Chapter Text
The Feast of Victory was, in the highest and best of elvish traditions, a celebration that had already gone for a week and did not show signs of stopping. The glittering lanterns which hung, heavy and fat as ripened fruit, from gold and silver chains gave the party an unearthly cast, a pale imitation of Valinor’s fair light.
Maglor threw his gaze just a moment to Daeron, unnecessarily reassuring himself that they were still in time. They finished the song together to thunderous applause and, as they retreated from the stage, quickly-proffered drinks.
They would be, if Maglor flattered his ego, an impossible act to follow, and indeed, the party lingered a while without music as the question of who would entertain them next floated freely in the air. As Maglor settled into a seat, Daeron still holding at his side, he spotted the usual contenders – Galadriel, whose sense of self was invulnerable to nervousness, and Finrod, who thought the joy was in the act of performing – together on the far end of the party, making no moves towards the stage. Neither of them seemed likely to sing tonight, still wearing mourning grey armbands for Aegnor as they were.
But someone did ascend onto the stage, towering over the rest of the guests, and, with a Silmaril set upon his brow, outshining even the beautiful maiden at his side.
Maglor’s jaw dropped. Daeron whispered, “oh no, she has a plan.”
Lúthien’s expression was utterly serene, but Maglor suspected that her brother knew her well enough to see through that, just as Maglor could see the carefully-hidden nervousness in Maedhros’s face.
On stage, Maedhros turned to face Lúthien, as if the crowd didn’t matter, and she took his hand between hers.
“My Prince,” she said, and though her voice was very soft, it hummed with power across the now-silent party.
Maedhros bowed and kissed her right hand, where she would have worn a seal ring had she been a Noldë, with great tenderness.
Then he turned, not to gaze over the crowd, but rather, to face Thingol and Melian, where they held court at its edge, as far from Maglor’s father as they could possibly have been.
“Your Majesties,” Maedhros said, with all the reverence he might have offered one of the Valar. “Let me first offer my gratitude to you, for your presence here these last nights. Though they are the year’s shortest, they have also been its most glorious. You have brought us much joy by your presence, not only fine wine and music, but also the finest of company.” He looked to Lúthien as he said this, as if nobody else mattered at all. “And now, My Lord of Ancient Forests, I would ask you that highest and best boon – that I might keep her. Though marriage is between elves and the One, neither Princess Lúthien nor I are purely ourselves, and thus I beg your consent. I would take Lúthien into my household and call her my wife, and be taken into hers, if she would honour me as her husband.
“For this honour, I know no boon can match. My presence is worth infinitely less than Lúthien could ever be. And so a year from now, on the day of our wedding, I will give her all that is mine, and crown her, as she deserves, with a light matched only by the stars.”
Maglor sought his father out in the crowd, trying to make out his expression as Maedhros casually used a Silmaril to barter himself a bride, but there was a pole between them.
Before Fëanor could object, Thingol said, “you undersell yourself, Prince Maedhros, for are you not Crown Prince of the Noldor, who faced the darkest of enemies at the side of your… uncle?”
Fëanor’s absence in that fight was still a point of some soreness, three months later.
“That deed has been ascribed to me, though in truth I offer much of the credit to those who fought with us, among them, of course, your servants Mablung and Beleg, without whom victory could not have been assured.”
The unsanctioned heroism of a few more honourable Iathrim in resistance to Morgoth’s flames was also a sore point, but of course, Thingol could hardly point out that he had been so dishonourable as to avoid sending more than the barest trace of aid.
“You are too modest,” Lúthien said, and to her father, “Ada, I know this must seem horribly sudden, but you have told me often enough that it is the way of elves to know the course of our hearts, unconventional though they might sometimes seem. Prince Maedhros honours me with his request, and warms my heart by entrusting me with that which he holds dearest.”
Maedhros said, “it would not be wise to hold any treasure dearer than I hold love in my heart.”
