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Chapter Text

Curufin’s device did not, in fact, send them home. 

Fingon thought for a moment that perhaps it had, and that he’d just had the simple shitty luck to land in the Fen of Serech. Badly. Off balance in slippery mud, and he went over backwards into a mire of questionable water, pond weeds, and slimy mud. 

It took him a few minutes to get himself unstuck, upright and to squelch his way to a hummock of much more solid ground. By that point he had figured out that he was not in the Fens, simply because the land was wrong. 

The Fen of Serech lay at the meeting of the Eithel Sirion and Rivil rivers, where they met to form the Sirion and run south between the Ered Wethrin mountains and the mountains to the east, which rose to form the Ered Gorgoroth. Wherever he was now, he did see mountains far off to the west, but none to the east. The flat marshlands were too broad, as well. 

He didn’t see anyone else about. Sighing through his nose as he attempted to wring muddy water out of his braids, he opened his mind and reached along his marriage bond. 

FINNO? Maedhros sounded relieved. Fingon could half-sense the flicker of his husband carrying on other osanwe conversations at the same time. You’re all right!

Fingon moodily eyed one of the long braids of his hair. The gold chains he had braided into it were dulled under a coating of muck. He picked out some duckweed with distaste. I’m throttling Curufin when I see him. He told Maedhros. Where are you?

He insisted that it wasn’t his fault, and now isn’t answering me. Maedhros sent an impression of rocky hills, chilly wind, and dry sere grasslands below the mountain peaks. Where are you?

Fingon sent a mental image of the lay of the land and of the sensation of chilly, mucky water soaking his boots. That got him a wave of sympathy, which was gratifying. 

Fingon? That was Finrod, who like Galadriel was unreasonably good at Osanwe. Oh good. you’re alive. Where…

Fingon sent the same mental impression of the swamp, and received the mental equivalent of a flinch. That brings back rather unpleasant memories. 

The Fen? 

The Fen. Finrod somehow managed to mentally pronounce the word with loathing absolutely dripping from it. Barahir had to drag me out of mud to my thighs as my guard kept the bloody orcs off us. Anyway. There was a curious sort of splitting sensation that meant he was broadcasting the next bit to several people at once, which was something Fingon had never mastered. I’m fine. Curufin and Helca are with me. We’re in the countryside outside what looks like a city. 

Fingon could feel the relief from Maedhros. The rest contacted me already. He sent, and Fingon was starting to wonder how it was so easy for them to converse via osanwe, though he had no idea how far apart they were. Moryo is in a jungle with your sister, Finrod. He’s complaining at me about the sweat right now, but I tuned him out. Maglor and his wife and daughter are in a coastal city somewhere, and he’s trying to get his hands on a map. Celegorm and Irisse are in a forest somewhere. The Ambarussa aren’t far from me, I think. The terrain looks similar. Mother is with Tyelpe somewhere called ‘Rivain’. They landed at the local matriarch’s house and she’s taken them in, so they’re safe. They’re also trying to find a map and some more information. 

Fingon, eyeing the distant mountains, gritted his teeth, shouldered his bow, and started slogging through the swamp in the direction of the mountains. If nothing else, some uplands wouldn’t be so fucking soggy. 

Even skirting around the lower, muddier areas, he sank to his ankles in mud about every thirty seconds. The mud was cold, and sucked at his feet with every step, and his calves were going to be killing him by the end of the day. 

Finrod’s mental voice sounded slightly strained. Curufin says that he’ll speak with you when he has a moment, Maedhros, and to stop shouting at him. He’s….rather busy. 

With what? Maedhros demanded, annoyed.

Why are you telling ME? Fingon asked, as he attempted to find a decent place to ford a small stream. 

Well. Finrod said. Ah. 

The next mental voice hit like a hammer blow, and was broadcast at large to anyone and everyone with a strength that exactly one elf had ever managed. WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE VALAR IS GOING ON? WHERE ARE THE REST OF MY SONS?

The shock and confusion were so great that Fingon lost his balance as he made his way up the bank of the stream, and he splashed down into the water. 

Feanor? He thought, wildly, as he scrambled back to his feet. His marriage bond with Maedhros was still wide open, and even when Maedhros wasn’t actively speaking to him over osanwe he could feel the absolute blindsided shock from his husband. 

Yes. Finrod sounded even more strained. Curufin and Helca and I aren’t the only three here. 

HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE IN MANDOS. Fingon shouted, mentally, as he got a handhold on the root of a stunted willow and dragged himself up over the steep bank of the stream. 

I suppose you’d prefer that, Findekano. Feanor’s mental voice was as warm as Feanor had ever been towards Fingon. Namely, something best compared to the northern winds on the Helcaraxe. 

That’s High King to you, Feanaro. Fingon snapped back, icily, because he was not having a good day and if Namo had chosen NOW to let Feanor out of Mandos he was going to fight Namo himself once they found their way home. 

Sure enough, that got a wave of fury, and an answering one from Maedhros, though it wasn’t directed at Fingon. Fingon got the impression that Maedhros was yelling back at his father, for all he was doing it directly rather than broadcasting it to everyone. 

Yes. Finrod sounded tired. I don’t know what’s going on either. Curufin and him are screaming at each other right now. He is very much alive, and here. And standing in front of me. Somehow. 

Better you than me. Fingon told him. 

FINNO? His sister. 

Irisse? 

Was that fucking FEANOR? Tyelko is losing his MIND. 

It was. Valar help us all. You’re all right? 

A sense of dismissal. We’re in a forest. We’ll be fine. We’ll find you once we figure out where we are and where you are. So much for Curufin’s genius. 

Russo says he’s claiming it’s not his fault. 

Of course he is. Why is FEANOR here? 

Fingon shrugged mentally, and skirted around a mucky pond. Frogs eyed him warily. He eyed them back. He’d already been hungry, and if he didn’t find anything better in the next few hours he was not above making a dinner out of frog legs. 

Well. Irisse said after a moment. This conversation is going to be fun. 

What con…

Irisse’s next mental shout was split.

LAW FATHER, WELCOME BACK! She yelled, with the glee of someone who was not within miles of Feanor and who couldn’t be shouted at in person. GOOD TO HEAR NAMO LET YOU OUT! YOU’RE GOING TO BE A GRANDFATHER AGAIN!

There was a moment of mental silence. Fingon only barely managed to slam everything but his marriage bond closed. Even so, he felt the mental shout from Feanor drum against his shields. 

A moment later he had to shut that too, because Maedhros was shouting and too worked up to not let it leak across, and Fingon had to concentrate on spotting quicksand and avoiding it. 

He was actually going to throttle Curufin, and probably Namo as well. 

Chapter Text

Tevinter Imperium, forestland just south of the High Reaches, not far from the Imperial Highway. 

The thing that had told him instantly that they were not home or indeed anywhere near it was the fact that the forest they found themselves in grew nowhere in Beleriand. 

There were a few minutes of distraction. His mother, his brothers and assorted cousins, nieces, and nephews were alive and well. As, apparently, was his father. 

That was still ringing back in forth in Celegorm’s head like a bell. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it quite. He rolled the fact back in forth in his head, staring blankly at the oak and pine forest around them. 

“Tyelko?” Irisse wiped a sleeve over her forehead, grimacing. It was warm. Far more so than Himlad or Hithlum or even Ossiriand ever got, even at the height of summer. They’d been dressed for a cool spring day, and they had both stripped off their cloaks and outer tunics already. Celegorm was considering going barefoot. 

Along their bond, concern prodded at him. You all right?

He gave her the mental equivalent of a helpless shrug, wavering. Part of him wanted to reach out along that kin-bond to the space in the world that was father, but…

…but will it be father-who-carried-me-on-his-shoulders, father like he was, or father-at-the-end?

He wanted the former, achingly badly. But the latter…

“This reminds me of some of the woods around Tirion.” He said instead of saying anything else. Which said rather a lot, because Tirion had been a summer city that never knew true cold. The trees of this forest, when he nudged at them and asked them where they were, spoke in strange voices, and did not know anything of the fierce cold of Beleriand winter. 

“These trees are smaller.” Aredhel said, which was true. “But then, Yavanna walked among the ones outside Tirion.” She was looking back and forth over the forest floor, even as Celegorm did the same. “Ah!”

Celegorm had seen the same. They were on a trail of sorts; it was little more than a deer track, but there were fresh prints on it less than a day old, so clear that Celegorm could have followed them blind by touch alone. They were the footprints of horses and people, though, not just deer. The sight of ordinary horse prints was proof they were at least away from that horrible pit of a world Curvo had dumped them on first. 

Trails led places, so that was a good start. This one hopefully led to water. They’d both need that before anything else. Celegorm closed his eyes and listened, and scented the air. Faintly heard the gurgling trickle of a stream running over stones, and…his ears pricked further…the sound of low voices.

“There’s water.” He said, and pointed down the trail. “And people, I think.” He looked to one side, where Huan was sniffing intently at the trail. “What do you think, old friend?”

“Twenty people.” Huan said, absently. “Six horses. They were coming this way, but they’ve stopped near water. Six of them  are wearing armor.” His head came up, and the dog sniffed at the air thoughtfully. “Ten are Secondborn, but the rest…” 

“The rest?” 

In answer, Huan trotted off, presumably to look ahead. Celegorm shrugged. 

“Well. Maybe they can tell us where the blazes we are.” Aredhel had rolled her cloak and outer tunic into a bundle, and lashed it to her back. She handed him his own, and he shouldered it similarly. 

Tyelko? A prod from his mother. 

Amil?

Here. And then there was the image of a map. Celegorm cursed, wishing that he had the materials to sketch it out. With a silent apology to the tree, he cut a sheet of smooth flat beech bark and made do with the point of his boot knife. They’re telling me Tyelpe and I are in Rivain. Where…

Don’t know yet, amil. 

A flash of worry, and the osanwe equivalent of Nerdanel reaching out to pat his cheek. Look after yourself and Irisse, Tyelko. Find your brothers as soon as you can. 

You should tell Rus…

I already did. A faint sense of amusement at that. He’s found a castle or fort of some sort, and has talked his way in. He should know where he is soon. Stay in touch with your brothers. 

His boots, made for cool damp spring, were too warm. The forest floor was all pine needles and leaf litter anyway; Tyelko sat to remove his boots, and rolled them into the bundle of his cloak and outer shirt. Barefoot, he made less of a sound on the trail than a mouse would have. 

Perhaps a mile or so down the trail, Huan came padding out of the underbrush. He gave Celegorm a solemn sort of look that set the short hairs on the back of Celegorm’s neck on end. 

Without a word, he strung his bow. It drew a hundred and sixty pounds, and Curufin had made it of laminated yew and dragon horn from the dread Glaurung. He nocked an arrow, but didn’t draw, and eased forward. 

A few hundred yards from the sound of water, he heard voices. He pricked his ears forward to listen. 

“...as well make camp here. Take some time to set up camp anyway.” A man’s voice. 

“Mmmm. Might as well. No hurry anyway.” A second man. The sound of someone rummaging through supplies. “Coffee?”

Several approving sounds. Celegorm melted into the trees, even as Aredhel did the same to the other side of the trail. She had an arrow fitted to her own bow as well. 

The sounds were coming from a little group of people sitting in what was clearly an established and often-used campsite in a little clearing next to a narrow but clear stream. Three were sitting around the fire; one was setting an iron kettle in the coals to heat. 

The other three, however, were some ways away. Huan had been right; six of the group were wearing armor, and carrying weapons. Six horses were hobbled and grazing at the edges of the stream. The other fourteen people, however…

Ah, not again. 

One of those collared and chained people lifted their head, as one of the armored people walked down the line. Celegorm’s heart skipped a beat, and stuttered. 

Many of those chained had pointed ears. 

His immediate impulse was to slap an arrow through the nearest man. He held himself back, though; Nelyo was always going on about thinking and not just jumping to the first conclusion, Tyelko. 

I suppose it could be prisoners of war. Aredhel had caught the thought. Her sense along their bond was slightly dubious, but willing and hoping to be convinced otherwise. We don’t know anything about this place. Why are they so short?

Indeed, the other elves were slighter even than the humans. Celegorm reached out to try and catch the attention of one of the other elves over osanwe, and received…nothing. It was much like trying to speak mind to mind to a human; he caught a vague impression of emotions, but nothing else. The emotions in this particular case were resignation and tired, mostly. 

Irisse…

No luck. She seemed as baffled as he felt. What ARE they? They LOOK like elves…

Well. Fuckit. 

Celegorm stood, and stepped out of the forest. Based on how often him doing this startled people, including his own brothers and cousins, the effect must have been striking. This was no different. One human dropped a pack he was rummaging through and yelped in alarm. The rest scrambled for their weapons, even as Aredhel melted out of the woods to the other side of the trail. 

“Maker’s breath, who… what…” 

Why are they speaking English? Aredhel was as baffled as Celegorm was by this, apparently. 

He gave a mental shrug. 

“Andraste’s tits, you’re a couple of tall bastards…why are they armed…”

“Shouldn’t we be?” Celegorm snapped, annoyed.

“You’re elves.” That was from a human who was wearing robes and holding a long and absurdly complicated staff, and who was trying very hard to look down his nose at Celegorm. This was difficult, because Celegorm was eight inches taller than him. 

“So?” Aredhel tossed her braid over one shoulder, which set her earrings to glittering. Several of the men were looking at her, and there was a dawning gleam of avarice in their eyes. 

“Don’t play stupid.” Snapped the man in the robes. To the other humans, “they clearly stole them. The make of those is too fine for a rabbit, even a pair of unnaturally tall ones.” 

“Stole?” Celegorm straightened at the accusation. “My father made this sword, you…”

“Just slap them in the fetters with the others.” The robed man went on, dismissive. “They’re escaped exotics, no doubt. They’ll fetch a good price in Minrathous. Stop cringing, it’s not like a pair of knife-ears will know how to use weapons that fine anyway.” 

The other humans looked slightly abashed at this, and squared their shoulders. One took a step forward, laying a hand on the hilt of his own sword. Celegorm tightened his fingers on his bowstring. 

“What about her?” One of the armored humans was giving Aredhel a keen, hungry look that Celegorm didn’t like at all, and which was making his wife prickle with hot sick little sparks of discomfort and flickers of hated memories. 

The robed man flicked a hand. “Have your fun with her if you like.” 

The hungry-eyed man grinned. There was a hot sick wave of revulsion from Aredhel, and through a sort of mist that seemed to bleach the color out of the world and render it all in sharp hot black and grays, Celegorm raised his bow, drew, and loosed. 

The arrow punched through the breastplate of the man nearest him. It had been a nearly point blank shot, and it punched out the backplate of the armor as well, having gone clear through the man’s chest. It stopped, red, only held in by the fletchings, and the man made a surprised, shocked little sort of sound as he looked down at the hole before crumpling. 

Celegorm dropped the bow, dropped a shoulder, and tackled the hungry-eyed man off his feet. Landed on top of him; the man tried to snatch out a knife. Celegorm headbutted him, got a knee on the man’s arm, and pried the knife out of his hand. Wrenched viciously when the man fought him, until the forearm twisted and he felt the snap of bone. Snatched the knife up, and drove it down through the man’s eye. 

Behind him, he felt a hum of gathering power. Aredhel’s bowstring sang, though, and it was gone. There was a good deal of screaming happening. Some of it was his own, in fury. 

He came up drawing his sword, the one they’d claimed he wouldn’t know how to use. It had been forged in Aman, at the hand of Feanor, and the blade gleamed like quicksilver, the edge so sharp as to be nearly invisible. The blade was as much spellcraft as steel, and it bit through boiled leather and mail easily, hungry and keen. A man fell, looking shocked. 

The last two of them tried to box him in and get him locked up, pressed back against a tree. Celegorm let one force his sword arm up and get close, and then promptly bit half his ear off. 

The man reeled, screeching. Celegorm turned and stabbed, running the point of his sword through the throat of the man who had been attempting to come in at the side and slip a knife into his ribs. Aredhel’s bowstring sang again, and the man clutching his bleeding ear went down, hard, with an arrow in his eye. 

Silence. Celegorm spat a few times, to get the blood out of his mouth. 

Irisse? He worried at her, and closed the few steps to lay a hand on her cheek and look her over. He reached out, just to reassure himself that the two little fea she was carrying were still there, content and oblivious. They were, still drawing on his own, a steady little pull. 

I’m fine. She told him. We’re fine. It…hm. Well. I enjoyed killing them. 

She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t press. 

“...Hello??” 

They both turned, a little startled. He hadn’t forgotten the strange elves…and a few humans…chained in a line, but. 

“Our thanks.” The speaker was an elf with brown hair. He nodded at the dead robed man. “The mage had the keys.” 

Aredhel looked down. Crouched, rummaged for a moment, and came up with a ring of keys. Chucked it to the chained line, who immediately set about undoing their fetters. 

Celegorm looked down in mixed bafflement and horror when the elves stood. The tallest was nearly a foot shorter than he was. Their ears were all reading relief and surprise, but their minds were all curiously quiet; he didn't feel even a whisper of osanwe from any of them. 

“Are they children?” Aredhel wondered out loud, outraged. 

The first elf, who’d spoken to ask for the keys, flicked his ears in amusement. “I’m forty.” 

“Oh, Eru. They are.” 

“I’ve children of my own, Lady, and gray hairs.” The elf looked up…and up… at them. “Maker. Are you spirits then, of Arlathan of old?”

“Spirits? Of what? Of when?” Celegorm was baffled. 

“Did you not have enough to eat growing up?” Aredhel demanded. 

“Well.” One of the other tiny elves seemed to consider that. “Probably not, really. Alienages never get what they need.” 

“ Eru.” Celegorm flicked the blood off his sword, sheathed it, and snatched up his bow. “What is this? Where are we?”

The freed slaves looked at each other. Back up at him. “Tevinter.” One said, cautiously. “You’re elvhen. You HAVE to know…”

“We’re Noldor.” Aredhel said. “I’ve never heard of Elvhen. Is it like Sind…hang on.” She switched to speaking Sindarin. “Do you understand this tongue?” 

Blank looks. One of the elves said something in a language that Celegorm didn’t know, and which did not at all sound like any dialect of Quenya or Sindarin he’d ever encountered. 

“Fuck.” Aredhel said, in Taliska. In Quenya. “I’m going to kill your brother.” 

“No, I’m going to strangle him first.” Celegorm told her, because he was going to lightly throttle Curvo a little when he got his hands on him. 

Aredhel looked over the group of former slaves, which was a horribly familiar sight after Gor. All were thin and hungry looking. She gave Celegorm a look. 

Even as he was about to nod and go see what he couldn’t find to kill for the pot, Huan emerged from the treeline. He was dragging a dead elk by the savaged throat, and dropped it at Tyelko’s feet. 

“I thought they might need it.” Huan said, and one of the tiny elves and two humans promptly fainted dead away. 

Chapter Text

“No.” Curufin said, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “No, no, no!” 

He’d had it. He knew he had. He’d felt the resonance lock on, had felt and heard the song flow straight and true, and then it had been disrupted, and now they were…somewhere that wasn’t home, and wasn’t where he wanted to be. 

He swore he’d heard a woman laughing. 

Several shouts at once. The first two were out loud. 

“ Arimelda!” His wife. She was safe. Good. 

“ CURUFINWE!” Finrod. Joy. 

The rest were via osanwe. 

CURVO! Nelyo, and his oldest brother could bellow in fury nearly as well mentally as he could in person. CURVO, YOU SWORE…

Atarinke! His mother, who was using the same mental tone she had when she’d caught him trying to sneak out of the house as a child. 

Way to fucking go, you ass. Celegorm, sounding annoyed. So much for have it figured out this time. 

I did! Curufin yelled back at Tyelko, mentally. 

Yeah. Sure. 

His other brothers were all mentally yelling at once, which was going to give him a headache. Curufin ignored them all, and reached for…

Atar? Celebrimbor. Curufin’s shoulders slumped slightly in relief. His son was only barely speaking to him again, and his mental voice was stiff, but it was worlds better than they had been only short years before. I’m with grandmother. 

Look after her. Curufin pleaded, even as Maedhros shouted against his mental shields at increasing and headache inducing metaphorical volume.

It wasn’t me! He finally protested to his oldest brother. Something interfered!

I DON’T BLOODY WANT EXCUSES, CURVO. WHERE…

Curufin became vaguely aware that Helca was, a little frantically, patting at his shoulder to try and get his attention, and Finrod was making high pitched noises of shock, rapidly increasing in volume. 

“...Curvo!” Helca was normally poised and self possessed to the point where many found her cold, but now she was visibly shocked. “Curvo, darling… ”

“Wha…” Curufin blinked, and blinked again, and didn’t finish the word. His mouth didn’t shut either, which probably made him look quite silly. 

They were next to a small woodland, on a stone road. The landscape rolled away in hills around them. They were not terribly far outside a city; it was probably only half a mile distant. The woodland seemed intentionally cultivated, and the hills behind them rose in faultlessly clipped green to a manor house. It wasn’t the only along the road. There were a fair few people out and about. One was trimming a hedge not terribly far away, and had dropped his shears to stare. 

They were not the only three elves. For one, the man who’d just dropped his hedge clippers had pointed ears and fine features, for all he was about two feet shorter than Curufin. For another, there was a fourth figure, now getting to unsteady feet between Curufin and Finrod. A figure wearing robes of grey, without seam. The hood was thrown back to reveal a long fall of sleek black hair, and Curufin knew him, even as the figure straightened. How could he not?

Feanor son of Finwe staggered again, and Curufin caught his father without thinking. For the briefest moment he swore he heard the sonorous voice of Namo, the Doomsman of the Valar. 

He’s your problem now. 

“What.” Curufin said, a little blankly, and then Feanor had a hand on either side of his face. 

“Curufinwe.” His father said, and it was almost a sob, and then Curufin was yanked into the most baffling embrace of his life. 

“ FEANOR?” Finrod’s eyes were the size of saucers, and he mostly just mouthed the name. 

“My sons. My sons. Where are the others? Curvo…”

“Father.” Curufin said, still blankly. “Father, you’re. Here.” 

“ Feanor?” Finrod managed, aloud, and Feanor’s spine went stiff. 

“Ingoldo.” Feanor’s voice dropped in temperature by about a hundred degrees. “I can’t have been dead so long you forgot to pronounce my name properly.” 

“Oh.” Finrod said this mostly to the sky. “Arguing about linguistic drift again. It is him.” To Feanor, and with impressive poise. “That’s how the Sindar pronounce it, Feanaro, and we have been speaking a good amount of Sindarin these last five centuries. Speaking of, I usually go by Finrod now.” 

“I care not. Where are my sons? My grandson?”

“Atar.” Curufin asked, a little helplessly. “How…”

“Namo tired of my company, and he has pronounced me as healed as he and Este can manage.” Feanor was looking Curufin over, almost desperately, and that was a very unexpected knife in the gut. “You look well.” He almost whispered that last. “Where are your brothers?”

“I don’t know.” Curufin said, honestly. And then quickly at the stricken look. “They were all well and alive a minute ago.”

“Where are…” 

“I don’t know! The device should have worked!” And they should be safe home now, rather than…wherever they were, and Helca and the child she was carrying should be safe home, not wherever this was, and very suddenly Curufin was furious. He opened his mouth…

…He winced. Feanor had always been absurdly, unreasonably powerful, and he proved it again now. 

WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE VALAR IS GOING ON? WHERE ARE THE REST OF MY SONS?

The osanwe shout was broadcast to anyone who could hear, and was powerful enough that it made Curufin’s worsening headache twinge, and it was all so ridiculous and so impossible and he was angry, with himself and at his father for things done five hundred years and more past. It was all too much, which was why he did something that he had never done before. 

“SHUT UP.” He yelled, at Feanaro Finwion, the greatest and most powerful of the Noldor. 

Five centuries. Five centuries, and Feanor had not been there. Five centuries of pain, and never had Feanor had to be the one to figure out how to go on. “JUST SHUT UP AND LET US FIGURE IT OUT.” Curufin shouted. “ LIKE WE ALWAYS HAVE TO!”

That at least startled his father into silence. For about four seconds, anyway. 

“Curufinwe…” His father looked hurt, and it made Curufin even angrier. 

“ Don’t!” Curufin hissed. “ Don’t!” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes again, hard. “Five hundred years. Five hundred years, we’ve been handling things, just don’t.” 

Because Feanor had left, he’d left them, had died in Curufin’s arms, had made them twice swear…

“ Curvo, you can’t think I wanted to die.” Feanor’s eyes were narrowing and his chin was going up in the way that was so, so familiar and meant that his father was hurt, and turning it into anger. 

“ YOU SEEMED WILLING ENOUGH TO SEE US DIE.” Curufin snapped, surprising even himself. “They were more important than us or your own life! How am I to know!” 

It was stupid. He knew his father hadn’t wanted to die, but there’d been that wounded place inside him for five hundred years now. Something that had torn open when Feanor had died in Curufin’s arms, and had never healed. 

It was so much clearer now, without the Oath digging burning fingers into him and driving him forward. The Oath that Feanor had sworn, and that Curufin had sworn twice over with his brothers. 

He’d been so desperately grateful so many times over the centuries that Celebrimbor had not sworn it. But that very fact…

Feanor recoiled as if slapped. All six of Curufin’s brothers were screaming at him over Osanwe, and he just shut them all off. 

Feanor drew a hand over his face. “You don’t understand…”

“ Nelyo captive!” Curufin screamed. “He went for you, because of the Oath, and they tortured him for thirty years! And you weren’t there!” 

Mentally, Irisse shouted something at everyone generally, but Curufin wasn’t listening. Feanor, however, wild-eyed, shouted back LAW FATHER????

Oh, of course. Naturally. 

“You can hardly be surprised.” Helca said this soothingly and reasonably, and Curufin wanted to go down on his knees and kiss her on the spot for it. “Tyelko and Irisse have been lovers since Aman. The only reason they didn’t marry there was because they thought you’d be angry, Feanaro, and after Maedhros and Fingon you can’t claim they weren’t right to fear it. They made it official some years ago now.” 

Feanor stared at his law daughter. “They what?” 

“Irisse is expecting as well.” Helca stroked her own belly, and Feanor’s eyes went even more wild. “She says it will be a girl and a boy.” 

Feanor’s face went through a great range of expressions very, very rapidly. Curufin watched a knee jerk reaction of disdain for Fingolfin’s children fight it out with his father’s equally knee jerk protectiveness of his own family. “You’re.” He managed. “Irisse…”

“What’s this?” 

All four of them spun on the spot. Curufin blamed the absurdity of the situation and the fair amount of yelling for the fact that ten Secondborn had gotten within twenty yards of them without their noticing. 

All ten men were in armor. Or at least wearing metal; even from twenty yards Curufin could spot goldwork that was not intended for actual battle, and he had no clue what they were playing at with the overly ornamented pauldrons and truly ridiculously sculptural helmets. 

Curufin narrowed his eyes, distracted despite himself. Ridiculously sculptural and had to be hollow to avoid being far too heavy, which meant that those helms were also far too thin in addition to having all number of points that would catch a blow rather than sliding it off. 

“A personal matter.” Finrod said. “Our apologies. Don’t mind…”

“Shut it, knife ear. Don’t you know to clear the road for Chevaliers?” 

Finrod’s ears drooped slightly. The humans immediately misread this. 

“That’s what I thought. One side.” The man gestured imperiously. 

Feanor, son of Finwe, Crown Prince and briefly High King of the Noldor, straightened. His eyes went narrow, and despite being on foot while the men were on horse, he managed to look down his nose at them. “And who do you think you are, that I should stand aside?”

The humans seemed to find this uproariously funny, and burst into laughter. Curufin wondered breifly how his father understood the men; they were speaking English for some strange reason. But, well, he recalled the strange translation magic of their guests from Ellinon. Perhaps it was something similar. In any case, Feanor clearly understood, and the humans clearly understood him in turn. Curufin watched his father’s shoulders go stiff, and could practically feel the anger rolling off of him. 

“This one thinks he’s funny! I am Chevalier Renmonet Boisselet, elf, and you are a long way from the alienage.” 

“Tall ones.” One of the other humans said. “I didn’t know rabbits could grow so tall.” 

“Thieves, as well. Look at their weapons! Far too fine.” 

“Ah, Leon! You are quite right. Bandits, no doubt. Well, give the weapons over and we shall be gracious.” 

Feanor’s ears flattened straight back. “I forged that warhammer for my son with my own hands.” He hissed. “And you speak to a king, boy. Mind your tongue, for it must grieve your mother to have raised such an ill-mannered son.” 

“Oh, dear.” Finrod said, unhappily. Helca began stringing her bow. 

“Atar.” Curufin and Finrod were wearing their armor, and had weapons. Helca had her bow. But Feanor was fresh from the halls of Mandos, clad only in thin grey silk, and even if Curufin could hear the faults in the swords the humans drew in the rasp of steel against leather those swords could still kill. 

Feanor ignored him. His father’s silver eyes were blazing, and his voice cracked like a whip. “If the Secondborn are all such ungracious and ill mannered creatures, I cannot fathom why Eru would create them. Perhaps I was right all along, and he is a great fool. The son of the Finwe himself I am, and still I would not speak so to strangers upon the road. I will forgive the slight if you beg my forgiveness, you ill-raised children.” 

Feanor’s voice had always carried immense power, and it rang now with a strength Curufin hadn’t felt since…well. Since his father had crafted the Silmarils. 

He watched the humans, despite themselves, lean back and wilt a bit in their saddles, turning their heads so that they didn’t have to meet that burning-silver glare. Several of the horses, being generally more sensible creatures than their riders, took a step or two backwards. For a moment, Curufin thought that perhaps his father really would bend the rude young humans with his voice alone. 

“You’re not going to let a knife ear speak to you that way, Boisselet?” Said one of the men, at the back of the group, and all of the humans puffed up like roosters trying to make themselves look bigger in anger. 

“ Atar.” Curufin said, in alarm, as the rest of the men drew their swords. 

“Why can’t they be reasonable.” Finrod said, intensely unhappy, but he was drawing his own sword. “Beor’s people were never like this.” 

The lead human spurred his horse forward with a shout. Curufin grabbed his father by the back of that grey robe, and slung him bodily behind himself. “Atar, stay down!” 

“See, they do flee like frightened rabbi…” The instigator from the back got off. 

Helca shot him in the face, and Curufin, cursing everything in general, cut to one side to avoid the charge and swung his warhammer with all of his considerable strength. He was tall enough that it hit Boisselet in the chest, directly in the center of the breastplate. 

The steel, which was exactly as ornamental and thin as Curufin had estimated, crumpled under the blow, and it took Boisselet clean off his horse. He landed hard, wheezing blood, and did not try to rise. 

To his side, Finrod’s sword flickered like quicksilver. He had never been so broad as Curufin, but he was vicious in a fight and as fast as a snake. A saddle twisted, the girth strap cut, and an armored man tumbled to the ground. The man, to his credit, rolled and came up on his feet, but he came up on his feet directly into Finrod’s blade. 

“You don’t NEED to do this!” Finrod shouted over the din. “Come now, there’s no reason for this!” 

“Shut your fucking mouth, you murdering elf!”

Several of the horses had refused to advance, and their riders had dismounted to attack on foot. A helmet shattered under Curufin’s warhammer, the decorative wings on the sides caving in, too thin and light to turn the blow. He whipped it around to slap a spear aside, and crunched the pick end through an armored thigh as one of the mounted men tried to charge him. Another arrow flickered past, and a man slumped on his horse without a word, the shaft through his throat. 

