection even more than he already did, but Maedhros also could not tell what to do other than immobilise it all with more bandages. This would be a task for a true healer, not someone with his paltry skills.

A memory came unbidden, looking at Alphangil's face again. "Fingon," he said. "Do you remember, in Aman, the only hunting trip that the two of us ever took with Tyelko?"

Fingon did not reply. He was stroking Alphangil's hair, once again staring off into nothing with an expression as though he stood at the gates of Mandos himself. "Fingon." Maedhros repeated. "Findekáno."

Fingon looked up. "I heard you the first time," he said quietly. "What does that matter now?"

"Her nose. Again - it does, if only for her comfort. Recall, Tyelko startled you out of the tree you were sitting in, you fell, landed wrong and sprained your ankle. And had nothing better to do than wrestle him to the ground and hit him in the face, breaking his nose."

"I'd returned from Tulkas' courts just before," Fingon added in a monotonous, faraway voice. "I was full of it."

"You were," Maedhros confirmed with a fond note creeping into his own voice. "But more importantly - I showed you how to set his nose. Do you remember? Make a roof of your palms, fingers touching, against the root of her nose, then pull downward."

"I am not hurting her any further," Fingon protested, without ever leaving the same numb intonation, but a blaze passing over his eyes told Maedhros that he meant it. "You do it."

"I cannot do it with a single hand, and if you want to explain to her, if she survives, why her nose healed crooked, then you are welcome to."

"IF!" Fingon shouted, finally revealing that his unwillingness before had been denial of what he felt was inevitable. "I cannot - Maedhros, I can't. I cannot sit here to watch her die. Do not make me believe she will survive when she will not, do not make a promise you cannot keep." He carefully laid Alphangil's head from his lap into the folds of Maedhros' cloak that slipped from his shoulders as he rose, stumbled to the edge of their makeshift camp, then disappeared, leaving Maedhros alone with Alphangil, and the sound of barely-muffled weeping in his wake.

He let Fingon go.

Instead of following, he bent, placed a soft kiss on Alphangil's forehead and ran his fingers through her hair, finding a patch where the skin was nicked and broken, with the hair hacked short. He combed it out as best he might with his fingers and carefully wove what they had left her into a loose braid with the help of his hand and stump, so that it no longer lay like a mussed, dark glory around her head.

He could still hear Fingon and realized after a short moment that he must be on the other side of the wall. Hacked-up sobs that he was trying his best to keep quiet - and failing - echoed in Maedhros' ears, threatening to pull himself into despair as well. In the weeping, he could hear words, muffled but audible and painfully familiar.

Fingon repeated the words once more, this time louder and clearer, as if he drew a measure of strength from them. "Oh King to whom all birds are dear…"

Maedhros hoped that Manwë still had pity on them, if they came to him out of this far country. He spent a long time listening for the beat of mighty wings in the darkness, but the night stayed silent. No eagle would be coming to take Alphangil to safety.

Time passed; the stars slipped onward from the early night and he kept the fire burning low and hot against the chill of the winter night. Fingon still had not returned, but his sobs and prayer had gone quiet at last. Alphangil had slept, or been unconscious. Once she spasmed again, but it was over quickly, and Maedhros cradled her through it.

Finally, when perhaps the middle of the night had passed, Alphangil stirred in his arms. Her eyes opened, focused briefly on him, and she reached out with her right hand, before letting it fall again with a soft noise of pain.

Maedhros forced a smile. "Hello," he said softly. "It is good to see you awake. All will be well."

Alphangil's eyes flickered back to his and underneath the pain that widened them, and the beating she must have taken that made her pupils uneven, there was a glint of scrutiny. "Usually you are a better liar," she managed, then closed them again, but shifted her body closer against his, shivering.

Maedhros pulled his cloak closer around her and opened the bedrolls for their blankets that he also spread over Alphangil to keep her warm and comfortable. "We will ride for Himring in the morning," he said. "Please - hold on until we reach it, when we can have my healers tend you."

She sighed, her eyes still closed, and moved her head from side to side, a wordless refusal, and Maedhros leaned down to brush a kiss over her cold, cracked lips, in comfort. He wanted to weep as much as Fingon did, and yet could not, not where she could overhear, or open her eyes to see his grief. There was a deep disappointment in Fingon, supposedly so valiant, lodged within his chest, to leave her and fall into his own pain, when it was Alphangil who needed them both.

"Try, at least. Please. I know how you must feel - I know. But it will not always be thus."

"The great Maedhros Fëanorion, reduced to pleading." A pause, another exhausted shiver. Alphangil's eyes stayed closed, her voice stayed weak and broken. "I thought of you, there. I will try, but take it for neither a promise nor an oath."

"Nothing like that should be laid upon you now," Maedhros replied quietly, taking her left hand and giving it a brief squeeze, careful to steer clear of the bandage around her wrist. "The attempt will be enough. I trust in your strength."

He bent again, this time to kiss her brow. "I have water here. Will you drink a little?"

No reply came from Alphangil. Her face was slack and exhausted once more; she had drifted back into sleep or unconsciousness.

He closed his eyes and bit down on his sleeve to muffle the weeping that broke its way free of him now as well. He moved back to sit leaning against the wall. Pulling Alphangil closer against him to share with her what warmth he could, Maedhros held her close, resting her head on his shoulder, drawing the cocoon of cloak and blankets closer around her still, and kept stroking her head mechanically, caressing her cheek and hair, finding swollen bruises at the back of her head - that would explain why she was passing in and out of consciousness.

Mindful of Fingon's earlier crying from the other side of the wall and of Alphangil's need to rest, Maedhros began to sing softly through his tears, the very song that Fingon had sung to pull him out of the darkness of his captivity and back into freedom.

On the other side of the wall, as Maedhros struggled with himself to breathe at one point, the drawn-on silence was broken only by hitched breathing. Fingon was listening.

He continued singing, beginning once again when the final stanza came, until he felt his own eyes drooping, until sleep muffled his voice and continued pulling him under inexorably.

He woke out of a dreamless darkness to a still-dark sky. Alphangil was still in his arms, securely held and - at least for the moment - seemed comfortably asleep. On his left a spot of warm weight lay, and fingers threaded through his where they lay on the back of Alphangil's head. Fingon had come back, moving up so that he was as close as possible to both of them. He, too, was asleep; the salt trails of tears clear in his dusty face.

Maedhros wanted to kiss him and apologize, but more than anything knew that Fingon, too, needed the rest.

He had been unjust to him, even if only in his thoughts. This was the second time that Fingon saw someone he loved after torture by the enemy, unsure of survival. Maedhros had never, much as he might have wished it, been his husband, and how much more deeply Fingon must be feeling Alphangil's fading he could not imagine, or how many of his worst memories of the rescue he relived now, merging with his present grief.

He remembered, too, how Maglor had been catatonic with grief after Lasbaneth had died in the Dagor Bragollach. When Glaurung had forced the land between the arms of Gelion, his brother had left his wife behind to protect her, still thinking she was safe in the keep from the flames, surrounded by water, but the moats and lakes around his fortress had been little obstacle for a fully-grown dragon vaulting himself across, bringing down the gates and passing in to burn at his leisure. Maglor had been forced to abandon his lands and his love as lost, and barely made it to Himring himself with those survivors who had been out in the field with him.

There had been no words of comfort then, and there were none now.

He let Fingon sleep. Although it was still dark, the stars were already fading in the clear, wintry sky, and it would not be much longer until Hwestonnen would come to wake them.

Maedhros quietly sat up and held watch over the two sleepers.

Chapter End Notes

Yes, the knife we're talking about here is something like a First-Age prototype for the Morgul-blade we are all familiar with from LotR.

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Her own shivering woke Alphangil.

It was daylight and she was alone, though beyond her sight she could hear elvish voices, the comforting nickering of horses and the loud crackling of what must be a large fire, smell the stink of charred, unclean meat.

