Work Text:
Dear Maedhros,
Does the phrase Dagor Bragollach mean anything to you?
Please be advised that if the answer is no, I WILL punch you the next time I see you, because you got me into this, you -
If you’ve left me alone in this, I swear I’ll kill you -
See attached notes for what my scouts have reported about the enemy’s latest movements.
Caranthir
[Message recovered from edge of bonfire, undelivered.]
It took her a while to really pay attention to the elf-prince. It was hard to care about the details when she still had the scent of the funeral pyres clinging to her.
It took her a while, but she noticed, and what she noticed, more than anything else, was, “You sound like you’re chewing on your words three times before you say them.”
The words were soft enough, but it was not a natural softness; it was a ground to bits softness. Words bitten down on for so long they had lost any trace of bite on their own and had been made bland with the loss.
The elf-prince did not pause in his work. She appreciated that; they had exhausted their stores of food while besieged by the orcs, and the elf-prince gutted fish even more quickly than he had gutted their enemies.
She handed another to him before settling in beside him, ready to work. She reached for her own knife before remembering that it was gone, buried beyond recovery in the skull of an orc no doubt currently befouling whatever distant stretch of river it had managed to float to, and she had yet to procure a new one to replace it.
The elf-prince drew forth three as if from thin air and offered them to her without bothering to look at her. They were fair and well wrought, and she almost refused them on principle.
She hesitated too long. The knives vanished, and the elf-prince produced three more; she almost wanted to let these vanish too so she could see just how many he had hidden on his person, but there was work to be done, and she had wasted too much time not doing it. She took the plainest of them and set to work on the fish.
The other two knives vanished, still without him speaking. Then, having had the time to properly chew up his lengthy speech, he delivered it: “I do.” He saw the look on her face and chewed up a longer one. He had to chew it fast though, and it came out halting. “I’m not . . . good at this part. Talking, when I’m not trying to argue with someone.”
If Haldar were here, he’d be elbowing her right now, making some joke about, Look, Haleth, it’s you if you were an elf-prince!
But he wasn’t here.
And that wasn’t her. She wasn’t going to mince up her words. “So argue with me,” she said with a shrug as she took up another fish. “This is just unnatural.”
“I can’t,” he snapped before he remembered himself and color flushed his face. “I don’t want to,” he corrected himself stiffly and took another fish himself.
She looked at him in fascination. “Can’t argue?” she asked incredulously. “Whyever not?” As far as she knew, there wasn’t much between them to argue about, but that was no reason not to; she was sure they could find something.
If nothing else, they seemed to be on the verge of arguing about this.
“I don’t want to strain relations between . . . our peoples over my own foolish remarks.”
Which was very wise and princely of him and also - odd.
That was a good reason for her not to argue with him, with half the men dead and their homesteads destroyed and winter coming on.
She was not sure it would stop her. She half wanted to do it on purpose just to prove she didn’t need him.
But what did she have that could possibly make him wary of crossing her?
She had her people, but what were they to him, these ragged dozens who might yet scatter to the four winds? She had her goods, but even if her homestead was not burned to the ground, even if the stockade had not been breached and so much beyond it despoiled, what were her leathers and furs to this shining elf-prince?
He must have seen her incredulity because he had chewed up more words for inspection: “I tried to treat with Men once before.”
Haleth was quite sure that her people were the only Men in Thargelion and quite sure that none of them had bowed the knee to an elven lord.
Which meant she was not entirely surprised when he said, “After we spoke, she decided to move her people halfway across the continent.”
Haleth felt a moment of kinship for this woman, whoever she was - or, given that she was speaking to an elf, more likely had been. If she could inspire half that much devotion in her own people -
It was not that she blamed them for wanting to go back to their own homesteads, to rebuild and let things be as much as they could like before; each family free on their own lands, banding together only when they must. It was only that if they had not done so - if they had lived in a village as other bands of men did, with a wall already built to protect them, perhaps there would not be so many bones on the pyre, in the river, in the ash of their homestead still waiting.
She would convince them. She had to.
In the meantime: “What did you say to her?” she asked, morbidly curious.
“I said she might like to move north,” he said. There was a mournful plaintiveness to his voice, as if he was still not quite sure what he had said wrong. “Her and her people.”
Haleth considered this as she took up the last of the fish. She suspected he must be leaving something out of this. “How far north?”
“Nearer to my keep. There had been a - a battle. I thought they would want the protection.”