Six men down in the space of ten seconds, and the remaining four seemed to be rethinking some things. Curufin hefted his hammer, grimly, and waited. 

“Death before dishonor.” One of the men snarled, and they advanced. 

The rest took very little time. 

Chapter Text

None of the swords were anything close to acceptable. 

The armor, of course, was trash. It was quite obviously for display rather than function, but even in that case it was a waste of steel. The engraving was sloppily done, the gilding uneven, the enamel of poor quality at best. The swords, though; they had clearly been intended to be functional, but when he flicked a fingernail against the blade and listened to the steel sing to him he could hear the faults in the metal. 

He threw the blade aside in disgust, onto the pile of the others. It had been the last. “Have the smiths of this place no pride?” He lamented out loud. Flawed blades happened, of course; he knew it well. But when he found one in a billet of steel he reworked it, and re-smelted it if necessary. He would never have allowed such a blade as any of these out of his workshop as a finished piece. 

“Here, father.” His son. Curufin handed over his own belt knife. Feanor recognized it well; he had made it, after all, long centuries ago. “Use this for now. And here.” He was undoing one of his own braids, and handed the tie over as well. 

He felt a little better after he pulled his hair back into a plait and it was no longer indecently loose. He still felt unsteady and impossibly new; the cobbles of the street hurt against his bare feet. 

Ingoldo… Finrod… noticed. He sighed, and began unlacing his own boots. 

“Here.” Finrod told him, and gave a little half smile. “I recall what it’s like, and very well. It will take a little time for your old calluses to return.” He offered the boots over. 

Well. Finrod was roughly the same height as Feanor, and his feet close enough to the same size. Feanor only hesitated a moment before accepting. 

“You were not in Mandos long.” Feanor said, a little bitterly. 

“No.” 

“I did not see you.” 

“Well. I did rather try to avoid you.” 

“Ah.” 

Curufinwe…oh, his son, his son… was still radiating prickly hurt. Feanor wanted to embrace him as he’d done when Curvo was small, wanted to explain, but…

It seemed terribly obvious now, after Este and Namo and that strange smiling goddess with an impish smile and quicksilver eyes had pieced back together the damage he had once done himself. Without that raw chasm in his fea, with the grief of his father’s death an ache in his memory rather than a fresh bleeding wound, the terrible mistakes he’d made seemed terribly obvious. 

Mandos was…strange, in his memory. Bits stuck, but others flowed away like water. One bit that stuck, though, was of the tapestry in the hall that showed scenes of the deeds of his family. 

On that one, his eldest son, his Maitimo, screamed to an uncaring sky as he hung from the cold and unforgiving cliff face from one poor wrist. Feanor had wept before it for a very long time, as well as a disembodied fea could. He’d raged at Namo, demanding that he be allowed to take his son’s place, demanding that this suffering should be his, but the Doomsman had not listened. 

He went for you, because of the Oath, and they tortured him for thirty years! And you weren’t there!

“Curvo…” He began, a little thickly. 

“Come on.” His son said, not looking at him. “There’s a city. Perhaps we can learn something. There should be someplace we can find you some proper clothes at least.” 

“Curvo, what is going on?” 

That got long sighs from his son, his law-daughter, and Ingo… Finrod. 

“I’ll tell you as we walk, Feanaro.” Helca offered. And she did, to Feanor’s increasing bafflement. Much of it was not a pleasant tale. 

Though. Certain things. 

He had grandchildren. Seven of them, who he’d never met. At least three fairly improbably, to be quite honest. “How did Maitimo and Findekano…”

That got a small huff of laughter from Helca. “Findekano sort of stole Ereinion from Orodreth, and isn’t giving him back now. As for Nolyaner and Yalë, Nelyafinwe found them as orphaned infants when the great alliance broke open Angband, and claimed them as his own.” A pause. “They most often go by Fingon and Maedhros now.” Another pause, and then, gently. “Maedhros does not much like being called Maitimo these days.” 

Thirty years in Angband, in the hands of Morgoth. I wasn’t there. It was me he wanted, I know it, and he took my son when he could not take me.

“Thank you for telling me.” He told her. 

From a distance, the city seemed a fair and shining thing. The luster tarnished as they got closer though. At the city gates, Feanor stopped and looked up, narrowing his eyes. 

The gates were of steel, with a facade of gilded steel. In parts the work was almost competent, but in others the quality dropped. He shook his head. 

Inside the city, it was more apparent. Many buildings were faced in white marble fine enough that Nerdanel would have been itching to get her hands on it, but it was badly set over building work of questionable quality. They got a great many baffled looks, but were generally left alone. Humans were quite a lot shorter than the Eldar, it seemed, so Feanor chalked that up to simple astonishment at their height. The rude and violent men on the road, perhaps, had simply been an aberration. 

The language was going to drive him mad, though. The humans around them were speaking in a language he did not know, but he heard it in his head as his native Quenya. It seemed a strange and complicated language, and he wanted to sit down and examine it to find out how it worked. 

A very baffled but polite man, when Finrod asked, directed them to a jewelry shop. 

“How do you speak this tongue?” Feanor asked, curious. 

“Learned it the last place we ended up.” Finrod said, absently. “It’s very strange that it’s used here as well. I wonder why…”

“And how did you end up…”

Finrod nodded at Curvo’s back. “Ask him. He built the thing.” 

“The thing.” Feanor said, dry. 

“I don’t understand it. He doesn’t either, apparently, because we keep ending up…”

“I understand the portal device perfectly.” Curvo snapped. “I keep telling you; something is bouncing us off.” 

“Portal device?” Feanor asked, delighted. 

Curvo straightened up. “Ah. Yes.” He sounded pleased. “Upon the revelation that there are other realities, I devised a way to link to the resonance of one you wish to visit, and with the right Song of enough power and a focus array you can open a way.”

Without a word, Feanor seized his son by the arm and hauled a startled Curvo around into an embrace. “I named you well.” He said, fiercely, full of pride. After a moment Curvo very slowly relaxed against him. “But how do you isolate…”

“A piece of the reality you wish to visit. Our guests left us this.” Curvo reluctantly pulled away, and drew from his belt pouch a scale. 

It was ivory pale, glimmering and iridescent as a pearl, perhaps two inches long and one wide. Feanor took it, fascinated, and turned it over in his hands. Tested the give. Unfocused his eyes and listened to the Song of it for a moment. Sure enough, it was a faint hum unlike any he’d heard before. 

“Hard as steel.” He murmured, a little absently. 

“They make armor of them.” 

“Of course! It’s much lighter than steel.” Feanor weighed it in his hand, and mentally extrapolated to a full suit. “Mithril would be lighter, but..” 

“Yes, much easier to get scales from beasts than to find mithril veins!” Curvo agreed, eagerly. “And, of course, the beauty! I’m told they come in every color imaginable.” 

Possibilities bloomed in his mind’s eye. “ Do they?” 

“The armor I saw had no two scales the same exact shade. Atar! Purples, reds, greens, blues, silver and gold, some nearly black, some like smoke…every shade you can imagine!”

“I see why you wish to visit this place.” His fingers were itching. He handed the scale back, a little reluctantly. “Interference?” 

“Mm. I know I made contact. Something on the other side interfered.” 

Feanor remembered an impish smirk and gleaming quicksilver eyes. “Hm.” Was all he said. “I’ll want to see your notes.” 

“Of course, once we figure out where the blazes we are. Ah. Here it is.” They stopped in front of a shop; a wide array of cut gems glittered in the window. Some of them were even competently cut. 

Curvo appeared to think for a moment, and then removed a bracelet of gold and ruby from his left bicep. It was Curvo’s own work; Feanor could have spotted that from twenty paces even if the power worked into the piece didn’t sing of his son’s work. 

They went in. There were not many people in the shop. The people who were present were dressed in an entirely ridiculous fashion, and were wearing masks of an array of bejeweled precious metals. He didn’t see a single one he considered competently made. 

“What?” The woman at the counter tried to look down her nose at them. Failed, because while she was tall for one of the humans she was a foot and more shorter than Curvo. 

Curvo laid the bracelet on the counter. “What can you give me for this?” 

She glanced at it, apparently halfway ready to dismiss it. Glanced again. Stared, lips parting. She very gently picked it up, eyes gone wide and round in wonder. Then, suspicious, she snapped her gaze back up to them, narrow eyed. 

“Where did you get this?” She demanded. 

“I made it.” Curvo snapped back, irritated. 

“You didn’t. No elf could…”

Behind the counter and a wide archway, there was a workshop. There were jewelry smiths working. Feanor couldn’t help a rather longing glance. His fingers were itching more. 

He glanced again. A third time, and then stopped listening to the woman accusing his son of being a liar and thief.

“Stop that!” 

The idiot at the work bench didn’t look up. The counter was not even hip high; it was easy to vault, and then a moment later he plucked the carved emerald out of the man’s hands. The man spluttered. Looked up. Spluttered more. 

“How dare…”

“You were going to set this?” Feanor demanded. “In that?”

“...Yes? Who are you? Someone get him out of…”

“It deserves better than that!” Feanor huffed. The emerald was a lovely thing; large and even and deep blue-green, with fewer flaws than most emeralds had. Some artisan had carved it with a very fine hand into the face of a woman in profile, with her hair falling around her face. The goldwork the madman had been about to set it in, however, was shoddy and ill-made; his son and grandson had turned out better work as children. 

A flash of something like pain in the man’s eyes. “You think I don’t know that?” He snapped back. “The marquis gave us a day and a half turnaround, and he’ll want it melted down and remade again in six weeks when the fashion changes again anyway! SOMEONE GET HIM OUT OF HERE.”

Feanor stared, in horror. Shook his head, once. 

“No.” He said, firmly. “No.” 

He dragged the man’s whole chair aside, with the man still in it. Grabbed an empty one, and sat down himself. Looked at the goldwork, shook his head again, and tossed it aside. Fortunately there was gold sheet, scrap gold and wire and all manner of other tools on the work bench, and even a little furnace for melting. The tools were not his own, but. 

“What are you…”

“It wants to be a necklace, not a brooch.” Feanor said, a little impatiently, and selected shears and a hammer. 

Ah, it felt good. He vaguely noticed that the indignant chatter cut off rather abruptly, as he roughed out the first ivy leaf from a plate of gold of the proper thickness and set to refining it and giving the shape a bit of life and naturalism. He didn’t pay it much mind. 

“Master Pierrey, who…” A very large man had appeared. Feanor ignored this. “Who is this? You want him gone?”

“Hold, Guillen.” Said the man Feanor had displaced, his voice considerably changed. “Hold.” 

Feanor hummed to the metal as he worked; it sang back, glad, and almost smoothed itself into the shape he desired. The first leaf link took shape quickly; his new fingers had lost none of their old skill. More followed, and at some point he’d gained a ring of observers. Every other workbench in the workshop had been abandoned. 

“He doesn’t have a pattern?” 

“Maker, those leaves look alive, how…”

Feanor fed a strip of wire through the flattening press, and set about making a proper setting for the emerald. The light had changed, which meant he’d been at it for some time, but that was unimportant. 

“Who are you? It’s almost evening, is he…”

“He’s not going to stop.” That was his son, who came to look over his shoulder. “Oh, that is a nice emerald. What… oh, you were going to set it in that?”

“It’s the style.” Pierrey said, in a resigned sort of tone. “It changes so fast, and it won’t do but to have everything up to date. Nobles come to have their stones reset and the old gold or silverwork melted down every, oh, six weeks on average. What are we to do? Of course we wish to do our best work, but could you bear to see it thrown aside after a month?”

“No.” Curvo agreed, sounding pained. 

“They can go to the Void.” Feanor said, without looking up. “Make your art. They will buy it or not. If they bring you the well made art of another and wish it melted down, refuse them. There is honor amongst artisans.” 

A half-sob bitter laugh. “I’ve children to feed, Grandmaster. I may hate it, but it pays my bills.” 

Feanor huffed. 

“Maker. He’s not even measuring, will the stone even fit…”

The emerald fit into its new setting perfectly. The sun had set at some point, and there was a brief bustle around him to light candles and lamps and angle the light so that he could keep working. 

“You’re his son?” Pierrey said, somewhere to one side. 

“I am.” Curvo confirmed. 

“Maker, you could be his twin. You must let me know what skin cream you two use. Here. Take your wife and your friend and get dinner, on me. There is an excellent little cafe on the corner. Tell them Master Pierrey sent you. There are rooms upstairs above the shop here; you may use them if you wish. Will he stop to rest?”

“No. Not until he’s finished.” 

“Yes, such is often the way of genius. Go.” 

The little ivy leaf links, each the size of his thumbnail, linked together with perfection, and the edges of the links smoothed back into the body of gold, unbroken, with a hum of power under his fingertips. Feanor frowned. 

“I need moonstones.” He said. “Cabochon. Three of them, teardrops, so big.” He held up two fingers a small distance apart. “I can cut them if you don’t have cut ones.” 

“Master…” Someone said, doubtfully. 

“ Get them for him.” 

He had to cut one of the moonstones down and re polish it, but they were all of good quality. He had to draw out finer gold wire too; there was none fine enough for the links of chain to dangle them from the emerald, as if they were drops of dew caught mid-fall. At some point candles burnt down and were replaced. 

The clasp was two twining ends of an ivy vine that curled and locked together. By the time he finished it the sun was well up again. At last, satisfied, he sat back, and lifted the necklace from the bench. 

“There.” He said. “That is beautiful. It will be as beautiful in a thousand years. If someone claims it no longer is and they no longer enjoy looking at it, they are lying.” 

He went to lay the finished necklace in Pierrey’s hands. The man shook his head. There was a ring of silent, wide eyed jewelry smiths surrounding the workbench, all staring at Feanor mutely and with eyes like saucers. 

“Grandmaster.” Pierrey said. “I cannot accept this. I will pay the marquis for the materials, simply for the honor of having seen you work, but that piece is worth more than my entire shop.” 

“I didn’t ask for payment.” Feanor said, mildly annoyed, and despite the man’s protestations laid the necklace in his hands. “It was a joy to work again. It has been too long.” 

The man looked down at the necklace in his hands. Turned it over, and watched the light glimmer on the golden leaves, shine back in blue and silver from the moonstones. The woman’s face smiled from the emerald, a mossy statue twined in ivy, with dew dripping down. Feanor realized the man was crying. 

“Are you well?”

“If I live a century more.” Pierrey whispered. “I will never make the like of this.” he lifted his eyes to stare at Feanor. “Who taught you? Who are you?” 

“I apprenticed to my law-father. It took me many years to learn my art, and I have practiced it for far longer.” Feanor said, pleased. “Put that in your sale case. Someone will buy it.” 

“Maker, they will be fighting each other in my shop for it. Adele, go put this in the case, and send runners to every noble in the city saying I’ve a special piece to show, for only the most elite customers. You. Grandmaster, your name?” 

“Feanaro, son of Finwe.” 

“When it sells, I insist that you accept half the price. No, I insist. Your son wished to sell some of his own work, and I have not the cash reserves in this shop to pay him fairly for such work; you are in need of money, clearly. My workshop is as yours. It is an honor.”  

“Master, he’s an elf…”

“Get out of my shop, Geoff. Don’t return.” 

“Master!” 

“ Now.” 

Feanor stood. His back creaked a little in complaint after so long bent over, and he belatedly realized he had blisters from his work. He scowled at them; new hands with no callus. Irritating. But yes, clearly the first humans had been an aberration. 

“Here.” Pierrey pressed a little leather purse into Feanor’s hands. “Your son said you were in need of better clothes. You are welcome to stay in the rooms upstairs as long as you wish; they go mostly unused anyway.” 

"Well." That was Curvo. "I suppose I can tell Russo that we're sorted for a bit."

Chapter Text

The wine was excellent. Maglor stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles, slouching a little further down in the lounge chair; the sun was setting over the harbor, and the sight was very lovely. The olive and cheese plate was paired perfectly to the dry rich red, and he nibbled a fig absently. 

“Melda.” Naldalime sounded amused. “You may have overdone it in the square.” 

“Maybe.” Maglor agreed, lazily. There were still people in the street below calling up, begging for just one more song. “But it did pay well.” 

“A few are attempting to fling their undergarments up here, darling.” She was laughing quietly in that deep smoky voice of hers that he found so lovely. 

Maglor sat up and leaned forward to look. “Ah. So they are.” He flopped back down, and selected another olive. “Still, I wasn’t sure how the musical tastes here would run, so I decided to err on the side of overdoing it.” 

“Hm. Well, you judged more or less correctly, if the purses they’re still trying to throw up here are any indication.” 

“Considerate of them, to pay an artist well.” Maglor said, happily. “I’ll have the hotel staff go pick up the money and bring it up here in a bit.” He sipped his wine again. “I don’t know what my brothers are complaining about. This place is perfectly delightful. In the morning, my darling, we should try that cafe that the staff here recommended. I’d like to try whatever a cappuccino is, as well as whatever a cornetto is.” 

“Oh, so would I. If it’s as good as that risotto, well worth a trip.” 

Maglor eyed her. The sunset gleamed off her dark skin in a most lovely way, and she, like him, was mostly just wearing a silk bathrobe provided by the hotel. They’d spent quite a long time in the delightfully heated baths. 

Come to think of it, he could undo that loose knot of the belt barely holding her robe on with his teeth, quite easily. She caught the drift of his thoughts over osanwe. Smiled, and raised a fine dark eyebrow at him. 

“Almiel?” He asked. 

“In her own room of the suite.” She plucked the wineglass from his hand and finished it herself. “I’ll be in bed. You ought to follow.” 

He did, with alacrity. The knot DID come undone with his teeth, in a very satisfying manner. 

By the time they were finished, it was full dark. He would have been quite content to drowse off with his wife draped over him, but just as he was sliding down into a doze there was a knock at the door of the suite he’d rented. He ignored it. 

“Sir?” A pause, and then a second more insistent knock. “Sir? Madam?”

Maglor heaved a sigh. Disentangled himself, located pants, and located his sword. He’d spent far too long on a war footing to relax, even in an entirely delightful place such as Antiva City seemed to be. 

“A moment.” He called. Naldalamie had completely undone his hair, and it wasn’t decent. He pulled it back in a fast messy braid, and then made his way from the master bedroom through the sitting room and to the door of the suite. 

“Yes?” He opened the door just a crack, and looked down. There was a man in the smart uniform of the hotel, and behind him…

“A guest to see you, sir.” The man was sweating a little. More than he would be if it were a simple Song-struck fan.

Maglor glanced at the shadows again. The man there was very adept at making himself still and unseen, but Maglor had elven eyes, and the elves had first been the children of starlight. Even now, they saw better in the dark than the other races, including even the dwarves. 

“I can see you there.” He said, sharp, and with one thumb popped his sword an inch from the sheath, ready to draw if he needed it. 

“Ah.” The man emerged from the shadow. “Forgive me. I mean you no harm. But we do rather like our theatrical entrances.” 

He was an elf. Short, in the way the strange elves of this place seemed to be; he was at least six inches shorter than Maglor. Blonde, with tanned skin and a tattoo on his face, curling around one temple and down his jaw. 

“I say.” The elf said. “You have very good eyes.” 

“You’re elven.” Maglor pointed out, dry. “Can you not see in starlight?”

“Hm. No, I cannot say I can. Our eyes are better than those of humans, but not so good as yours, it seems.” The elf looked up at him, keen. “May I come in?”

“Why?”

“To speak. Of matters of business.”

Maglor stepped back, and opened the door more widely. “If you draw those knives.” He said, pleasantly. “I’ll kill you where you stand.” 

“Naturally. But really. If a Crow wanted you dead, my friend, I would not have knocked on your door. I would come in that balcony, while you slept.”

“Would you.” 

“You are a suspicious sort. Wise. Do bring us up some espresso, Enzo.” 

“Of course, Master Arainai.” The nervous human inclined his head and left at some speed. 

The blond elf made himself at home, spinning a chair out from the little table to sit on it backwards, his arms folded on the back. He looked Maglor over again with keen interest. “I say. They did not lie. You are a sight. I take it I interrupted you and your lovely wife at some amorous pursuits? My apologies.” 

“Maglor?” Naldalaime. “Who…”

“I don’t know yet.” Maglor told her, not taking his eyes off of the other elf. “Who…”

“Ah, you aren’t from around here. Zevran Arainai, at your service.”

He waited a moment. Maglor didn’t react. 

“I say. You are very not from around here.” 

“No.” Maglor sat down across the table from him. “I take it between your name and ‘Crow’ that should mean something.”

“Oh, yes. The Crows are of course the guild of assassins who run this city.” Zevran said it easily. “They call me the Black Shadow, for the number of them I’ve killed. You know, it’s very funny. If you kill a few, they begin hunting you, but if you kill enough, you get to be in charge of them. Put that sword away. I’m not here to harm you. Quite the opposite. I think we could be quite useful to each other.” 

“Could we.” 

“Quite. Your, ah, performance in the market square has the city in quite an uproar.” Keen dark eyes gleamed. “For all you did not in any obvious way use magic, I am no fool. You’ve power, and for being more subtle with it than most you are likely the more dangerous. That could be quite useful.” 

“I’m no assassin.” Maglor said, shortly. 

“Oh, I don’t wish you to be. Indeed, all I wish of you is the talents you have already demonstrated. Namely, to enchant people with song. I wish to hire you to perform at a banquet. A banquet of Crows, to be specific. I would quite like the night to go off without any of them attempting to poison me. I suspect that you could slip a bit of soothing into minds without your listeners even noticing.” 

Maglor tilted his head. “Easily enough. Why should I?”

“In exchange, the Crows under my command…which is most of them, and if I’ve my way the rest soon will be…will look after you, my friend. You’re new to the city. It is a lovely city, but it can be a dangerous one. And, of course, I will pay you. Extravagantly well.” 

Maglor considered it. “We could use information.”

“Ah, and no one better to ask! Delighted.” 

“Some of it up front.” 

“Of course. One must make informed decisions in business.” 

“Some of the things I ask will sound very strange.” 

“I have lived a strange life.” 

“First of all, what is this world called?”

Zevran paused for a moment. “Ah. Well, you did say strange. Thedas.” He raised an eyebrow. “I think I may have questions for you in turn.” 

“Mine first. Where, from here, is Val Royeux?” 

Zevran’s eyebrows climbed higher. “Some ways distant. A week by ship.” 

“Is there a library in this city, where I could learn more of the lands and customs?”

“Several.” 

“Can you get me into it?”

“Easily. A word, and any friend of mine will be welcomed. You are very not from here, I take it.” 

A rap on the door. “Your coffee, Master Crow.” 

Maglor went to retrieve it, not taking his eyes off Zevran. 

“Enzo.” Zevran called, cheerfully. “Do find and bring up a map of the world for Master… I am sorry, I don’t know your name.” 

“Maglor.” Said Maglor. 

“Do find and bring up a map of the world for Master Maglor. If you must go buy one, here.” The elf drew a gold coin from his purse, and flipped it to the young human, who caught it. 

“Of course, Master Crow.” Enzo took off at a jog. 

The bedroom door opened. Naldalaime was dressed a little more decently than Maglor was, which was not difficult. “Makalaure, who…”

“An assassin, apparently.” Maglor told her. “Who wants to hire me for a performance.” 

“Do you trust him?”

“No. But I’m considering it.” 

She moved over and took a seat next to him. Zevran looked from Maglor, to Naldalaime, back to Maglor, back to Naldalaime. Sighed. 

“Oh.” He said, sounding a little strained. “ Oh.” A little hopefully. “I don’t suppose you ever take a third into your bed?”

“No.” Maglor told him, as Naldalaime shook her head. 

Zevran sighed. “Ah, well. If you don’t ask, the answer is no every time. Very well, I will not ask again. So. Have we a deal?”

Maglor opened his mind to his wife, so that she could peruse any of the strange conversation she’d not heard. She considered for a moment, and then sent silent approval. 

“You do.” He said. “But if I decide I dislike anything, I will leave.” 

“Fair enough. But really. We are excellent hosts; we would never be able to run a city if we went about slaughtering the catering staff and musicians. Indeed, those who take issue with those in the employ of the Crows take issue with the Crows themselves, and few will dare do so.” 

Well. That could be very useful indeed. “I’ll need details of the event, of course.” 

“Naturally. You’ll have them by tomorrow.”  

Chapter Text

Weisshaupt was the opposite of anything that most people would call homey. It was a severe and bleak place, built on a cliff above rocky grassland that rolled away in all directions, broken only by the rocky hills. 

It reminded Maedhros more than a little of Himring, though. Himring was not what most people would call welcoming or homey either, but it was…comfortable. At least to him. He’d built it, and he’d held it against everything the Enemy could throw against its walls, and he liked it. He liked the fortress of Weisshaupt almost at once, simply because it did remind him of his own keep. 

The people inside the keep were very different from his own, but also not. There was a sort of familiarity there too; a certain sort of grim practicality that he recognized. 

They were hospitable enough, if a bit baffled. They’d let him stay the night, and agreed to set up a meeting for him with their leader. 

The beds were too short, but they were clean. Maedhros had slept on far worse. More importantly, his brothers and their spouses and children were all apparently safe for the moment, as was his mother. Their cousins seemed to be well enough, though Moryo was complaining intermittently about the unbearable heat and humidity of wherever ‘Par Vollen’ was. 

And. 

His father. 

He reached out along the kin-bond, a little cautiously. It was strange that it was so easy here, but that was a worry and question for later. The space in the world that was Atar had so long been blank and empty, but now there was that achingly familiar and furiously bright energy that was Feanor. 

He wanted to think it felt like the father he remembered from his youth, rather than the brittle-bright and furious beyond reason Feanor at the end. He wanted to, but couldn’t quite bring himself to. 

There was a ferociously focused edge to the sense of his father that he knew well; it was Father At Work. Even so, Feanor stirred at the attention. 

Mai… a pause and then, deliberate and careful, Maedhros?

Maedhros drew back, and walled himself off. His father sent a questioning sort of prod, but when Maedhros ignored it withdrew after a moment. 

Maedhros sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, heavily, and pressed his hand over his eyes. It was trembling slightly, and it took him a long moment to compose himself. 

The memory of his father’s body burning away from the inside as his blood was still wet on Maedhros’ hands was something that was still as vivid in his memory as anything he’d ever suffered. He’d longed a thousand times since to hear his father’s voice again, but actually hearing it was…complicated. 

He shook himself. Purposefully walled up the complicated mess of dread and longing and hurt and set it aside to be dealt with later. It was late, and it had been a very long day before being dumped outside a strange fortress miles from any of his family. He needed rest; he knew he did. 

Still. He’d spent too long at war to trust easily in a strange fortress, and the small room he’d been given did not have a latch on the door. He remained sitting on the bed, still clothed, with his sword across his knees, and only allowed himself to drift into the shifting vagueness of first sleep. 

This very much startled the Gray Warden who came to rouse him the next morning. The woman rapped perfunctionally on the door and then shoved it open. 

“The First Warden has a few moments over breakfast, and will see… MAKER.” 

Maedhros blinked and rose, and the poor woman jumped nearly out of her boots. “ Fuck my arse sideways, were you just…did you sleep, or…” 

“As I needed to.” 

“Andraste’s ass. What is up with you?”

Maedhros looked down at her blankly. She was an elf herself. “Can you not first sleep?”

“....the fuck is that?”

Ah. Maedhros chalked up another difference between elves such as himself and the elves of Thedas. “It doesn’t matter. After you.” 

“...sure. Right. This way.” 

He followed her through the fortress. He’d been eavesdropping shamelessly since the gate guards had let him in, and continued doing so now. Some conversations were in a language he didn't understand. Many were in English, though, strangely enough. Of those, most were of little importance; people wondering what there would be for lunch, flirting with each other, or going about the regular every day motions of life. A few, though, were more interest. 

Blight. Darkspawn. He knew what neither were, but they mattered a great deal to the Gray Wardens. And, interestingly, a fair few complaints about the food. 

The Anderfels. That was the name of the country they were in, and for reasons he did not yet fully understand most of the supplies the fortress relied upon needed to be imported from the south. 

He reached out over osanwe to get the attention of one of his youngest brothers. 

Russo? Amras. 

What have you found?

Our children, for one. A flash of a red haired toddler, wrapped in Amras’ cloak and asleep on his lap. They’re well. That was tinged with relief. As is Naridh. We found some shepherds; we’re not far from wherever the fortress you mentioned is. They said they can show us the way. 

Maedhros felt a knot of worry ease a bit. Good. See what you and Telvo can find out about this place, and come here as fast as you can. Where is…

A mental image of Amrod, sitting near a fire, eyes blank and vague in first-sleep, with his sword at hand. Naridh was leaning against his side, also drowsing, with little Narerde curled up in her lap. Sleeping yet. 

Ah. 

“The First Warden.” Maedhros’ guide told him, as she showed him into an office. “Sir, the stranger we found outside the gates yesterday, as you wished.” 

The man who stood up from behind a half-eaten breakfast on his desk was bald, mustachioed, and broad shouldered. He was tall for one of the Secondborn, and Maedhros got the impression that he would have liked to loom. He was still more than a foot shorter than Maedhros, though, and didn’t manage it. The fact obviously annoyed him; he scowled up. 

“I didn’t know elves could grow this tall.” The man said, irritably. Maedhros said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. “Jowin Glastrum, First Warden and Supreme Commander of Weisshaupt. Who are you?”

“Maedhros.” Said Maedhros. “There’s titles that people use, but I doubt you’d know or care about any of them.” 

“I’ll be the judge of that.” 

“Lord of Himring.” Maedhros said, while reading the paperwork spread all over  the desk upside down and backwards with great interest. “Lord of the March, Overlord of East Beleriand.” 

“Where the blazes is Beleriand?” Jowin demanded. 

“I did say they’d mean little to you.” 

“What are you doing at my fortress?”

“Magical accident.” Maedhros said, which was not even a lie. The letters on the First Warden’s desk were fascinating, and a plan was clicking together. “Suffice to say I am a very, very long way from home, far enough that any titles I hold there matter little here. I am grateful for the hospitality, First Warden.” 

“Ah.” The man’s mustache twitched, and a little of the prickly annoyance faded. “Well, yes, there’s been a great deal of magical upset these last years. Are all elves so tall where you come from?”

Maedhros smiled. Two thousand and more years ago, he had grown up as Feanor’s heir in Valinor. It had been generally assumed by all that when Finwe eventually got bored of being king and handed the crown to his eldest son, Feanor would tire of the job in a fortnight and almost immediately abdicate in favor of Maedhros. Finwe himself had been chief among those who assumed this, and Maedhros had grown from toddlerhood learning the finer points of politics at Finwe’s knee. 

By the time he was four hundred if reckoned in years of the sun, Maedhros had been running half of the bureaucracy of Valinor. Long before he’d been feared as a warlord, he’d been feared as a viciously skilled politician. 

No one here, of course, knew any of that. Jowin didn’t see anything more than a pleasant smile. The scars made such smiles rather more forbidding now than they’d once been, but many of the Gray Wardens were scarred as well and the First Warden didn’t seem put off by them. 

“Much taller than the elves here.” Maedhros said, pleasantly. “But I’m reckoned tall even among my own kin.”

“Hm. Well, we can put you up for a time, but I don’t keep people about my fortress who don’t earn their keep. You’ll have to be on your wa…”

“Have grain merchants been price gouging you long?”

“... what?” 

Maedhros, without asking permission, spun an open ledger around and tsked down at it. “One would think.” He said, without entirely understanding what the Blight even was. “That merchants would charge those who fight the Blight rather less. If one tried to charge me half this, I’d throw them out of my fortress.” 