She felt weak - weak and ice-cold and alone. Even though she tried not to move aside from the spasms of shivers that wracked through her uncontrollably, her field of vision was inconstant, flickering and dizzy, and she quickly closed her eyes against the soft blue of a morning sky, the plume of smoke from the burning that swept southward on the wind, and the ruins that loomed into her sight.

Tears formed unbidden in her eyes as she remembered Cýronil and the knife, the evil shimmer on the blade, and the piercing pain far beyond any of the ordinary wounds she'd suffered. As if the mere thought of it re-awakened whatever evil was in her, the wound pulsed again with a dark, throbbing pain, stretching around her heart and seizing it in its claws.

She could not help a whimper of pain that only did not turn into a scream because she bit down on her lips, sobbing. Even the pain of childbirth had been nothing, nothing compared to this.

She pressed her face into the blankets that wrapped her and tried to keep breathing, tried to remember the scents of Fingon and Maedhros as they'd held her through the night, tried to remember her love for them, something beyond the all-consuming pain.

It lightened and let up slowly, but it left her exhausted and too weak to even push herself up. Even her eyelids were leaden. By the time she thought she could breathe unhindered, she was no longer cold - she was burning up and once more her body started shivering beyond her control to stop it. Against the fabric of the soft blankets, her skin felt paper-thin and as ready to go up in flames as a secret letter held to a candle.

A shadow passed across her vision, looming large, something - someone - blocking out the morning sun as they knelt by her. She could not tell who.

"Alphangil, beloved?"

Fingon. He sounded near to tears, worried as she had never heard him. That was, in the end, what made her re-open her eyes, even though her vision still swam. There were two of her husband, and both wavered like a reflection in restless water.

She couldn't find the strength to even lift her hand toward him, and new tears of frustration sprang to her eyes. Her throat and mouth were so dry that she couldn't form words; only a formless croak came out. Fingon heard her all the same, and as if to calm her, he smiled, radiant and utterly false. There were shadows under his bloodshot eyes, and they dimmed his bright gaze. He looked completely exhausted.

"Thank the One. I feared you had gone and left me here."

She weakly shook her head just once - it hurt too much - and managed to gather some spit to moisten her mouth and form words. "I said I would try. Water - please."

"Maedhros made a tea of asëa leaves. It's cooled by now, but drink carefully."

Fingon fumbled loose a water skin from his belt, uncorked it and carefully set it to her lips, lifting her head with his other hand to let her swallow. The liquid ran down her throat still faintly warm and sweetly floral, like the scent of her wildflower meadow by her parents' house in Mithrim. She felt a measure of strength return; a little of the heat in her skin abated.

"Thank you," she managed at last, after Fingon had coaxed her to drink a little more, but even this little effort had taken so much more strength than she felt she was able to expend. At least the world steadied somewhat around her, and the two Fingons merged into a single man, though he remained inconstant and wavering at the edges.

He carefully kissed her hair, and almost she resented him for it. He had never before treated her like she was fragile, not even when she had complained steadily about her pregnancy and what it did to her body, not even when she was giving birth to Gil-galad, nearly screamed Eithel Sirion into crumbling and threw a vase at Fingon for his part in their son's creation in the worst of labour pangs.

"Try to rest a little more," he murmured into her hair now, his arms around her, helping her sit. "We are planning to ride in a few hours. Maedhros means to join up with the other part of the host; he sent a messenger to have them meet us on the road and is only waiting for his scouts to return before we set out."

"Do I have another option?" she asked. Something bitter and tired had crept into her tone. "Did you find her?"

"Maedhros' thrall? No," Fingon said through thin lips. "She stabbed you with an Enemy-touched knife and escaped. I thought I was losing you and did not pursue her. Do you not remember?"

"I remember - or rather, I feel - that she stabbed me, after all the hurt before. She took me as bait, for the two of you, and once she knew she was overcome…" She sighed deeply, suddenly once again on the verge of tears with the helplessness of the horrific day and night before, the thought that her men might have been hurt because of her. "And she meant to take me into Angband for questioning by Morgoth."

Try as she might to suppress it, her shoulders shook suddenly and another sob forced its way past her lips. Fingon looked stricken, and his hold on her tightened, until another pair of arms came around her as well and Maedhros was there, simply reassuring her by his presence that this could be overcome, that she would not always be so haunted.

"All is well, Alphangil. Cry," Maedhros said, even though his voice cracked. "It will wash out the poison of her deeds."

His words opened the floodgates of tears she had not thought she still had in her. In the end she cried until sobs racked her and her wound began to pain her again, until her aching head began to pound as if Cýronil had once again struck her and if Maedhros and Fingon had not held her upright between them, she would have fallen and fainted.

Eventually, out of the tears and pain, still held by them both, she quieted and slept.

*

"Do you think that she is still in danger?" Fingon asked quietly, once Alphangil's exhausted sobs had died away into silence and her eyes closed. She lay against Fingon's shoulder, by all appearances utterly worn out by her tears. It seemed that he had somehow, perhaps with the coming of daybreak, regained some hope, or found strength enough for denial and ignorance.

Maedhros could not help a sting of longing, but he extricated himself from the tangle of limbs and bodies, carefully withdrawing his hand from Alphangil's. She sighed in her sleep, a sound of protest, and he carefully pulled aside the cut-open fabric revealing her shoulder. The dressing he had put on the wound the night before was soaked, but it did not look like elven blood - far darker, almost approaching the black colouration of orcish blood. The streaks ran across her shoulder halfway up her throat now.

"She still bears this wound, and I fear what happens when this poison - whatever it may be - spreads further through her. It may well be that we may yet lose her. I felt it more strongly last night, and I do not know whether it was my fear or a premonition, but…" Maedhros felt his voice lower even as Fingon's gaze sharpened, suspended between bright hope and the darkness of fear.

"... but?" Fingon coaxed, anxious.

"... I think it was the latter. We may yet lose her," he repeated. "Above all, I would have her be comfortable, as much as we can make her during the journey, in case we do not reach Himring in time."

Fingon shook his head at him. "No," he said tonelessly. "No, I will not allow that, and if you do, then you will see neither hide nor hair of me on the battlefield, nor ever again. There will be no more love between the Sons of Fëanor and the House of Fingolfin."

Pain coiled tight in Maedhros' stomach, dragging his voice down once again into the same dangerously quiet cadence that Fingon had provoked him into once already the day before.

"If I had any choice in this," he said, and felt his eyes brimming with tears and an angry light that he saw reflected in Fingon's widened ones. "If I had any choice at all, do you not think that I would give my own life to preserve hers? Do you not think that I also love her, Your Highness?"

He regretted the cruelty almost immediately, when he saw how Fingon's face hardened. Had Fingon not been holding Alphangil, Maedhros had no doubt that he would be on his feet and away now to slash his sword senselessly against some rock until it notched and chipped and was ruined.

As it was, he expected Fingon to yell at him once again, to thunder until the air was clear. He was not prepared for Fingon, the man he thought he knew best aside from his brothers, and had chosen to love the most, to slide into the same deep, still cadence Maedhros was using. Shivers raced over his back. He understood, suddenly and viscerally, why his brothers were sometimes terrified of him when he felt forced to lord over them.

It was unsettling. This was Fingon as the calm in the middle of a storm, the deadly center of a battle.

"I love both of you more than life itself. I will give my treasures, my force of arms, my life and the strength of my spirit to you. But if either of you dies and leaves me, I shall never forgive you."

Someone might have struck Maedhros in his stomach and he would have felt no less winded at Fingon's words, and possibly have found it easier to breathe. Fingon's eyes were burning again, again the bright white fire that turned the blue-grey of his irises into sunlit water and cast his face into shadow even in daylight.