Ah. Haleth took the woman’s side at once. “If they had survived the battle, they probably thought they could continue to survive quite well on their own without swearing to you.”
“I didn’t want her to swear to me,” he protested, flinging up his hands. They came dangerously close to destabilizing the mound of fish. “I wouldn’t have asked Ulfang to swear to me if Maedhros hadn’t been trying to get the leaguer together, I don’t want to drag anyone else under the curse - “
“Curse?”
The furious rush of blood in his cheeks faded, and she was sorry to see it go; it had made him look more real, somehow, and she misliked the grave-sick pallor that replaced it. “The fury of the Valar lies on my House,” he said quietly. “From the West to the uttermost East. My House and all that will follow them. Despite our hopes, that Doom lies still. I do not seek to add to the number that must die to fulfill it.”
She did not know much of the Valar, though she has heard the word before. She did not wish to admit as much to him. “And what is this Doom?”
“We shall die,” he said. He said it with utmost certainty, as though he could see the corpses already. “And we shall die ill, having achieved not what we sought, having seen all good we attempted fall to evil. By weapon, and by torment, and by grief we shall be slain.”
Haleth looked at the remnants of the pyres where her people had burned, having fallen to battle and to the orcs’ sport.
She looked to the river, where some of her people in despair and grief had gone.
“Yes,” she said dryly. “A unique curse indeed.”
(She had, she reflected a few hours later, succeeded in getting the elf-prince to argue with her. And as it turned out, she was right: it was more satisfying to argue with him than to watch him chew up all his words one by one until all the flavor had gone out of them.)
Dear Celegorm,
I hope you’ve been practicing your parrying technique; watching you go down to Dior last time was just embarrassing. Forget Nimloth’s knives; I died of sheer mortification on your behalf.
If you will insist on leaving a blindspot on your left, I will insist on you keeping Huan with you this go around. I can send some treats to help you bribe him if you don’t think you can manage it any other way; Haleth’s people have these dried meat strips that their dogs seem very fond of, and it seems like it might at least be worth a shot
This had better have made sense to you or I swear that I
[Message found stuffed in satchel; never completed.]
It was only when Haldan asked about it that she realized she still had the elf-prince’s knife, and she would not have herself thought a thief, which meant that once she had distributed the fish and checked on the wounded and set up the watch and should have been able to rest, she was instead stalking between the tents of the too-pretty elves to find where their leader was hiding.
When she found him again, he had a small wooden box balanced on his knees and a piece of parchment spread across it that he was writing upon.
Her people had little use for writing, generally, but her father had known the elvish letters and had passed them on. She could make out most of what he was furiously scribbling down.
Dear Maglor,
I am taking full and complete credit for the following song lyrics unless you write to stop me.
I know you almost certainly aren’t here because somehow you stayed alive that whole time, how did you do that, how did you not go insane, were you insane? I think I am going that way -
Does the name Elrond mean anything to you? Because if not, I have thought of a way to prevent a great many future problems if only Celegorm does not mind killing an ancestor or two of Beren’s -
On second thought, perhaps she didn’t know elvish letters as well as she had thought. Very little of that struck her as sense.
And perhaps he agreed; ink was slowly dripping down from his quill to blot out whatever came after that part, and then he was furiously scratching out that line too.
“I am sure the ancestors of Beren are relieved,” she said from behind him.
He didn’t startle; he just glared harder at his parchment. “It was an empty threat,” he said. “I don’t even know who they are, really.” After a moment of even more intense glaring, he grudgingly added, “And it would be poor payment to Elrond besides.”
She nodded as if this was common sense that could not possibly need explanation as she sat beside him on the grass. “And who is this Maglor that needs threatening?”
He grimaced. “He’s my brother.”
He said this as if he did not doubt she would understand the rest.
She did. If she could have shouted sense at Haldar as he broke cover - if she could have threatened him into it -
I will raise Haldan to think you the king of fools, I will spit on your pyre, I will blot your name from our ancestors’ song if you do this -
But she had not, and she would not, and that was why, she supposed, the elf-prince - oh, all right, Caranthir had crossed out so many lines; brothers were too good at knowing which threats you meant.
“You could still do that first one,” she suggested. “Steal his song.” She would have done that to Haldar if he had displeased her enough while he was courting Meleth; taken a song he had written for her and rewritten it as an ode to her beloved brother and sung it before all in her father’s hall before he could make use of it himself; he had hated composing the tunes, as good as he was at writing the words, so it would have been a fitting punishment.