Jowin puffed up, but Maedhros had struck gold. “Yes! Yes I have been saying! At last, an outsider appreciates…but of course so little of the land here is good, and we must ship in supplies from Orlais and Nevarra.” 

“Doesn’t excuse them charging this.” Maedhros said, delighted at the mention of Orlais. Curufin had once ratfucked Finrod out of a kingdom. If his brother and his law-sister and Finrod together were put to it, he was certain they could be ruling half a kingdom within two weeks. The devastating charisma that was present in all of Finwe’s descendants was as sharp a weapon as any sword. 

Curvo. He prodded. When he didn’t get a response at once, he did it harder. 

Nelyo? Curufin sounded distracted. Wha..

Get yourselves influence down there. I’m going to need deals on grain, and soon. 

How…

You talked Nargothrond right out from under Finrod, Curvo. Don’t tell me you can’t. Particularly since I’m about to ask him to help you. 

A pause, rather tinged in guilt. Well. Curufin said after a moment. There are nobles already fistfighting each other in the street over Father’s works. I can work with that. 

That surprised Maedhros not at all, save for the fact that it had been astonishingly little time. Literally?

Literally. He finished a necklace an hour ago, and there’s three of them brawling over it in the street. One more slipped off and is at a bank mortgaging his estate to afford it. 

He wanted to ask how their father was. What he really wanted to know was if it was their father as they all remembered and loved him, or the father who’d grown paranoid and suspicious and angrier after he’d made the Silmarils. But it wasn’t the time. 

Good. Do what you can, Curvo.

That got him a mental grumble, but also a fine, Nelyo. 

Out loud he said, mildly, “those receipts don’t add up.” A nod to a stack of treasury withdrawal receipts the man had clearly been balancing against the ledger. “There’s two hundred gold missing.” 

The First Warden’s eyes widened. He glanced down, then up, then down, then back up, his eyebrows climbing. “You figured that upside down and backwards?”

“Am I wrong?”

“No, blast it! Someone’s skimming, and I’ll skin them once I figure out who! I’ve better things to do than to have to double check the damned receipts myself and shake down my own people until I figure out who’s developed light fingers.” The man looked him over, eyes shrewd, and Maedhros could have laughed to himself. “You’re angling for a job.” 

“I’ve nowhere else to go until I figure out a way back to my own lands.” Maedhros said, entirely truthfully. “And as you said, you don’t keep people around who don’t earn their keep.” 

“No, I don’t.” The First Warden eyed him thoughtfully. “Well. You can do sums; I don’t suppose you know how to keep a fortress running as well.”

“I’ve run my own for probably longer than you’ve been alive.” 

“I’m forty three, boy.” 

“ Much longer than you’ve been alive.” 

“Wh…never mind it. I’ll give you a try. If you do well, you can stay. You’ll hardly be the only non-Warden we employ here.” 

Maedhros smiled. Any Noldor who knew better would have compared the expression to a shark. “Entirely fair.” 

Chapter Text

“You’ve been very kind.” Nerdanel said this over the rim of a teacup. “But we can’t stay.” 

“Ahh.” Daniela was human, and elderly by the standards of the Secondborn with their mayfly lives. Her skin was very very dark and wrinkled, and her hair a cloud of silver-white. Nerdanel tried not to stare when the old woman smiled, at the way it wrinkled her face still more. She knew it was rude, but she had spent most of her life in Aman, among her own ageless people. It was still so strange, to see such things. “It is no trouble. It does an old woman good to have some excitement in life, and you’ve been very polite.” 

Nerdanel thought that Daniela probably had plenty of excitement without strange guests; the old woman had a constant stream of grown children coming to ask advice and grandchildren and great grandchildren tumbling into and out of her house. The former were listened to solemnly and sent off with advice and kisses on the cheek; the latter were exclaimed over and given sweets. Even now, the old woman was holding a bright eyed fat cheeked infant on one knee with the expertise of long experience, as the relieved parents of the baby went about some errand. 

The infant babbled something incomprehensible, keenly. Daniela glanced down fondly as the baby began squirming, and set him down to crawl about on the burnished plank floor. The baby crawled over to Nerdanel, and pulled himself up to stand with her robe. Nerdanel hefted him into her own lap without a thought. Daniela beamed. 

“Rafel.” She said. “My youngest daughter’s first. I know this one here is your grandson; have you many children?”

“Seven.” Nerdanel smiled. “All boys.” 

“Ahhh! Spirits, and if they’re all big strong boys like this one you must have had a time feeding them!”

Tyelpe went a little pink. He was probably older than Daniela by several centuries, but didn’t say anything. 

“Oh, they could pick the pantry bare in an afternoon.” Nerdanel sighed, but fondly, and she was smiling as she said it. “Three of them are taller than Tyelpe here.”

“Ah! Such elves, your world raises!” Daniela sounded fascinated. 

“You’ve been…very accepting.” Tyelpe said at last. “Of…everything.” 

Daniela gripped her walking stick and heaved herself to her feet. Tyelpe started up to help her, but was shooed back into his chair. “I have been studying magic since I was a child.” The old woman said, sounding amused. “I am a Seer, and have been communing with spirits and seeking their wisdom since I was young. People come to me for advice and claim it is because I am wise. I say this; I know just enough to know that I do not know nearly all there is to know, and never will. Who am I to say such things are impossible?” She vanished into another room of the big timber house for a few minutes, and returned with a basket of sweets and a great granddaughter tagging along at her heels. Daniela indulgently examined the agate the girl had found, gave her a lemon cookie, and sent her on her way. 

The rest of the lemon cookies were set on the sitting room table and pushed towards her guests. Daniela took out some sewing from a basket next to her chair. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to. You’ve been pleasant company, and a good story.”

“Thank you.” Nerdanel said. “But I can’t.” She hesitated. “I have…I have things I need to see to.” She paused again, and then scowled a bit. “I have someone I need to see. And maybe strangle.” 

Tyelpe’s ears lowered a bit, and flicked anxiously. 

“Your husband?” Daniela asked this with a knowing sort of tone in her voice, as she began mending a shirt. 

“How did you…”

“I’ve buried two husbands myself. One lost to pirates and the other to illness. I didn’t mourn the first. I know a bit about husbands.” Bright dark brown eyes glinted over the top of the mending. “I don’t know a thing about what’s passed between you two, but I will say you’re right in that if there are things to be said, they’re better said than to leave to fester.” 

Nerdanel sighed, heavily. She could remember the last fight, centuries past. Even then, Feanor had been magnificent, even when furious, even when she’d been just as furious in return. By then, it had been many years since he’d let her into his mind, and she’d been hurt by that long before he’d tilted further in paranoia and fury. 

“Yes.” She agreed, heavily. Said, thoughtfully. “I might brain him with a rock yet.” 

“ Haruni!” Tyelpe winced. 

“He’d well deserve it.”

“Ah.” Daniela said, easily. “Dear, if you want him dead, there are ways to have it done much more easily.” 

Tyelpe gaped. “I…”

“I don’t. Not forever.” What she did want from her husband was an excellent question; Nerdanel wasn’t entirely certain. 

No. She knew. She did know, in her heart of hearts. She wanted him back, the Feanor she’d first loved. If that were possible, she did not know, but…

Feanor’s death had rendered their marriage bond an inert thing. Now that he was alive again, it still slept. She knew, instinctively, that it would do so until they actively reached out for each other.  

She hadn’t done it. Not yet. Feanor had not yet reached out to her; she didn’t know why. She hoped it was shame. She would not do so until she could look him in the eyes and see the answer for herself.  

“Death tends to be rather final, child.” Daniela was saying. 

Nerdanel laughed softly. “Not for us.” She said, softly. “By the way you reckon years, I am thirty six hundred years old. My husband has died once already, and Namo returned him. Even if I send him back to the Halls of Mandos, he’ll return again in time.” 

Daniela’s eyebrows climbed, and she stopped mid-stitch for a moment. On Nerdanel’s lap Rafel was falling asleep in the crook of her arm. It reminded her so much of how her own sons had used to sleep in her arms when they were small, and it made her ache with a strange sort of longing. 

“Well.” The old woman said after a time, quietly. “ Well. That must be a thing.” She looked Nerdanel over, as if searching for signs of age, but of course there were none. No white hairs, no wrinkles, no physical sign of age at all. “What must we seem to you?” She said this mostly to herself. 

“Brief.” Celebrimbor said, softly. “But no less valued, and sorely missed.” 

“Well.” Daniela started sewing again. “You said he is in Val Royeaux?” 

“My father is there too.” Tyelpe confirmed. “And my mother. And…Finrod.” 

He sounded a bit dubious about the last. Nerdanel did not know exactly what was going on between Curufin and her law-daughter and Finrod, but it was enough to make Tyelpe wrinkle his nose whenever he thought of it. 

“Well, that’s good. It’s a port city, and Rivain has the finest ships and sailors in the world.” Daniela beamed. “Three of my children sail. My third son, my Lalun, he…” She considered. “He is a sailor of fortune, and sometimes a merchant. He is in port in Llomerryn, just to the south. Half a day’s ride, no more. If his old mother asks, he’ll take you where you need to go.” 

Nerdanel leaned forward to take the fine-boned old hand and squeeze it gratefully. “Thank you, Matriarch.” She used the term that seemed to be an address of respect and affection from the woman’s many descendants, and hoped it wouldn’t be overly familiar. She’d guessed right, by the smile. “But I can compensate your son.” 

“Mmm. Yes, and sensible of you.” Darniela herself was wearing earrings and necklace and bangles of heavy gold, and she’d not turned an eyelash at both Nerdanel and Celebrimbor wearing many and varied jewelry. “Orlesians like to hide behind their masks and call us Rivani garish for wearing our gold, but how do they store their wealth, I ask? It would be smiled on, but not necessary.” 

“I insist.” Nerdanel said, firmly. 

“Very well, very well.” The old woman put her sewing aside and stood with the aid of her cane, again refusing any help. “I will see to it about having a carriage prepared, and then tomorrow I will take you to the port and we will see about getting you passage to Orlais.” She examined both Nerdanel and Tyelpe critically. “And we will stop somewhere and see about getting you more clothes. Besides. It will give an old woman a chance to stop at the shops and see what new fabrics are in.”

“Thank you.” Nerdanel said again, and meant it. “I will not forget your kindness.” 

“Ah!” Daniela shook her cane at Nerdanel, but she was smiling. “You will not catch me lacking in manners! I know another matriarch when I see one. You might not have my wrinkles, but if you’ve seven boys and grandchildren besides you have earned the title as much as I have. Never let it be said my house turned aside a matriarch in need!”

“Still. You have been a friend in a time of need, and I shall not forget it.” 

Tyelpe suddenly rose, and drew a ring off his pinky. It was his own work, of delicate gold filigree and enamel in the likeness of a dragonfly, and nearly as fine as anything Feanor himself could have made. “Here, Matriarch.” He said. “For your kindness.” 

She accepted it solemnly. When she really looked, however, wonder kindled in her eyes. “Child.” She said, though Tyelpe was six and more centuries her senior. “I cannot accept…”

“I made it.” Celebrimbor said, as stubborn as his grandfather had ever been, and not for the first time Nerdanel reflected how very much he looked like Feanor. “I’ll give it to whoever I choose.” 

The old human woman looked at him, and then nodded. 

Chapter Text

His father’s necklace sold in less than an hour. True to his word, Master Pierrey insisted on shoving half the staggering price at them. Feanor, however, had grown up the crown prince of the Noldor in Valinor, and had never had much if any real interest in money. 

Curufin, however, had lived five centuries in Beleriand, where such things as money and where your next meal would come from were rather more pressing. 

“Curufinwe can look after it, then.” His father said, seeming to consider the matter settled satisfactorily. Master Pierrey was nearly tearing out his own hair in consternation; Curufin suspected the human had never before in his life seen someone seemingly not care about such a sum of money. “He and my law-daughter.” He wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation; he was eyeing the workshop with a glint in his eye. 

“Of course, Feanaro.” Helca said. 

“It was good to have a warm up.” Feanor narrowed his eyes at one wall, thoughtfully. “But it would be nice to do some proper work…”

“That wasn’t proper…” Master Pierrey’s voice pitched up sharply. 

“...pity this place doesn’t have a proper forge. I could make myself a halfway decent sword.” 

“ SWORD?” Master Pierrey wheezed. 

“And some armor that isn’t trash fit only for the scrap bin. One would fit along that wall…”

“Father.” Curufin said, patiently. “This isn’t your workshop.” 

“The Grandmaster.” Pierrey said hurriedly. “May outfit a workspace as he likes. Shall I contact some masons?” 

“Yes, you should.” Feanor did not so much as blink. “I’ll need some decent blacksmith’s tools as well.” He glanced sidelong at one of the work tables, and shook his head slightly. “I can make some better tools, to start, once I get that.” 

“....these are the best…”

Curufin lifted a small embossing hammer, regarded it for about a quarter of a second, and set it down. “They’re dead.” He said, dismissively. “No Song in them at all.” 

“Yes, precisely.” Feanor agreed. 

“... what…”

“They’ll do until we’ve something better.” 

Master Pierrey rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I. Certainly. Of course.” He sighed. “Come. I must go to the bank and deposit this; I will take you with me. You’ll likely want to open an account of your own. I don’t like keeping this sum of gold under my roof. 

Without a good strong vault, among unknown people, Curufin understood the caution. “Wise.” 

“Come then. You’ll need me to vouch for you to open an account, seeing as you’re elves.” 

Curufin blinked. Feanor’s ears flicked backwards slightly and he spun on his heel. Helca drew herself up. Finrod looked baffled. 

“Why.” Feanor asked, and Pierrey wilted slightly. It was an overwhelming thing, to have the full strength of Feanor’s attention boring into you. “Would that make a difference?”

“Ah.” Pierrey said, a little weakly. “Well. I mean. Elves?”

“Eldar.” Feanor said. “The Firstborn.”

“It’s the proper translation into their common trade language, father.” Curufin said, heading off an argument about linguistics before it started. 

“Ah. Why would it matter?” 

“Maker, what…”

“We are from.” Finrod said. “Very far away. We arrived here via a…magical accident, and are unfamiliar with your customs. Please excuse any ignorance. We would appreciate an explanation, however.” 

“I…oh. Well, that would explain a few things. I suppose. Sit.” Pierrey scratched his head, as if wondering where to start. “Well. I suppose you all know about Arlathan and all that.” 

He received four blank stares. 

“Maker. All right. So…”

The explanation took some time, and did in fact explain rather a lot about their bloody encounter on the road. Curufin could feel his own ears laying further and further back as Pierrey went on. Finrod’s were laying back almost as furiously, but Feanor was practically vibrating. 

Atar. Curufin said, silently. ATAR. 

How DARE…yes, Curvo?

PLEASE do not start a fight. There are four of us, and this city has thousands in it. He paused only a moment before he added. Russo has already asked me to see about gaining political influence here, and I’ve…done similar before. Let me think, please. 

There was a furious cold silver fire burning in his father’s gray eyes that Curufin had seen before. But unlike when he’d challenged the Valar themselves, Feanor hissed angrily through his teeth and said back very well, but think fast and hard. 

It was unexpected; the father he’d known at the end had listened to the council of no one. The relief was immense. 

Darling? Helca was eyeing Feanor warily. 

He’s being…reasonable. Curufin told her, and watched her eyebrows shoot up in shock. 

Out loud she said “Yes, you coming along would likely be best then, Master Pierrey.” 

When they returned, Feanor had angrily graded all the stones…cut or not…in the workshop, selected a particularly fine ruby, and had commandeered a gem cutting wheel. Curufin knew perfectly well his father was taking his frustration out on work, because Curufin shared the exact same habit. Indeed, while Helca went to see if she couldn’t find a halfway decent loom to purchase, with Finrod along to keep an eye on things, he helped himself to tools and supplies and channeled his own frustration and anger into something productive. 

He became vaguely aware after some time that he had several journeymen…and Pierrey…hanging over his shoulder and watching. 

“Andraste.” Pierrey sounded pained as he stared down at the silver water lily taking shape under Curufin’s hands. It would be a brooch; he’d spotted a very nice citrine for the center. “You’re grinding the enamel powder more ?”

“Yours wasn’t fine enough.” Curufin said, absently. “And I wanted it more purple.” 

“That’s the finest we can get!”

“Which is why you should grind your own.”

Helca turned back up around dusk, with a loom in tow. She had it hauled up to the rooms they’d taken over, along with a seemingly enormous quantity of various threads. She came down some time later…he wasn’t sure how long…to drag him away from his work. 

“It is time for a bath, and dinner.” She told him, severely. “Put it down, arimelda.” 

Curufin did, reluctantly; it was best not to argue with her when she got bossy. He had most of the petals shaped, and was starting on the enamel; he was getting used to the enameling furnace here and seconding his father’s wish that they had a better one available, wound with Song to keep the temperature at a perfectly consistent level. 

After, she insisted he go to bed as well, rather than going back down to his project. Finrod watched, amused. 

“Bossy really is your type, isn’t it?” Finrod laughed quietly from the bed as Curufin gave him a dirty look. “Oh, stop it. Lie down and go to sleep.” 

“ Curufinwe.” 

His father. There was a brief lurch of terror…how to explain that Curufin and Helca were sharing a bed with Finrod… but Feanor appeared not to notice. He seized Curufin by the arm and dragged him from the little bedroom to the sitting room of the apartment. 

It was a well appointed place, for all Helca had pronounced all of the textiles barely fit for rags. The loom was set up, and she had a project well underway already. A glance told Curufin that the thread count was at least quadruple that of the current bedsheets. 

“Atar?” Curufin asked, worried. 

“Your brother.” Feanor said, quietly. Before Curufin could prompt him which one, “Nelyafinwe. I…” He trailed off. “How…bad? You said…” He appeared to steel himself. “In the Halls, there are tapestries. Some show the deeds of our family. There is one of Maitimo, hung from a cliff…”

…ah. 

“...I begged Namo to let me switch places.” Feanor’s voice was very quiet. “Screamed it at him, before that tapestry. He would not listen. And you tell me that monster who slew my father had Maitimo for thirty years. Your wife says that he does not like his mother name any longer. How bad is it, really?”

Curufin stared at his father for a long moment. 

“Helca is right.” He said, a little thickly. “Nelyo won’t thank you for calling him Maitimo any longer.” 

“There is nothing anyone could have done.” Feanor said, fierce. “To make that name untrue. What happened? How bad is it? Curvo, please.” 

Don’t come after me. Maedhros had said. If I don’t return. But I have to try, if there is a chance…

“Morgoth offered to parlay.” Curufin said, slowly, through a lump in his throat. “Just…just after you died. Nelyo went, and of course they betrayed him. It was an ambush, and he was taken captive and taken back to Angband.” 

“ Why? Why would he…”

“Morgoth offered the Silmarils. And the Oath…” 

Curufin watched his father wilt. There was no other way to put it. Very slowly, Feanor collapsed onto the chair Helca had set up at her loom. “And you didn’t retrieve him?” His voice was accusing, and it hurt. For all Maedhros himself had long forgiven Curufin along with their other brothers, it still hurt.

“We thought him dead.” Curufin said, quietly. “It was Fingon who knew otherwise; Fingolfin and his people crossed the Ice. Fingon knew Russo wasn’t dead, and he went after him and brought him back alone.” 

Feanor was silent for a long moment. “How bad?” He asked again, quietly. 

So Curufin drew up a mental image of his oldest brother as Maedhros was now…with the ragged missing ear tip, with the many scars, with that fire in his eyes honed to a bright furious cutting edge, and with the missing hand…and offered it over to his father via osanwe. 

And then, a little spitefully and very guiltily all at once, he remembered Maedhros as he had been in the sickroom by Lake Mithrim, just after Fingon had brought him back. Bone thin, bruised, bloody, delirious and raving, fearful of even the kindest touch, when they had honestly thought he might die at any point yet. 

Feanor’s shoulders bowed, and very slowly he buried his face in his hands. Curufin realized after a moment that his father was weeping like a broken man. 

“My boy.” Feanor said, into his own hand. “My poor boy.” He raised his head and gave Curufin a stricken look. “Morgoth wanted me. It should have been me, not him. Maybe if I had let them take me, they wouldn’t…”

“We’d have come after you.” Unsaid was and then it would have been all of us. 

Feanor caught the unsaid. It didn’t seem to help. He got to his feet, heavily. There were a number of wine bottles sitting on a side table; a bottle of wine seemed to be the gift of choice in Orlais for someone you wished to impress, and they had received twenty at least from Pierrey’s various journeymen and apprentices. He found a bottle opener set nearby, dug the cork from the first bottle, viciously, and drained half the bottle in twelve seconds. 

It was…it was almost gratifying, to see his father’s clear distress. But…

“You had us swear the Oath.” Curufin said, and he heard the challenge in his voice. “Did you not think that we might risk our lives or die for it?”

“I thought.” His father’s voice was very quiet. “That I would be there, and that I would bear the worst risks, not you boys.”

Curufin turned away. “We all thought foolish things.” He said, bitter. 

He left his father slumped in a chair and halfway through a second wine bottle. He did not go to bed; he went back down to the workshop instead. 

Chapter Text

Dinner the first night was frog legs. It started drizzling miserably three hours before sunset, which meant that getting a fire started was a nightmare. It took him an hour of frustration to manage it, tucked into the meager shelter of a half-rotted old fishing cabin at the edge of a lake. 

He yanked his boots off and morosely wrung his socks out as the frog cooked. His cloak had held up heroically for as long as it could, but the heavy wool was sodden as well. He swore in four languages as he squeezed as much muddy water out of it as he could, and spread it near the fire next to his boots and socks. The fireplace at least was still in decent shape. 

He curled himself up next to the fire, damp and generally feeling sorry for himself, and glumly picked duckweed out of one of his braids as the frogs cooked. 

He didn’t really sleep. He slid into first sleep, fitfully, but kept jerking awake with a hand on the hilt of his sword when he heard the rustle of an animal nosing through the marsh. He set out the next morning very early, hungry and irritable. His socks were still damp, to boot.

The next day was no better and was in fact even worse; it rained the whole cursed miserable fucking day. Near midafternoon, when he stopped to eye a catfish just visible in the shallow water of the fens consideringly, a beast with leathery hide the same grayish brown as the mud lunged up and snapped the fish down before Finno could string his bow. He cursed it for a lunch-stealing villain as it retreated back into deeper water and submerged entirely again. 

He saw two more of the leathery, lumpy creatures with the jagged teeth. They eyed him warily and retreated into deeper water when he passed.   

He spent THAT night in a sleepless miserable huddle under the dubious shelter of some tangled brambles in a pathetic little copse of stunted half drowned trees. 

The third day, around noon, he finally squelched his way out of the worst of the marshes and up onto firmer ground that was beginning to rise in slow rolling hills towards the mountains in the distance. 

He was, almost at once, attacked by a bear. 

This was not actually a problem, per se. It was, indeed, not the first time in Fingon’s life that a very large bear had decided that he looked delicious. The ice bears of the Helcaraxe had been massive, bad-tempered, and numerous. 

THIS one was brown, barely half the size of an ice bear, and made a perfect target to take out some irritation on if it was going to insist on trying to maul him. Fingon did not have a spear. It was too close, when it erupted from the brush, for him to bring his bow to bear. He could have gone for his sword. 

Instead, he drew his belt knife, grinned in an expression that was purely teeth, and met it halfway. 

The bear was stronger. Fingon was faster. Fingon was also wearing armor forged by the greatest living Noldorian smiths for their High King (somewhat grumpily, but Maedhros could always get Curufin to make anything Maedhros wanted, even when it was a gift for Fingon). Fingon also knew exactly how hard a bear could bite, and was very irritated. 

He shifted aside, avoiding the swipe of the great paw, and jammed his left forearm into the bear’s jaw. The bear bit down, hard, on his vambrace. 

The vambrace won. There was a crack, but it was one of the bear’s teeth shattering against Curufin’s work. Fingon drove ten inches of viciously sharp knife through one of the bear’s eyes. 

He ate rare bear for lunch, which at least fixed the problem of being hungry. The scuffle made him feel marginally better about things, as did the firmer ground. He gave the hide a somewhat regretful look; it was a summer pelt, but it was still a nice sleek glossy one, and would have made a splendid rug. 

Or. Well. If he had to spend another night rough…

When, several hours later, he finally found a path and followed it into a village, it was with the bear pelt rolled, lashed with sinew, and slung over one shoulder. The village was a small place at the edge of a lake, and seemed mostly centered around goats, sheep, and fishing. He got open mouthed stares as he trudged grimly in. 

“Is there anywhere here.” He asked a baffled farmer droving some sheep down the path. “Where I can get some blasted supplies and a damned map?”

“ Maker.” The man said, looking up, eyes very wide. 

“Supplies. Please.” 

The man, wordlessly, pointed in the direction of a small thatched wooden house with a sign hung out front, creaking gently in the breeze. Fingon squelched in that direction; his socks were still damp. 

He’d collected a trail of interested bystanders by the time he made it to the little inn. They were all Secondborn, and seemed baffled by his height. 

“ Andraste’s tits.” Said the man who owned the inn, when he craned his neck back to look up at Fingon. 

“I don’t know her or her tits.” Fingon said, tiredly. “ Where am I.” 

“Miremarch.” The man was short for a Secondborn, which meant he was probably getting a crick in his neck to look up at Fingon. “Maker, you came from the swamps. Brought half of them with you.” 

“Yes.” Fingon said, gloomily. It was going to take hours to get the mud out of his hair. “I want a map, a horse, and some supplies.” 

“None of those are free.” The man said, eyeballing Fingon’s hair. Even under the mud, the gold braided there gleamed. 

Fingon pulled the ring off his right pinky and slapped it down on the plank over two barrels that was serving as a bar. It was not his favorite, and he’d worn it mostly because the emerald in it matched his tunic that day. The innkeep’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. There was a brief mad scramble. 

The map was painted with thickened ink on a clean flour sack torn up for the purpose. The inkeep’s stolid old cart horse was offered over, and Fingon judged it better than going on foot. The supplies were basic, but better than nothing. 

“What’s some rich sort doing in the Wilds?” That was an elderly woman who eyed Fingon in a pinched, disapproving sort of way. “And an elf.” 

“Magical accident.” Fingon said, shortly. This seemed, on their previous misadventure, to have been the best accepted explanation for what was going on. Sure enough, that got a round of ‘ahhhs’ from the small crowd of rubbernecking bystanders. “I’m trying to get anywhere but.”

“Good call. Wilds are full of barbarians and witches.” The innkeep said. 

“Where, from here, is Weisshaupt?” Fingon was looking at the map. 

The innkeep’s eyebrows rose. “You’re here.” He pointed to a place far towards the southern boundary of the map. “Weisshaupt? That’s up here.” 

Fingon watched, with increasing dismay, as the man’s finger tracked over rather a lot of territory…an entire kingdom called Ferelden, a small sea, and then a great deal more land, further and still further north…before stopping. “The Wardens’ fortress is up here in the Anderfels.”

“ Fuck.” Fingon said, with immense feeling. The man gave him an almost sympathetic look. 

“Probably be best to keep going north.” He said. “There's a port up here at Jader. It's not a big one, but you might be able to find a ship there, either to Val Chevin direct or at least to Kirkwall. Ships go from Kirkwall to everywhere, so you’ll for sure be able to find one to Val Chevin there. There’s a road up north from there that’ll take you for a bit at least.” He marked the respective places on the map. 

Fingon cursed under his breath, long and inventively and in no fewer than six languages. To the man, though, he just said “my thanks. I don’t suppose you have a room?”

The man did have a room. Fingon eyed the bed and its rather suspect straw and population of fleas, however, and decided that he’d rather not. He had them add some soap to his supplies, and flea powder, and took his leave. 

Once out of the little village, he stopped by the lake and investigated the blankets he’d bought thoroughly. Washed them just to be on the safe side, and made camp. The horse grazed placidly, and he made a fire, tiredly threw some oats in a pot with water over the coals to cook, and whined over osanwe to his husband as he did his best to sluce the mud out of his hair in the lake. 

It’s in my BRAIDS, Russo! 

The sympathy he got back was gratifying. Are you far? Maedhros asked, rather hopefully. 

Fingon sent him a mental impression of the map, and the relative locations of the mudhole Fingon had found himself in and Weisshaupt. Maedhros’ dismay was even more gratifying. 

Be careful, Finno. Maedhros cautioned. It seems that there are…problems, when it comes to Eldar here. 

Problems? Fingon asked, baffled. The humans he’d met had seemed decent enough. 

They don’t like us. Maedhros said, bluntly. I’ve been called a ‘knife ear’ thrice now. I think Curvo and Finrod killed several men for trying to bully and rob them. Have you seen any of the Firstborn here?

No. Fingon got a mental image almost at once, which left him more baffled. There were pointed ears and fine angular features that were normal enough for one of their kind, but they were tiny. Shorter even than the humans, let alone Noldor who’d seen the Trees. 

Are they not fed as elflings? Fingon demanded. 

I asked the same! The answers were…hm. Concerning. Be careful, Finno. The last was laced with worry and affection. 

I’m always careful. Fingon insisted. What are you doing up there, anyway?

Stealing a fortress. Maedhros seemed almost pleased at the prospect. Though, Eru, I might have to keep going. The Anderfels are a MESS, Finno. That was accompanied by a very rapid series of images summing up what seemed a proper political shitshow indeed. 

Oh, good. Fingon said, pleased. It was nice to see Maedhros getting back to his old hobbies from Tirion, which had largely been composed of ruthlessly efficient political maneuvering that had ended up with him running about two thirds of Finwe’s government. I’ll come as fast as I can, dearest. 

Fingon settled down for the night. Or would have, if two MORE bears, attracted by the smell of food, hadn’t decided to wander in and make themselves his problem. 

Twenty minutes later, eating porridge and rare bear steak, Fingon grumpily hoped that the bear issue was not going to prove a general rule in this country. One was a diversion, but three was getting ridiculous. 

He met, to his dismay, four more over the next two days.  

Chapter Text

Amras almost laughed when he saw the fortress Nelyo had found. 

This is ridiculous. Amrod said, via osanwe, even as Amras shook his head. 

Can he SMELL them? Amras wondered back. 

Maybe? Amrod hitched Narerde higher up in his arms. She was sleeping against his shoulder, with the total lack of care that only a very young child could manage. We should experiment back home. Build a fortress on a cold mountain and just see if Nelyo shows up. 

There’s the Andram. Amras said, considering. We could…

“You’re doing it again.” Naridh sounded more amused than anything. “Share your thoughts, boys.” 

“Shit.” Amras said. 

“Sorry.” Amrod said, at the exact same time. 

She shook her head at them, but fondly. 

“Our brother.” Amrod said dryly. “Seems to be attracted to this sort of location.” He nodded at the fortress built on the jagged stony craigs of a great rocky outcrop looming over the dry plains below. 

Naridh considered. In her arms, Narnona fussed. “It does bear a certain resemblance to Himring.” 

“Himring is better maintained.” Amras said. “And better built. But it’s uncanny, really.” 

Ambarussa? Nelyo, over osanwe. The lookouts are calling out. Is that…

It’s us. Both of the Ambarussa said to that, at the same time, and the flicker of relief from their older brother was instant. 

“Your brother is a Warden?” The shepherd who’d led them here asked, not for the first time. They’d not really answered him.

“No.” Amras finally told him. “But he’s here.” 

That got them a doubtful look. “The Wardens aren’t known for taking in travelers.” 