The effect was startling, not least, and to his shame - most of all at the words and the conviction and love behind them - Maedhros felt heat pool low in his body, even felt himself harden. If he had ever harboured any doubt before that Fingon was his lover as well as his king by rights, to whom he owed loyalty and fealty, he no longer did.

"Well, have you nothing to say?" Fingon asked, breaking the speechless silence.

Maedhros closed his eyes and willed down the sudden, inappropriate desire, willed his cheeks to stop burning. "Slain ye may be and slain ye shall be, by weapon and by torment and by grief," he echoed a voice from the shores of a dark sea long ago. "Alphangil knew when she married you, and when you brought me into this relationship, that she would enter into this same doom. It is not because of this that I think she may die, but the wound she suffered - it may prove too much even for her. You said before that you were not Mandos, and neither am I. We can make vain promises and hope, or make for Himring with all the speed that we can muster, but that is all."

It was Fingon's turn to fall silent. The light of his eyes flickered. "Then that is what we will do. Pilin is swift and true, and certainly the fastest of the horses here, and the most enduring. Without you or me as a burden, he will make Himring in two days, perhaps one."

"You mean to send her ahead?"

"Is that not her best chance, if speed is of the essence? Is there any other horse here whose line descends from Nahar through Rochallor, and who could keep up with him?"

"If she dies on the road, she dies alone," Maedhros said, aghast even as he understood that Fingon spoke true.

Fingon's hold on Alphangil tightened. "And if she dies with us, she still dies. Is there - do we have any chance that she lives, do you think? If there is, it is a risk I will take. If there is not, I will sit by her and have her comfortable until she passes to Mandos, and not even Morgoth himself will move me."

"She all but promised to hold on and I have known few stronger hearts than hers. And - you brought the Elessar to Himring with you, did you not?" Maedhros asked, only now remembering the green stone in the eagle brooch on Fingon's chest when he had ridden up the long causeway to the keep, a signal from afar that Maedhros had seen blazing even from the walls. "If she lives until she makes it there, Idhlinn will know how to use it. It is the only thing other than the light of the Silmarils that I can imagine will save her, if anything can."

It seemed to Maedhros that Fingon wanted to exhale in relief, and not betray the feeling too soon. Alphangil was in danger of slipping from them still, even with a spot of hope on the far horizon. He held himself perfectly motionless, but his fingers on Alphangil's unhurt shoulder were clenched white.

"I hated you, when you gave us that stone," Fingon admitted. "I shall not be able to take that back; it is past so long now, but - coming to our wedding unannounced after letting our messages go unanswered, and giving us the most valuable jewel in your possession, as if you did not know exactly what that gift meant, and now - " He passed a hand over his eyes.

Maedhros nodded. "I intended both the scandal and the hatred. I thought taking revenge on you and her would make losing you easier for me. I was wrong, but I cannot now feel sorry to have done it, not when it may save her life."

"I am only sorry that, hoping for secrecy, I did not bring it on the road," Fingon replied bitterly. "Then it is decided. Will you make her ready for the journey, while I speak to Pilin?"

Maedhros bent toward him and pressed a quick kiss to Fingon's lips. "So much hatred, and now look at us." He tenderly brushed a fallen strand of hair from her face and took Alphangil from Fingon. Alphangil stirred but did not wake as he laid her back down, and Fingon, lingering and reluctant to go, knelt in the dusk to rest his forehead against Alphangil's for a moment, his eyes closed and face tender.

His lips moved, but Maedhros could not make out what Fingon said to her, and thought that perhaps he should not witness it. As if Fingon had caught a sense of the thought as Maedhros made to turn away, his hand shot out and grasped Maedhros' sleeve, pulling him down toward the two of them.

He followed easily, led to Alphangil's side. Amid the devastation, it felt right, as little had ever felt right.

"You belong here as well," Fingon said softly, almost reverently. "Whatever happens, we are three."

*

She knew before waking fully that the fingers on her wound, changing the poultice of asëa and re-dressing it, were those of Maedhros. Her nose throbbed and she could taste blood in the back of her throat again, but it no longer smarted as painfully as before, with bone and cartilage smashed out of place. She touched the swollen area around the root of it with her left and hissed softly through her teeth.

"I finally convinced Fingon to set it while you were unconscious, and he did well. You will barely know it was broken once it is healed," he explained, and returned to her shoulder wound.

She tried to tell him to stop, that there was no use for false pretense of her survival, and no sense in using up valuable healing herbs on a dying woman, but her cried-out voice once again refused to rise above the faintest whisper and her swollen eyelids refused to lift fully.

She laid her good hand on his instead, and he stopped immediately, bending down to peer at her anxiously. For the moment her half-lidded view of the world was clear, but the daylight once again hurt her eyes like the pressure of dull needles in her skull.

She could feel the corruption all the more clearly now. It had reached her heart, pumping away stubbornly, but with difficulty. Breathing had become a chore. She tried to speak once more, and finally managed enough strength to lift her voice enough to make it audible. "Don't. I'm as good as gone."

"You said you would try, and my heart will not allow for anything else," Maedhros replied, stern and clipped, as always when he refused to show that something pained him. She knew him that well. "I must hold you to those words, and offer you this hope: We mean to send you to Himring. Pilin will bear you and my healers know how to work the Elessar to save you. Idhlinn used it to help me heal after Fingon brought me to Mithrim, and before that, when my mother gave birth to the twins - that was why my father made it."

She knew better by then than to shake her head; it would only make the pain and dizziness worse. "No promise, nor oath," she reminded him. "My word will not be enough - this darkness is stronger than I."

Unbidden, tears sprang to her eyes once again, pooled over. She did not want to die. Maedhros wiped them away and kissed her face; his lips were soft but the voice in her ears rough with unshed tears of his own.

"You are not wrong to fear the night. You may not come back to the light again in this life, for all we have is a desperate attempt, a last best hope, and even that is far from us. But you may prove stronger than you think and come to the morning at last. Will you try? We will follow as swiftly as we are able."

"... alone?" Fear welled up in her mind like a dark, inexorable wave in her, whirled through and dragged her under. Without Fingon, without Maedhros, without anyone to draw strength or comfort from, who would pull her back from the dark brink that she found herself standing on?

"... please. No. Come - come with me." Her left hand caught Maedhros' tunic and clenched, even though her grip was weak and her wrist hurt more the tighter she held onto him.

He gently prised her hand away with no more difficulty than if she were a child, and curled his long fingers over her palm, lifting it to his mouth and pressing another kiss to it. A sob worked its way up her throat. "Please - I need you, both. Do not send me to die alone, do not, do not…"

The icy darkness clawed into her in response, a living, growing, chuckling thing. She sobbed, trying to break free of Maedhros, to what use or effect she did not know.

Maedhros contained her struggle easily, and began to sing under his breath into her ear. She did not know the song or understand many of the Quenya words, but she could tell it was a lullaby, and with his eyes shining even in the daylight, it must be one that held some power - something that Maglor had taught him? What for? -

But though unwilling, the torrent rush of fear in her mind calmed a little.

"We must send you, if you are to live."

Maedhros smoothed back her hair, tied off the bandage and tugged the cut tunic into place so that the blankets she was wrapped in covered it, a cocoon that protected her much as it trapped her. He shoved a bundle wrapped in cloth deep into the folds of the blankets. "For Idhlinn, so she will know what happened to you. I wrote to her, and she may need the dagger as well."

Once again he helped her sit, cradling her against himself before seeing whether Alphangil would be capable of sitting on her own. She did not find it in her to keep herself upright, instead sagging against his chest with an exhausted sigh. He said, "You will need some strength for the journey. I found you lembas, and more of the asëa tea."

"I cannot eat," she protested. Her stomach closed up at the mere thought. "But I will drink." Maedhros set the water skin to her lips, and the same floral taste as before washed away some of the parchedness and the taste of blood, ash and sulfur on her tongue. She sighed, weary from something that should go as unthinking as swallowing some liquid, which sloshed around in her stomach unpleasantly.