“I could,” he agreed. “Unfortunately, if I sing of the fall of my cousin’s city while it yet stands, I think the rest of my family might take it amiss.”
“They might,” she conceded. “Why was your brother writing of it then?”
He opened his mouth to answer and then closed it again promptly.
“Please don’t start chewing on your words again,” she said wearily. “I cannot believe it is good for your teeth.”
“It is not that,” he protested. “It is only that asking me why Maglor writes anything is entirely an unfair question.”
And that was fair enough, she had to concede. Certainly she would not like to be held accountable for some of her brother’s earlier attempts at verse. So she nodded and drew out the knife she came to return, offering it carefully, hilt first.
He barely glanced up at it. “Is it unsuitable?”
“It’s yours,” she reminded him, and she wondered what was wrong with elves that in the space of a day he could forget he had handed off the best steel she had ever seen.
“And does that make it unsuitable?”
She stared at him for a long moment, translating this into something more sensible before asking incredulously, “It’s a gift?”
The tips of his ears went rather unsubtly pink.
And that -
Surely he was just embarrassed at being undiplomatic again.
Surely.
“It matches your eyes,” he said stiffly. “Excuse me.”
Quick as a wink, he half vanished into the twilight, descending onto two of his people who had been building a fire some ways a way and who looked quite startled at the interruption.
She stared after him, disbelieving.
Her eyes? Her eyes?
They were - gray, she supposed. Most of her people’s eyes were. One could compare them to steel, perhaps, if you had more poetry in your soul than sense.
But her eyes?
(She kept the knife. She also, once she had made her last check of the perimeter for the night, went to find her nephew. He would sleep with the other children, safe in the heart of the camp, but they were all each other had left now, and she didn’t like to leave him for long.
Also, she had some very important wisdom to impart to him that might serve him well in the coming days.
“Elves are very strange,” she told him. She had knelt down so that she could more easily pull him into a tight embrace; he was still young enough not to protest. She confided these words of wisdom to his rat’s nest of dark hair.
Meleth would have hated that. She had always pulled her wooden comb so carefully through Haldan’s hair, even when he squirmed like a wild thing and moaned like the winter wind through the eaves at the time it took. She would have to fix it tomorrow; do it up in the proper braids for a boy who had lived through his first battle.
But for now, Haldan was falling asleep on her shoulder, and she needed to carry him off to rest.)
Dear Amrod and Amras,
I know you hate it when I write just one letter to the both of you, but I only brought so much paper with me when I was riding out, and I am swiftly running out of it, so you will just have to make do.
I am working off the assumption that either both of you remember or neither of you do; if I’m wrong about that, and the two of you actually managed to do something separately for once and I’ve just made things extremely awkward you have my apologies
No, you know what, you do not have my apologies, I refuse to apologize, I am not apologizing for anything until someone can tell me exactly how we got from idly musing on an impossible plan to me waking up in this time of all times
[Message torn into small pieces and carried off by curious birds]
The elves did not leave. They stayed to help with the healing, and they kept a wary eye out for more orcs, and though they did not interfere with the arguments that ranged up and down the camp about what, exactly, to do next, Haleth was very sure they were listening.
Her people could not not stay where they were. The land was defensible enough, but the ground they had blocked off with the palisade was not large enough for them to farm on, and if they spread out enough to fix that, it would no longer be defensible.
They needed to leave. This was clear to her; this was also apparently clear to the elves, because she caught one of them asking Caranthir, “Why not invite them north?”
She wondered if that elf wasn’t with Caranthir the last time the elf-prince had tried that with Men.
“He learns from his mistakes,” she said, and she enjoyed watching both of them jump; apparently they hadn’t noticed her approach, and after almost a week of having them flit around like ghosts, it was intensely satisfying. “Where did that other woman’s people end up, anyway? Across the continent is rather broad.”
The other elf looked confused, so apparently he wasn’t there for that; Caranthir waved him away wearily before answering her question. “Thingol’s lands,” he said grudgingly. “There were . . . worse choices available. They lasted a good while.”
That sounded ominous.
He peeked at her out of the corner of his eye. “The Isle of Balar would have been better.”
She considered that. She had not heard that name before, but considering the name itself: “That sounds like it would require boats.”
His shoulders sagged. “It always seems to come back to boats.”