The Ambarussa laughed at that, in the simultaneous sort of way that often unsettled people. “You’ve not met our brother.” Amras said. “Our thanks for your aid.” He drew off a ring…gold and sapphire…and handed it over. The shepherd stared down at it, eyes wide and mouth falling open. 

“It’s been four days.” Amrod said this thoughtfully. “A case of peach wine from Nargothrond says he’s running it.” 

“Ambarussa.” Amras gave his brother a baleful look. “That’s a sucker’s bet and you know it.”

“Well, come on.” Naridh told them both. “I’m hungry. Some of us are eating for three yet.” 

Maedhros greeted them at the gates, towering a foot and more above the warriors in blue and silver around him. They stared at the little group, seemingly astonished. 

“Bloody fuck.” Said a Secondborn man. “I thought it was just him who was a tall bastard.” 

“My parents were married, Maurice.” Maedhros said, calm. “But you’re not entirely wrong; I am the tallest.” 

There was a middle aged secondborn man, bald and with a bushy mustache, glowering next to Nelyo. “You’re just inviting random family into my fortress?” He snapped up at Maedhros. 

“Oh.” Amras said, in Quenya. “Is this the one you’re stealing this place out from under?”

“Stealing?” Maedhros replied, also in Quenya, sounding insulted. “I’m simply offering a better option. He’s terrible at running this place; his order is falling apart despite the fact that they’ve regularly saved the world. A few years ago, it seems he approved summoning an army of fell and terrible creatures, thinking it would benefit him and his order.” Their older brother’s silver eyes glittered, dangerously. “He’s more interested in seizing the throne of this land than doing his sworn duty.” 

He switched to English. “Temporarily.” He said, to the irritable mustachioed Secondborn. “My youngest brothers, their wife, and their children. Here the same way I am. I’ll see about finding them better arrangements, but they’ve nowhere else to go at the moment, and you yourself said these lands are dangerous. Surely you’d not set a mother and her babies out without shelter?”

He switched to Quenya again, as several of the Wardens made sympathetic sounds and looked from the babies to shoot sidelong looks at the First Warden, to Amras’ amusement. “I know you’re not wed to them, Lady Naridh.” Maedhros said. “But it’s easier to explain this way. Go with it for now, if you don’t mind.” 

“I don’t.” She said, not bothering to hide a smile.

“What are you saying?” 

“Explaining that you’re the First Warden, Ser Glastrum, and that we are here at your kindness.” Maedhros lied without so much as a flicker on his face to betray it, and Amras could have laughed. Amrod was wheezing in hysterical amusement over osanwe, though he was keeping his face blank. “In our own tongue. And telling her that I am glad to see her unharmed.” 

“Ah.” The man glowered at them. Amras got the impression that the fact they all towered over him was annoying the man. “Well. You’ve proved useful. I suppose. If they do as well…”

“I’ll be taking over your stables, of course.” Naridh said, and handed Narnona off to Amras. She folded her arms. “I can hear them complaining from here; have you been skimping on their feed quality?”

The First Warden stared, and sputtered. 

“My law sister.” Maedhros’ face was blank, and his voice even, but Amras knew him well, and he could hear the amusement there. “Breeds some of the finest warhorses I’ve ever known. He has; the grain and hay are expensive, it seems. I’ve made some strides in stopping merchants from price gouging the Wardens and sorting out some better funding, but it’s a work in progress.” 

“It’s been FOUR DAYS.” Said one of the blue and silver clad warriors who must be Wardens, his tone admiring. “The second day, he raked one of the grain merchants over the coals until the bastard dropped the price he demanded by three quarters.” 

“As I said.” Maedhros lifted his good shoulder. “A work in progress. I’ll see what I can do about getting better fodder in.” 

“Good. I’ll need to see what I’m working with.” 

The First Warden huffed again, but stared at them. There was a considering sort of look there. 

The youngest of Feanor’s sons Amras might have been, but he was a prince of the Noldor, and a grandson of Finwe. He’d held his lands in Beleriand with his brother for five centuries, and he’d fought many battles against the most terrible creatures Angband could spit out. He’d won the the loyalty of his people and the Laiquendi, along with Amrod. While none of the sons of Feanor, at Maedhros’ insistence, used the title king, Amras was no fool. He knew what he and Amrod were, to the Noldor and Sindar of Estolad and Ossiriand. 

He knew ambition and petty greed when he saw it in the First Warden’s eyes, and knew on the spot that the man intended to use all of them to further his own ambition, if possible. He and Amrod both glanced at Nelyo, who looked back, face blank. Amras well remembered his oldest brother in Tirion, centuries past; only Finwe had ever been better at court politics. 

Oh. Amrod said in his mind. Nelyo is going to EAT him. 

He agreed silently. Out loud he said, in English, “We’re very grateful, Lord Warden.” Smiled, and inclined his head. 

He was, after all, a grandson of Finwe as well. 

“Jowin.” Said the First Warden, seemingly mollified. “Jowin Glastrum. But First Warden will do” 

“Ambarussa.” Said both of the Ambarussa, at the same time. 

“Naridh.” Said Naridh. “And I would very much like something to eat; I’ve not had much in the last few days, and I’ve children still nursing.” 

Several of the Wardens winced at this. “Come on.” One said. “I’ll show you to the mess hall; Liona can turn you up a room.” Rather belatedly, the man glanced at the First Warden.

“Yes, yes.” Said Jowin. “Get to it. I’ll be in my office.” 

The man who showed them to the mess hall was named Roland. He was human, and glanced up at them sidelong as they walked. 

“Which one of you is Ambarussa?” He asked, curious. 

“Me.” Said both of the Ambarussa. Roland blinked. 

“Amras.” Said Naridh, pointing to Amras. “Amrod.” She pointed to Amrod. “Amrod has darker hair. But you really can just call for Ambarussa; they always know which one you mean. I’ve not quite worked out how.” 

“We’re used to sharing.” Amras shrugged. He couldn’t imagine not sharing everything with his twin, and didn’t want to try. “Toys. Clothes. Food. A name.” 

“Father tried to get us not to use Ambarussa.” Amrod said. “He never really understood, I don’t think.” 

“Well. None of them do.” Amras pointed out. “Not even the other five.” 

“True.” 

Roland glanced at Naridh. Muttered to himself, very quietly, “Even share a wife, I suppose.” 

They all heard him, of course. 

“Having two strong vigorous men in your bed has its advantages.” Naridh said, cheerfully. “I can’t complain.” 

The Warden looked guilty. “Fucking elf ears.” He shook his head. “Sorry. None of my business, I suppose.” 

“No.” Amras informed him. “It isn’t.” 

In the mess hall, Naridh immediately set about demolishing a large portion of stew and bread. Narerde started fussing, shoving hungry indiscriminately at them. Naridh unlaced her tunic, took her daughter, and juggled her into place one-armed; the baby girl latched onto the offered breast at once. Amras took Narnona so that Amrod could eat. 

There were a number of Wardens there. Amras was not entirely sure what a Gray Warden was. Curious, he poked at his elder brother along the kin-bond. 

Nelyo. Nelyo. Nel…

Telvo? Maedhros was well used to his younger brothers prodding for his attention in such a way. 

What ARE these people? What’s up with their order, anyway?

Ah. Still working it out, to tell the truth. Sworn to defend the world against terrible creatures they call Darkspawn, but I’m still learning what a Darkspawn is. I’ll explain what I do know later.

Good enough. Amras looked with immense curiosity at some of the Wardens; there were elves here. Elves that were about a foot and a half shorter than him, were built far more slender and willowy, and who were staring at them with huge astonished eyes. 

He attempted to greet some of them with osanwe; he got nothing. It was like speaking to a human mind to mind. 

Bizarre. He told both his twin and their lover. 

It really is. Amrod seemed fascinated. Why are they so small?

They’re not quite like us. Naridh handed a sated Narerde to Amrod, who settled her on his shoulder and patted her on the back until she burped. Amras waited until Naridh had bared the other breast, and handed over Narnona for feeding. Didn’t your brother say they were mortal? 

Tyelko had said as much, bafflingly. He’d said little the last few days; from what little he had said Amras rather thought that Celegorm and Aredhel were carving a fairly significant swath through a fair number of humans who thought the place of elves was as slaves, wherever Tevinter was. 

Even as Amras ate, a dwarf…a proper dwarf, and it was good to see one of the familiar sturdy folk again…in the Gray Warden armor stumped in, steel-shod boots sparking against the flagstones. He made his way over, and handed a rolled parchment to Amrod, who took it with the hand he wasn’t holding a baby with. 

“Lord Maedhros wanted me to give this to you.” He said. He gave them an appraising sort of look. “That one is a clever bastard.” 

“Yes.” Amrod unrolled the parchment. It was a map. “He is.” 

“I probably ought to warn old Glastrum about him.” The dwarf’s black eyes glittered. “But.” He seemed to consider that. “Old man hasn’t ever given me much reason to do so.” A thin smile behind the thick black beard. “If you’re half as competent as your brother, I think we’ll get on, Gray Wardens or not.” 

“ No one is as competent as Nelyo.” Amras said this with absolute confidence. “But we can hold our own.” 

The dwarf laughed, and clumped off again. 

Chapter Text

There were many things to enjoy about being alive again. Food and drink; the dead needed neither. The sheer tactile delight of having a body and being able to touch things. And, of course, the body was that she’d had when she was young; strong and hale and unscarred, and without any rheumatic creaking joints that ached in winter. 

That same ability to touch and feel, though, brought discomfort as much as it did more pleasant sensations. That included being too fucking hot. 

The tall golden-haired and terrifying she-elf Moryo claimed was his baby cousin had plowed head-on into the strange and baffling people they’d found themselves among. The people…some human, some Eldar but strange short slender ones, and some great tall ones with horns… seemed to give way with unusual ease before a tall and forceful woman who had self assurance in spades. Enough so that they had a house now. Haleth and Moryo had promptly retreated to the basement, which was still muggy but much cooler than the miserable sticky heat of the rest of the place. 

Even the heat, though, was not enough to keep Moryo from clinging. 

The cellar was not what Haleth would normally associate with the word ‘cellar’. She tended to picture a root cellar, or the wine cellars, storage, and vaults underneath Caranthir’s fortress at Mount Rerir. In Par Vollen, it seemed, the heat drove people to either sleep on rooftops for the breeze, or in tile floored stone-walled cellar rooms that stayed cooler. 

She didn’t know where Galadriel was sleeping. Or if she was sleeping, for that matter. Properly sleeping, anyway, and not just the strange open eyed zoned out vagueness that Moryo insisted was also a sort of sleep. She also didn’t particularly care; she had much more important things on her mind. 

Or on her breast, at the moment. Caranthir had laid his head there. He had not stopped clinging as if she might vanish into smoke at any moment since that strange pair of goddesses had found her and offered her a second life, and a choice. 

She stroked that long fall of sleek black hair, currently disheveled. She could half-feel that he was pressed against her mind as well. 

She’d not understood that, when she’d been a younger woman and first had been puzzling out his strange elven ways. She knew now that it was as vital to a wedded elf as touch and speech, and perhaps more so. 

She stroked Moryo’s hair again, and traced the point of one of those expressive pointed ears. It twitched, and she smiled; she’d learned long ago that elf ears were sensitive. 

She repeated the motion, and again a third time. That dark head came up off her breast, and Caranthir turned a somewhat despairing sort of expression on her. The dim light in the cellar…they’d not lit any lamps…made the strange gleaming silver light of his eyes even more striking and lovely. 

“Woman.” He mumbled. “You’re insatiable.” 

“You knew that already.” Haleth told him, pleasantly. “Where’s that famous elvish stamina, husband?”

He shifted up the bed. It was a graceful movement, the way elves seemed so often to make even mundane things graceful and lovely. That ink-dark hair fell in a curtain around her face, cutting off her view of the pale limestone walls and blue and red tiles of the floors, and he kissed her. 

He kissed her with desperation, the same way he’d kissed her since those two goddesses had given her back the body she’d had as a girl of twenty and a second life. She kissed him with hunger, the same way she’d always kissed him. 

The beds of Par Vollen were a woven net of cotton ropes over a wooden frame, with a sheet tucked and tied over and pillows added for the head. It had taken some getting used to, but she could admit she saw the benefit in a hot and humid place. Right now, they’d thoroughly worked the sheet loose, and it tangled around Caranthir’s long legs. He kicked it off in annoyance, and it landed in a rumpled heap on the floor. 

She buried both hands in his hair and gave him an encouraging shove lower. He went easily, even eagerly, and she hooked her legs over his shoulders and lay back to enjoy herself. 

“ Moryo!” The Lady Galadriel’s voice, at the door. She sounded in good spirits, which probably meant she was running the town and the neighboring couple of settlements as well by now. “If you can stir yourself out of bed, I’ve got tax codes I’d like you to put eyes on.” 

Haleth locked her thighs around Caranthir’s ears, even as he made a frustrated sound that, given where his tongue was, sent a pleasant little shiver up her spine. “He’s busy.” She called back. 

“... Still?” A pause. “ Unbelievable. You’re as bad as Findekano and Nelyafinwe were when they married. Moryo, there is no call for that sort of language.” 

Caranthir must have sent an even more hostile mental curse over; Galadriel huffed audibly. Haleth steered her elf-king to a better spot by the hair, and did not even attempt to hide her moan of pleasure. 

“At some point, when you do get out of bed.” Galadriel said through the door. “ Do come up and actually look over some of this. This country could benefit from proper trade, if I can get them to stop trying to forcibly convert their neighbors.”

Caranthir raised his head. “Go away.” He snapped aloud, irritably. 

“Morinfinwe.” 

“Go away. I’ve not seen my wife in fifty years, Artanis. Do whatever you please, but leave me alone.” 

“ Moryo.” 

“ In my own good time.” Caranthir snapped, and then went back to much more interesting things that made Haleth’s eyes roll back in her head. Galadriel must have left; she at least didn’t say anything more. 

After, as they both panted for breath and sprawled across the bed, she raised herself up on an elbow and just looked at him. 

Fifty years, she’d been dead, and she’d died an old woman. He looked no different after all that time. That same fair skin, no gray in his hair, no wrinkles on his face. 

There was still, though, traces of a pain there that she did not remember, and she knew it was because of her. She’d seen the worry and the sadness start to creep in during her last years, when her mortality and his immortality started to seem intensely real, and she’d begun to regret what she’d done to him. She knew elves took it hard, when they lost a spouse. She'd worried so that the great fool would try to follow her, and had been so glad that he'd still had their son to anchor him. 

“No.” He said, even as she thought it now. “No, Haleth.” He looked up at her, with those old eyes, entirely earnest. “I knew what I chose.” He drew her down to rest her head on his shoulder. “And it’s long done, now.”

“You could choose to dissolve it now.” She said, quietly. “And find a she-elf.” 

“No.” He said simply, as if it simply were not an option at all that had crossed his mind, and she knew it wasn’t. 

“You could.” She pointed out, stubborn, propping herself up again. He scowled. 

“You’re here now.” He snapped. “You think I’d abandon you now?”

“For what? Three hundred years, that silver-eyed woman said?”

“More than I’d ever hoped for.” He said that very quietly, and her heart ached a little. 

“But it will end.” She said. “And then, when I’m gone again, you could…”

“We had this discussion before, Haleth.” He said. “Before even Erestor was born.” 

“Things have changed since…”

“Not for me.” He said, and she knew he meant it. “Don’t ask it of me. I’d give you almost anything, Haleth, but that’s the one thing I will not.” 

She touched his cheek, very gently. “Stubborn elf.” She said, but very softly. “Ridiculous creatures.”

Despite the cool of the cellar, they were both sticky with sweat as well as with sex. Caranthir would very happily lay pressed against her body and mind for hours, but Haleth was mortal, and she stirred. He made a protesting sort of sound. 

“I want a bath.” She told him. “And I’m thirsty, and hungry. You must be too, elf or not. And you can go appease your cousin.” She contemplated the question of Galadriel for a moment; she had never before met the she-elf, for all Moryo had mentioned her. “How is she not sweating her tits off?”

Caranthir snorted into the pillow. “She’s a powerful singer, and learned from Melian. Which is also how she’s twisting this place around her fingers, I suspect. I’ll put good odds on either she’s some charm she’s using, or she is and just isn’t letting on.” 

“Ah. Well, she could share.” Haleth found the light loose trousers she’d been given. “Come on.” 

He eyed her. “Are you going to…”

“To what?” She asked, innocently. 

He was looking at her breasts. “A shirt?” He asked, a little faintly. 

“Why? It’s too hot. Half the women here don’t bother with shirts.” She smiled wickedly and bounced on her heels, purely to watch him watch her bounce. 

He swallowed hard and muttered something she couldn’t make out into his pillow. Got up, with the innate easy grace that elves seemed not to even think about; the dim light ran over that smooth skin, the almost statue-perfect beauty that so many elves wore so easily. She wondered if he’d be amenable to fucking in the bath. She doubted it, but it was a pleasant thought. 

The heat and humidity outside as they headed for the bath house hit like a slap. Moryo swore. Haleth swore far more foully. 

“We need a boat.” She said. “One of your brothers has to be somewhere with a reasonable climate.” 

“Several.” He confirmed, as several people looked at them sidelong. Haleth hadn’t lied; most of the women were either wearing very brief shirts or none at all. Caranthir was drawing far more looks than her naked breasts were. She still didn’t know how anyone survived in this sort of climate. “I’ll talk to Nelyo.” He glanced at her again, and his eyes lingered. 

“I don’t know.” Haleth said, smug, as he nearly walked into a man hauling a tray of bread rolls. “I think you like some things about it.” 

“I’m going to expire from sweating in this horrid place.” 

Haleth bounced. He swallowed again, hard. 

“The view is good.” He allowed. “But it is the only redeeming characteristic.” 

Chapter Text

The thing about his father, Curufin reflected in the market, was that Feanor was intensely, incredibly likable. 

Fingolfin might have disagreed, but even Curvo’s half-uncle had wanted Feanor to like him. He was, however, very much in the minority in finding Feanor irriating. There was a very good reason so many of the Noldor had been willing to turn their backs on the Valar and follow Feanor into unknown danger in Beleriand, across the sea and through the dark, and it was because they loved him. 

Curufin reflected on this as his father bought a skewer of grilled onions and mutton from a street vendor. The shop was a tumult of workers right now, who were building a forge and blast furnace to Feanor and Curufin’s exacting expectations. The workers had stopped for lunch, which was the only reason Feanor and Curufin weren’t hovering and supervising. 

The street vendor was one of the strange eldar who referred to themselves as ‘Elvhen.” She was fairly young, and was both running her stall and trying to supervise her young child playing around her feet. 

“I’m sorry.” She said, apologetically as she tried to count change and as the small girl babbled up at Feanor. The food seller was staring at Curufin and Feanor both with awe; she, like many elves, had started turning up near Pierrey’s shop. It could have been simple chance; there was a large square there that was used as an open air market most days. Curufin doubted it. He thought that rumor of them had gotten around quickly. “Briari, don’t be a pest.” 

Feanor, to the delight of the child, smiled down and then hefted her and settled her on his shoulders with the ease of someone who’d done exactly this many times before. Curufin felt a flicker of nostalgia; some of his own earliest memories were of that exciting swoop of height and then looking down at the world from the seemingly impossible height of his atar’s shoulders. 

“Oh, she’s all right.” Feanor said, even as the child grabbed his hair and shrieked in delight. “There, little one, stay there so your poor mother can concentrate for a moment.” 

“...she has muddy hands!” The poor woman exclaimed, in obvious horror.

“Mud washes out.” Feanor said, dismissive, and smiled a little. There was no one alive who was immune to the charm Feanor could bring to bear, even without meaning to, and Curufin could see astonishment and then wonder replacing horror in the woman’s eyes. “I raised seven children. It’s far from the worst thing I’ve gotten in my hair.” 

“I’m tall!” Briari proclaimed proudly. “Look! I’m tall!”

“Very tall.” Curufin agreed, solemnly, quietly aching at the memory of carrying Tyelpe around like that when his son had been small. 

“Shame her father couldn’t watch her for you, while you work.” Feanor said, as the woman handed two skewers to Curufin. “But he’s at work too, I expect.” 

The woman went very quiet. 

“He’s dead.” She said, after a moment, and at the look of horror on Feanor and Curufin’s faces both rushed to try and comfort them. “I’m managing. It’s been two years, and I’m managing.”

Two years? Two years was nothing. The blink of an eye. 

“I’m sorry.” Curufin said, softly. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Thank you. We should have known better.” She reached out to take the small girl back as Feanor hefted her down. 

“What.” Feanor said, very softly. “Do you mean?”

A shrug, and a bitter sort of expression, her ears lowering. “The usual sort of way. He stayed at work late to earn a bit more, so he was out after curfew.” She shrugged as if that made any sense at all. “We needed the coin, and he knew some back ways, but a chevalier caught him anyway.” 

Curufin remembered the armored men outside the city. Rabbits, those chevaliers had called them. 

“And your lord allows this?” Feanor demanded. 

“They are the lords.” The woman looked up at them, half-disbelieving. “Maker, it’s true. You must be displaced in time from Arlathan of old, before the humans threw it down and slaughtered us.” 

Feanor was silent for a long moment. But then, of all things, he asked “What was his name?”

“... sir?”

“Your husband. What was his name?”

She blinked for a minute. “...Sorrith.” 

And Feanor son of Finwe held out a shining heap of silver coins, and tipped it from the palm of his hand into the hands of the stunned, startled elf-woman. “So that you might have a bit of rest.” He said, when she tried to give it back, and they left her standing there, stunned, and then hurriedly shoving the coin into a purse and hiding it in a pocket. 

They’d gotten about twenty steps when another elf intercepted them. 

“That was unkind.” He said, severely, from where he was selling apples. 

“What?” Feanor drew himself up, startled. 

“That much silver in the hands of anyone of the alienage is a target.” The man said, plainly. “If they search her house and find it, they’ll accuse her of stealing it, and have her put to death.” 

Curufin breathed evenly, trying to keep his temper in check, but simply burning the Imperial Palace to the ground was looking to be an increasingly attractive proposition. 

Feanor, however, had not had the benefit of five hundred years of Beleriand to temper his reactions. His eyes went narrow, and his chin went up, and it was with pure fury that he said “ Who would?”

Curufin had heard that sort of fury before. Under a dark sky lit only by the stars, as the Trees lay dead and Lightless and Finwe lay dead at Morgoth’s hands. 

The elf stared, swaying back on his heels a little. “Everyone?” 

“Is there no one you might go to seek justice for murder, then? Is there not an Empress who is beholden to her subjects? Or does she forsake her duty, and such pleas fall on deaf ears?” 

Silence, and then a low, bitter laugh. “Elder.” The apple seller said. “If you come from the time before, you know little indeed. The empress herself burned thousands of our people in their homes to win her throne when her cousin contested her rule. Men and women and children alike, in their beds, for no reason aside from being born elvhen.” 

Feanor spun on his heel. Went back to the woman and her child. 

“Is it true?” He asked. “Could that silver place you in danger?”

She stared. There were more elves gathering, watching the whole thing with silent wide eyes. There were a few humans too, watching silently. 

“Yes.” She said, very quietly. “But it could also buy our way out of this city, and to Antiva.” She hesitated. “Our people are safer there. They even have schools that will take elves.” 

She looked down at her daughter as she said it. 

Feanor nodded, slowly. There was a muscle working in his jaw. 

“Go.” Curufin said, quietly. “Go right now, then.” He paused. “And when you get there, my brother Maglor is in Antiva City.” 

Her eyebrows rose. “There are more like you?” But she was already hefting her daughter up on her hip. “I will. He’s a powerful lord?”

“He’s a king.” Curufin said, bluntly. Without Maedhros around to scowl at it, there was no point in dissembling about what they were. “He’s ruled lands of his own for centuries, and done it ably. I don’t doubt that he’ll carve himself out a place in Antiva quickly enough.” He smiled very slightly. “Atar has seven sons, and all of us ended up kings, whatever Nelyo says.” 

“Thank you.” She breathed, and set about packing up her stall. 

Feanor watched her go. Turned on his heel, and noticed their audience. 

“Friends.” He said aloud. “I find myself ignorant of this place and, it seems, sorely so in many bitter ways. But I wish to learn, if you would teach me.” 

And Feanor sat on an empty crate near the apple stall, and listened. Curufin watched, and listened. 

Within five minutes, they were in the palm of his hand, and Feanor was not even trying. Curufin  knew in his very marrow that every elf and a fair few of the humans in that market square would have killed for his father, after that few minutes. 

Feanor did not stop at five minutes. 

An hour later, Feanor was standing on that crate, and speaking. Curufin prodded at his oldest brother. 

Curvo! Maedhros answered quickly. How are things….

You wanted me and Finrod to see if we couldn’t gain power down here. Curufin told him. 

Yes, wha…

Father’s beating us to it.

A pause. From on top of the crate, Feanor’s voice rang, with all the power Curufin remembered from his boyhood. 

He wondered abruptly when that voice had lost some of that strength, though it had still been powerful. Had it been around when his father had made the Silmarils?

“How much have you lost! How many have you lost? You mourn for those taken, even as those who took them walk free? Cowards and bullies, who lift a sword against those who have none! Yes! Cowards I name them, and as cowards I curse them!”

Curvo. Maedhros sounded alarmed. Curufin, what is he…

Curufin sent his brother a rapid replay of the last hour. There was a pause. 

He’s not… Curufin paused. Not like at the end, Nelyo. He seems….himself. Just very angry at things.

He always. Maedhros returned, slowly. Had a very keen sense of justice. Well. Another pause. Curvo, make him some bloody armor and a decent sword before he gets himself killed again. 

Yes. Curufin agreed, watching their father. I think I probably should. 

By the time he got them back to the shop, Feanor was still seething quietly, and there were at least a thousand elves and two hundred humans who would have followed Feanor into death on the spot. 

The forge was not done. Curufin huffed, and turned to a very confused Pierrey, who was staring out the front door at the crowd who’d followed them. 

“This is the street of craftsmen, yes?” Curufin said. “There has to be one of them along here with a functional smithy.” 

“Three doors down.” Pierrey said, absently. “What…”

“An empire led by murderers and cowards.” Feanor said, darkly, from back in the shop. He was rapidly finishing polishing a ring, apparently without actually looking at it, and tossed the piece at Pierrey. “Sell that if you like. It’s a poor effort, but I’ve not done filigree work for a time. I needed a warm up though, to practice for the feathers.” 

Curufin glanced at the ring. It was gold, set with a perfectly clear pale blue sapphire, and the filigree traced out the shape of highly stylized iris buds. Some of the filigree work was in wire barely wider than a thread. He could see no flaws in it. Pierrey looked at it and made a nearly pained sort of sound. 

“Atar.” He said. “I actually think we should make you some armor. There’s a great deal I learned in Beleriand that I think you would like to see.” 

Feanor’s ears flicked around in interest. 

"Three doors down, you said?” Curufin asked. 

“They have hinges and drawer pulls and decorative trinkets in the window, but…”

“Any forge you can make a drawer pull at I can make armor at. It will do.” 

Pierrey, holding a ring probably worth the price of a mansion, with a crowd shouting Feanor’s name outside and his own shop a mass of shouting workmen, laughed utterly helplessly. 

“Tell Vierre that I apologize in advance.” He said. “For overturning his life, by sending you his way. I suppose he’s a grandmaster armorer too.” 

“He is.” Curufin said, honestly. “But I’m better. Atar, come, I’ll show you what I learned in Beleriand.”

Chapter Text

The slog north was, generally, miserable. Compared, of course, to thirty years on the Helcaraxe, always halfway to starving and with death an ice fissure or snow bear away, it was not nearly so bad. There were, however, some things that made Fingon almost wistful for the ice bears.

The horse actually did not help all that much with speed. It was a stolid old dun plow horse, and not one of the horses of the elves of Beleriand, who had the steed of Orome as an ancestor. Fingon’s own endurance was much greater than that of the gelding. He was considering hard after the first couple of days whether it was worth it to keep the horse with him, or just to shoulder the supplies himself and sell the horse. 

Just outside a village by the name of Honnleath, the horse got a stone in his hoof. Fingon removed it, but the poor beast was lame after that, which decided him. 

He stopped in the town. Ferelden seemed to build largely in timber, with wattle and daub walls and thatched roofs, and to pave only the main squares and most important roads. He got a number of confused looks, which were expected. He got a couple, though, that were wary and unfriendly, and remembered what Maedhros had said. 

“Anyone willing to look after this horse.” Fingon chose to ignore the stares as he stopped in the town square, spread his gear out, and sorted through it. He repacked a saddlebag, fashioned a shoulder strap, and settled the pack on his own back. “Can have it. He’s lame, but a few days of care will have him all right.” 

“Where’d you get him?” That was a man throwing out waste water into the gutter. 

“South a ways. But I can move faster without him.” Fingon eyed the man, and the other unfriendly eyes, and decided it wasn’t worth trying to find a decent room or hot bath, however badly he wanted a hot bath. “I don’t need anything else. I’ll keep on my way.” 

“Stole him?” The man spat. “Typical for a rabbit.” 

“I bought him.” Fingon said, much more patiently than he was feeling, and started walking. The man scowled as he left, but no one tried to follow him. 

He made better time without the horse. 

He had a rather worse time a few days later, in Redcliffe. It was also where he first met one of the strange short elves of Thedas. 

There were a few in the city. He tried not to stare, and they were fairly obviously also trying not to stare, but they were all failing. He didn’t think a single one of them reached even six feet, and all were built rather lightly. Their ears, though, broadcast surprise and curiosity as clearly as any other Eldar he’d ever known, and as clearly as his own probably were. 

“I don’t suppose.” He asked one of them, a slim brown-haired elf man who left off buying potatoes to openly stare up at him. “That there’s anyplace here I can get a decent meal, a decent bed, and a decent bath. I can forgo the first two, but the last one particularly would be very, very welcome.” 

“Maker.” The other elf breathed up at him. “You’re tall. There’s the Gull and Lantern. They serve elves.” 

Fingon blinked down in bafflement. He had not considered an establishment turning away perfectly good gold. “I would be grateful for directions.” 

“This way.” The man led him a ways through the streets, past a statue in the shape of a fantastic beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a great cat, past the shops and bustle of an active trade town, until they were in the northeastern part of the city.

The inn was a big timber building, with split cedar shingles rather than thatch, and a sign outside carved in the shape of a stylized gull holding a lantern in its beak. It was late afternoon, and there was a cheerful riot of noise going on inside. 

“My thanks.” Fingon said to the elven man. 

“Be careful.” The man said, a little anxiously. 

“I’m always careful.” Fingon said, and went in. 

The talk died off rapidly as he moved through the common room. Fingon was easily a head and more taller than anyone else in the place, which was, to Noldor eyes, rather rough and rustic. 

“Fuck me.” The man behind the bar said, looking up. 

“I’d rather just get a room.” Fingon said. “And a bath, and a hot meal.” 

The man eyed him for a long moment. Looked, a little nervously, around the room, very quickly. “I can do all three. Four silvers for the lot.” 

Fingon removed the topmost pair of small gold stud earrings from his ears, and laid them on the bar top.

“...Or that’ll do, I suppose. Ellen!” He flagged down a blonde woman who was deftly filling mugs with what looked like quite good ale behind the bar. “Find the tall elf a room! We’ve got a boar roasting in the back, or we’ve got a good mutton stew goi…”

“Hollin.” The voice was unfriendly, and Fingon had been listening to the footsteps for the last few seconds. The man was just behind his left elbow. “You’re doing business with a damned thief?" 

“Why.” Fingon asked, tiredly. “Do people keep thinking that?”