After, Maedhros nudged a corner of Lembas against her lips. "Please, try a little, at least. You know well how it nourishes. After all, you made it."

To put him at ease, Alphangil opened her lips and broke a few crumbs off of it with her teeth, but as soon as it touched her tongue, the taste felt wrong, poisonous, and made her sick. She forced it back out, coughing, spitting the breadcrumbs into the dust, feeling sorry for it, and for herself. Her head still ached, though the tea had helped a little. All the same, it didn't lift the weakness or the shivers from her.

"It is alright," Maedhros soothed. "I felt much the same when I was made to try solid food again for the first time," he said. "You do not have to be ashamed, but if this is all, we must go now. Fingon is waiting." She did not bother to correct him, that the blessed grain was what ailed her, that the corruption had spread too far in her.

She felt herself being lifted securely in Maedhros' arms, her head supported against his shoulder, and for the first time saw the camp that her rescuers had made - nothing more than a scatter of bedrolls and discarded packs on the ashy ground in the cover of a few walls, a couple of paths trodden through the remnants of the Dagor Bragollach, not even firepits. On the outskirts lay the now only smouldering pile of orc bodies, and nearby, one single body in the dust, covered by a blanket.

"Cýronil?" Alphangil asked, looking in that direction. She wondered - perhaps they would not burn another elf, although she knew that that was how the House of Fëanor honoured its dead. Whether Cýronil would receive that honour - Alphangil did not think so, and on the heels of that thought came the question what they would do with her own body - would Fingon build a cairn for her as her own people did, or would he let Maedhros turn her to ash? She closed her eyes again when the pain from her wound pulsed again, and once again she could hear that dark chuckle as if the weapon had imparted some dark entity into her that was taking possession of her slowly but surely.

"One of my people. Cýronil fled. You are Fingon's entire world - after she hurt you, all he had eyes for was you, not the fight. But we will seek her. Do you have any memory of it?"

"No," she replied weakly, too tired to unravel the confusion of waking, unconsciousness and sleeping, although she remembered the knife piercing her shoulder. "Not anymore, it is dark…" Along with the darkness came more pain, and a fear that if Cýronil lived, she would find her on the road and do what she had intended to begin with, take her to Angband. The edges of her sight dimmed.

"Shh," Maedhros tried to calm her, softly. He held her with his left arm supporting her weight, his right steadying her. He carried her to what might have once been a stone-built stable in this collection of ruins, now roofless and blackened, where the horses were tethered, Pilin among them, and Fingon with him.

"Please. I cannot," she said once again. "Please. Do not make me leave you."

No one made a reply. Perhaps the words had been in her head. Fingon looked up, and even with the darkness sweeping into her vision, she could see how tired and worn he still looked, how pale his face was, and another shiver of pain that made her bite her lip passed through her. He came toward the two of them and wrapped his arms around them both, seeking the most closeness possible.

"Do you wish to die? Then I will not force you to take the road alone, I will let you go to your rest and break my heart," Fingon choked out, sounding close to tears. "But if you wish to live, this is all we can do."

"I wish to live - I will try. But do not blame me if I cannot." She was endlessly tired and wondered if Fingon had even heard the words, faint as they had fallen from her lips.

Something resolute crept into Fingon's voice. "Then we must send you now, and waste no more time." Alphangil found herself lifted from Maedhros to Fingon, who carried her to Pilin. "We must tie you to him," he explained "So you do not fall if you sleep or lose consciousness. Pilin would walk to Himring if I told him, but he must make haste and run the way, so that he cannot keep you safe and seated."

She nodded weakly. At a word from Fingon, Pilin laid down in the dust, and she found herself lifted onto the blue-and-silver saddle blanket laid over his back, leaning forward against Pilin's neck for purchase as best she could. Her arms were laid around his neck and broad strips of soft fabric lashed them together. A rope around her hips also went around his neck, and her feet, when Pilin rose back up, were tied under his belly.

She towered over them now, feeling like a piece of trussed-up game, and wanted to reach out for them, touch them one last time, but she could not.

"Pilin, run as the wind, run as though Oromë had given you wings." He tilted his head back to look at her. "Namárië, my beloved," Fingon said softly to her. "I will see you when we reach Himring."

Once again that utterly false smile, as if, even now, she could not tell. Maedhros said nothing, but she felt his mind brush hers and try to impart a flood of light, a Mingling of the Trees that she had only ever seen in song.

The darkness of the wound rose up once again in her as if in answer, in towering shadow and ruin, and took her down with it. Barely she could feel Pilin begin to move through the mist that shrouded her eyes, the warmth of his coat, the scent that sometimes clung to Fingon when he came in from the stables.

More keenly, she could feel Maedhros, Fingon and the strength she drew from them shrink into the distance, eventually fading and then vanishing entirely like two stars that went out. Her strength, what little she had left, fell down into darkness as Pilin, in his smooth, tireless gait, flew mile after mile eastward, toward Himring.

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When Pilin's hoofbeats faded into the distance eventually, Fingon, as if it were now safe, let himself fall to his knees, as if the strength to stay upright had gone out of him entirely with Alphangil's departure. He knelt in the ash and dust, and Maedhros noticed for the first time how dirty his face still was, Fingon's earlier tear-tracks now once again covered up by dust.

He supposed he did not look much better, especially not after he knelt by Fingon and dusty ash swirled back into the air around them.

"Did I send her to her death?" Fingon asked tonelessly.

"She was on her way to her death. You may have sent her toward life. Hold to that thought until we are at Himring, when you will see whether she lives or dies."

"Or feel it, when she dies before." Fingon reached up to touch his heart, laying his other hand over Maedhros' chest; his touch was almost as icy as Alphangil's had been, even now that the sun was high and the clear day's weather was no longer particularly cold. "I will feel it, when - and - " he laughed breathlessly, unhappily. "- I am afraid of the pain. Not for the pain's sake, but… "

"If," Maedhros corrected gently, thinking of Fingon's shout the night before. "If. Come now, we should go. It is a long road, but as far as my riders went, it is safe and clear, and Pilin will outrun any enemy that crosses his path, if there are any there."

He grasped Fingon's arm and pulled him back to his feet, releasing him only to brush the dust from him. Fingon did not object, however much he hated to be patronized. "Come now. Pull yourself up. You are the High King - mine, and of my people. Keep up appearances for a while longer."

"Have you ever asked whether I wanted to be the High King, whether I wanted this office?" Fingon asked, but the words lacked heat and ardour, revealing only a profound, tired sadness. "I stand by my words from last night, but I would be happier to surrender the crown back to you and your house and watch your back break under its weight. Always, since my father's death."

"You do not mean that," Maedhros replied, wishing there were anything he could do to help Fingon, but short of Alphangil finding the strength to live, it was no longer within his power to change anything. He did not think he could stomach another fight without something between them irrevocably breaking, the fight that Fingon seemed so transparently to long for. "Fighting with me will not make anything better. I know you blame me - not only for passing the crown to your line, but also for Cýronil. The latter I will take upon myself; it was my failure. You, your being King, is not a mistake."

When Fingon turned away, Maedhros moved. His heart decided before his body followed what he should do. Hidden behind the stable wall from the rest of the host, he pulled Fingon in and kissed him deeply.

He knew exactly how to coax Fingon's mouth open, what to do to turn him to wax in his hand, his to mold and form, and Fingon seemed equally eager for something, anything, that was a distraction from the misery. He kissed Maedhros back with a stifled, desperate sound. Only his hands on Maedhros' shoulders lay there motionless, as if caught between wanting to push him away or pull him closer yet.