The smiles they exchanged were sickening.
Maglor’s father stood, stepping into Maglor's field of view at last. The twin Silmarils that shone together on his own crown looked like an unworldly pair of eyes, piercing through the souls of all they landed upon.
“Nelyafinwë,” he said, offering a brazen insult to Thingol in his change of language, “are you serious about this?”
“It is a rare thing,” Maedhros told him in Sindarin, “to meet one who is a match to heart, wit, and will. I believe I have encountered here all three.”
Thingol, with a wicked joy at Fëanor’s scepticism, said, “well put indeed, and I am sure any elf wed would agree there is no joy greater than a true partner at one’s side. You will of course spend the engagement in Doriath, learning our customs.”
“For the first six months,” Fëanor overruled, hurriedly, “for it would be our honour, now that we have freed these lands from shadow, to welcome the people of Doriath back out into them. Princess Lúthien, of course, ought to be first among them, since she is to become a daughter of our house.”
It was consent for the match. Given in a spirit of competitiveness and spite, certainly, but consent none the less.
Maglor caught, at the corner of his vision, Fingon turning on his heel and storming out of the party.
--
An Hour Earlier
--
Lúthien, once she was far enough removed from the revellers that she was certain she would not be spotted, leaned up against a tree, the papery birch-bark smooth beneath her fingers.
She never should have left Doriath. It was awful here. She could feel her father and Fëanor sliding towards another war that would be a thousand times worse than facing the enemy because there would be elves on each side. Everything was so tense all the time. If it wasn’t her father and Fëanor, then it was Fëanor and his brother, or her father and Uncle Olwë, old and pointless arguments resurrecting themselves at the slightest sign of trouble.
“Here,” the Noldo prince said, and he offered to her not a glass of wine but a skin of water. His tree-bright eyes were kind, and they met hers, rather than raking her body as so many of the guests at the party had seen fit to.
Everyone in Beleriand knew Maedhros Fëanorion by looks alone. He was singular, with his brilliant hair and his sharp features and his brutal scarring. Like Lúthien, there was no fading into the crowd for him. Like her, he had escaped into the woods, and in doing so, they had met.
“Thank you,” she said, and accepted his offering.
Prince Maedhros came then to sit beside her on the ground, companionable for a stranger, and removed his third of the glorious crown that his people had fought a devastating war for. It shone still in his lap, but at least there it did not overwhelm the light of his eyes.
“Are the parties like this in the court of Doriath?” He asked, “or is it a particular Noldorin madness that renders them so…”
“Unbearably tense, full of the feeling of impending Doom?”
“Just so.”
She would like to say that her people were not subject to such fits of madness, envy and cruelty as their kin from across the sea, but her father’s temper this last week belied that.
“It’s a different sort of tension,” she said, “but I never like parties.”
“You have little enthusiasm for dance?”
“I love to dance,” she said tightly, “more than anything. But I have little love for dancing observed.”
He grimaced. “This I know.”
Prince Maedhros raised his right hand, drawing Lúthien’s attention to the glistering gold, marked with fair engravings like constellations.
“It is not kind,” she said, “that they should subject you to staring for wounds taken on their behalf.”
Had it been wise for the Noldorin prince to attempt to negotiate with the Enemy? Of course not. But he was the one who had bled for it. It would have been easy to send some servant to bear that risk, but Prince Maedhros had taken it himself. Lúthien’s father would never have done that, would certainly never have allowed her or Daeron to.
“It is not kind that they subject you to staring for being as you are.”
“No.”
They regarded each other with quiet understanding, all the vast majesty of their respective lineages rendered unimportant by the connection between them. Music wound through the trees; harp and flute, surely joyous in context, sounded lonely in their solitude.
Lúthien returned his water to him, and Maedhros offered his hand in its place. “Would you care to dance?”