That got a sharp bark of laughter. “What else are decent folks to think, when they see a bloody knife-ear decked out in gold and jewels?”

“I don’t know.” Fingon said, only a little through his teeth. “Maybe that they’re wealthy, and bought them?”

That got another laugh. 

“This way to the rooms.” Ellen said, nervously. “If you would.” 

There were three men now. Fingon turned slowly, and looked down at them. They looked up, faces hard. 

“There are.” He said, very much through his teeth. “Other elves, right over there.” 

“Normal sorts.” One of the men said, dismissive. “As knife ears go. Humble. Not dripping with gold. Stay out of the way.”

Fingon, who had never once stayed out of the way of anything at any point in his life, glanced at the shorter elves. They were all shooting him desperate warning looks. One was shaking his head, a little frantically. 

Fingon squared his shoulders instead, very deliberately, and watched one of the men watch the motion with the distinct air of someone realizing that he was trying to pick a fight with someone twice his size. Finno rolled his neck, and rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. “I just want.” He said. “A bath, a meal, and a bed, in that order.” 

“Jareth.” The man eyeing Fingon’s height and shoulders said, nervously. “He’s a big bastard.” 

“My parents.” Fingon said. “Are married, thank you.” 

The other two looked Fingon up and down. Fingon eyed them up and down, unimpressed. 

The men blinked. Backed up, and looked away. There was an audible sigh as several people let held breaths out. 

“The roast boar.” Fingon said, watching until the men sulked back to their tables. “Will do very well, thank you.” 

The room was, by Noldor standards, again very rustic. The walls were all timber, as was the floor, largely undecorated. The bed, though, was clean, even if it was too short. Ellen bossed two maids through filling a wooden wash tub with hot water, and left soap and a towel. 

It was not the right sort of soap for curly hair. He didn’t dare try to take his braids out, but still felt much, much better when reasonably clean. He would have killed for some decent hair oil, but Ellen just looked at him blankly when he asked. 

“I can have your things laundered.” She offered, and then sized him up. “I don’t know if we have any robes that will fit you, though.” 

“ Please.” Fingon said, gratefully. 

He slept hard, though only because the door locked solidly. He hadn’t done more than first sleep for a week and more. Despite some worry, his clothes were returned the next morning, much cleaner. 

Reasonably without incident, he managed to find a merchant selling all manner of goods. He pulled off one of his bracelets…gold, and set with very small diamonds…and held it out. “What will you give me for this?”

It was not one of his finer pieces, though Fingon did not actually own any jewelry that was not very fine. So he was not surprised, when the merchant’s eyes went very wide. 

“Two hundred sovereigns.” The man said, promptly. Which was probably much less than it was actually worth, but it would do for the time. Fingon took it, restocked on supplies, and headed north to follow the road skirting Lake Calenhad and leading west and then north.

He was robbed two miles outside of Redcliffe. Or it was attempted, at least. There were six of them who jumped him.

Or attempted to. Fingon had spent five centuries at war; his reflexes were much, much better than any of the men had been expecting. He was also much stronger and much faster than they’d been expecting. He slapped the first axe aside without bothering to draw a weapon, got the man by the throat, and lifted. 

“This.” He said to the man, as he dangled six inches above the ground and clawed frantically at Fingon’s wrist. “Is extremely foolish. Jareth, wasn’t it?”

Jareth didn’t answer. Fingon looked at the other five men, who’d frozen in place. 

“I am going to drop him.” He said, pleasantly. “You may take him, and leave. If you try me, I will draw my sword. If I do that, none of you are going to enjoy what happens.” 

“That’s unnatural.” One of them said, even as he skittered to the back of the little group. “Fucking unnatural, they aren’t supposed to get that big.” 

Fingon opened his hand. Jareth fell in a heap, wheezing. Fingon laid his hand on the hilt of his sword, and waited. 

Four of them were smart. 

Two were not. 

Fingon drew his sword. 

He did not like killing Secondborn. He got on well with humans, in more reasonable places. There seemed to be plenty of reasonable humans even in this place. 

But. If they wanted blood, Fingon did few things better than fighting, and they were in his way. So he killed them anyway, and then left them there where they fell, and kept heading north. 

He had to do similar things thrice more over the next week, before he left the shores of the lake and followed the road west towards Jader. 

Chapter Text

Finwe had become High King of the Noldor largely because he had been, all agreed, perhaps the most persuasive and likable ner of the whole lot of them. Noldor were nothing if not opinionated, but it was almost impossible to have met Finwe and spoken with him and come away not feeling as if you were a great friend of his, whether or not it was true. 

Maedhros had seen it in action, many times. His father had inherited the same gift the most strongly of all of Finwe’s children, and Maedhros himself shared it. Maedhros knew it, and knew it for the tool and weapon it was. 

It was something he’d thought probably blunted after Angband. Fingon disagreed, staunchly, and Maedhros himself had seen it as well. It was, if anything, sharper. The scars had not mattered so much as Maedhros had first assumed. 

Now, when he took his lunch among the Gray Wardens in their mess hall, asked about their lives and deeds, and listened attentively to their stories, he knew exactly what he was doing. And it was working; he could see that it was working. It was working very, very well, even. Across the mess hall, Amrod gave him an amused sort of look, even as his brother coaxed a wriggling pair of young toddlers into trying mashed peas and stewed mutton. 

“Shit.” Louis was a human Warden, who claimed to be from Montfort. “There we were on the border, but Ferelden wouldn’t bloody let us in. Loghain gave orders to have us shot on sight if we put a toe over the border. Man had a damned blight at hand, and he wouldn’t admit it…”

“Mac Tir spent his youth fighting Orlesians.” Someone else pointed out. 

“I know, but it was a bleeding Blight! That’s what we’re for! Anyway, sat our asses at the border for months, figuring that eventually he’d have to let us in to do our jobs, and then we hear that someone slew the Archdemon! Turns out a few recruits had survived Ostagar, and Ysari Mahariel…she’s the Warden Commander of Ferelden now…dragged their shit together and mounted a defense. She slew the Archdemon herself, but she had some ancient elvish magic that let her survive it. All without us!”

“Horseshit.” That was a dwarf with hair and beard almost as flamingly red as Maedhros’ own hair. “I served with the Warden Commander during the Blight. It wasn’t any bleeding elf-magic. It was some magic shit that Morrigan cooked up. I heard it from Ysa myself.” 

“Morrigan?” Louis sounded startled. “That sorceress the Empress keeps as an advisor?”

Oghren spat. “Not my fucking empress. That’ll be her, though.” 

The records of Weisshaupt were fascinating; Maedhros knew now what a darkspawn was, and what a Blight was. He also knew that there was a great deal of interest in where the Warden-Commander of Ferelden was, among the Gray Wardens of Weisshaupt. 

“You served with the Hero?” He prompted. 

“Served with! I helped her drag some asses together to fight the Blight! I was on the ground when she slew the Archdemon!” Oghren puffed up. “That was before I was a Warden. Joined after.” He gave Maedhros a narrow-eyed once over. “You probably wanna know where she is too, huh? Well, I don’t bleeding know. She went off chasing a way to fight the Calling.” He shrugged elaborately and took a drink of ale. “Anyway. I joined in Amaranthine, same as a few others. Ysa left Sigrun in command there a bit ago and went off on her task, and I don’t know where she’s at. But she’s alive, mark me. That’s a hard woman to kill. Seen her kill a lot of things trying to kill her. Seen her shout down Loghain. Seen her kill an Archdemon. Seen her fight and slay a Broodmother alone, in the Deep Roads when the rest of us went down for the count in the fight, too injured to stand.” 

That got a murmur of profound respect from the gathered wardens. Interesting. He’d read of the Deep Roads, and when he saw home again he was going to have to tell Azaghal about them. 

Broodmother, though, was something he’d seen only reluctant references too in the works he’d read so far. 

“A Broodmother?” He asked, and the Wardens around him went abruptly very quiet. All except for Oghren. 

“Count yourself lucky for not meeting one.” Oghren refilled his ale. “I like a pair of tits as much as the next man, but eight of them is too much. That and the tentacles.” He grimaced, and then blinked at Maedhros’ blank face. “Ah, shit. You don’t bloody know.” He gave the other Wardens an accusing look. “You’re letting him run the place and you haven’t even told him about the blighters we have to kill?” 

“It’s a recent thing.” Maedhros interjected. “You only arrived, what, three days ago?” If the dwarf was one of the Fereldan Wardens, a few had arrived recently to give reports and take a number of fresh recruits back to Ferelden with them. “And I would not presume to be the one in charge; I am, of course, not a Warden. I am simply rather experienced with running a fortress.” 

With a straight face. Amrod marveled, over Osanwe. Maedhros ignored him. 

“Right, right. Well, we could probably rustle up some darkspawn blood if you wanted…”

“I do not.” Maedhros said, a bit sharply. “Intend to ever drink blood again, if I do not have to.” He pushed back a few deeply unpleasant memories of Angband, and of Sauron with a golden goblet of liquid that was absolutely not wine. 

A beat. 

“ Again?” Oghren blinked. 

Nelyo, what the FUCK. This time his brother’s Osanwe was horrified. Maedhros ignored Amrod again. 

“It’s of no matter here.” He said to the Wardens, who were all looking at him sidelong. “You were speaking of Broodmothers.” 

“You’re happier not knowing.” Nial was a warden from Antiva, and he said this with some feeling. 

“I’ve seen a great many terrible things.” Maedhros said, evenly and truthfully. 

“He’s a grown elf. If he wants to know he wants to know.” Oghren refilled his ale again. “It’s how darkspawn make more darkspawn, lad. They don’t have females. They have to take females. ‘S why they try and kidnap women, rather than kill them.” 

A terrible sense of foreboding settled on Maedhros. Several of the wardens quietly reached for the nearest alcohol, which seemed to flow like water in Weisshaupt. 

“So they drag the poor lady down to some hole, and they force feed her the Blight, right? And then rape her while it changes her. If they’re lucky, the poor women just die. If they’re not, they change. Get all big. Grow extra teats. Tentacles. Start eating anything or anyone the darkspawn bring her. Start whelping litters.” Oghren grimaced. “Faugh. They can whelp thirty or forty young at a time, and the spawn grow fast.” 

“You get different kinds of Darkspawn.” Nils said, hollowly. “Depending on what race the poor woman was.” 

“Yeah. Dunno if anything of the poor lady is left in there. Only way to help them is to put the thing down when you find one, though.” Oghren scowled into his ale. “Fucked shit, is what it is. Anyway. That’s where darkspawn come from.” 

Across the mess hall, Amrod had frozen. His ears were flat back, as were Maedhros’ own. 

Maedhros thought, distantly, that Sauron himself would have delighted in such a terrible way to breed armies for Angband. He didn’t know what sort of expression the Wardens saw on his face, but his hand on his wineglass was trembling, very slightly. 

“Yeah.” Oghren pulled a flask out of a pocket, uncapped it, and helpfully poured some of whatever questionable liquor he had in it into Maedhros’ wine. “If you’re wondering, that’s why we all drink. Well. I drank before, but that’s why I drink now.” 

“Not like any of us will get old enough for the drink to kill us.” Nils held out his own mug, and Oghren obligingly poured a shot into his ale. “Taint will get us before then.” He lifted the mug. “To taking as many of them with us as we can, when the time comes.” 

Every Warden in hearing lifted a glass to that. Maedhros stared at Oghren. For all the horrors of Angband he’d seen, apparently there were still things out there just as terrible. 

“Drink up, lad.” Oghren advised, apparently not realizing that Maedhros was many, many centuries his elder. “It helps.” 

Maedhros drained the wineglass. Whatever Oghren had added was about as smooth as bile, and burned all the way down his throat, but he did not care. 

Eru. His law sisters. His niece. His mother. He shoved himself to his feet as fear knifed through him, ice-cold. 

One of the dwarf wardens looked up at him with keen dark eyes, and there was a sympathetic sort of look behind that thick black beard. “Here, boss.” He said, and fished a flask of his own out. “Just get it back to me tomorrow. I can refill it myself.” 

“Thank you, Belwas.” Maedhros said, with automatic politeness. He was shaken enough that he actually took the battered stoneware flask. 

Always learn names. Finwe had told him, a lifetime ago. And use them. People appreciate it, if you remember their names. 

Naridh. Naridh was safe in a fortress of Gray Wardens; as safe as it was possible to be. 

CURVO. It was still difficult, even with how easy Osanwe was in Thedas, to speak over such distances unless it was along kin or marriage bonds, and he reached for his brother rather than Helca directly. CURVO!

Nelyo? Curufin answered almost at once. What? What’s wrong? Why are you so…

Maedhros didn’t have words for it. He just shoved across the whole memory and the knowledge of darkspawn and broodmother all in one go. 

Warn her. He begged Curufin. Curvo, WARN HER. 

What. He got the impression that Curufin had just dropped something. There was sudden terror laced into his sense. What, what, I, Nelyo, WHAT. 

I just learned. Maedhros told his brother, and bit the cork out of the flask. The alcohol inside had been badly distilled and was probably mildly toxic to anyone but a dwarf or one of the Firstborn; he drank it anyway, and reached for his mother, as Curufin closed himself off to have a panic attack on the floor of a smithy in Orlais. 

Nerdanel did not take it any better than Curufin, or any better than Maedhros himself. She tried to hold it in check to speak with him, but he could feel it. 

I’m on a ship. She told him, trying to reassure him. I’m on a ship, on the sea, headed for your father and Curvo. I’m all right, my Maitimo. 

He didn’t even protest the name that didn’t fit his scarred face, though he didn’t hide his relief. Good. Stay behind strong walls, Amme. Please. 

Nerdanel was strong and brave, but she was not a warrior and had no interest in it. Not like…

Ah, Eru. The one who was most at risk…

I will. I will. I’m well. 

Maedhros reached for Celegorm. Got no answer at first, and did the mental equivalent of knocking on his distracted brother’s mental shields with a battering ram. 

Nelyo, what the… Celegorm sounded annoyed at first, caught the general state of Maedhros’ thoughts, and it transmuted almost instantly to anxiety. Nelyo? 

Get Irisse here. Maedhros told him. Tyelko, whatever you’re doing, drop it, and get HERE, as fast as you can travel, and get Irisse behind stone walls. 

Have you lost your MIND? Celegorm demanded. We’re fine. We’ve been hunting slave caravans, you know that, she’s enjoying herself. I’m not ordering her about, Nelyo, she hates that sort of…

Maedhros shoved the horrid knowledge over, and waited out the several moments of blind screaming mental panic from his younger brother. 

Get here. He told Tyelko again, remembering the maps he’d looked at. You’re not terribly far. This is the safest place. Tell her, and tell her it’s safe here. 

Oh what the fuck what the fuck what the F….

TYELKO. 

Yes. Right. Right. Nelyo. Thank you. Tyelko closed off the bond abruptly. 

Maglor, ever quietly and unexpectedly one of the more stoic of the lot of them, took the news with only some quiet internal screaming. 

We are in a city. Maglor managed after a moment. We have bodyguards furnished by the Crows. But…I will speak with Zevran, I think. He says he has contacts in the Wardens, and if they can sense the monsters before they’re seen, I would hire some. Thank you for warning us, Nelyo. 

As he closed his mind to Maglor, Maedhros drained the flask, and tried to think. The Warden notes had said that Par Vollen did not have Darkspawn; Haleth and Artanis were safe, then. Still. 

Caranthir did not take the new information any better than Maedhros had expected. 

Stay there. Maedhros told him, as far away in a meeting room in Par Vollen his little brother hyperventilated. They don’t seem to have these monsters on that island. You’re safe. Haleth is safe. Stay THERE. Tell Artanis to stay up there, until Curvo can figure out how to get us home. 

Maedhros had rather upgraded his bedchamber in the last two weeks; Belwas had silently shown him to a large and comfortable chamber clearly intended for someone of rank after the first three days, and no one had said anything about Maedhros moving into it. Now, he bolted the door behind him, sagged back against it, and reached for his own marriage bond. 

Fingon responded instantly, and just as instantly realized that something was wrong. 

Russo? He asked, worried. 

Maedhros had already reached out for Fingon panicked once, when he’d learned that Darkspawn could spread the taint through their blood. Now he just somewhat shakily leaned against that steadying bright presence against his fea. Fingon leaned back, concerned. Russo?

They’re worse than I knew. Maedhros said, and showed him. Felt the flash of panic. I already told Tyelko. He’ll get Irisse here, where she’ll be safe. They aren’t far. Finno, where…

Nearly in Jader, and from there I can get a ship. Fingon told him, not bothering to hide his relief at that. I’m coming, Russo. I’m safe. I’ve not run into Darkspawn. I’ll be careful. I’ll be there soon.

Chapter Text

Curufin had, in their centuries in Beleriand, become very very good at crafting arms and armor. Very good; the only one who could come even somewhat close was his own son. 

There had been Eol of Nan Emloth; Curufin had heard the name and seen one or two of his pieces. He considered the work good. But of course Eol had been a monster, and Aredhel had slain him with his own cursed sword before wisely leaving it laying in the forest loam. 

Even there, though, Curufin knew his own work was better. They’d worn armor Feanor and Curvo had worked together to make when they fought the Foamriders and stole the swan ships; they’d worn that armor through the Dagor-nuin-Giliath. It was after those first battles that Curufin had taken stock of the wounds and close calls he and his brothers had taken and realized that it could be done better. 

(Except for Maedhros. He had never learned if that first armor had failed his eldest brother at all.) 

He’d spent the next five centuries looking at where things nearly failed, and making improvements. The armor he’d made each of his brothers had been tweaked and remade and overhauled a dozen times each. And it had worked; none of them had fallen. 

Through the long siege and its ten thousand skirmishes, through the Dagor Bragollach, through the great alliance and the final great battle on the plains before Angband, his work had kept his brothers alive. 

Now, all that experience and expertise meant that he had spent several days having the very strange experience of his father attentively listening to him. And looking at him with that bright absolute focus that Feanor always turned on his work or a problem he wanted to puzzle out. 

“ Oh .” Feanor said, delighted, as Curufin sketched out the illustration of a fullered blade. “Oh, of course.” 

“Came up with them while trying to figure out how to make Nelyo a sword that worked for him after Fingon brought him back.” Curufin said, absently. Those first swords so long ago in Aman had been diamond cross sections. Tyelko still used his, but Celegorm could also use two hands and so the extra bit of weight and perhaps slightly less precise balance mattered less. “I was trying to figure out ways to save some weight without weakening it. Nelyo will flat out club an orc to death with a blade if the orc-armor is thick, so it had to stand up to that .” 

Feanor went very quiet at that. Curufin, who’d set the drawing aside to go back to the nearly finished blade and the hammer and tools, did not actually register this fact for several minutes. He did not, in fact, realize it until his father spoke again. 

“None of you went after him.” 

It was an accusation that Curufin had flagellated himself with a thousand times. They all had. Which was why now it just dug up a weary guilt. He paused in his work, not taking his eyes off the steel of the blade as the heat from the forge slowly faded out of it. 

“No.” He said. “Nelyo ordered us not to, before he went.” He hesitated, and then went on. “We all thought he was dead. What point would there be in all of us dying too?” He looked up. “You rode on Angband’s gates, atar. You saw them, if only from afar. They’re worse up close. I saw them shattered and torn open; they’re ten feet thick, of solid iron. They were made with Sauron’s power, and Morgoth’s. You would never have gotten through them, and neither would we.”

And that was something Maedhros had known for four hundred and seventy years, and how his eldest brother had carried that hopelessness all those centuries and not gone mad with it Curufin would never know. The Noldor would never have broken into that fortress, while Morgoth held it under his power, and Maedhros had known it. It had only ever been a delaying action Nelyo had hoped for, and he’d fought a near five hundred year doomed stand anyway. 

“If we had ridden upon Angband to try and rescue Nelyo, we would have joined him.” It was truth, and it helped the guilt not at all. “Fingon knew he wasn’t dead.” He added, at Feanor’s stricken expression. “Only because they are wed. And he did not ask anyone’s opinion or aid. He just vanished in the night. We all thought he would die or worse.” 

Fingolfin had been beside himself; he’d been convinced that he’d lost two sons in a very short period of time. But of course Fingon was Fingon, and had returned with a very battered and insensate Maedhros. 

Feanor looked at Curufin, and then to Curufin’s shock looked away and down, ears drooping. 

“I thought.” Feanor whispered. They were alone in the smithy; it was somewhere in the middle of the night, and the incredulous human blacksmiths had eventually dropped from sheer exhaustion. The smithy…small and poor by Curufin’s standards, but usable…was lit only by the glow of the forge. For elf-eyes, that was more than enough. Their kind had been children of starlight first. “I thought that Findekano seduced him to spite me.” 

“I know.” Curufin had thought the same, once. “We were wrong.” He smiled without humor. “Fingon told us as much loudly, repeatedly, and very harshly. Several times.”

“I owe him, then.” Feanor said, bleakly. “For the way I treated him, when they made it known.” 

Which was very true, but was not the greatest of the reasons Curufin thought it likely that Findekano would break a wine bottle over Feanor’s head on sight in the near future. He picked up the tongs again; the blade had gone cold, and it went back into the coals to heat again. Feanor took up a hammer too, and they fell into the rhythm of it for a time, both humming softly to the steel. 

“He’s…how is he? Maedhros?” Feanor said that when the blade had gone into the quench tank for the final time. 

“Now? Ask him yourself.” 

“He will not speak to me.” Feanor admitted, and there was a waver to his voice that Curufin had never heard before. “I’ve reached out. He just…walls off.” 

“He’s good at that.” It was true. Maedhros had some of the most impenetrable mental shields Curufin had ever experienced. “He’s…well. As well as he can be. He kept us all alive.” He smiled again, thin and wry. “He held the North and kept us all alive, and he did not die fighting the great enemy. He always expected he would, I think. But he’s doing better now.” 

“Better than what?” Feanor demanded, because he was as sharp as a sword and had not missed that. But it was not anger in his father’s eyes; it was pain, and grief, and guilt. 

Ahh, but how to explain that to Miriel’s son? 

“Better than we thought he’d ever be, when Fingon first brought him back.” Curufin said instead of the truth. “We found his craft after all, atar.” 

That, thankfully, distracted his father. “You did? What…”

“War. Grandfather was right all along. It is politics. And war is just politics, but you do it in armor and with a sword. Nelyo is very good at it. He did you proud, atar.” 

Feanor paused, and gave him a strange look. “None of you could do anything else.” He said, faintly puzzled. 

Curufin stared at him. Feanor stared back, and then abruptly dropped the hammer. 

“Curufinwe.” Feanor said, and was around the anvil, and had a hand on either side of Curufin’s face. “Curvo. I have never not been proud of you. You know this, yes?”

Curufin realized his hands were trembling. 

“We have done ill things.” He said, thinking of Finrod riding from Nargothrond, and of the flashes of blood soaked horror he’d caught when Finrod remembered. He could feel Beren’s hands at his throat. 

“I’ve wronged all of you.” Feanor said, and he was trying to be steady but there was a waver there that was starkly different from the furious brittle burning light at the end before. “I was a great fool, and you have all paid for it. But you looked out for each other, and kept each other alive, and I am proud of all of you for it.” 

“Tyelpe disowned me.” Curufin whispered. “He’s only just speaking to me again. I drove my own son away. I…” 

“I saw.” Feanor whispered. “I remember the tapestries. I saw.” A pause, and then, slowly, rough with regret and sorrow and pain. “I should never have made you boys swear my oath.” 

Curufin broke. He was as tall as his father, and broader, but he shook and then he was burying his face in his father’s shoulder in a way he had not done in a thousand years, and weeping. 

A day and a half or so later, when his wife and Finrod came to extract them bodily from the smithy, Curufin had finished the sword, and Feanor was just fiddling around with the engraving on the crosspiece and pommel, purely on principle. Curufin was well into the armor proper, and was tempering the breastplate and greaves. 

“Bed.” Helca said, implacably, after one glance at the nearly identical dark circles under both of their eyes. “You’ve been in here for four days. Food, a bath, and bed. In that order. The armor will wait.” 

“He went a week in Nargothrond once.” Finrod told her. “I found him facedown on the workbench on the seventh day, out like a light.” 

She sighed. “ Just like his father that way, and Tyelpe is the same. Hammer down, darling. Finrod’s made dinner.” 

Curufin made a token protest, but only so they’d fuss at him. It was very nice to have someone to worry about him. 

Feanor, being Feanor and not having Nerdanel to narrow her eyes at him, brought the leather work of the scabbard he was making for the sword back with him, and worked at it as he ate. Eight pointed stars were taking shape down the length of it, and a spiralling pattern. 

“I need gold leaf.” He muttered, to no one in particular. “And garnets.” 

“Eat your fish, law-father.” Helca told him, serenely. 

It was full dark by the time they’d eaten. Orlais had marvelous bathing rooms, with hot piped water. Curufin did feel quite a lot better when clean. 

His father watched them as Helca wished Feanor a good night, and she and Curvo and Finrod retreated towards the large bedroom. Curufin, to his abrupt horror, could see the wheels turning in his father’s mind. 

“Finrod.” Feanor said, slowly. 

“Ah!” Finrod said, brightly. “Yes, here we go.” He turned. “Feanaro! Yes, you’re not stupid, we know, though you being a great fool is a matter of historical record. Now! Since your son has been twisting himself into knots trying to think of any way to say it, I’m not going to let him, and you can be furious with me instead. It won’t be any different from normal, really. I’m sleeping with your son and his wife. It is not platonic. I have known them carnally, and intend to do so again frequently. We are all quite happy with the arrangement and intend to continue. Curvo, go to bed, if your father wants to scream he can do it at me.” 

“Oh, Ingoldo.” Helca said, warmly, as Curufin froze. “Thank you so much, darling.” 

“He might as well get used to it!” Finrod said, watching Feanor go an interesting shade of red. “Beleriand didn’t have a use for a great number of foolish things we thought were the end of the world in Aman, but which really don’t matter a bit. We’re all happy, so it’s really none of his business what we do, to my mind.” 

“Your grandmother…” Feanor wheezed. 

“Did not give her explicit approval and I am not trying to sever a marriage bond!” Finrod said, and his voice was bright but there was razor-edged steel there too. “So! As I said. None of your business, Feanaro.” 

“ INGOLDO.” Curufin finally managed, horrified. 

“Yes, I know, I’m sleeping on the floor for a month.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Helca said, firmly. “Curufin darling, your father’s not an idiot. Come. Come lay down.” 

“No.” Curufin said. “No. I…”

“ I RAISED YOU BETTER THAN…” Feanor started, and the rafters trembled, shaking down a few cobwebs. 

“I’m happy!” Curufin shouted back. “We’re happy!” 

“ Feanaro.” Helca said, cold and furious. “If you make Curvo cry again, I’ll send you back to Mandos myself.” 

Feanor, quite abruptly, shut his mouth mid shout. 

“ Again.” He said, bleakly. Turned on his heel very suddenly, and stared at the wall. “Eru. Eru. We just spoke of Findekano, and I’d do it again.” He took a deep breath, as Curufin watched, half panicked and baffled. “I will say nothing.” He said. “I do not understand it, but I will say nothing.” 

All three of them stared. Curufin made a high pitched, incredulous little sound. He did not relax until Helca gently steered him into the bedroom and coaxed him into bed, and then laid bodily over him, using his chest as a pillow. 

He buried his nose in her hair, breathing hard. His pulse was still racing. He eventually fell asleep, but it took some time. 

The Empress’ men came to arrest them the next morning. 

Chapter Text

“On what charge?” Feanor demanded, of the men in armor at the door. Outside, the sun was still rising, painting the city in gold and rose. He could hear his son and Helca and….Finrod…stirring. 

One of the men in armor looked up at him. It was a considerable way to look. Feanor, like Finwe, was tall even for a Noldo. His own sons had all inherited his height as well. Particularly Maitimo; Feanor had found it necessary to go through his household and raise every doorframe by several inches when his eldest had hit his final growth spurt. 

Such height was not, it seemed, a trait of humans. Feanor had nearly knocked his head on many doorframes since returning to life. The humans were all giving him angry looks, as if having to look up at an elf was a cosmic unfairness. 

“Murder.” Said the leader of the armed men, shortly. In the large bedroom, Feanor heard a curse in Curvo’s voice and a scramble, presumably after arms and armor. 

“I don’t recall doing any murder.” Feanor said, with absolute and ringing truth in every syllable, and shut the door in their face.

He went back to the table, as the banging on the door began again. It quickly went from irritated to angry to violent, even as Finrod burst out of the large bedroom, still jerking the buckles on a vambrace tight and settling his sword at his side. Curufin was only a moment behind, hastily yanking on a boot. 

“Atar?” Curufin asked. 

They found the soldiers you killed. Feanor told them, silently. And traced them to us. He picked up the sword he and his son had made from the table, and the scabbard. The scabbard was not finished yet, in his opinion; it would look better with the scrollwork and the stars of his house picked out in gold leaf and red garnets. But it was serviceable, and the sword was finished. Out loud he said “They are seeking to take us before their empress to face justice for murder.” 

Curvo cursed. Finrod cursed even more foully, in several languages, not all of which Feanor knew but with an energy that absolutely carried the general tone. 

“How many?” Curufin asked, grim. 

“Fifteen.” Feanor belted his sword on. 

“We can take…” Curufin trailed off, looking at Feanor. “Atar. Atar what are you thinking?”

There was a great deal of wariness there, and it was well deserved. This side of the Halls, and with the rents in his fea he’d dealt himself mended, it was easier to see. But. 

“I am thinking.” Feanor said, dangerously calm as the latch splintered. “That we should go with them, and see this Empress.” 

He turned on his heel as men piled in, swords drawn. “Easy, good men.” He said, and poured every bit of power he had into the words. “We will come along. I simply wished to gather my family and make it known that we should go with you peacefully.” And he smiled at them. 

It hit them as hard as Curufin’s warhammer might have. 

“Oh.” Finrod said, as he watched the men wearing the lion on their breastplates draw up short, blinking in confusion, sword arms lowering. 

“Oh.” Said the leader of the group of soldiers, in a much different and less knowing tone. “Well. You could have just said. Well. We’ll have those weapons, then…”

“The streets are a dangerous place for an honest elf.” Feanor said, smoothly. “I am certain you would do your best to defend us with your own steel, but we all feel better with means to defend ourselves at hand. I’m certain you understand.”

“Jorge.” Someone at the back said, but uncertainly. “They murdered chevaliers.” 

“We certainly did no such thing! A misunderstanding, I am certain, and one that will be understood soon.” 

He watched the men waver, and delivered the coup de grace. “Besides.” He said. “You are fifteen, and we are four; what have you to fear from us, you strong armed soldiers?”

“To the palace.” The leader allowed. “I suppose.” 

“ Dropping vain tears into the thankless sea.” Finrod muttered, in Quenya, and shook his head, half wondering and half despairingly. “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to see it at work.” 

Atar. Curvo’s tone over osanwe was deadly serious. We can get past them now, and flee. We could go north, to Nelyo. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, I will not risk this. 

He was thinking of his wife as he said it; there was a flicker there of white-blond hair and the thought of a son or daughter that would not be born for several years yet. 

It was something that Feanor would not have risked either. But he’d seen it laid out before him in his dreams last night, a perfectly straight line between where they were now and something better. 

I do. He told his son. But his sons had trusted him before when perhaps they should not have, and it had led them all to Feanor’s death and five centuries of war for his sons. 

But. He amended, to all of them. If you do not trust me, then we will leave. Through them, if necessary. And we will go to Nelyafinwe. 