Maedhros found himself with his knee pressed between Fingon's legs when they broke the kiss at last, and Fingon moving against it almost frantically. Maedhros kissed him again; his hand found its way under Fingon's mail shirt and into his pants, closing his hand around his hardening cock and stifling Fingon's noises with his mouth, swallowing them down like they were honey.

He caught Fingon's release in his palm when it came, finally withdrawing his hand and stepping away. Fingon quietly handed him a cloth and regarded him with half-lidded, exhausted eyes as Maedhros wiped his hand clean.

"I feel like an Orc," Fingon said miserably as he caught his breath. "She is dying, and I - we - "

Maedhros dropped the soiled cloth into the dust and kicked sand over it, just as a trumpet signal sounded in camp. "They're back. Pull yourself together. Saddle Arveril and let us ride."

"You do not need - "

"No," Maedhros cut him off. He could do without.

Three hours later, the sun was westering red and immense behind them. Some would call it the foreshadowing of a calamity. It cast long, dim shadows like scurrying ghosts over the ash-covered road ahead of them as the host finally made its way to the rendezvous point and was re-ordered taking those horses bearing the most wounded and fallen into their center - and then on toward Himring at a slower pace, never more than an easy canter. Maedhros and Fingon rode at the front on Nimlach and Arveril, who seemed ill at ease beneath Fingon, being used to Alphangil's gentler hand, and spooked by her new rider's restless fidgeting at that.

They passed onward silent and exhausted after the sun dropped below the distant Ered Wethrin and shadows fell long across Anfauglith before darkness came. One rider - Ríngannel, a friend and briefly a lover of Maglor's in Aman, who had survived the Bragollach to swell the ranks of Himring with her wife, began a song when the stars rose, but no one else joined in, and she let her beautiful voice plunge into silence again after only a few lines.

Clouds stood before their mouths and the horses steamed in the icy night air.

They rode on through the night at a slower pace for a semblance of rest, especially for their animals, and more than once it seemed like Fingon wanted to complain about their lack of speed, but then thought better of it. Maedhros caught his baleful looks from the side, because he showed no sign of abandoning his people to ride ahead, and for the moment held himself straight and still on his horse, his gaze and thoughts fixed ahead, trying to estimate how far Pilin had come, and how Alphangil was doing.

He watched Fingon carefully for any impression of sudden pain, but - so far, at least so far - it was a cycle of fidgeting, sometimes of helpless, quiet, angry tears that ran down his face soundlessly and unknown to anyone riding behind him, because Fingon somehow kept his breathing perfectly level and his shoulders from shaking, thankfully heeding the advice Maedhros had given him far better than he had expected him to.

"Fingon," he said eventually when they stopped to water and feed the horses. He drew out the lembas that Alphangil had not eaten, broke the wafer in half and handed part to Fingon. They sat, eating, still in silence, until Fingon eventually sighed.

"She is so brave. I wish she did not have to be. It makes me think of Helcaraxë… and how much I hate to lead when times are so hard. Your war better bring us freedom, or I will return the crown to you and ride over the Ered Lindon, and you will have seen the last of me."

When Maedhros looked up, there was a crooked, unhappy smile on Fingon's face.

"Is that an apology for your words earlier?"

Quietly, Fingon replied, "I think so."

"Then I accept it." Maedhros' heart beat a little faster in spite of the apprehension that still weighed it down like a stone.

He looked around furtively - the host was busy minding their own, and although any of them might have glanced in their direction at the wrong time, Maedhros found that he did not in his heart of hearts care. These were his people, they had forgiven greater sins than the one he was about to commit, but he turned his back to them all the same, tugging on the too-short cloak he had taken off the dead soldier who had died in the ruins, since Alphangil had ridden wrapped in his.

With his body shielding Fingon from view, Maedhros pulled him to his feet and kissed him once again. "I forgive you," he said against Fingon's parted lips. "For all that you said and did not mean, and especially for what you said and meant."

Fingon panted into his mouth and shoved against his chest with both hands, forcing Maedhros back a step, although the gesture was full of a hollow tiredness. "You - incredible - I - no, I do not want any more comfort or absolution now, not until I know Alphangil is safe!"

Maedhros reached for him, but Fingon marched back to Arveril and mounted, leaving Maedhros standing and whispers picking up behind him. Fingon had not been quiet.

Maedhros lifted his hand, trying to mask the sudden heartache by standing straight and tall again. "Make ready to ride on!"

*

Pilin ran on far into the night, unopposed and arrow-straight eastward along the road.

Alphangil passed in and out of consciousness, sometimes lulled to sleep by the tireless rhythm of his beating hooves, sometimes in too much pain from the constant movements that drummed into her hurting head, and sometimes because the wound clawed into her with another jolt, passing further and further through her body in cold numbness, except for the constant burning. At other times, when she was awake, her arms grew numb or the bonds holding her on the horse began to chafe - not as badly as Cýronil's orcish ropes, Maedhros and Fingon had made sure of it, but it was far from comfortable, and sleep, if she could get it, was much preferable.

The darkness was invading the edges of her sight again.

As Pilin flew onward and she tried to draw comfort from the speed at which he went, she lifted her eyes to the fading sky. A moment - an eternity of darkness and terrible dreams that left her in tears but without memory of them as she startled back awake - later it was entirely black, but studded with a myriad of the stars of winter, lying unmoving on the blanket of the sky like a hoard of shining jewels.

The stars of her name, the Swan, flying high on the northern sky in summer, had almost dipped below the horizon now that midwinter was approaching, but there they were, she thought, seeking desperately for the familiar pinpricks of light.

Still there, still shining. Not vanished yet.

She felt impossibly small - a speck of ash that had burned away long ago under the watchful eyes of Elbereth - and even as she tried to lift her voice to sing the even-song, the pitiless darkness moving through her clawed at her throat like a thing with intent, and she plunged into dark once more.

Next she woke, the stars were streaking by above and around her, and they stank and shrieked and Pilin whinnied a war-cry, kicking and biting to make them scatter, and then they were past and left them behind, and the road was clear again. Only belatedly she realized that they had forced their way through a band of torch-bearing Orcs marching along the road. Had there been a brown-haired woman among them? She hadn't seen Cýronil, but that did not mean that she had not been there. And - had Pilin been hurt?

She listened anxiously, her cheek and ear pressed against Pilin's neck, for a change in his breathing, but neither that nor his gait had changed once he was back on the free track and began to gain speed again. He had not been hurt.

Alphangil closed her eyes against the tears that came up, fear and relief and black exhaustion.

Ahead of her, it looked as if the horizon was lightening. Morning was rising to meet her. She closed her eyes against the oncoming light, instead trying to reach out back across the leagues for Fingon and Maedhros, but could feel nothing.

She was alone, and her strength was fading quickly, as if the growing daylight sapped it away.

*

"She is… she is flickering, as if she were there one moment, and gone then next," Fingon burst out in a whisper at some point after they had ridden well past noon the next day, with only sporadic stops, more concerned with the horses' well-being than their own. Fingon's eyes, when he turned them to Maedhros, were bloodshot after the pursuit, the ride, the long wakefulness and worry, after the tears and the even longer stretches of vacant stares and silence.

Maedhros closed his eyes in return, trying to banish the thought of how Alphangil had cramped and spasmed in their care after they had found her, how she had begged them to not send her away, how he had tried to instill courage in her that she would live.

How, it seemed now, he had been wrong.

"Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps her strength was not enough," he said under his breath.

"How - how do I go on when she is no longer here?" Maedhros heard Fingon ask, and he had no answer, but Fingon, if he was asking at all, did not wait for a reply and kept speaking, his voice rising now. "Why did I ask her to come with us at all - I sent her to Eglarest for a reason! Why did we meet on Himring, where we know the Enemy is watching, where we know he has spies? You, me, yes, but I should not have let her come! Why did I not stay by her side when we made camp?!" The words finished in a yell.