He wouldn’t be able to watch her, when they drew close. She took his hands, metal and flesh alike, and he said, “you’re the better dancer, I imagine.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed, “though I haven’t seen you dance.”
“It was never my craft, not the way it may be yours.”
“My ‘craft’?”
“Every Noldo has one, an area where you excel in skill, to which you dedicate your hands – or feet, I suppose.”
He was tall, unwieldily so, but Lúthien had grown up dancing with her father. It was not difficult to pull him along, informal but joyous steps following the song weaving through the trees and the song that beat always in Lúthien’s soul. He didn’t fight her, letting her will dominate his own until the music through the trees faded; then he lifted and spun her, sending her hair, unbraided in contrast to his own long tail, fanning out behind her.
He dropped her after a second, unable to keep a firm grip with his prosthetic, and Lúthien laughed, not at him, but from the release of tension. It was impossible not to laugh in a moment of such childish joy shared with someone who could have, perhaps should have, been as an enemy.
“All will be well,” he said to her, with a joyous grin of his own. “They cannot celebrate forever, even so great a victory as this, and then my father will dispatch my uncle back to Vinyamar and my brothers and cousins back to our little fiefs, and everyone will have time to bleed off their battle-fury.”
He didn’t know. Lúthien betrayed her father for someone she had known not even half an hour. “They will hardly have time to blink. My Father intends to ask payment for the lands he granted yours upon your arrival in Valinor.”
“The lands he’d abandoned?” Maedhros demanded, with some offence, and then understanding and horror overtook his face. “No. He doesn’t mean to ask for…”
“A Silmaril,” Lúthien finished grimly. “Which your father will not give.”
“Cannot give, rather, in a very literal sense. We swore that we would destroy those who took them from us and in truth I do not know what would happen if they left our care now.”
“‘Us’?”
“My family. So unless your father intends to wed mine…”
Unlike Fëanor, Lúthien’s parents were happily married, and she didn’t think they were likely to graft the quick-tempered King of the Noldor in.
“But it isn’t only your father that has the right to them,” she said, and their gaze fell together upon the crown he had abandoned to dance with her.
Maedhros’s pale cheeks flushed to match his hair. “You are a fine dance partner but I did not mean any implication by it.”
She felt blood rise to her face in turn, and was thankful that it showed less on her than on him. “Nor did I! Or I meant to imply, I suppose, but not that. I meant it out of love of the fragile peace that lies now between our people, not out of desire for you, though I imagine I could come to like you as well as I would ever like anyone.”
His eyes did bear into her then, but in a way that seemed to scrutinise far more than her looks.
“Lúthien Eluviel,” he said, “will you marry me, to prevent our fathers from going to war?”
“Have you no other… commitments that would keep you from this?”
Lúthien did not. She had never desired any before, though many had desired her.
A sadness came upon him, bitter in his eyes, but he shook his head and said. “No.”
“It would not do to begin a marriage with a lie.”
“It would not,” Maedhros agreed, “but I speak the truth. There is one I would have, if the world were other than it is, but he does not want me. Since I will love no other, a marriage by other means suits me just as well.”
She wanted to ask, but by the way his hand had come to the seam of his prosthetic while he lost himself in memory, she thought she knew. Daeron’s tales of sweeping romance, it seemed, had held more truth and tragedy than he knew.
--
That Afternoon
--
“I love you,” Maglor said, in a tone of profound put-uponness, “but what in the name of all that is right and good in this world were you thinking?”
Maedhros wet a cloth in the basin and dragged it across his face, removing the makeup that, while not obscuring his scars, at least served to mask some of their scope. He hoped Lúthien wouldn’t find it false advertising, and was vaguely relieved to remember that the marriage was a scheme and she wouldn’t care about his looks one way or the other.
“Do you want to go to war with Doriath?”
Maglor stared at him. “No?”
“Well then, be exceptionally grateful for Lúthien's decision to warn me that her father planned to ask for a Silmaril before he had time to bring the matter to our father.”