That shook them. Visibly. And he watched his son and his law-daughter both look at him and choose the same thing they’d chosen in Aman. Finrod eyed them, and sighed. 

“I’ve died once.” He said, resigned. “It can’t be any worse a second time.” 

And so they followed the rather dazzled and unaware soldiers of Empress Celene, who let them keep armor and weapons both. The men led them across the city, and to the sprawling Imperial Palace, a building of polished white limestone and graceful towers roofed in gold-leafed tiles. The gardens were equally vast and sprawling, and far too rigidly laid out and severely clipped for Feanor’s taste. 

They had acquired, to the increasing nervousness of the soldiers, a large number of people trailing them. Elves and humans both. 

“Jorge.” Said one of the soldiers guarding the gilded gates. “Why are they still armed?”

“Surely you can see that we attract great attention.” Feanor said, winding song into the words with the rhythm of his speech. “As brave as I am sure you are, we feel better with arms to hand to defend ourselves. Besides, you are soldiers trained and sworn, and outnumber us; we would surely be fools to draw them when meaning harm to you or your Empress.” 

“Why are they being held?” Someone behind them in the press of the crowd asked. 

“We are accused of murder.” Curufin said, and Feanor could hear the power there as well. “Unjustly. And now the Empress thinks to vanish us into the palace, unarmed and defenseless.” 

The crowd murmured, angry and numerous. 

The guards traded a nervous look. 

“You can keep the damned weapons.” One of the imperial guards said. “For now. They’ll take them before the Empress sees them anyway.” 

They did not, in fact, do so. Twice guards moved to. Twice more, Feanor spoke. Curvo helped, the second time, and Curvo and Finrod both the third. 

When they stood before the Empress of Orlais upon her golden throne, Feanor reflected that the throne was one of the ugliest, most tasteless, and most overdone things he’d ever seen in his life. There was a lion face on the back, surrounded by stylized rays. The armrests were snarling lions. There were winged nudes supporting the lion heads. The entire thing was gold leafed and painted, and Feanor had the immediate urge to throw the horrible tacky thing into a fire so that it wouldn’t curse perfectly innocent eyes any longer. 

“Why are they armed?” Demanded the woman on the throne. She was blonde, wearing a mask as so many Orlesians did, and looked angry. 

“Celene Valmont.” Feanor said, before anyone could get a word in edgewise. “I charge that you have done murder, on a grand and terrible scale, and made streets run with the blood of those you are charged by nature of your station to protect. I charge that you have turned a blind eye to the terror and murder your vassals do in the streets of your own city with no fear of justice. I charge that you are a coward who listens to cruel whispers and weak of mind enough that you would slay your own people to silence them. And on behalf of those you have wronged in the ill course of your rule, I challenge you, by the laws of combat of your own lands.” 

Silence. 

“Are you mad?” Celene demanded, but her knuckles were white on the armrests of her throne, and she was trembling. 

“If you slay us without cause.” Feanor said. “There are thousands outside your palace, even now, who will want answer made for the crime. How many guards have you to hand?”

Not enough, said her expression. Not enough. Said the uneasy shifting of her guards. 

“I have cause.” She said. “Or did you not murder a group of chevaliers on the road outside the city?”

“Have people no right to defend themselves when accosted upon the street?” Feanor demanded. “Those villains sought to steal the weapons and valuables we ourselves made. There was no murder done; they struck the first blows, intending to slay us. Will you accept, or prove yourself a coward?”

“Only those of noble blood have the right…”

“Ah! And so I am. Finwe was my father; the High King of the Noldor. And after he was slain, I was High King in turn. I have seven sons, and every one of them a king. I am as nobly born as you, cruel coward.” 

Celene was wavering. There were few among the Noldor who could have been unaffected by the full force of an angry Feanor son of Finwe; Celene was affected, and trying desperately to conceal it. 

“Thierry.” She said, softly but urgently to one of the armored guards at her side. “Are there really…”

“At least five thousand people outside the gates.” The man answered her, tersely. “Restive and unruly, and calling for justice. I don’t know what’s gotten into them. We’ve two hundred and fifty men here, Empress. It won’t be enough, if they decide to break the gates.” 

Behind the mask, Celene was schooling her face to blankness, but her lips were tight. “I am the empress.” She said. “I do not answer the challenges of an accused murderer.” 

“I have seven sons.” Feanor smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile he had given the Valar, before telling them to shove it where it didn’t shine. “And if they hear that you slew me for murders I did not commit and dishonored a fair challenge by your own laws, my sons will burn this palace to the ground.” 

“That.” Curufin said. “Is true. My eldest brother alone would flatten this place to the ground, and have your bones buried in an unmarked coward’s grave.” He smiled too, showing teeth. “He’s just to the north now. I’ve brothers in Antiva and Par Vollen. We are all kings by our own deeds once already; they will be again, if they aren’t already.” 

The color drained from Thierry’s face. 

“Empress.” He whispered. “There are reports of an unnaturally tall elf who has taken up with the Gray Wardens; our spies have been. Very concerned.” 

Curufin smiled more widely. “They’re right to be.” 

Celene stared down, lips thin, knuckles white, and Feanor saw and felt the moment her will buckled against his. 

“I do not fight duels.” She said. “I have a champion for such things.” 

“Then I will fight him.” Feanor said. “And I will do it for all to see.” 

Chapter Text

There had been no ships going from Jader to Orlais or Nevarra. There had been one going from Jader to Kirkwall, where Fingon was assured that there would certainly be a ship going to one of the ports south of the Anderfels. It was only a couple of days sailing. It seemed reasonable. He paid and spent three days ignoring the stares of the sailors on the cargo ship. 

He had hoped, in a large port city, to find a decent place to sleep and some hair oil. Kirkwall, however, when he left the cargo ship as the crew began to unload furs and timber, had other ideas. 

Kirkwall might have been one of the worst places he’d ever had the ill pleasure of setting foot in. The creeping miasma of misery reached well outside the city; he felt it even as they approached the cliffs, oily and dark. He was nearly sick when he saw the statues on the cliffs. 

Gaunt, hopeless, weeping. For a moment he was on the cliff side of Thangorodrim again, clinging by some slim handholds to the side of the mountain as he desperately fought with that cruel manacle around Russo’s wrist. He could hear Russo weeping hopelessly in his ear again. He looked away, shuddering, and had to breathe with his eyes closed for a few moments before he had a hold on himself once more. 

He was, Fingon reflected, as he watched an absurdly large rat chew on the corpse of a dead pigeon in the street, not going to get a wink of proper sleep. There was something wrong with the place. He wasn’t sure what, but there was a cloying aura that to the senses of a Noldo whispered of old blood and pain. It reminded him far too sharply of clearing the pits of Angband. 

The horrid statues wept overhead as he went down the docks, speaking to one crew after another in hopes of finding a ride. He hit success on the fifth one. 

“We’re going to Cumberland in the morning.” The captain of a large fat bellied merchant ship said, squinting up at Fingon. “You can follow the Imperial Highway north from there through Nevarra and nearly straight to Weisshaupt. You thinking to join the Wardens?” 

“Is there any way you could leave before then?” Fingon asked, still trying not to look at the statues. 

“Won’t finish loading our cargo until then, so no.” The man shrugged. “That one over there is leaving for Val Royeaux in a couple of hours, but that’ll add days on foot or horse.” 

Fingon ground his teeth. The hair on the back of his neck was prickling; it felt like the city itself was watching him, a great malevolent beast that did not like him any more than he liked it. 

“I’ll be back in the morning.” He said, reluctantly. “If you know any good inns to stay at, I would be grateful.” 

Every sailor in earshot burst out laughing. 

“Never been to Kirkwall before, eh?” The captain asked, amused. 

“No, and I don’t like it here.” Fingon answered, bluntly. 

“No one does, Kirkwall is shit. The Hanged Man is better than most. If it’s full, there’s the Alienage. Elves’ll usually take in one of their own for a night.” The human looked Fingon’s seven feet two inches up and down. “Though you might not fit on their beds. Maker. What did your parents feed you as a boy?”

Fingon ignored that. “Directions, if you would.” 

Armed with directions, he found his way through Lowtown. To his increasing horror, he eyed the terrible state of the place; the construction of the best of the buildings would have made any of his own people cry in horror . A pack of children ran past, playing with what looked like a dead rat. 

As he passed one of the narrow filthy alleys, about twelve figures melted out of the shadows. Or tried to; a human might not have seen them in the gloom, but Fingon did. 

He stopped. Turned, even as they tried to slip out behind him, drawn by the gleam of gold in his hair and ears and clearly intending to crack him over the head with one of those wooden cudgels. 

“Why.” He said, tired, to no one in particular. He did not get an answer and had not been expecting one. He did get a club swung at his face. 

He leaned back, watched it pass by, grabbed the forearm of the man swinging it, and wrenched the man entirely off his feet. Heaved him at two of his friends, bodily, sending all three to the ground in a tangle of startled limbs. 

There was a beat. The men, startled, stared up at him. Fingon, tired, stared down at them. About fifty people in the street, enthralled, stared at the lot of them. 

“I am.” Fingon said, still tiredly. He hadn’t gotten more than first sleep in five days, and he hadn’t had a proper bath in seven. “A foot taller than any of you. Why.” 

In answer, a crossbow bolt tinged off the armor between his shoulderblades. He turned and saw a man hiding behind a few crates near a stall selling hand pies. Fingon started forward…

…and stopped, as a hand lined in glowing blue burst from the man’s chest, holding a heart. The man looked startled more than anything else, as the elf pulled his hand back, dripping. 

“Because.” The elf had hair as white as some of the Sindar, or Celegorm, chopped off into a shaggy cut that just brushed his jaw. He watched the human fall dispassionately, even as the rest of the band of attackers scrambled backwards and vanished. “They are stupid.” 

He shook drops of blood and gore off his hand, and then pulled a rag out of a pocket and wiped the rest off before hooking a toe under the dead man at his feet and kicking the body over onto its back. “You’re not from here.” 

“No.” Fingon said, staring. 

“No one from Lowtown would wear ten pounds of gold openly and be surprised that someone tried to mug them.” The elf crouched and rummaged through the dead man’s pockets. “And only some of the muggers here would be idiot enough to try and rob someone a foot taller than them and twice as broad. Vishante kaffas, cheap bastard only had twelve coppers.” He stood and eyed Fingon, keenly. Those gleaming blue-silver tattoos ran up his arms and vanished under his armor, to reappear at his throat and curl up to his chin. 

“My thanks.” Fingon said. 

“You had them.” The other elf said, dismissively. “But I was interested.” He looked Fingon down, and up, and up. “ Kaffas. I thought I was tall for an elf. Where are you bound, stranger?”

“The Hanged Man.” Fingon answered. “I was told I could get a room there.” 

“You were told right. It’s the best Lowtown has to offer, and the better establishments in Hightown don’t like letting in our kind. They know me there. Come, I was heading that way myself.” 

“ Our kind? And I did not get your name.” 

“Fenris.” Fenris flicked the point of his own ear. “Our kind. Knife ears. Rabbits. Pointy eared little vermin.” He half smiled without humor. “You know. Elves. They’ve all sorts of names for us.” 

“Yes.” Fingon said, sourly. “I’d noticed. What is their problem, anyway?”

Fenris barked out a laugh. “You really aren’t from here. Come. I’ll tell you over wine. What’s your name, stranger?”

“Findekano.” Fingon said. “Fingon most often these days.” 

The Hanged Man was a better building than most in Low Town, which meant little. It was busy, but people cleared out of Fenris’ way when they saw him. 

“Corff.” Fenris said, to the blond human man behind the bar. 

“Fenris.” The man said. “Your usual?”

“Send it up to Varric’s suite. I’ll be using it for the night. And put everything on his tab. He still owes me twenty crowns for last time we played wicked grace.” 

“Sure enough.” Corff glanced up…and up. “Who’s…”

“A friend.” Fenris offered no further information. “His tab’s with mine.” 

Fingon, ignoring this, drew out a golden crown and laid it on the rather dented and scratched oak bar. “For dinner.” He said, firmly. “And a bath, and drinks.” 

The gold vanished almost instantly. “You’ve got it, mister. We’ve got stew, or roast goat, or…”

“Roast goat.” Fenris said, instantly. He glanced at Fingon. “Maker only knows what they put in the stew.” 

“Goat twice. Anything else, or…”

“Hair oil.” Fingon said, a little hopelessly. “Mild soap or powdered soapwort. I don’t suppose…”

“Oh. Stall outside three down on the left. Specializes in Rivaini goods.” 

Fingon slapped another golden crown onto the bar in sheer relief and headed for the door. 

The woman running the stall had hair curlier than his, and very dark skin, and he nearly wept when she handed over hair oil and a shampoo bar. He paid her, and immediately returned to the inn. Fenris, looking bemused, took him up to the very top of the building. 

The pair of rooms was outfitted in a style that would not have been out of place among the dwarven kingdoms of the Blue Mountains. It could have used the walls finished with plaster and rather more decoration in Fingon’s opinion, but it was better than he’d hoped for. And, wonder of wonders, there was a large copper tub that was being filled with hot water by a pair of maids. 

He waited impatiently as they finished. Food arrived, and wine. Fenris began to eat with good appetite. Fingon sat and inhaled his own food. It was not the best he’d ever tasted, but it was far from the worst. 

“So.” Fenris asked, as Fingon drank the wine. It was somewhat sour, but it was wine. “Where are you from?”

“Another world.” Fingon told him, plainly, and ate the bread and butter that had come with the mutton. 

Fenris blinked. Blinked again. “ What?”

That took explaining. By the time Fingon finished, the tub was full. The maids left, and Fingon bolted the door and without ceremony began unbuckling armor. 

“If you’re going to try and kill me.” He told Fenris, bluntly. “Please do it now so that I can have a bath in peace. It’s been weeks since I could properly wash my hair.” 

Fenris laughed, a little hysterically, and uncorked another wine bottle. “ Kill you? No. No one’s paid me to kill you. Oh, Hawke won’t believe this; I have to write her. This is just the sort of nonsense this city would spit out. You’re headed for Weisshaupt? Alone? Have you been attacked on the road?”

“Repeatedly.” Fingon said, tiredly, and stripped off his gambeson and the linen tunic beneath it, draping both over the privacy screen the maids had dragged around the bath. His trousers followed, and he stepped into the water and set about the long, laborious job of undoing his braids. 

“Part with a little of that gold, and I’ll go with you to Weisshaupt and guard your back. You’re clearly capable, but you’ll sleep a little easier.” 

Fingon considered it as his fingers worked. It was not a terrible idea. “I could maybe sleep at all.” He admitted. “You’re a mercenary?” 

“Just so.” Fenris sounded pleased. “I am.”

“I don’t generally trust mercenaries.” 

“Wise of you, in general terms. But you interest me.” 

Fingon selected one of his bracelets. It was of yellow gold and blue sapphires, a series of curling spirals holding the gems, wrought by some of the finest craftsmen of the Noldor. He tossed it over the screen. There was a clank and and a scramble as Fenris retrieved it. “That enough?”

“Fuck my ass. That’s enough.”

“I’m married.” Fingon laid aside another golden ribbon from his hair. “I’ll pass.” 

A chuff of laughter. “We can get horses…”

“I’ve got passage on a ship in the morning, to Cumberland. I’ll pay your way too.”

“....even better.” Fenris sounded delighted as Fingon gingerly ran his fingers through his hair, and then dunked his head underwater to wet the lot. 

It took Fingon three hours to wash his hair, oil it, and braid it up again. He felt considerably better once he did, but it also let him feel the oily malevolence of the city even more keenly. He sighed. 

“I sent your clothes to be washed.” Fenris said, when Fingon looked around for them. “They needed it. There’s a robe there. Should fit you. They get Qunari staying here now and then.” 

The robe did. 

“You can have the bed.” Fingon told Fenris. 

Fenris’ eyebrows rose as Fingon settled himself on a chair, his sword beside him. “I can sleep anywhere. It’s fine.” 

“There’s no way I can second sleep in this city.” Fingon shivered a little. “I'll stay right here, and get what first sleep I can. I feel like this city is watching me. Terrible place.” 

“Well. Kirkwall.” Fenris didn’t argue the point. “The shit is first sleep?”

Fingon looked at him, blankly. “The kind where you still have your eyes open? Where you’re still aware of what’s going on, to an extent?”

“ Kaffas. You can do that?”

“You can’t?”

“Be bloody useful.” Fenris muttered, but took the bed anyway. “Suit yourself, I suppose.” 

Chapter Text

His father fought the Empress’ champion the same day. Outside in the garden where everyone could see, at Feanor’s insistence. They’d yet to meet anyone who had the sort of mental fortitude to withstand Feanor once he got talking, and it didn't seem likely to happen soon. 

There was no time to finish the armor Curufin had been making. Feanor, even relatively fresh from Mandos, was broader through the chest and shoulder than Finrod. He was not, however, as broad as Curufin. Neither of their armor would fit him, which was going to kill Curufin with sheer anxiety alone. 

He attempted, for about ten seconds, to talk his father out of it and let Curufin fight for him. That went nowhere. There was no force so unmoving as a stubborn Feanor digging his heels in, save perhaps now, post burning ships and five centuries of war, for a stubborn Maedhros digging his heels in. 

But Maedhros was not there to argue with their father. 

Curufin worried a little less when he saw the Empress’ champion. He had not been impressed with Orlesian armor in general. He was less impressed with Michel de Chevin’s in particular. 

“If you wish to retrieve the rest of your armor and don it.” Feanor said, politely. “I will wait.” 

Ser Michel flushed angrily. “Fine talk.” He said. “From a man wearing none.” 

“I am wearing exactly as much armor worth the name as you.” Feanor said, in the tone of a Noldorian smith who was judging the work of another and finding it sorely lacking. 

Nelyo. Curufin prodded, anxiously. Nelyo. 

Wha…Curvo? What’s wr…

Curufin packed the important points of the morning’s events into as little space as he could, and shoved it at his older brother. A couple of hundred miles to the north, Maedhros nearly choked on his morning tea. 

If this goes badly. Curufin said, as he watched Michel roll out his shoulders and neck and angrily try and puff himself up at their father, who was more than a foot taller than the chevalier. We may be running your way. 

Maedhros swore roundly in Curufin’s head. If it goes badly. He said, grimly, after about eight uninterrupted seconds of profanity, I’ve enough loyal to me here that I can send them south with one of the Ambarussa and meet you as you flee. 

Curufin let out a breath, relieved. Of course Nelyo would help; that was one steady constant in the lives of him and all of his brothers, through all the madness of the last five hundred years. I’ll let you know. He said. Either way. 

Do. I’ll make preparations, just in case. And if Atar looks like he’s about to get himself killed again, drag him out of it.

Of course. Curufin hadn’t considered anything else. 

Before them, in the ornamental courtyard bordered by flowering plants laid out in unnatural precision, Feanor drew the sword Curufin and he had made. The sunrise was just brightening into warm yellow from the reds and oranges of dawn, and the golden light ran down the blade, lighting it up like the flame it had been named for. It flickered over the tengwar Curufin had engraved into the blade along the length. 

Oryanar is my name. Curufinwe made me. 

There were two maker marks on the blade just above the gold and red enamel crossguard, one on either side. One was Feanor’s. One was Curufin’s. Anyone living in Beleriand would have known the meaning, and the price of such a sword would have been above any sum of gold. 

No one in Orlais knew, or knew what such a thing meant. Michel drew his own sword, and Curufin squinted. 

“Oh.” Said Helca, who was no smith but who had been married to Curufin for fifteen hundred years and had picked up a few things via sheer osmosis. “ That’s blade heavy.” 

“Terribly.” Curufin agreed, beginning to wonder if the weapon and armor smiths of Orlais simply hated the chevaliers they crafted for. 

To his credit, Ser Michel did pause, and stare at Feanor’s sword. 

“Where did you get that?” He demanded. 

“We made it.” Feanor said, with quiet pride. “My son and I.” He lifted his chin, eyes blazing silver. “Your Empress named you her champion, as she has not the skill to answer my challenge.” He shot Celene a withering look that would have made a Valar flinch. Celene had ordered a chair to be brought out, and she was sitting in it very straight, and very pale. She did her best, but she still flinched. 

“I am her Champion.” Ser Michel said, through clenched teeth. “I am a Chevalier. We are here to fight, elf, not talk.” 

Feanor laughed. “Words can cut as deep as swords.” He said, witheringly, and this whole spectacle was an example of what happened when Feanor was allowed to speak. 

Of course, nothing save death had ever been able to keep Feanor from speaking. 

“For Briari, then.” Feanor raised his voice, as if to prove his point. 

“... who?”

“The daughter of a murdered father.” Feanor’s voice cracked like a whip, a force almost physical, and outside the gates where people were pressed close to watch a murmur rose. 

“The duel is to the death.” Celene said, voice high and tight and, to Curufin’s ear, wavering a bit. “Ser Michel…”

“I’ll slay him for you, my Empress.” Michel didn’t take his eyes off his opponent. 

“Come then.” Feanor said, and raised his sword. Ser Michel moved to meet him, an attack that was swift and furious and clearly meant to kill the troublesome elf as quickly as possible. 

Feanor had not the centuries of war experience that his sons did. He had died, those centuries ago, on the plain before the gates of Angband. But it had taken ten balrogs to do it, and even then he had survived long enough for his sons to drive the balrogs back. For a little while, at least, Feanor had stood alone against ten balrogs, and they had not at once managed to slay him. 

Ser Michel was not ten balrogs.

Ser Michel was not one balrog. 

Oryanar, the Rising Flame, glittered in the golden sunrise, swift as a snake. Feanor was taller than Michel. Feanor had the reach on Michel. Feanor was stronger than Michel. Feanor was faster than Michel. 

Curufin saw Ser Michel realize all of this, very abruptly, at the precise moment that Oryanar bit through the wood and steel of Ser Michal’s shield as if it were soft cheese. To Curufin’s ear, the hiss of the sword through the air was gleeful. 

Michel scrambled back as the top third of his shield fell, sheared away in a cut almost as smooth as glass. Feanor let him go, waiting. 

There was a great horrified intake of breath from every Imperial guard flanking the Empress. An elf outside the gates, though, shouted “one of the Ancestors!” with delight. 

Someone else, sounding almost transported, called out “Arlathan!”

The cry echoed, taken up by others, back and forth, and there was real fear in Celene’s eyes behind that mask. 

Curvo. Feanor told Curufin, mind to mind, in the frozen moment before Michel collected himself and hurled himself back at Feanor, determined. The gate. 

And Curufin understood. 

As his father parried the rising cut and slid aside, as Ser Michel caught himself and pivoted on the ball of a foot, furious, and as Feanor clove Ser Michel’s shield cleanly in two, Curufin hummed, and found the Song of the gates. 

They were not gold. They were gold leaf over cast iron. Curufin knew iron. 

Ser Michel threw the broken shield aside. He lunged again, set and determined and brave. Feinted, did his best to work inside Feanor’s reach, and when he saw an opening went to run the point of his sword through Feanor’s kidney. 

Curufin saw the trap. He knew his father. He’d seen Nelyo use the same trick a thousand times, and Nelyo and Feanor had first worked it out in Formenos, centuries ago. 

Feanor caught the blow with the crossguard of his sword and twisted; the blade-heavy sword that Ser Michel was fighting with was ripped out of his hand. 

Break, Curufin commanded the gates, in Quenya, singing the word into the iron, and the iron obeyed. 

Feanor spun his sword. Curufin remembered the Dagor-nuin Giliath, the battle under the stars, and how his father had smashed through the orcs of Angband like a hammer through glass, and pursued them as they fled. 

Michel gasped. He seemed startled, as he touched his throat. His fingers came away red, and red was quickly drenching his tunic. 

The rapt crowd outside the gates, finding the gates give way as the lock broke, surged forward. 

Ser Michel fell, bleeding crimson over the spotless white crushed limestone of the courtyard. 

Feanor raised the bloodstained blade, and pointed it at Celene. “My charge stands.” He said. “You are unfit for the crown you wear, a murderer and a coward. I am a king, the son of a king, and the father of kings. If this empire needs a crowned head, let it be mine.” 

Celene’s guards had been right. They had two hundred and fifty men. But when five thousand enthralled by the strange mighty elf stormed the gates, it was not enough. It was not nearly enough. 

Nelyo. Curufin told his brother, shortly after when things had settled down a little and the blood had stopped flowing, and Feanor was tossing chunks of the Imperial Throne of Orlais into the fireplace with disdain. So. Our father is the Emperor of Orlais.

There was a pause, from where his brother was sitting in a fortress that Maedhros had neatly stolen out from under a man who still thought he was in command.

Ah. Maedhros said at last, in the tone of one utterly unsurprised. Well. Tell him I need deals on grain, then. 

Chapter Text

Her sons were all anxiously keeping in touch with her, of course; Nerdanel knew what was waiting for them even before they put into port in Val Royeux. She couldn’t say she was surprised. 

Lalun and his crew, however, did not believe it. Nerdanel couldn’t blame them, and did not bother to argue. 

Thus, when they put in and she was greeted at the docks by her son Curufin and a number of armed guards who were giving Curufin the sort of baffled, astonished, and awed sort of looks that Nerdanel remembered very well from Aman when Feanor had begun rallying support, she was not surprised. 

“ Amme.” Curufin said, openly relieved, and she opened her arms and embraced him. He embraced her back, fiercely, but then was turning to his own son. 

“Atar.” Tyelpe said, quietly. 

“Tyelpe.” Curvo said, just as quietly, and very gingerly laid a hand on Celebrimbor’s cheek for a moment. “I’m glad you’re safe.” 

Among the greeting party on the docks was a man. He was one of the strange tiny elves of this place, rather on the thin side, and dressed very brightly. “Empress.” he breathed, and then visibly collected himself. “Welcome to the Empress of Orlais!” 

Lalun promptly nearly fell out of the rigging. 

“Yes.” Nerdanel said, a little dismissively; she had been wed to Finwe’s heir for more than two thousand years, and had also been High Queen of the Noldor for about three months until her husband had gotten himself killed by balrogs. “Curufin, darling. Your father. What is going on?” 

“Atar is atar.” Curvo said, quietly, which said a lot in three words. “Namo released him. He’s…” He trailed off for a moment. “He’s like he used to be, so far as I can tell.”

Which said a great deal more. 

“ Emperor ?”

“Well. I can’t actually say he was wrong to do any of it.” 

Celebrimbor made a thoroughly skeptical sound in the back of his throat, and Curufin flinched. “You have to have noticed that Eldar are not well liked here.” 

She had, and was baffled by it, but… “I can imagine how well he’d like being called a knife ear.” She allowed. 

“Worse. They kill… killed elves in the streets here, simply to test swords. Atar…took exception.” 

Tyelpe’s ears went, in a moment, from ‘skepticism’ to ‘flat back horror’. Nerdanel could feel her own flattening as well. 

“It’s true.” The thin elf said, and he was staring at Nerdanel and Celebrimbor with that same awed near-worship. “It was how a chevalier graduated from the academy.” He said it very matter of factly, and Nerdanel was reminded horribly of how casually all seven of her sons had confirmed that yes, orcs would eat a victim alive if they caught an elf. 

“Oh.” Celebrimbor said, quietly. 

“I want to see him.” Nerdanel said, grimly, and ignored the nervous twist of her stomach. “How long ago…”

“Just before I told you.” He led her towards a waiting carriage. “So. Three days now? Things are unsettled yet. We’ve got the city, but I’m expecting the nobles of the outer provinces to rise any moment. And when I say we have the city, I mean mostly the poor. There’s many elves, and they nearly all support us. There’s just as many humans. Some of them do. Some don’t. The wealthier certainly don’t.” A slight smile. “Though if they’re willing to listen to us, most come around.” 

Nerdanel knew very well how very persuasive her husband and sons could be. “ Most.” 

“Most.” Curufin said, a little tightly. 

Lovely. So they were in considerable danger, actually. 

“Finrod is managing some of the more difficult ones.” Curufin said, seeing her expression. “It doesn’t matter who you put in a room with him; an hour later they walk out liking him. And Helca is managing the palace; she’s found many ears that are kindly inclined our way. She just frightens people.” He said that fondly. 

“Your father?” The carriage pulled up through the gates of a palace, into a very unattractively overly formally styled garden. 

“Give atar five minutes.” Curufin said. “And the ear he cannot bend is rare.”

Truer words had never been spoken. 

Tyelpe offered her a hand down out of the carriage. Nerdanel narrowed her eyes at the Imperial Palace. It was built in some truly excellent white limestone, though in her opinion the finishing chisel work could have been better. There had very recently been statues flanking the massive entry doors; she could see the empty plinths where they’d been set. 

“They were very ugly.” Curufin said, noting where she was looking. “A great deal of the decoration was very ugly. Atar’s been on a tear about it. You can see them if you want; I think he’s got a storage room shoved full of them by now.” 

“I saw the city.” Tyelpe said. Her grandson was a good hearted boy, who always sought to see the best in people until proven otherwise, and he was remarkably forgiving in many ways. It was why he was speaking to his father at all again. Now, though, he was speaking with the intensely judgemental tone of a Noldorian artisan who’d seen slapdash work. 

Nerdanel had too, and the thing these people did to perfectly innocent marble was a crime. “Your father has always had excellent aesthetic sense.” She said, firmly. Feanor had his flaws, but that was not one of them. 

Inside, there was a vast hall. It had been lavishly decorated, but it was currently in the process of being stripped back to bare stone. The rubble of plasterwork with entirely too much gilded paint and some truly hideous plaster lion faces lay in heaps on the floor, which was tiled in a spectacular black marble with veins of paler gold inclusions. Workmen were actively tearing down what looked like about five remodels worth of dry rotted lathwork and plaster, each just as ugly as the last. The ceiling, when she glanced up, had been torn back to bare beams. 

“It was terrible” Curufin said. “All plaster molding, far too ornate. Finrod was appalled. From what I can tell they didn’t even allow it to cure properly before they went and they gilded half the building, and now half of the plaster is cracking and crumbling to dust the moment it’s touched. You should have seen the throne. Atar took an axe to that and threw it in a fireplace.”

“NEL.” 

That voice shook more plaster dust from the roof beams. The arm of a nude figure rendered with very sloppy proportions crumbled, and it and the fanciful curl of stylized grapes it had been holding fell to shatter on the floor. 

Feanor had plaster dust in his hair, which he’d tied up in a tight bun the way he always did when he was working. He had plaster dust on his shirt as well, and it didn’t matter. He’d always been the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, and nothing had changed with that. 

He looked exactly as he always had, as he shoved several startled workmen he’d been giving orders to out of his way and half ran across the hall. He stopped in front of her, and they stared at each other for a long, long moment. 

He looked the same. She didn’t know why she’d expected something to be different, knowing it was a new body that Namo had made him, but every hair was the same. 

“Feanaro.” She said, quietly. 

“Nerdanel.” He said again, very very quietly, and there was longing in his voice. “ Nel .” 

She drew in a breath. She’d pictured seeing him again a thousand times, but faced with it she found all the things she’d wanted to say forgotten. 

“ Haru.” Tyelpe choked out, which gave her a moment to collect herself, because then he lurched forward and Feanor had their grandson in a rib-creakingly tight embrace, plaster dust and all.  

“ Tyelpe.” Feanor said, and kept saying it. “ Tyelpe.” 

Celebrimbor was exactly the same height as Feanor. He tucked his face into his grandfather’s shoulder and clung as if he’d never let go. 

“I’m back.” Feanor said, into his hair. “I’m back. I’m here. I have you. Oh, Tyelpe, I missed you. I wanted to come back. I tried. Namo would not let me.” 