Beneath him, Arveril danced and nearly broke out to the side before Fingon wrested her back under control with an agonized, wordless shout.

"Fingon!" Maedhros said sharply. "The horse is not at fault. Nor are you. Cýronil is. The Enemy is. He has spies in your hosts and in mine, it might have happened anywhere, had he commanded it. And we will repay him for every soul he took from us. Had you stayed at her side…" he shook his head. "You yourself - you would be slain or taken."

At the thought of Fingon dead or worse, Fingon trapped in Angband, everything in Maedhros hurt like a shock that passed through him, as if losing Alphangil was not already painful enough. Losing both of them was unthinkable. Even if he might go on and try to find a measure of happiness with Fingon, it would never be restored to what it had been. He could no longer understand the person he had been, who had wished hatred undying on Alphangil once for coming between them, when there had always been enough room for him as well.

But even so -

"Even so, I would rather see you slain - or her dead - than either of you taken. Perhaps this - perhaps it is the kindest thing that may happen to her." If it was a comfort, it was as cold as Helcaraxë must have been.

The look Fingon gave him was poison. "No! She is alone, with no comfort! How dare you!"

Before Maedhros could reply - before he could remind Fingon that Angband was a fate crueller than death, Fingon spurred on Arveril, and sped her down the road ahead at a gallop. Maedhros let him go, even as Nimlach danced and wanted to follow, his hand hard on the reins. Ahead, already shrunk to a speck of his silver armour and Alphangil's brown horse, Fingon veered off the road and up the slopes on their right, and even from the distance, Maedhros could see that he had his sword drawn, swinging at something on the ground. He jumped from the saddle, seeming to land on top of it, leaving Arveril riderless.

Fingon drove his sword home with a furious shout that rang across the distance, and his flashing blade continued rising and descending, rising and descending, rising and descending. Coming closer, Maedhros saw what Fingon had found. On the road, trampled by great hooves - Pilin's, Maedhros presumed - lay three dead orcs, and another on the slope that - Maedhros presumed - Fingon had found wounded but alive, and had just slaughtered.

With the host's arrival, Fingon summoned Arveril, mounted, returned. His dirty face was dirtier now, once more streaked with black blood that he simply attempted to wipe off with his hands, his armour no less splattered.

He was breathing hard, but speaking quietly, and for the moment his gaze was clear and present. "I understand now what my father must have felt after all this," he said with an expansive gesture at Anfauglith. "He loved this land."

"Is she gone, then?" Maedhros asked, anxiously listening within if he felt any absence, any shift, if he could find some awareness of Alphangil. He knew he should not expect to feel anything - they were not married. But how he wished that all three shared that bond, to be part of them fully, part of a happiness like that of his parents when he had been young. To shelter Fingon from the worst of the pain and bear the brunt of it that he deserved, not limited to words and castigation. To take from Alphangil what pain he could.

Fingon shook his head, and something seemed to splinter in his eyes and in his breaking voice. "Not yet, but it will not be long now."

*

Daylight should have driven the shadows from her sight, but they lay more and more like a blindfold over her eyes.

The dagger pierced into her again. Again, again, over and over. It reached beyond her heart and mind, and grasped her, soul-deep.

She screamed out the pain, muffled it against Pilin's neck, against his sweat-lathered coat, could feel her muscles tense against her will as another cramp passed through her. The horse slowed to a walk over ground that seemed softer than the road, as if in answer to her pain after the seizure faded and left her breathless, but he himself was exhausted as well, hanging his head and nearly tipping her forward as he stood shuddering, and finally stumbled on again.

Fading in her sight were frozen plains around her, stretching flat, featureless, horizon-wide and empty all around, except forward. Pilin was making his way to the foot of a cluster of hills now not far away, the highest in the center, citadel-crowned - and toward spots moving on the plain, rushing toward her, or were they hope and wishful thinking?

Pilin stumbled again, shaking her painfully, the host of dark spots rising and getting larger like crows descending on her dying body, darkness vaulting up entirely around her. All she could hear was Fingon's weeping while he thought she slept, Maedhros' kind, earnest, grieved voice imploring her to try.

No promise nor oath.

She forced herself to think, and to shape words from her tired mind to her heavy tongue. She barely still had breath enough to speak them.

"Eru Allfather, Elbereth, Manwë, Badhron, hear and witness - I ask you to hold me to this oath: I swear that I will not pass to the Halls of the Dead."

Her eyes were so heavy.

The pain turned into agony. It pulled at her with clawed hands through flesh and spirit, terribly intentional, down, down, away for good —-

A suffocating night closed in around her.

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Maedhros had been in quiet conversation with Nellómin about the next war council as they rode - anything to take his mind off the worry for Alphangil - until Nellómin touched his elbow and pointed: Fingon slumped forward onto Arveril as if all strength had left him suddenly. Once again the image of the Two Trees foundering in the dark in Alphangil's mind rose up unbidden behind his eyes, when Fingon began to lift his voice in a wordless, breathless, soul-deep lament.

It was as beautiful as it was terrible, the song of a slain man, and Maedhros felt a choking cry rip itself free of his throat in response. Their faint hope had proved vain, worse than vain.

Alphangil was dead, and she had died alone.

At last Fingon lapsed into silence and stupor. Mute tears ran over his face and his hands on Arveril's reins went slack; the horse stopped moving and began to rip at the thin, withered grass by the wayside, where wind had blown the ash away. Fingon slipped sideways, insensate and close to falling. Maedhros halted, cursing his stiff legs as he dismounted, and pulled Fingon from Arveril, cradling him for a moment and stroking his cheek. Fingon's eyes found his, but then their brief focus faded back into dim grief, his gaze far-flung as that of a soldier who had seen too much of war.

The host waited, though Maedhros could feel the growing tension behind him, and he roused himself to mount up again. Fingon did not resist or protest when Nellómin and Hwestonnen helped lift him into the saddle before Maedhros. Nimlach snorted in protest, but would simply have to bear the additional weight now; he was in no shape to ride alone.

Fingon's head lolled backward against Maedhros's chest.

They continued their way more slowly now, Arveril guided by Nellómin, since the reason for their urgency had passed. None of the other wounded were in danger of succumbing, but they were all exhausted, both his people and their horses. There were whispers there, both of relief for the respite, as well as speculation and worry. Maedhros could not find it in himself to respond, instead he watched the landscape pass by in an agonizing crawl; his heart like a cold stone in him. By evening they might reach the eastern edge of Dorthonion, where the mountains dipped away to the south, and all that still lay before them were the southern marches of Lothlann and the hills surrounding Himring. The next morning would see them return to his fortress.

Alphangil must have been so close. With her earlier start and Pilin's speed, she would have been nearly to Himring itself before her strength had failed her, and that made the thought all the more bitter to bear and harder to accept, but as with any death, there was nothing for it. Maedhros passed his sleeve over his eyes and breathed deeply, kissed Fingon's hair and rode on.

There would be time to grieve in private, later.

*

She found herself lingering before wide-open doors leading into soft, deep darkness, set with mirror shards that reflected nothing where her face should be. Out of the dark reverberated a sourceless, solemn voice, grave as a mountain, deep as fate.

As you have sworn, foolish child, and as we have heard, there shall be no rest nor even entry into these Halls for you. Houseless shall you dwell, desiring a body, for your hröa is broken beyond living. So speak the Valar.

The doors began to close and shut her out, and she was pulled back, back, back, like a star hurled off course - back to Beleriand, to its entire great expanse lying spread out under her. She saw it all, from the first soft stirring of flower seeds in the soil of her small garden at Eglarest, to Gil-galad, muddied from head to toe and laughing while he was digging for clams with Círdan, to her parents pacing, restless and worried, by the shore of Lake Mithrim, and on into the East to Maedhros' people making their tired way toward Himring, Fingon held tight in the tense circle of Maedhros' arms, tears staining his face.