She gave him a moment to see if he would explain that particular bit of elvish oddity. He did not. She moved on. “How’s the farming up north?”
He stiffened. “You are not coming up north.”
“Oh, I’m not, am I?” The way north, normally faintly ominous with its ill winds blowing down, heavy with hints of malice from the foe lurking there with all his foul workings, now seemed sharply enticing. There was nothing quite as bracing as the snappish strength of spite. “You don’t like us as well as that other woman’s people, I suppose. What was her name, anyhow?”
He gaped at her like the fish he had gutted. He looked rather like she was gutting him now. “Her - what?”
“Her name,” she repeated impatiently. “Women often have them.”
“Hal . . . finwe,” he blurted out.
His ears were as red as a mortal wound.
“Halfinwe,” she repeated. “I have not heard that name before.”
“No,” he said stiffly. “Excuse me.”
She watched him as he fled.
(“Haldan,” she said, “I have a mission for you.”
It would be good for him to stay busy, she thought.
And it would be good for all of them if she got some answers before she marched her people off what very well might be a cliff.)
Dear Curufin,
I need some advice. When you were courting Nirivel did you
Have you managed to let Celebrimbor out of your sight lately? If so, please tell me how you managed it if you did so successfully for more than an hour because even though the situation is entirely different I still find that I
On a scale of one to ten how much rage does the name Annatar fill you with?
Yours sincerely,
Who am I fooling, I’m never actually going to send one of these.
[Message found stuffed in a hollow log that was possibly used as a bench, undelivered.]
She found him on watch duty that night. She couldn’t fault his work ethic at least.
Other things . . .
Like forthrightness, for instance. To pick a random example.
She stood beside him for a long moment, staring into the dark. “Haldan asked around,” she informed him. “He got the other children to help. None of your people have heard of Halfinwe before.”
He gritted his teeth and said nothing.
“I do notice, however, that you were looking at me when you said that name, and my name starts with ‘Hal.’ And according to your people, at least half your family ends their names with -finwe.”
He winced.
“None of them have heard of you having any kind of dealings with the Edain before now, in fact. Dwarves, yes. Your own people, of course. But not mine.” She paused. “They say you met your own scouts halfway coming to the aid of mine. They said something about foresight?”
“I do not have that gift,” he said hoarsely, still staring into the darkness. “I have never had that gift. Or that burden.”
She eyed him skeptically. “Then what’s all this about then?”
He turned and looked at her for a long moment. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m lying to you,” he predicted. “And then you’ll go halfway across the continent.”
“And here I thought you didn’t have foresight.”
He laughed, long and bitter. “Alright, then,” he said, voice as sharp as his knives, and as wild and fey as she had ever heard him. “Alright, why not? If we are doomed to live out all the old tragedies again, we might as well sing them as we go. We have been singing them for millennia now; why stop?”
“You speak in riddles,” she snapped.
“I speak in truth: I have lived this before.” He threw it down as a challenge, his eyes locked so hard on her own that it felt impossible to look away.
It took her a moment to unravel this. “You’ve . . . been in similar circumstances before?” She had not thought so, after what Haldan had discovered, but it was said that elves lived long. Who knew how many of her people he had known? Who knew what he might not have told his followers?
“I have courted you before,” he corrected. “I have courted you, and I have watched you walk away from me, and I have fought all the battles of my people, and I have died, and now I am back to the beginning and courting you again.”
This took her a longer moment. “You have gone back into your own past.”
He nodded impatiently.
For the first time, he looked truly other to her eyes. “I did not know your people could do that.” She was willing to believe that they could, though; there was a burning horror in his eyes behind that impatience, and it was easier to believe that this was yet another strangeness of the elves than to believe that horror a lie.
It was his turn to look startled. “We can’t. Couldn’t. Or - “ He waved a hand in frustration. “This is not typical. The war would be going much differently if we could all just go back whenever we didn’t like something.”
That was a settling thought. The rest was not. “Do we win?”
She did not think he would have come to his own past if they had won.
His mouth twisted. “That depends greatly on who is we.” He sighed. “And, for that matter, what is winning. Morgoth doesn’t win. That was supposed to be enough.”
“Of course that’s not enough,” she said indignantly. “What good is it if we all go down together?”
“It wasn’t quite all,” he said quietly, “but - too many.” He darted a look at her. “You believe me then? Truly?”