They were attracting an audience. Workmen and their assistants were drifting over to watch. There was a second shout, and then Nerdanel’s law-daughter was also shoving past workmen to wrap herself around Celebrimbor. 

“ Tyelpe.” 

“I’m fine, amme.” Celebrimbor said. “I’m fine.”

“I know, but I still worried. Come. I had the staff lay out tea. You must be tired and hungry.” Helca gently but firmly steered her son off towards a hallway, and Celebrimbor did not protest at all. 

They followed. Nerdanel walked next to Feanor, and said nothing. He was watching her; she could feel it. She did not look at him. 

In a much smaller and cozier room with some truly atrocious relief work on the walls, Celebrimbor sagged gratefully into a very plush chair and accepted tea. Curufin was still watching both his parents sharply. Helca was still eyeing them as well. 

Nerdanel turned to her husband. Feanor looked at her, and said nothing. 

“Give me one reason.” She said, very softly. “Why I should not break my bond with you, ‘Naro. I could.” 

She watched his face crumple. Watched him look away with the expression of someone who’d just had the thing they’d feared most happen, and watched his shoulders slump. But he said nothing. 

“You had many words for me last time we spoke.” She snapped. 

“I did.” He closed his eyes. “I have none, Nel.”

She looked at him, and saw the regret and sorrow. And then she reached along that dormant bond, and it flared to life again. 

His eyes flew open. He jerked, and almost stumbled. For a moment, his mind was open and bare to her, in a way he had not allowed in many years even before he had died. Hers was to him as well as the bond snapped properly back into place, but she’d never wanted to keep him out.

In that moment, she saw exactly what the great fool had done when he’d made the Silmarils, and the secret he’d shut himself off to keep from her. She saw why he’d done it, and she understood it all. 

“ Naro.” She breathed, horrified. “Oh, Naro, you fool.” 

“Nel?” He was breathing fast and hard. “You…”

“If you’d called me faithless again, I would have.” She told him, truthfully. If he’d met her with anger or accusations or excuses, she would have broken the bond then and there. “But, Eru help me, I still love you. I never stopped. I’m furious with you still, mind you.” 

There was joy dawning in his eyes. On the other end of their bond he was leaning almost drunkenly against the brush of her mind, for all she was shuttering herself off again. “I know.” He said. 

“I’ll want my own room.” 

“I can arrange it.” Helca said, immediately. 

“As long as you need.” Feanor agreed, just as quickly. “ Nel. I should never…”

“You should never have done a lot of things. Our sons, Feanaro. The OATH.”

He flinched at that, but again said nothing in his own defense. The Feanor that had left her in Tirion would have raged at her, all reason gone, and every effort to get through to him taken as treason. 

“I know.” He said, wretchedly, inadvertently taking one more miniscule step back towards her good graces. 

She brushed past him and sat next to their grandson, and poured herself tea. The porcelain, at least, was of reasonably good quality. “I’ll need more clothes.” She said. “If I’m to be Empress now.” 

“I’m working on it.” Helca’s expression soured. “There’s little cloth worth anything in this city; they dispose of a garment a week, in their chase for new things. They want fast, not good. But I’ve found a few artisans that produce or import acceptable cloth, and a few who can sew to an acceptable standard. I’ll have them come around.” 

“Thank you, dear.” Nerdanel said, warmly. 

“It must be fit in around other things too, I’m afraid. There’s a vast amount that needs to be overhauled here; Curvo and I have been going through laws for two days. Much should be entirely reformed or thrown out.” 

Curufin made a face. Nerdanel knew her son very well, and knew that such an activity as going through books of law was very far down on Curufin’s list of things he enjoyed doing. He was much like his father that way. 

Quietly, to herself and herself alone, she started the counter of how long it would be before either Curvo or Feanor himself called for Nelyafinwe. 

“I’ll do what I can.” She said, though it was the sort of thing she also disliked. 

“I was hoping you could look at the palace.” Feanor said, slowly and almost shy. She looked at him. “There were many very badly done sculptures I’ve had removed, but it needs art. There’s a local source of white marble…”

“Oh.” She considered, and relented. “Well. I suppose I could let you take me to have a look.” 

Feanor smiled. 

Chapter Text

In retrospect, taking in the strange elves had been a good idea. Jowin was inclined to believe at least part of the somewhat dubious story Maedhros and his brothers told; if nothing else, Maedhros had not been lying that he was well experienced in running a fortress. 

Things were, in fact, ticking over like oiled clockwork. Jowin had kept an eye on the first few transactions with merchants, but he’d quickly realized that he didn’t need to. No one had managed to price gouge the elf. They were, in fact, paying less than a quarter of what merchants had previously been charging the Wardens. Maedhros would allow a fair market price, and a fair fee for transporting the goods, and not a worn copper more. 

The elf had papers laying out fair market value for goods in various markets across Thedas. Apparently there had been a great many meetings with assorted Gray Wardens to draw them up. Jowin had seen merchants wilt in their seats when Maedhros laid them out and asked how they liked living in un-Blighted lands. 

He’d more or less allowed the elf free rein after that, and after Maedhros had ferreted out one of the supply sergeants for the embezzlement that had been vexing Jowin in the first place after about a day and a half. That had been a couple of weeks past. Jowin hadn’t been bothered about trifles in a week and more, and was all in all well pleased with things. 

It was worth the small price of having that unsettling pair of twins around. And even there, each of the pair was, it seemed, an astonishingly competent scout with eyes far keener than any Gray Warden. 

Even the horses seemed generally happier and more tractable. 

With things going so well, in fact, it quite freed him up to set his mind back on other matters. Well satisfied that things were stable, Jowin sent his scribe to summon a few reliable Wardens in order to put together a company to ride with him to Hossburg. 

His scribe returned some time later, rather nervous and without any Gray Wardens in tow. 

“Dorrin.” Jowin frowned. “Where are Blackstone and Orlys and Roan?” 

“Busy. Sir.” Dorrin answered him with immense reluctance. 

“ Busy?” 

“Busy.” Dorrin’s dark eyes were fearful. “On duty.” 

“I’m the fucking First Warden. I set…” He paused, realizing. He had not been setting duty schedules. Not since Maedhros had taken them over. But that did not matter; orders from the First Warden superceded other duties. “Where the fuck is Blackstone?” The dwarf was a solid dependable sort, not usually given to nonsense. 

“He’s in charge of one of the repair crews.” Dorrin’s face was going more pinched and pale. “He’s on the east wall, seeing to some masonry work that’s been put off.” 

“Why the fuck…” 

“He was a stoneworker before he joined the Gray Wardens. He seemed quite happy at it, sir.” 

Jowin, furious, lunged to his feet. He had been sitting at his own private desk in his private suite, writing a letter to one of his noble supporters in Hossburg that he would not trust to any other pen. Now, though, he threw the pen down angrily. “Take me to him.” 

The dwarf, sure enough, was directing a work crew of other Wardens on the east walls. A section of crumbling stonework and mortar was being chiseled away busily, with fresh materials being hauled up by winch to mend the crenelations once the weathered old ones were removed. Blackstone was directing things with all the precision of a surgeon plying his craft, dark eyes gleaming behind those bushy black eyebrows. 

“ BLACKSTONE.” Jowin bellowed, and work froze. 

“Sir.” The dwarf looked up at him. 

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“Work.” The dwarf said, with a strange cagey sort of blandness in his tone that Jowin didn’t like at all. “Needed to be done. Lord Maedhros got in mortar and good stone and found those of us who knew something about masonry, and is seeing to some repairs. Some ought to have been done fifteen years past.” That was said a little resentfully, and Jowin recalled periodic requests on his desk to see to some of the older and more weathered stonework. Had some been made by Blackstone? He thought perhaps they had. 

“We couldn’t afford the skilled masons.” He said, through clenched teeth, because it was true. They couldn’t afford the skilled masons. 

“Well.” The dwarf said, and those black eyes were glittering. Jowin was pretty sure the dwarf was grinning behind that ink-black beard. “No sir. That’s why he found the skilled stonemasons we already had hanging around with their thumbs up their arses.” 

“We are Gray Wardens.” Jowin hissed. “Not common workmen.” 

“Nothing wrong with some honest sweating over mortar and stone. Keeps folks out of trouble.”

Jowin had never known the dwarf to argue back like this. “Warden Blackstone, I am ordering you…”

Blackstone looked up at Jowin, and seemed to consider. He spoke slowly, and with poorly concealed relish. “I’d have to check with Lord Maedhros first.” He drawled. “I’ve got orders already, see.” 

Jowin saw red. 

He stormed through Weisshaupt with a slowly accumulating trail of interested Gray Wardens following him at a safe distance. He found the office he’d given over for Maedhros’ use, and found it entirely empty. 

“WHERE THE BLAZES…”

“Ah.” Dorrin said. His personal scribe was sweating heavily. “Um.” 

“ SHOW ME.” 

Dorrin, looking as if he wanted to shrink down and vanish, led him to, of all places, Jowin’s own fuck damned office. The gall of it was breathtaking. If Jowin hadn’t been so furious, he might have been impressed. 

The door was open. He stormed in. 

The ginger prick was sitting behind Jowin’s desk. With, of all things, a small ginger toddler curled up asleep in his lap, wrapped in Maedhros’ own cloak. A second toddler was standing on a chair very near Maedhros’ good side, well within easy grabbing distance, and scribbling busily on a sheet of blank paper with a charcoal pencil. Someone had stitched together a stuffed nug for her out of rags; it was sitting on top of several duty schedules. She was babbling at it animatedly. 

“...been getting the first replies back from wealthy benefactors in Hossburg and Nevarra.” Maedhros was saying, to one of the Wardens tasked with keeping the accounts. “Things seem promising; it took less convincing than I’d feared to get them to open their purses. Just a few mentions of the recent Blights…ah. Jowin.” 

“ Why are there children in my office?”

The temperature in the room felt like it dropped by about ten degrees. “I am watching.” Maedhros said, frostily. “My niece and nephew for their parents, who needed a chance to get a bath and some rest without children clinging to them.” 

“This isn’t a nursery, what is she doing at my desk…”

“She likes to help her uncle at his work.” The warden-accountant, who Jowin couldn’t remember the name of, said defensively. “They’re not a bother, sir, leave them be.” 

“Traitors all around!” Jowin snapped. In Maedhros’ lap, the boy woke and began to fuss. 

“Now you’ve scared him.” The accountant said, unhappily. “Sir, please…”

“I want you and your cursed family out of my bloody keep by sundown.” Jowin roared. 

Silence. The toddlers both began to cry. Maedhros said something to them in their own language, soft, and then carefully set the boy on his feet. The boy clung to the chair as his uncle stood. 

Slowly, with the implacable inevitability of a glacier. He straightened to his full height, and Jowin had so often seen him bent over a desk recently that he’d almost forgot how bloody giant the elf was. The elf stepped around the desk, very deliberately. Looked down at Jowin, shoulders square. His sword was at his belt, a fact that Jowin realized very abruptly and with some dismay. 

He recalled, very suddenly, hearing in passing a few Gray Wardens speak in awe and admiration of what they’d seen when Maedhros went out to train with his brothers. 

“Is it?” Maedhros said, softly. “Your keep?” He flicked his eyes at the office door. Jowin glanced around, and saw probably twenty Wardens crowded around to watch. One of them was Blackstone, who was watching with undisguised delight. “Give them the order, then.” 

Jowin gritted his teeth. There was a horrible sinking sensation in his gut. “Drag this man out of my fucking office.” He said. “Now.” 

No one moved. 

“Lord Maedhros?” Someone asked. 

“Remove Jowin from my office.” Maedhros said. “He’s just having some trouble adjusting, I expect, but I won’t have him frightening Narerde or Narnona. When he’s calmed down, he can come see me and we will speak of his plots on the Throne of the Anderfels and how he can best be of use to Weisshaupt.” 

Blackstone and four other Wardens started forward at once. 

“I have friends.” Jowin gritted through his teeth, betrayed. 

“Yes. Two thirds of the nobility of Hossburg. I’m aware.” 

“I have friends in Orlais as well. I…”

“Had.” The elf said. “They have bigger problems.” 

“What sort of…”

“My father.” Those silver eyes were implacable, and Jowin had to look away. “Who has overthrown Celene and taken the throne.” 

What. 

“ What?”

“When you’ve calmed down, we can speak.” Maedhros remained standing as several Wardens gently pulled Jowin towards the door. “I realize this is a shock.” 

Jowin seethed as he was ejected from his own office. He glared at the damned traitors surrounding him, who at least had the decency to look guilty. 

“I’ll see you all punished for this.” He hissed. 

“Well.” Someone said. “That’s not much reason to side with you, sir.” 

“ Why would you…”

“Well. Sir.” Blackstone removed a toothpick from his mouth. “See, thing is, he’s better at it than you.” 

“He’s not a Warden!”

“Doesn’t have to be, to keep the grub coming, and he’s right bloody good at that. Firm but fair. Has some good ideas about combating Darkspawn before they even surface. Listens to us. Hell. He’s gotten in better beer and even some shipments of rum from Antiva.” 

There was a general enthusiastic agreement to that last. 

Jowin spent the next few hours furiously tearing his way through Weisshaupt to see how many loyal men he still had. The answer, incredibly depressingly, was almost none. 

At last, ready to bite, he found the fucking elf’s damned brother. He wasn’t sure which; they looked entirely identical to him. In, of all places the bath house. 

“YOU.” He roared. 

“Oh.” Said whichever of the Ambarussa it was, who made absolutely no move to cover himself where he was kicked back on the bench of the steam room. “You figured out what Nelyo was about, finally.” 

“ HOW DARE YOU…”

That just got him a snort of laughter. “This stopped being your fortress the moment you let him inside. He just let you think you were still the one in control for a bit. You’re letting the heat out. Close the door.” 

“I ought to throttle you here and now, you ungrateful…”

“You can try.” The elf said, unconcerned, which was something that Jowin wasn’t used to when a man was sitting there with his cock out. “In the unlikely event you got lucky, though, you’d have Ambarussa and Nelyo both to deal with.” 

Jowin weighed his options, realized that the fucking elf was correct, and left. Stood there outside the bath house and stared at the sky for a solid few minutes, blankly. 

In retrospect, taking the strange elves in had been the worst idea he’d ever had. 

Chapter Text

Cumberland was strange. It wasn’t the terrible malevolent strangeness of Kirkwall, but for an immortal from a race of immortals, there were elements that were baffling. 

“It’s a necropolis.” Fenris supplied, helpfully, as they passed a great ornate building. It was undeniably lovely, but rather macabre; the friezes on the walls were carved with skeletal figures and scenes of death. “They inter the bodies of the dead there.” 

Oh. It was rather more intricate than anything elves bothered with for death, but wanting your body to go somewhere beautiful made sense enough. Fingon was content with that. 

“There are mages who tend to them.” Fenris went on, though. His lip curled a little. “The mummified dead, that is.” 

Mortal attitudes to death in general were strange; Fingon wouldn’t pretend to understand them. He could quite understand wanting to visit a grave to pay respects, and to remember, for all he knew full well he’d see his father again in time. But. 

“Tend to them?” He asked, utterly confused. “Why would a dead body need…”

“Nevarra.” Fenris said, as if that should explain it. “They’re odd.” 

“But they’re dead!” 

“I don’t understand it.” Fenris said, slightly irritably. “Don’t ask me. Tevinter burns their dead, and Kirkwall…well. Kirkwall either burns them or just throws them into the harbor after they take the clothes and boots.” 

Well. At least other people found it just as odd. 

They found horses easily enough. Good horses this time, and Fingon paid for supplies. He paid rather more, he suspected, than a human would have. It was an increasingly irritating fact that was very quickly getting on his nerves. 

“Knife ear tax.” Fenris said, casually, when Fingon complained out loud as they set camp. “I avoid it if Hawke is around by making her do the dealing. Sometimes I avoid it with threats, if she isn’t.” 

“Why does any elf tolerate it?” Fingon groused, and unrolled a bedroll. 

“Well.” Fenris said, dry, as he kicked back against a stone with dried meat and trail bread. “Most of us aren’t six feet tall and can’t phase into a man’s chest to tear his lungs out.” He paused, looking Fingon over. “Or seven feet tall and able to lift a human man by the throat.” 

“Not all eldar of my world are either! The Nandor and many of the Sindar aren’t! Not all of us grew up under the Trees. They’re still fierce in a fight!” Fingon insisted, stubborn. 

Fenris gave him a look. “None of that means a bloody thing to me.” He said, still dry. 

Fingon considered the history of Arda, and tried to determine a way to explain the Trees and the myriad divisions of the elves before and during the Great Journey to someone who had only ever known a sun and moon. “It’s complicated.”

“Sounds it.” 

Fenris took the first watch, as he always insisted on doing. Fingon did manage a few hours actual deep sleep. They were attacked once, but by the time he jolted awake and was on his feet sword in hand Fenris had already killed two men and the third was fleeing. 

Things went much like that until they reached the borders of the Tevinter Imperium, and the Silent Plains. 

They were warned about it by a group of merchants retreating back south, clearly terrified. The oxen drawing the carts were near panic, half bolting, and Fingon had to hum under his breath to calm them. The people were little better. 

“Best choose another way.” One of the people said, as they passed. 

“What’s…” Fenris asked, sharp. 

“Fucking dragon, that’s what’s happened. Set up in the Silent Plains, and is hunting the road.” 

“ Shit.” Fenris said, with feeling. “Is there another way?”

“Back two miles, there’s a smaller road. Goes out of the way and around by three days, but won’t go through a high dragon.” 

“Excellent. Our thanks.” Fenris turned to Fingon. “We ought to turn back, then.” 

“How far is it?” Fingon asked. “The dragon.” 

“A mile or so, just into the dunes of the plains.” 

Fingon began stringing his bow. Fenris’ ears flicked forward, and then back. “You can’t be thinking…”

“Oh.” The last of the merchants sounded grave, as they finished passing Fingon and Fenris and continuing on south. “Well. May the Maker look kindly on your grave then, stranger.” 

“I’m not delaying three days.” Fingon said, and headed on north. “Come or not as you like.” 

Fenris swore. “You’re mad.” 

Fingon ignored this. Fenris, after a moment, swore again, at length, but kneed his horse forward and followed him. 

“You can turn back.” Fingon told him. 

“I took your bloody pay.” Fenris snapped. “I’ll do what I can to keep you alive. Kaffas, it’s like trying to reason with Hawke.” 

The horses knew that the dragon was near before they did, which surprised Fingon not at all. Horses were generally perceptive and sensible creatures. They shied, dug their heels in, and refused to go on. 

Fingon squinted. He could not see as far on this strange world with horizons that bent, but he was elven, and had the eyes that entailed. Far off, over the dunes, he saw the moving shape of something large. 

Horses might be sensible. Fingon had never once in his life claimed to be. He dismounted, and left his horse tethered to a shrub with grass to crop. Fenris, grim, followed suit and doggedly followed him. Fingon gave him credit for bravery. 

The dragon came into closer focus soon enough. It was a great beast indeed, grooming a wing as it reclined in the sun at the peak of a dune. Fingon eyed the great claws and the broad wings. 

“If we weren't downwind.” Fenris hissed. “It would be on us already. You’ve seen it. Let’s go back.” 

Fingon drew an arrow, and fitted it to his bow. 

“You lunatic, they have wings.” 

“This is not the first time I’ve fought dragons.” Fingon told him. “It is not the second either.” 

He stood, and advanced. The dragon spotted him quickly enough, and left off grooming to watch him, apparently bemused. As he closed range, it heaved itself to its feet and stretched, languidly, before shaking itself. 

Fingon raised his bow, set his shoulders, and drew. He was not, perhaps, quite the archer that Celegorm was, but the difference in skill was closer than Celegorm would ever admit willingly. 

He aimed for the joint of the wing at the shoulder. He waited until the beast raised its wings, baring the lighter scales of the underside. And then he loosed, and watched the arrow hiss home. 

It was a perfect shot. Noldorian steel forged to fight Angband’s monsters bit deep and hard, and the dragon screamed even as it swept its wings down to try and take off. It screamed again, as the motion ground the sharp steel of the arrowhead inside the wing joint, and staggered. It did not get into the air, and whirled on him with a roar. But it did it with one wing held limp and lame, and when it roared again in fury and came for him, it did it on the ground. 

Fingon had fought Glaurung, when Glaurung had been about the size of this creature. So he was ready, when the beast opened its mouth and spat fire. He cut to one side; a moment later the dusty sand he’d been standing on melted to glass in the heat of the dragon’s breath. 

He nocked and got off one more arrow; this one embedded itself in the dragon’s chest, deep enough to wound but not fatally. A great clawed forelimb swept around as the beast roared in pain and fury, and Fingon tossed aside his bow and dragged his sword out in one thought-swift motion. He twisted, and ducked, and cut up. The sword bit through the underside of the forelimb, deep and true, but Fingon did not stop. He threw himself away, rolled, and was back on his feet as the dragon screamed and baked the sand underneath it into a molten mass with a breath. 

“YOU MADMAN.” Fenris howled, but Fingon wasn’t listening to him. The dragon, even down a wing and with a front leg lame and laid open to the bone, was remarkably agile and swift. The tail swung around, and he had to dodge closer to the beast to avoid the blow. 

A flicker. Fenris carved a chunk out of the dragon’s side with his broadsword, grim faced. The dragon wheeled on him, momentarily losing track of Fingon, and Fingon took the distraction. 

He sidestepped, lined up his sword, and bracing one palm on the pommel he drove the blade into the dragon’s chest, point first, with all his strength. He did not stop until the crossguard hit scales. 

The dragon’s death throes took a few minutes. Fingon retrieved his sword when they were done with. 

“You.” Fenris was splattered with dragon blood, and looked equal parts impressed and astonished. “ Are mad.” 

Fingon cleaned his sword and sheathed it, and retrieved his bow. “We can get the horses now.” He said, mildly, as he unstrung it. 

“ Insane. Utterly.” Fenris began to laugh. “It’s like traveling with Hawke!” 

“Saved three days.” 

“ Saved three days!” Fenris continued to laugh. He laughed all the way back to the horses, half in the exhilaration of surviving a battle and half in sheer disbelief. 

It was somewhat regrettable to leave that much dragon bone and dragon ivory and dragon horn behind. Still. Fingon left it, and continued north. 

People say we’re a week off. He told Maedhros, that night. I’ll see you soon, Russo. 

Any trouble on the road? Maedhros wanted to know. 

Some. Fingon allowed. Nothing I couldn’t handle, though. I’ll tell you about it when I get there. 

Chapter Text

Some of the freed slaves knew the way to Weisshaupt. Many of them had chosen to return to the homes and families they’d been captured from, but more had none left. Many of them had expressed a desire to stay near the pair of tall fey hunters out of ancient legends who’d freed them. 

The history of this place was vastly different than the history of Arda. Celegorm was beginning to understand the history of the strange short elves who looked so superficially similar to himself and his people, yet were very different in a few fundamental ways. 

There had been, so far, no convincing them that he and Aredhel were not elves displaced in time from ancient Arlathan. The descriptions of Tirion had not helped their case at all.

 Amras met the group of twenty on the plains of the Anderfels. Celegorm saw the glint of sun off copper hair from miles off, and Huan raised his nose to the wind and sent up a glad howl of greeting. The distant rider sped up to a canter, and it wasn’t long until Amras was dismounting to shoulder check Celegorm in greeting, and Celegorm ruffled his baby brother’s hair back. 

“Maker.” Someone said, in awe. “Another?” 

“Tyelko has six brothers.” Irisse told them, amused, as she took the reins of a horse. Amras had brought enough for everyone to ride back, so long as a couple of the smaller elves were willing to ride double. “I have three, and Findekano at least will be around here somewhere.” 

“...Maker.” 

“Telvo with the little sparks?” Celegorm asked, in Quenya. 

“Hmm.” Amras confirmed. “Nelyo thought you’d all appreciate horses the last dozen miles, after coming this far on foot.” He looked over the slightly ragged little group. “He’s things ready for your followers too.” 

“Wasn’t there some prick in command of..”

Amras snorted, which told Celegorm everything he needed to know. “He figured out what Nelyo was about and forced the issue. He’s sulking now, and Nelyo’s stopped pretending.” 

This surprised Celegorm absolutely not at all. If he knew his eldest brother at all, Maedhros would have the newcomers housed, fed, sorted by trade, and found useful places within hours of their arrival. 

Hello. He said, in Horse. Several of the horses snorted and looked at him in shock. 

Another one! One of the mares seemed delighted. She trotted over, shoved her nose into his chest, and nudged him in greeting. Celegorm scratched behind her ears under the mane, to her delight, and then mounted. 

“Maker.” Felcen said, for about the fifth time. “Are the horses just. Following you? Lord…”

“Ambarussa is fine.” Said Amras. 

“His name is Amras.” Celegorm told them, as Aredhel also chose a horse and mounted. “He and Amrod are just strange.” 

“I don’t speak Horse as well as Tyelko or Naridh, but they like me.” Amras told the little group. “They like me more because Naridh likes me. Come. Mount up, you all must be hungry. These lands are shit for hunting.”

“There’s something wrong with it.” Celegorm scowled at the short grass. “I’ve been feeling it for two days.” 

“It’s like it’s sick.” Irisse agreed. 

“Not wrong.” Amras grimaced and turned his horse towards the west. “It was Blighted. I’m not entirely clear yet on what Blight is, but ‘some sort of sickness’ seems to be the basic explanation. It lingers. Sometimes for centuries, apparently.” 

“What are you saying.” Ririel was a blonde elf, short even by the standards of the elves of Thedas. 

“Ah.” It was very easy to fall into Quenya with his brother and wife. Celegorm switched back to English. “I was asking why the land here is sick. Pityo was saying it’s because of the Blight.” 

“...Pityo?”

“Oh. Pityafinwe. Pityo. My brothers are the only ones who use that, you can just call me Ambarussa or Amras.” 

“...How many names do you have?” Ririel’s voice was pitching up sharply. 

“Mother name.” Irisse held up a hand and began ticking off names on fingers, riding without hands. “Father name, shortened use-names…like Pityo…and those are the Quenya from Valinor. We all took Sindarin names in Beleriand, which is where Amras comes from.” 

“...what? Do you all…”

“Yes.” Aredhel said, patiently. “Take Tyelko. Tyelko is short for Tyelkormo, which is his mother-name. Turcafinwe is his father name, but hardly anyone ever uses that. Celegorm is Sindarin. Or me; Irisse is my mother-name. Ar-Feiniel just means ‘noble white lady’ and is just a nickname because I look very good in white and silver and wear them a lot. Aredhel is Sindarin.” 

Several people were giving them blank faced looks of bafflement. 

“I’m just Huan.” Said Huan. “Elves like naming things. That includes themselves. They’re also immortal, so they tend to collect a good many names over the centuries.”

“As you say, friendly demon.” Someone else said, warily. 

“I’m not a demon.” Huan said, for about the fiftieth time. 

When Weisshaupt came into view, Celegorm could only laugh. The fortress was set on a high stony hill, looming over the plains below, harsh and forbidding. It was so very, very Maedhros. 

“I know.” Amras didn’t need to even ask. ‘I think he can smell them.” 

Maedhros and Amrod met them at the gates. Amrod had a toddler in each arm, both of whom shrieked happily and reached out to Amras when they saw him. Amras dismounted and took one, apparently at random, and perched his niece on his shoulders. Narerde laughed in delight and wound her little fists into Amras’ hair. 

“Sweet ones!” Irisse promptly stole Narnona from Amrod, and bounced him up onto her shoulders. Celegorm, not for the first time, reflected that his little niece and nephew probably spent more time being carried than any other Noldor children alive. 

Maedhros wasn’t bothering to hide his relief at having them somewhere safe; Maedhros had ever dealt with threats to his family by mother henning over the lot of them, and Celegorm was well used to it. 

“Tyelko.” His older brother said, with open relief in his voice, and pulled him into an embrace with his good arm. 

“This shit is a mess.” Celegorm said, with feeling, and leaned into the embrace. “Nelyo, the fuck is wrong with this place?”

Maedhros sighed, and rubbed between his eyes in a little gesture that Celegorm knew meant Nelyo had been up late and suffered more than one stress headache trying to figure out exactly that. “A lot of things.” His older brother said, in a brilliant example of the sort of dry understatement that Nelyo was capable of. “Come in. I’ve quarters arranged, and you must all be hungry.” He looked over the little ragged band of followers Irisse and Tyelko had amassed as Naridh collected the horses, cooing at them in flawless Horse and smiled at her children being fussed over by Aredhel. 

The group of little elves stared back, and up. Celegorm and Aredhel were both tall, like most of the Noldor raised under the Trees and like all of Finwe’s descendants. Celegorm, though, was the shortest of his brothers by a slight inch, and Nelyo was the tallest by several inches. 

“If you’re friends of my brother and law-sister.” Maedhros said. “You’re welcome here.” He inclined his head and gestured to the open gates with his stump. “Come. There’s food ready.” 

“We don’t want to join the Wardens.” Someone said, warily. 

“I didn’t ask that you did. It’s a big fortress.” 

“But the First Warden…”

“I.” Maedhros said. “Am the one in command of Weisshaupt, not Jowin Glastrum. If you’re worried about overstaying your welcome, don’t. I’m certain you all have skills, and this fortress is in desperate need of workers. I can arrange fair wages, in addition to room and board.” 

They all stared at him like he’d just promised them the moon and sun. For people who’d been slaves taken from desperately poor families, Celegorm reflected, it probably did seem too good to be true. 

“I can cook.” Lilya was tall…for an elf from Thedas… and dark haired and thin. She ventured this rather timidly.

“Good. I’m in rather dire need of helping hands around this fortress.” 

Nelyo. Celegorm said, over osanwe, as several people glanced guiltily at the very distinct lack of a hand on Maedhros’ right side. Really?

Maedhros, who thought he was very funny, ignored this. “Come. I’ve had food laid out.” 

Maedhros had people sorted into various positions before they’d finished their lunch, which surprised Celegorm not at all. There were a few freed slaves who’d worked skilled trades, but a good number more who professed experience with laundry, cooking, and other domestic tasks. They seemed rather surprised to have these considered seriously, apparently not realizing the sheer amount of laundry that a fortress the size of Weisshaupt could generate, even if not at full strength. Celegorm could not profess to be as adept at running such a place as Maedhros, but he had been Lord of Himlad for four hundred years and more. He’d left most of the administration to Curufin and Celebrimbor, but he still knew the amount of supporting labor running a military force took.

Quite frankly, the fact that the Gray Wardens had not had several hundred civilian staff working in Weisshaupt was fucking astonishing. He said as much out loud, and got a very long very tired sigh from Nelyo. 

“And they were wondering why they were struggling.” Maedhros knocked back the rest of his wine, very quickly. “I’ve largely got things sorted now, or am getting there.” 

Celegorm propped his boots on the table and leaned his chair back on two legs. He was eating at the high table, next to his brothers. The food had not been fancy, but it was decent and there was plenty of it. The wine wasn’t half bad. “Where’s the idiot you threw over for this place?”

“Sulking.” 

“He going to be a problem?” 

“He’s going to try and be.” Maedhros shrugged. “But he was very unpopular before I showed up. It didn’t take much, in truth. He’s maybe two people who harbor any sympathy for him at all here. If he gets to Hossburg he might cause problems; he’s been angling to usurp the throne of the Anderfels for years, and has a fair number of noble supporters. I’ve been in contact with several of them, which he doesn’t know. Give me a month yet to work on them, and I can cut the last legs of support out from under him.” 