She wished to reach out to them all so much that even her spirit ached with the need for it, wished to hold her son squirming in her arms, console her mother and father, kiss Fingon's tears from his face and take Maedhros' cares from him, but she was less substantial than a breath of wind.

Then - a pull on her fëa, no less commanding than her death had been.

It guided her to Himring, toward her body, slack, naked, frail, and wounded to its death. She was laid out on a bed in the healing ward and the words of Badhron came to her again: Your hröa is broken beyond living, and she wanted to weep, seeing what Cýronil had made of her. And yet - Maedhros' healers were fighting to restore her life, pressing down on her chest with desperate urgency to beat her heart for her, forcing their breath into her lungs to breathe for her, calling her name and imploring her to follow their voices back to the light. Where the Elessar was and why they were not using it, she did not know.

It changed nothing. Her body remained empty. She remained dead and could see determination give way to doubt in their faces. If she could not find a way to rejoin herself, they would give up. There would be no holding, no consoling, no kissing for her, forever disembodied. Badhron would have the right of it.

Amid the dread and grief of this future, a sharp-edged flicker of rebellion at the thought. Badhron had rejected her, and she would reject his proclamation in turn.

She would live.

Next they called her, next a breath was put into her lungs, she followed it, air to air, and her wide-open awareness faded abruptly into darkness.

*

Himring was a bare hill, and Maedhros once explained that he had had the trees on the lower hills and the plain felled for defense and clear sight toward the north. There were no other forests nearby until the foothills of the Ered Luin, and even those lay bare in winter.

Why, then, was a green light as sunshine through spring leaves blinding her even through closed eyelids? What beacon was this? How long had she slept? Why was she asleep outside in the forest? It would not do - it was dangerous out. An Enemy servant was still roaming free, a dagger at the ready, a dagger of terrible darkness that would claw and consume and corrupt and kill.

Its pain lanced through her, but the stronger the pain became, the more the green light grew in response, enveloped her, and held her safe in the heaviness of soul and body rejoined.

*

Riders bore toward them swiftly out of the gathering dark, bringing rested horses, provisions and aid. They also bore news directly to Maedhros, who still held Fingon cradled against him on Nimlach.

Maedhros knew he was awake - his breathing was too deep and regular. It was pretense, wanting to be left alone with his grief, and at least for the moment, Maedhros let him be. He only hoped that Fingon would not let it overmaster him, let it seduce him into fading and following Alphangil.

"My Lord," said the leader of the outriders, Company Captain Aurast, even as her wife Ríngannel pushed forward through the riders toward her, impatient. Aurast did not let herself be distracted.

Aurast's eyes, Maedhros saw, and wondered at it, were shining, and not with worry or unshed tears, but with good tidings. He dared not hope. Too often he had seen it offered and then snatched away. The grief over Alphangil's loss was still too raw a wound to believe in any sudden, miraculous turn for the good.

"I bring greetings from Lord Maglor, and news from Master Healer Idhlinn. She and the other healers cannot be here although she knows they may be needed, but they are tending to the High Queen - Queen Alphangil lives. Only barely, but she lives."

Maedhros could not believe her. "She died - the King felt it, feels it still. How?"

*

Fingon had roused himself when he heard the news, but did not seem to believe it, and pulled Maedhros's hand to lie on his chest, whispering, "Our bond is gone, I cannot feel her - are you certain?"

Maedhros could offer no explanation, because Aurast had none to give either, other than to speak to the Master Healer.

Now Fingon stumbled and fell, still caught in his rushed forward motion, on an uneven flagstone of Himring's stable-yard. He picked himself back up with barely any delay. Maedhros could hardly fault him for abandoning the horse, whose name he didn't recall, or for tearing away toward the healing ward in the main courtyard through the gate, where all shutters were closed tight against the night.

The door fell shut behind Fingon.

Maedhros wanted more than anything to follow, but his people still looked to him, and now that they had returned, there needed to be an explanation, lest rumors and lies began to fly, lest his battle plans, strategies and tactics would be doubted or accounted weak. There might still be Enemy servants or spies in his ranks, and they would no doubt seize this opportunity.

The confusion of the campaign's end certainly merited questioning, and he needed to set the record straight: A company of outriders returned bearing Alphangil after spotting her on the plain, leaving Pilin to rest and follow at his own pace. Even the great war-horse had come to the edge of his strength after running himself ragged unchecked for over more than a hundred miles along Dorthonion at Fingon's bidding. By then Himring had been stirred up into action and Maglor, its commander in Maedhros' absence, had sent out Aurast with a search party for the rest of them.

Maglor came toward him through the crowd from the direction of the forges, himself looking glassy-eyed and exhausted, as if he had drawn on some large store of his power, before Maedhros had taken stock of all that needed doing. He was still seated on the new horse, but dismounted gratefully once he saw his brother and handed the reins off to a stablehand fading out of the throng of people.

Maglor kept step beside him as Maedhros strode toward the main house.

"Send out messengers. I know it is late, but have everyone gather on the training grounds in an hour. Everyone, from the kitchen maids to yourself and my other seconds, including Fingon's people and anyone else who might be here - Dwarven craftsmen, any Mannish allies, I do not care. Healers, the wounded and Fingon excepted. Maintain only the most necessary guard on the walls and gates."

Logistics were a comfort, a sign that, for all its griefs, the world continued on. All the same, Maedhros could not help a longing glance at the healing ward before the gates shut behind them. He trusted Idhlinn with his life - she had held it in her hands more than once - but the longing to see Alphangil and quiet the last of his fears was strong.

Maglor nodded briskly, asking no more questions, bowed briefly, and hurried away to see it done. Maedhros made his way to Fingon and Alphangil's chambers, found the door open - knowing Fingon had locked it before they left - and the small engraved casket that housed the Elessar opened and empty, the letter that he had sent to Idhlinn with Alphangil as a sign beside it.

A leaden weight in his chest lifted.

*

" - and I would not care if you were Manwë himself, she needs rest unless you wish to endanger her life yet more after such a - "

Fingon laughed in Idhlinn's face, not in mockery but overmastering joy, tears streaming from his eyes and catching green fires as they fell.

Alphangil's room in the Healing Ward was lit only by a fireplace and candles to allow the healers to see - and by the Elessar blazing green light, set in the center of Alphangil's bare chest. The dark streaks that had crept from the wound in her shoulder had already faded and receded, even if they were not yet wholly gone. As Fingon sat by her bedside and took Alphangil's left hand, pressing kisses to it and resting his face against her palm, he could feel Idhlinn glaring at him from across the room. The sound of mortar and pestle that she worked with to grind some substance or other into powder, made him think that this was what she would like to do with his head for the unthinkable offense of running in her Healing Ward, and he found he did not care at all.

Alphangil was alive, her eyes closed, her chest heaving and sinking with soft breaths.

He could hear Idhlinn's mutterings, though. "I pulled you out of your mother and slapped your bottom until you screamed in my ear so loudly that I thought I would go deaf on the right ever after. Do not think that just because your father - whom I pulled out of his mother - bequeathed you the crown of the Noldor, I owe you respect."

He did not, at the moment, mind those mutterings, either.

Alphangil was alive.

There was a snort at the Master Healer's words, badly disguised as a cough, from Cuingail, the bespeckled healer who was her second-in-command. He was working on Alphangil's right hand, squinting through the glasses that he kept pushing back up his nose every time they slipped. Another healer stood by with a tray of instruments and assisted him. Cuingail was diligently re-assembling a splintered bone in the back of Alphangil's hand. Fingon tried not to look - he had seen enough of Alphangil's blood for the rest of his immortal life - but if she were in any more immediate danger of dying, he was certain that they would not try and heal her other injuries.

Fingon made no reply. He released her hand and bent down instead to kiss Alphangil's gently parted lips - pale, but the breath tickling his own lips left no doubt that she lived, that she breathed. He stroked her hair, now shorn in the back to better be able to attend to the wounds there.