Maglor’s expression of horror was almost as priceless as his look of shock when Maedhros had proposed marriage on stage. “He wasn’t going to…”
“He was. As payment for the land.”
He looked as green as Maedhros had felt when Lúthien told him. “So, Lúthien and I decided to eliminate the need for him to ask. Thingol will see a Silmaril on his daughter’s brow, and can hardly think the match is beneath her, when the crown prince is her groom.”
“So you haven’t fallen in love with her. Good. I was worried I might need to ask Galadriel to check if you were possessed by wicked spirits.”
Maedhros reminded himself that he loved his little brother more than anyone else in the world. Sometimes it was hard to remember why exactly. “She’s clever and kind, and a very skilled dancer.”
“But you don’t love her.”
“I could,” Maedhros snapped, rather more forcefully than necessary. “And you will never say otherwise to anyone else.”
“But Fingon-”
“There is nothing between me and Fingon!”
There was a heavy piece of gold at the end of Maedhros’s wrist that disagreed. Maglor said, “you deserve better.”
“Better than the unparalleled grace and loveliness of Lúthien of Doriath?”
Maglor stayed quiet, but he looked unhappy.
--
“Lou,” Daeron asked, very softly, “do you need me to get my knives?”
It wouldn’t have been the first time. She didn’t like to tell their parents when people bothered her.
Lúthien shook her head. “He always meets my eyes, and he wanted to dance with me instead of watching. He dislikes being watched as much as I do.”
“And yet you both decided to throw yourself to the wolves? I’ve never seen you climb on stage by choice in your life.”
“I knew Father wouldn’t refuse if there was an audience. I took advantage of that.”
His expression was all scepticism. “And you wanted him so badly that you had no time to win our father over?”
“Our father. His father. A mirror reflected in a mirror, perhaps.”
“That doesn’t explain what you see in Maedhros Fëanorion. I mean, his brother is alright – the eldest of them, at least, the next one down sets my teeth on edge and I’ve yet to meet the others – but… you know as well as I do that no one ever comes back from Morgoth. Not wholly.”
Lúthien’s brother was her only real friend, and he was one of the most marvellous and talented people she knew. But he was not one of the kindest.
She thought of Maedhros, who carried water through a party of elves half-pickled in wine, whose makeup had been flaking, just a little by his ear, as they descended from the stage.
“Morgoth rules by fear,” Lúthien said, “and I will not now be governed by him. Maedhros is not his tormentors, nor is he his father.”
Daeron gave. He always did, in the face of things Lúthien truly wanted, although not always with any particular grace or gentleness. “You’re serious about this.”
“I mean to spend the rest of my life at his side.”
Daeron shook his head at her madness, but said little more on the matter.
--
“That whoreson bastard,” Aredhel said, crushing her brother close.
“Nerdanel ‘s’not a whore.”
“Fëanor is.”
--
Maedhros’s father looked like he’d swallowed a lemon whole, as Maedhros and the party from Doriath departed the feast together. Thingol, truth be told, did not look significantly happier about the situation.
Uncle Arfin, playing the adult for the entire assembly, kissed each of Fëanor’s cheeks. “I honour the High King of the Noldor,” he said, “and will guard that which you treasure with my life.”
The ambiguity he left around whether it was Maedhros or the Silmaril at his brow that should be guarded put the lie to his pretences at maturity.
Fëanor ignored the insult in favour of looking directly on Maedhros. He had not, even in privacy, yet admitted that he had consented to the marriage only out of anger. As long as his stubbornness and Thingol’s pride held for another year – less a week – they’d be married, the families one, and the matter would be closed.
Maedhros said, “thank you, Father. For all you’ve done for me.”
There was a little softening in his gaze, and he grasped Maedhros’s arm with a smith’s strength. “Come to Barad Eithel on your return.”
It was as close to forgiveness as Maedhros was likely to receive. “We will.”