She didn’t know if she should, but she knew that she did. She shrugged. “It seems an odd lie to tell. What would it profit you?” He could be mocking her, she supposed, but surely if he was, he would have preferred an audience for it. And if he wasn’t -
How great a burden to bear alone.
No, she would believe him for now, and if he mocked her - well, if he mocked her, she would have her revenge. But until then, she would believe him.
And then the rest of what he had said trickled past the more shocking parts and she said, “Courted? Really? You courted me?”
“Not very successfully,” he said dryly. “I wasn’t lying about you marching your people halfway across the continent.”
She tried to wrap her head around this. “So you - what, saw me biting an orc’s throat out, thought, yes, I like that, and courted me for a few weeks - “
“You had a spear, last time. An orcish one you’d taken off one of their dead. You pinned two at once with it and then immediately started shouting at me about much good I did riding up with my fancy horses now. Not,” he added hastily, “that biting through an orc’s throat was any less impressive.”
That did sound like her, she had to admit. It did not sound like any attribute she had ever heard described as even vaguely likely to attract courtship, but it did sound like her.
“And it was a few months,” he added more quietly. “Three months and a week. I implied otherwise to my brothers afterward, and you must have done the same when you talked to anyone; the histories all seemed to think you left almost immediately.”
“Three months and a week,” she repeated and carefully did not touch the implication that anyone telling the tale of the great histories would have thought her worth talking to. “And then you . . . “
His mouth twisted. “Oh, I went on, of course. For a hundred and thirty-one years after you left, and eighty-six years after you died. And then I rotted in the halls of the dead for a few thousand years or so; no one kept me informed on the precise dates. And I wondered what I could have done differently, that you would have stayed.”
“And you didn’t move on?” she asked incredulously. “For a few thousand years? And don’t you dare try telling me elves don’t, I’ve heard all about your father’s half-brother from your people this last week.”
“That’s not - “ He sounded a bit as if he was going to start shouting for a moment, but he reigned himself in. “Not typical of us.”
“And what you did was,” she said skeptically.
He tried to say this, but he apparently decided that if he had stopped lying to her about all of the other many ridiculous things surrounding all of this, this wasn’t the place to start it up again.
“It was worth it,” he said instead.
Haleth had a terrible notion that it was now her turn to look like a fish.
She had expected many things of the elf prince who had come charging into her battle with help she hadn’t wanted to need.
She had not expected him to tell her that he had spent a few thousand years puzzling over her memory. That it had been worth it to do so.
She rather wanted to shake him. She suspected this was not the correct reaction.
“I barely know you,” she pointed out.
“I know,” he said quietly.
“Sooner or later, I am going to leave again, even if I don’t mean to,” she pointed out with slightly more desperation. “Even if we win properly this time, I’m still going to die sooner or later.”
“I know,” he said, even more quietly.
“Courting me cannot possibly have been interesting enough that you want to experience it twice.”
His eyes snapped up. “In two lifetimes, you have not said anything more wrong.”
She rocked back on her heels at the force of the fire in his eyes. She had to turn away for a moment; had to stomp off a few paces to gather herself before spinning back around and stomping back to him.
“I don’t like you knowing so much about me when I know so little about you,” she said when she had found her tongue at last. “You’re going to have to fix that on our way north.”
He froze. “North?”
“I’ve been spending the last few days talking my people around to it,” she informed him. “You need to start paying better attention. I think it could be militarily advantageous to both of us. Unless you disagree?”
“I don’t. But the doom - “
“We’re all doomed anyway,” she broke in. “Apparently. We might at least try a different approach to it this time.”
As nice as his face looked in angry red, there was something to be said for it when brightened with dawning hope.
A good deal to be said, but Haleth was not currently going to be the one to inflate his ego by saying it.
Still. In the spirit of trying a different approach and all. And to make sure there was one more thing they both knew and one fewer thing he was keeping all to himself.
It seemed like the moment to discover what it was like to kiss him. Just to see.
She had to say, she was very satisfied with the result.
Dear Caranthir,
I have now heard from everyone but you and Maglor, and unlike Maglor, you were right there in the Halls of Mandos with us when Atar attempted to send us back.
I know you remember the future. If you do not send confirmation within a day of receiving this message that you are still with us and have not used your knowledge of the future to do something lethally stupid, I will ride down personally with an envoy of our uncle’s, and I will give that envoy my personal assurance that you would love some help doing this year’s taxes.
This is a promise.
Your loving brother,
Maedhros