"When will she wake?" he asked.

Idhlinn huffed through her nose and moved over to the fireplace set in the back of the room to retrieve a steaming kettle. "That remains to be seen, but I expect it will be several days at the very least. We had to bring her heart back into beating before the Elessar could work its power, and I had Maglor sing over the dagger to end the spell that it forced onto her and then had him melt it down for the healing to begin beyond simply preserving her. She was dead - I saw her be turned from the gates of Mandos when I looked into her mind. She had passed the brink of life, but somehow, by some sheer stubbornness, pulled herself back."

"She had. I thought - there was no - no. Yes." The urge to cry rose in Fingon's throat unbidden, and more tears followed. "She - "

Idhlinn's booted steps across the marble floor came closer, she touched his shoulder with uncommon gentleness, and a cup was pressed into his hand, steaming with a wholesome herbal scent. "Drink, it will help calm you down."

Fingon blew on the tea and drank it down quickly, trying not to scald his mouth, handed the cup back to Idhlinn and turned his attention back to Alphangil. She was still bruised around her eyes and her face was so pale that her freckles stood out from her brown skin more pronounced than usual.

Fingon found himself repeating a game they had often played in their courtship and the early days of their marriage, tracing constellations in the jumble of marks on her forehead, cheeks and nose, really just a transparent excuse to touch the beautiful woman before him, but now he steered clear of the broken nose - more expertly set by the healers than with his attempt - and the other scrapes and bruises on her cheeks. He just needed to convince himself that she was real - that this was real, that Alphangil was safe and real and alive.

At the same time, he felt a warm, leaden tiredness spread from his stomach into his limbs and the rest of his body, and his eyes drooped. Idhlinn came to him again and steered him away from the bed, shushed his protests that he needed to be with his wife and that Idhlinn had drugged him, although she also admitted that she had, and sat him down on the bed next to Alphangil's.

He was asleep almost immediately.

*

Maedhros had early on learned that one did not run in Idhlinn's healing ward, unless it were to provoke her wrath, and few people were quite so reckless. He was almost certain that Fingon, with his sprint across the courtyard, had not slowed his step inside in the hurry to get to Alphangil's side.

Idhlinn came up to him as he approached, drying her hands. He breathed in deeply; the ward smelled of herbs and clean sheets, of scrubbed marble floors and of Cuingail's collection of teas. The scent never failed to comfort him, and had never failed to comfort him since he had woken in Idhlinn's ward in Mithrim after Angband, lucid enough for the first time to register it as a place of healing. It allowed his anxiety to drain away now, at least a little.

They stood together wordlessly for a moment, and he could feel Idhlinn studying his face, the tiredness and more than that, the dirt he had not bothered to clean away before the assembly. Bathing had seemed far less important than declaring Cýronil wanted for the abduction and killing of the High Queen, and the death of seven of his people. He'd promised a bounty large enough to make Caranhir's face flush angrily and speak up if not for Rowenn's hand on his arm.

He swore the populace of Himring to vigilance and attention against other traitors in his ranks and had his scribes pen messages to all the remaining Elven settlements as well as to their Edain and Naugrim allies, with orders that if Cýronil showed her face at any, she was to be delivered to Himring or Hithlum alive, and a flock of birds went out carrying the missives. He left Maglor to oversee the aftermath, and walked straight to the healing ward: He had delayed too long already, and although he trusted Idhlinn and her skill with his life - and Alphangil's - his need to see Alphangil and convince himself would brook no more delay.

"She sleeps," Idhlinn said. "So does Fingon. He is fine, and as I can judge it as of now, she is out of danger. Cuino saw to her hand. I recognized your skill with all else. You did well, Maedhros, and it may well have bought her enough time and strength to make it far enough still clinging to her life by the thinnest of threads. Had she perished any less close to Himring, there would have been no bringing her back; her body would have deteriorated far too much beyond even the Elessar's capacity to restore - "

Idhlinn stopped herself when Maedhros threw his arms around her and wept, shaking and letting go of the harrowing grief he had carried all this way. He shook his head. "I thought I was losing her, and I could not bear it."

"You bore it," she said softly. "Come, once you have calmed yourself you may see her, convince yourself, and then go take a bath and rest," Idhlinn said, and Maedhros felt her press a surreptitious, motherly kiss to his hair.

When he trusted that he could breathe again without weeping, he let Idhlinn lead him into the chamber that Alphangil and Fingon slept in. "Of course he did not bathe either before storming in, but he is so deep under now that he did not notice me undressing him and cleaning his face and hands at least. There is one more bed for you here, and as soon as I deem her ready to be moved, I'll have her taken into her chambers. She will need both of you to lend her strength in her healing, as long as you do not tire her too much for a while. I know that her and Fingon's marriage bond was severed by her death - perhaps that is why he did not feel her return - but I am afraid I must ask all three of you to abstain for a while longer before it is re-knit."

The words were said with a fond exasperation that made Maedhros think of his mother.

In the warm green glow of the Elessar, steady and reassuring, that reminded him, once again, of his own recovery after Angband, Maedhros pulled up a chair to Alphangil's bedside. She looked fragile and far smaller than she should be in the large bed, but her breathing was deep and regular, and her face was peaceful.

*

Bright daylight through the curtains tickled her nose, and she sneezed.

It hurt as if her face were strangely tender but it was nothing that did not pass quickly. Alphangil blinked her eyes open slowly as Himring's noontime bells began to ring outside the window. She found herself testing the feeling of a familiar mattress and the weight of her body - that seemed new and unfamiliar, somehow, a little untethered as if something had tried to pull her away from it. She could remember only scraps of how she'd reached Himring - the stone walls of her room with the swan tapestry and Fingon's banner left no doubt of where she was - a long, dark ride over a frozen plain, terror and pain and fading. And then - nothing. A thundering voice judging her, and a void in her memory.

Nothing at all. Death.

She shuddered and felt her right shoulder, where Cýronil had so fatally wounded her, reaching under the nightshirt and finding a knotty, half-healed scar that felt cool and hard under her touch, with almost no sensation in her skin, the mark that the evil weapon must have left. Other than that, she felt almost whole again. Her head throbbed a little, radiating pain from the back of it where it rested against the pillow, and her wrists were tender and swathed in bandages, much as her right hand was.

To the right and left of her in the large bed lay Fingon and Maedhros, both turned toward her and each other, hands joined over the center of her body and Fingon's green gem, even in sleep - for both slept, cocooning her in their warmth and strength. It finally convinced her that this ordeal was over.

She laid her left hand lightly on theirs, closed her eyes and slipped back into sleep.

Chapter End Notes

There you go. Most of you knew already that Alphangil would have to live, because she obviously shows up in later stories (the danger of writing a series non-chronologically! Heh.) but after setting the stakes for her life so high, it would have felt like cheating if Alphangil had simply managed to hang on until she could reach Himring. I hope, given the all the medical handwaving I've done here, especially the integrity of her dead body, isn't too grating. Something something Elessar. ;)

There will likely be a shorter sequel to this that deals with Alphangil's (and Maedhros and Fingon's) healing process. Regarding Cýronil - I also have a story in the works featuring her; the first chapter of that is almost ready for posting, so we absolutely have not seen the last of her yet.

Finally, special thanks go, once again, to Chestnut for their wonderful name list that yielded the names of Arveril and Nimlach, as well as to Minubell for talking me through the medical intricacies of hand injuries.

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I owe a lot of people thanks for supporting me through this: The SWG write-in crowd (you know who you are!) for the enthusiasm and the write-ins that got the majority of this fic written, the phenomenal IdleLeaves for letting me yell at her about this story and generally having an open ear and for her betaing help, and additionally, the lovely, lovely Saelind for her betaing skills to get this polished. Thank you all.

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