“Good to see you’re enjoying yourself.” Celegorm leaned forward to retrieve the wine bottle. “Where’s Findekano?”

“Four days south.” Maedhros said, instantly, and with more than a little longing. “I keep telling him to stop and rest, but he never listens to me.” 

Celegorm had been at Alqualonde, and remembered full well the sheer singleminded vicious tenacity of a Fingon the Valiant who’d decided he was going to get to Maedhros by any means necessary. “Fingon doesn’t listen to anyone.” 

“No.” Maedhros said, with fond weariness. 

Celegorm nursed his wine, and considered. At last, cautiously, said “Have you spoken with atar?”

Maedhros’ silence was answer enough. 

“Me either.” Celegorm stared into his cup. For about the thousandth time, remembered Feanor’s displeasure when Maedhros had married Fingon, and thought of his own wife. He could remember as clearly as if it had happened yesterday standing over the scorched grass where his father had died, and feeling very lost and not knowing what to do. 

It hadn’t been a betrayal. He knew Feanor had not intended to die. But it still had felt like it, when they’d all been left without him in a strange and vicious land that had taken their oldest brother scant weeks later, and had only grudgingly given him back after thirty years, scarred and haunted and furious. 

“I should.” Maedhros almost whispered. “I know I should.” 

“If he lays into Irisse.” Celegorm said. “I think I might hit him.” 

“I think she would first. And I think Finno would be first of all.” Maedhros’ eyes were far away, and Celegorm thought that his brother was thinking about ships burning, and Feanor slapping Maedhros across the face when he had refused to take up a torch. “I don’t know that I’d stop any of you.” 

They both brooded about that through the rest of the meal. The thin, ragged rescued slaves all ate like they’d never seen food before. Huan somewhere got an entire raw leg of mutton, hauled it over to the fireplace, and happily set about eating it bone and all. 

“I have talked with Curvo.” Celegorm said at last. “He says he can build it again, and get us home, if not to the Lady Systlin’s Keep. Faster, even, if atar is there.”

“Good.” Was all Maedhros said.

Chapter Text

The Antivan Crows, it turned out, were exceptional friends to have. And once it was known that you were their friends, absolutely no one in Antiva was willing to give you any sort of measurable trouble. 

They also paid exceptionally well, and believed in taking care of their good friends and occasional hired musicians. Or at least Zevran did; shortly after Maglor played the dinner Zevran gave him the keys to a villa on the edges of the city, beaming. 

“It’s no trouble.” He insisted. “It was offered as payment for us dealing with a certain, ah, inheritance issue some years back. My predecessor lived there, but he is no longer in need of it. I prefer to live in the city, myself, and so it is unoccupied at the moment. We can supply the references of a number of potential staff for you to survey and hire, if you like.” 

“Terribly generous of you.” Naldalaime said, dry. 

“Hardly. It’s in my best interests, I think, to keep you well inclined towards me and uninterested in hiring your singular talents to any of my enemies.” Zevran smiled like a knife. “This is wholly self interest, Lady, make no mistakes about it.” 

“And of course the staff you vetted will keep an eye on us.” Almiel observed, in the same dry tone her mother had used. 

Zevran beamed. “Naturally! So long as you’re staying in Antiva. It’s not personal. We keep an eye on everyone of importance in the city.” 

Maglor, to tell the truth, appreciated the forthrightness. The villa was a well appointed and very pleasant place, and came with a fully stocked wine cellar. There was a wide airy room with lots of windows that Almiel promptly took over as a painting studio. Maglor, after the first several days of Nalda doing her level best to fuck him absolutely dry, set up a chair in the studio as well. It was…it was very nice, to sit and watch his daughter capture the sunrise on the hills in oil paints, as he wrote. 

He was thoughtfully jotting down musical notation for a piece inspired by the sound of songbirds in the olive groves outside the villa as Almiel painted when Zevran turned up again, after perhaps a week of inhabiting the villa. The Crow looked very serious, but he still paused to eye the canvas Almiel was working at. 

The Noldor were, after all, artists in their bones, and had centuries in which to perfect their crafts. The soul who was immune to the beauty they could create was a vanishingly rare thing. 

“Lady.” He said. “You’ve a rare talent.” 

“Yes.” Maglor agreed, proud. 

Almiel set her paints aside and cleaned her brush. “You did not come here to praise my talents, I think.” She arched a dark eyebrow that was a near identical copy of Maglor’s own; the dubious arched eyebrow was as well. Maglor had treated all of his brothers to that expression a thousand times over the centuries. 

“No.” Zevran sat on a windowsill. “I have received a job offer.” 

“Oh.” Maglor said, unsurprised. “Someone wants me dead?”

“Oh, probably, but it’s known you are a friend of the crows. It’s unlikely that people would bother trying. No. There are some very wealthy people in Orlais, it seems, who would very much like the Emperor dead. They are willing to pay an enormous sum for it.” 

Maglor felt his jaw work. It wasn’t surprising. He rose to his feet, slowly, and picked up his sword. The instincts of five centuries of war died hard, after all; he did not like being without it near. 

Almiel. He told his daughter, silently. Stay behind me, if things go badly. 

“Peace, friend.” Zevran didn’t rise. “We will not take the contract. It is your father, yes?” A slight wry smile. “I have heard a dozen versions of how he took Celene’s crown from her. I would think them all absurd, save for the fact that I have seen you work. If your father has a tenth of your gifts, I think I am not so surprised.” 

“I have, at my very best, half of atar’s gift for swaying people.” Maglor said, honestly. Zevran’s eyebrows climbed for his hairline. “When it comes to politics, I’ve not even my oldest brother’s gift for swaying people.” 

“Ah.” Zevran contemplated that for a moment. “And you’ve six brothers? My word.” Another pause. “Are they all so…” He waved a hand, taking in Maglor from head to foot. Almiel made a face. 

“Not all of them are as good looking as I am.” Maglor, who was a consummate artist in the practice of dragging little brothers, said casually. “But most people find them reasonably attractive. Your chances are best with Celegorm, and I suppose he’s reasonably pretty if you can ignore the fact that he’d live in a dirt heap given half a chance.”

“I see. Well, I will remember that. A formidable family. We digress.” His eyes sharpened. “You see, the Crows made a promise, some time ago. At least half of our number are elves, you see. Many others are at least elf-blooded, for all many can pass for human. We find ourselves in a unique position, therefore. We are assassins, but that gives us certain power that few elvish groups have held. Mostly on account of the fact that any time elves try to gain any power of self-determination, various human groups have declared an Exalted March to put us down again. So. Some time ago, it was agreed among the Crows that the next time any possibility of an Elvish homeland rose, those who inevitably decide to crush it will start dying.” 

He gave Maglor a knife-edged look, dark eyes glittering. “Now, you see, an elf is Emperor of Orlais, the empire built on the bones of our people. They say he struck down the Empress’ champion in the name of an elvish street vendor’s husband, murdered to test a Chevalier’s sword. Whatever your story, what is being said street to street and house to house and whispered in alienages is that he is one of the ancients from Arlathan that was, the vengeance of ten thousand murdered elves. Tell me now and true; if it is demanded of him that he return the Dales to the elves, would he?”

“Yes.” Maglor said, without having to think about it at all. Feanor had his flaws, but his sense of justice was a keen and burning thing. 

“Ah.” Zevran’s voice was soft, and he sounded almost pleased. “Well. Good enough for me, then.” His smile was thin and sly and cold. “I will start arranging a few visits to those who sent birds asking to pay for an Emperor’s death, then.” 

He rose. “Thank you, my friend. Do send to your father my best regards and hopes that his life be very long and that he continue irritating people.” He headed for the door, and paused. “Oh. I have heard some very strange reports from the Anderfels of late. Weisshaupt, in particular.” 

“Oh.” Maglor said. “That would be Maedhros, my older brother. He found the First Warden very lacking, and took his castle out from under him.” 

Zevran tilted back his head and laughed for a solid minute and a half. Long, heartily, until he was wiping away tears and leaning on the door frame for support. 

“Oh.” He gasped at last. “Oh. Oh, I must get in touch with Elana at once. My love will be furious.” 

Maglor blinked blankly. 

“My dearest Elana.” Zevran was still laughing. “Elana Tabris, Warden Commander of Ferelden, Hero of the Fifth Blight. She’s hated Jowin for years. Oh she’ll be so angry she missed it. My friend, your family is a gift. Oh, I must get her back here from her quest and introduce you, she’d adore you. I may send your older brother a gift basket on her behalf. I’ll need to get his tastes in wine and cheese from you.” 

“The sharper the better, and the drier the better.” 

“Splendid.” 

Chapter Text

“Who’s coming again?” Blackstone asked, curious, as Maedhros stared off at the horizon as the sun slanted towards late afternoon. The dwarf was, Maedhros was finding, a steady and reliable sort, and had a mind like a honed razor behind those sharp black eyes. 

“Finno.” Maedhros caught himself. “Fingon. Findekano.” 

“You tall fuckers all have too many damned names. Pretend I don’t know who the shit Fingon is, boss.” 

“The High King of the Noldor.” Maedhros said, simply. “I’ve told you the story, Blackstone. At least the broad strokes.” 

“Sure. But that doesn’t explain why you’re pacing. You’re going to wear a hole in the battlements, boss. Forgive the comparison, but you’re pacing like a lady waiting for her lover to return from sea.” 

Celegorm, who was perched precariously on a crenelation, snorted with laughter. “You’re more right than you know.” He cackled, as Maedhros leveled a look at him. 

Blackstone’s eyebrows climbed. 

“I’ve been wed to Fingon for twenty five hundred years.” Maedhros said, quietly. 

“He used to pine in between visits where he and Findekano would go out and go hunting.” Celegorm snorted. “Which meant going out to the forests to find a quiet clearing to moon around and fuck in. Neither of them can hunt. They honestly thought they were getting away with it, even though they almost never brought any game back.” 

“I was hunting before you were born.” Maedhros said, coolly, on sheer principle. “I might not have ridden with Orome, but…”

“You can shoot or spear a deer if it wanders in front of you by accident.” Celegorm allowed. “But you can’t track to save your life, Nelyo. You bloody well lost Finrod, you and Maglor.” 

Maedhros scowled; it was one of the few arguments that any of his brothers could win against him. “Finno can.” 

“He’s better at following a trail than you.” Celegorm allowed, with well earned arrogance. Whatever else he was, he was possibly the finest tracker alive, and Maedhros knew it well. “But that bar is low.”

Blackstone just nodded thoughtfully. Glanced up at Maedhros. “Married, huh?”

Maedhros held up his hand. The gold of his wedding band gleamed on his index finger. “It should go on the right hand.” He said. “But Fingon took me giving him my hand quite literally.” 

Blackstone…and several other Gray Wardens…flinched. Celegorm rolled his eyes. “He thinks he’s being funny. That’s a joke he doesn’t make unless Fingon isn’t around; it makes Fingon look at him all sad.” 

“Azaghal laughs.”

“Azaghal’s sense of humor is terrible. Just as terrible as yours, Nelyo.” 

“People will be disappointed.” Blackstone visibly chose to ignore that entire exchange. 

Maedhros blinked. “Dissapointed?”

Celegorm buried his face in one hand and muttered something that sounded vaguely despairing under his breath. 

“There’s four dozen people off the top of my head who were wondering if they could manage to tumble you.” Blackstone said. “I don’t go for men myself, and I prefer other dwarves, but for an elf and a man you’re pretty to look at, I’ll give you that. But, like I said. Men aren’t for me, and you’re the boss now besides. Lot of other folks here will be disappointed, though. Some of them still might give it a shot.” 

“They should.” Celegorm said, instantly. “Please tell them they should, for my personal amusement. It won’t work, but watching the frustration is always a good show.” 

“Tyelko.” Maedhros said, through his teeth. “I will drag you down those stairs and throw you into the fish pond. Shut your mouth.” 

Celegorm, who knew full well that Maedhros would follow through on such a threat, shut his mouth. 

“Pretty.” Maedhros kept his voice level, but a little of the brittleness came through. “Is something I’ve not been called for a long time.” 

“In your hearing, maybe.” Celegorm interjected, apparently forgetting to shut his mouth, but his tone was serious. 

“Tyelko.” Maedhros snapped. 

“Half of Himring would fall into your bed in a heartbeat, Nelyo. You have to know that. I know you’ve probably never in your life looked twice at anyone but Fingon, but you can’t be that blind.” 

Maedhros contemplated shoving his little brother off the wall. Celegorm was saved by the distant sight of a pair of riders. 

Finno? He called. 

Russo. Fingon’s mental voice was strained with exhaustion. Varda. You really did just go and find yourself Himring again, didn’t you. 

Maedhros blew past everyone else, down the stairs to the bottom of the wall, and past a number of startled Gray Wardens to wait at the front gates. 

The eyes of the Firstborn were keen; it was some time yet before Fingon and his traveling companion actually arrived. Maedhros waited impatiently. 

Fingon arrived at last, drew up his dun gelding, dismounted, and made straight for Maedhros without hesitation. He looked terrible, or as terrible as Fingon could; weariness and dirt couldn’t hide that astonishing beauty.

Maedhros opened his arms. Fingon walked into them, dirt and all, and in a moment all was right with the world again, at least for a few moments. 

“I have had.” Fingon said into Maedhros’ shoulder, rather muffled. “A time.” 

“Have you slept?” Maedhros worried. 

“He has not.” Fingon’s traveling companion dismounted. He was an elf, tall for one of the elves of Thedas but shorter than any of the Noldor. His hair was as silver-pale as Celegorm’s, and there were blue-silver tattoos running down his arms and up his neck. “Not for six days. Apart from that odd thing he does while sitting there open eyed while I sleep.” 

“Finno.” Maedhros admonished. 

“This place makes me uneasy.” Fingon didn’t loosen his embrace. “I haven’t been able to second sleep in the open since we reached the Anderfels.” 

“Well, get in here and into a proper bed, then.” Maedhros eyed the strange tattooed elf. “You’ve my thanks for watching his back, Fenris.” 

“You know my name…of course you do, because you can talk to each other in your heads.” Fenris sighed, and then started to laugh, a little hysterically. “Watch his back, he says. Watch his back. That lunatic is possibly the most astonishing swordsman I’ve ever seen, and he says watch his back. Dragged me along more like.” 

“I said you didn’t have to follow me the last bit.” 

“I took your pay.” Fenris snapped. “I’ve professional pride, damn it.” 

“Fingon.” Maedhros asked, noticing. “Why do you have a necklace of bear teeth?”

Fingon made a deeply unhappy sound. “I have had a time, Russo.” 

“Come on.” Maedhros told him. “You need a bath, Finno.” 

“Russo, you know just what to say.” Fingon sighed against his shoulder, and with immense reluctance let go of him. “I’ve not had a proper bath since Kirkwall. Which is the worst city I have ever been in.” 

“Hm.” Maedhros tended to measure how terrible any place was against Angband. Very few places got close enough for him to actually consider them more than ‘mildly unpleasant’. 

“I’ll tell you later.” Fingon rubbed his eyes. “After I get clean, and get some decent sleep.” 

Maedhros turned his head. Blackstone was there, watching the whole scene with interest. “Don’t need me the rest of the day.” He ordered. “Unless you absolutely must.” 

“Sure thing, boss.” Blackstone produced a toothpick from the seemingly inexhaustible supply he kept in a little silver box, and stuck it in his mouth as Naridh strode out of the gates towards the horses. Both horses pricked their ears towards her, and trotted towards her happily. 

An hour later, Fingon was slumped down into a bath. Maedhros, sitting behind him, patiently unpicked his braids, worked out the snarls with a wide toothed comb, and then bid Fingon dunk himself to wet his hair. 

Fingon dozed off into first sleep as Maedhros washed his hair. It was a long task; Fingon had an immense quantity of beautiful curls that had suffered rather badly in his time on the road. Maedhros did not mind. It was a far dearer task than many. 

“Finno.” He murmured at last. When that didn’t rouse his husband, he repeated it. ‘Finno.” 

“Hmm?” Fingon blinked several times. 

“You can rinse.” 

Fingon did, shaking his head underwater and surfacing again. There were dark circles under his eyes. Maedhros smoothed back a dripping lock of hair from Fingon’s eyes, and began to gather up the gold ribbons from Fingon’s braids he’d set aside. “There’s hair oil in my chamber, and then you can sleep as long as you like.” 

Fingon climbed out of the warm bath with some reluctance. Maedhros watched as he toweled off, noting with some concern that Finno had lost a bit of weight during his ordeal. Not much, but enough to be noticeable. 

Fingon twisted his hair up into a towel and shrugged into a robe. The clothes he had been wearing were about to make some of the laundry staff really work for their pay for the day. The string of bear teeth knotted onto a length of twine had been shoved in Finno’s belt pouch. 

People stared when Maedhros led Fingon from the bathhouse to Maedhros’ quarters. Maedhros couldn’t blame them; even tired and with his hair in a towel, Fingon was effortlessly, heartstoppingly beautiful. 

In Maedhros’ own quarters, he shut and locked the door. Fingon eyed the bed…fresh sheets, turned down invitingly…with intense longing, but sighed and sat at the chair next to the little writing desk shoved under the high narrow window for the light. 

“Where’d you find…” He asked, as Maedhros retrieved the bottle of sweet oil scented with rosemary. 

“Naridh did.” She had hair just as curly as Fingon’s, and even more so. “She got some for me and Irisse when we asked.” 

“I’d make her a lady again.” Fingon mumbled, as he tossed the towel on the floor and his wet mass of hair tumbled down over his shoulders. “Just for that.” 

It took quite some time to oil Fingon’s hair. He fell asleep again during that time, open eyed. Maedhros gently shook him awake at last when he was finished. The sun was well down by then, the last traces of red fading outside the window into the velvet dark of night. 

“I’m done.” He said, gently. “Go to bed, Finno.” 

Fingon yawned until his jaw cracked. Pulled his hair forward, and braided it into one very fast thick plait to keep it from tangling. Stood up, removed the robe, walked a few steps, and folded forward into bed with a groan. 

He was, Maedhros thought, asleep within thirty seconds, and without even bothering to pull the blankets up. He went and drew them up; Fingon didn’t so much as twitch as the sheet and blanket settled over him. 

Maedhros called for a very late supper. Paged through a study on the deep roads for a bit by lamplight as he ate, and at last headed to bed himself, contemplating how much stone and mortar it would take to simply fill in as many tunnels as could be found. 

Fingon stirred, but only to mumble incomprehensibly as Maedhros fitted himself around the curve of Fingon’s back, slinging an arm over his waist. 

Maedhros closed his eyes. After a time, opened them and swore quietly. Fingon, dead asleep, didn’t so much as twitch an ear. Maedhros closed his eyes again and tried to focus on the smell of Fingon’s hair rather than the press of his ass against Maedhros’ groin. This worked not at all, because Fingon’s favorite hair oil had ever been scented with rosemary, and the smell brought up a great number of exceptionally pleasant memories. 

He sighed. Rolled to his back, shoved the blanket back, and got out of bed. His cock, stubbornly, remained as hard as steel. 

He retrieved the discarded towel from the floor. Sat on the edge of the bed, and took himself in hand. 

It didn’t take long at all. He had gotten quite good at staying quiet while engaged in such activities; with seven boys in the house, they had all learned as much out of sheer self preservation. Fingon did not wake and did not so much as stir, even as Maedhros shuddered and bit back a groan of pleasure and then cleaned up the mess with the towel. 

He tossed the towel in the hamper, rather than on the floor, and then slid back into bed. With the edge taken off, it was much easier to settle down. Fingon stirred again when Maedhros spooned up behind him, but only to roll over and settle again. 

With Fingon breathing soft and even against his chest, Maedhros slept better than he had in weeks. 

Chapter Text

Fingon woke slowly. Rolled over, eyes still closed and only half-conscious, in search of a nice warm husband to drape himself over. All he found was an empty bed and a pillow that smelled faintly of Maedhros. When he cracked his eyes open, he found one red hair on that pillow, and no Maedhros in the room. Judging from the light coming in the window, morning had not only come but had gone as well, and it was early afternoon.

He yawned, stretched, and sat up. There was a plate set on the desk, with fruit and bread, and a teapot set next to it. He investigated, not bothering with clothes. The tea was cold, but there was a warmer and an unlit candle. Fingon lit the candle from the fire burning down in the hearth, and set the pot over it to warm. 

There was a note too, written in Maedhros’ hand. 

You’re still sleeping, as I’m writing this, and I did not wish to wake you. I’ve left some breakfast. I will try to be back for lunch, but if you wake before then just call for me. If you still aren’t awake, I’ll leave you to sleep. I’ve some work to see to, while you’re abed yet. 

All my love

Your Russo

There was jam with the bread, in a little pot. Strawberry, which was Fingon’s favorite, which Maedhros of course knew. Fingon ate the lot. Investigated the stack of books piled rather haphazardly on the desk. Selected on on the history of the elves in Thedas, and returned to bed with it and a cup of tea. 

It felt downright luxurious, to have nothing in particular to do but make himself comfortable against the pillows and flip through a book at his leisure. That lasted maybe half an hour; rested and fed and reclining upon a proper feather bed rather than lying on a patch of rocky ground, his thoughts drifted away from Arlathan and towards the pleasant memory of Maedhros’ careful gentle hand in his hair the previous night. He’d been tired enough that he’d barely been able to enjoy it properly. 

Ordinarily, Maedhros helping him with his hair almost invariably ended with them making love; Maedhros very much liked tending to Fingon’s hair as well as he could, and he was patient and gentle and skilled at it. It always felt wonderful, and put Fingon in a mood for other things that felt very good. 

He drained the teacup. Set aside on the bedside table, along with the book. Still recalling the lovely sensation of Maedhros’ fingers on his scalp, licked the palm of his hand to wet it, and reached for his cock. 

He was already half hard; he got the rest of the way there very quickly, as he stroked himself and thought of Maedhros’ intent little frown as he concentrated on picking out a snarl in Fingon’s hair without pulling. He thought of Maedhros’ hand, and how it felt on his skin, and Maedhros’ lips, and groaned. 

An utterly delightful plan was taking shape. The bottle of hair oil was still sitting on the desk; Fingon stood long enough to retrieve it. He slicked the fingers of his left hand and, still stroking his cock slow and steady with the right, sank two fingers into his own hole. It wasn’t as good as when Maedhros did it; the angle was a bit awkward. Still, he crooked them, found his sweet spot, and moaned as pleasure rolled up his spine. He added a third finger, way more hastily than Maedhros ever did, but Maedhros liked to take his time to enjoy such things. 

He slid his fingers deeper, moaning at the sensation. Stroked his cock more slowly, and reached out. Russo. 

Finno! The answer was instant and glad. You’re awake. Are you hungry still? You missed lu…

Fingon twisted his fingers, dropped any barrier between them, and shoved everything he was doing at that moment at his husband as he crooked his fingers and groaned with pleasure. 

Halfway across Weisshaupt fortress, Maedhros nearly dropped the inventory list of the shipment of supplies from Nevarra that was being checked. Several people eyed him, concerned. 

“You good, boss?” Blackstone asked, around a toothpick, as he directed the unloading of the carts. 

“Fine.” Maedhros managed, rather unconvincingly. “I’m fine.” 

Back in the bed, Fingon smiled, pleased with himself. This would be better if it were you. He purred, and curled his fingers inside himself again. But if you’re busy, I suppose I can amuse myself. 

FINNO. Maedhros managed to convey a groan of lust over Osanwe. You…I…

Fingon stroked himself, slow and deliberate, and looked down at himself, taking in the view of his own chest and belly, his cock hard and flushed dark in his hand, his thighs spread, his other hand between them to play with his hole. With great delight, he gave the image to Maedhros. 

…will be there soon. 

In the courtyard, Maedhros shoved the inventory sheets at the nearest brother hanging about, who happened to be Amrod. “Finish that.” He said. “I need to go.” 

“You sure you’re fine, boss? You’re flushed.” 

Amrod sighed, the image of every put upon younger sibling ever to live, as Maedhros vanished at a very fast clip into Weisshaupt. He flipped through the papers until he found where Maedhros had left off. “I’m guessing Fingon’s awake. Some advice; avoid that wing of the castle the rest of the afternoon unless you want to hear….things.” 

“Things.” Blackstone sounded amused. 

“Things.” Amrod grimaced. 

In the bedroom, Fingon, immensely pleased with himself, added more oil and went back to toying with himself. He wasn’t actually trying to get any nearer to climax, and so instead just lazily slid his fingers in and out of himself and stroked his cock every so often, savoring the slow sweet heat in his groin. 

You’d best hurry up. He told Maedhros, purely to tease. I’ll get  impatient and finish without you. 

He got a half frantic wordless sensation of too-tight trousers in response, and smirked about it.

It was only a few minutes before the door flew open. Maedhros, looking a little wild, kicked it hastily shut behind himself, slammed the bolt home to lock it, and began to yank at his cloak pin, fingers slipping as he took in the sight of Fingon, sprawled out on the bed in all his glory. 

“Fingon.” He half croaked, as the cloak hit the floor and he started on his belt. 

“Russo!” Fingon said, happily, and reached out a hand. “Come here, I can help with that.” 

“There were people…”

“I don’t care.” Fingon told him, and dragged Maedhros down by the front of the shirt to kiss him, long and filthily and deep. Maedhros, sinking down on top of him, kissed back with fevered desperation. Fingon scrabbled at Maedhros’ tunic, dragged it off of him, and discarded it on the floor. Did the same with his belt, as Maedhros ran his hand down Fingon’s side and hip and his tongue down the length of Fingon’s neck. 

Fingon smoothed his hands down that broad strong back, delighting in the shift of those powerful muscles. He got Maedhros’ trousers open and shoved them down, and there was Russo’s cock, hard and flushed red and straining. Fingon wrapped a hand around it and stroked; Maedhros keened and dropped his forehead onto Fingon’s shoulder as his hips hitched forward into Fingon’s touch, helplessly. 

“Finno.” He sounded wrecked, and Fingon needed him right that moment, more than he’d ever needed anything. 

“Let me…” Finno panted. Maedhros gave him space; Fingon rolled onto his front. Hitched his hips against the bed, groaning a little as he rutted against the sheets. Spread his thighs and arched his back a bit, invitingly. Maedhros swore, low and nearly reverentally, and then he was settling himself over Fingon, between his spread thighs, and Fingon couldn’t help but press back against him, drunk on desire. 

“Don’t make me wait.” He ordered, and Maedhros, obedient to his king, did not. 

Fingon was ready; he was more than ready. That first thrust was still torturously slow, much to his frustration. 

“Easy.” Maedhros murmured into his ear, voice rough with the effort of being slow and deliberate as he sank his cock into Fingon. 

Fingon swore at him even as Maedhros hilted in him, hips pressed against Fingon’s ass. “No.” He panted. “I don’t want easy. Don’t be gentle. I want to feel you tomorrow, Russo.” 

“Finno.” Mae breathed, and the next thrust drove all the air out of Fingon’s lungs. Oh, oh, yes, that was it, that was what he’d wanted…

He twisted his hands into the sheets, even as Maedhros bent over him, braced on his forearms, and began to really put his back into it. Fingon shoved back against him, rutted against the bed, torn between which felt better, panting, and then Maedhros adjusted his angle slightly and hit the spot that sparked white fire all up Fingon’s spine and made stars burst before his eyes. Fingon keened, and Maedhros’ pleasure at that sound flared hot and wild across their bond. 

“Yes.” Fingon panted. “Yes, there, yes yes yes…” He cut off and moaned, wordless. 

“Keep talking.” Maedhros begged. “Keep talking, I want to hear you.” 

“I missed this.” Fingon groaned into the bed. “Laying awake nights, only my own hand, and not even that most of the time, thinking about your cock…”

Maedhros shuddered. The poor bedframe was creaking in protest as Maedhros did his level best to rut Fingon right through the mattress, but Fingon didn’t give a single shit if it broke. The only thing that mattered was the fact that he was finally being split open the way he’d been dreaming of for weeks, and the heat building fast in his groin. Maedhros was panting into his hair, just as far gone as he was, their mutual pleasure feeding back and forth along their bond. 

“Thinking what I’d do to you when I had you again….harder, Russo, I want to feel it for days…oh fuck…” 

Maedhros nosed his way to the soft skin behind Fingon’s ear, kissed it, and rolled his hips again in a way that scattered all words clean out of Fingon’s head. Fingon groped behind himself, blindly, and gripped Russo’s hip. “Again.” 

Maedhros did it again. And again, and again, and oh, oh, oh…

“Russo…” He managed, barely, because he was very, very close. 

Maedhros shivered, did it again, and then somewhat to both of their surprise was shuddering his way into a truly spectacular climax, shoving as deep as he could go and groaning against the back of Fingon’s neck. The wash of his pleasure caught Fingon, and then he was gone too. 

Anyone in that wing of the castle probably heard his wail of pleasure. Fingon didn’t see the point of trying to be quiet; he and Russo were married, and it was a perfectly normal and natural thing to enjoy bedding your spouse. 

Maedhros sagged against him, after, heaving for breath. Rocked his hips once more as they rode out the pleasant aftershocks of pleasure; Fingon tightened around him very deliberately, which drew a soft curse before Maedhros collapsed to one side, eyes closed, panting. Fingon, sated and still floating on a delicious warm pleasurable cloud, pressed himself against Russo’s side.

“Oh.” He said, a little dreamily, after they both caught their breath. “Oh, I needed that.” 

“Mm.” Maedhros still hadn’t quite pieced words back together. He rolled enough to draw Fingon into his arms. He kissed him on the temple, the jaw, and then on the lips, slow and soft. Fingon reveled in it, delighted. 

“I was working.” Maedhros murmured at last, but he entirely ruined the attempted admonishment by the fact that he was half naked save for the trousers still shoved down his thighs, he had his arms tight around Fingon’s back, and the fact that he said it while lazily nosing his way up Fingon’s throat to kiss him under the jaw. 

“You like it when I bother you this way.” Fingon purred, because he knew for a fact that it was true. Maedhros was not nearly so bold in some ways as Fingon was, but he found it thrilling when Fingon pushed in certain ways. There’d been many a party in Tirion where he’d gasped out half-mortified but mostly delighted warnings that they might be found as Fingon got his hands down Russo’s pants in a quiet hallway. 

“Eru. Yes. Yes, I do.” Maedhros began running his fingertips through the short hairs on the back of Fingon’s neck, which felt lovely. He stopped after a moment, which Fingon scowled at, and sat up, which Fingon scowled at more. It was only to finally yank off his boots and kick his trousers off, though, and then laid down and wrapped himself around Fingon again. 

“Your sister was asking after you.” Maedhros said, after a bit. 

“Mm. I was wondering where she was when I arrived.” 

“Trying to explain to the kitchens how to make pickled onions like the ones they used to have in that one tavern in Dor Lomin.” 

“...She doesn’t like pickled on…” Fingon grinned. “Oh. My little niece and nephew demanding pickles, are they?”

Maedhros laughed. “Just so. You seem terribly sure.” 

“Oh, I’m just guessing.” Fingon admitted freely, and sat up, but only to straddle Maedhros’ thighs. He leaned down to twine his fingers into that lovely hair and kiss Russo, thoroughly. “What did you tell her?”

“That she’d at least see you for dinner.”

“Oh, excellent.” Fingon rocked his hips down. “We’ve hours before dinner yet.” 

Maedhros looked up at him, a gleam kindling in those fierce silver eyes. He sat up, wrapped his bad arm around Fingon’s back, twisted, and bore Fingon, to Finno’s great delight, down onto the bed.