Chapter Text
Erestor eyes the door in front of him and tries to look biddable. Dagnis told him to look biddable. Orothiel told him what biddable meant.
They’re going to try again today.
They've been trying—well, Nana has been trying, and Erestor has been accompanying her—for weeks, now. They've had no success thus far, but it won't stop Nana, and she stands straight-backed on the smithy's doorstep, Erestor next to her, her scarred fingers wrapped around his. He’s just taller than her belt, now, and growing. Maybe he’ll be taller than she is, someday.
The door opens, and Erestor stands a little straighter. Dael told him it was important to stand up straight. The braids in his hair pull tight. It took Nana a long time to get them so neat, this morning.
The man at the door looks none-too-pleased when he sees who's standing there. He scowls. Erestor looks up at him, and tries to appear pleasant—no, biddable. Biddable, biddable, biddable.
Nana speaks first. “I had heard you were seeking apprentices—”
“You were mistaken. Good day.” The door doesn’t quite slam, but there’s a finality to the way it closes, and Nana stands there staring at it for just a little longer than is necessary. Her shoulders tighten, but her hand stays relaxed around Erestor’s.
Erestor may be young, but he’s old enough to know that she wasn’t mistaken. They’ve tried every smith in the Havens, even the Secondborn. No one wants him.
She sighs, and smiles brightly down at him, one side of her mouth lifting up, the other staying put, as always. “Well then," she says, “No matter. Perhaps we will find a different trade for you.”
She turns, and starts them back toward home. Erestor walks silently beside her, all thoughts of biddability forgotten, glowering down at the dirt of the road until he asks, “Why do they refuse?”
She keeps smiling at him, but her eyes look sad. “There are some who do not trust us.”
“Why?”
She sighs, and without a moment’s hesitation she reaches down, and scoops him up into her arms. Erestor gladly circles his own arms around her shoulders, and settles in. Nana has very strong arms, and he likes being tall. She smoothes his hair, her touch gentle even though her hands are rough with callus. “Do you remember where I told you we came from?”
He nods. “Gondolin.”
“Many of us were from somewhere else, before that.”
“The mines.”
The smile freezes, but her hand on his hair never stills. “Yes, the mines. We were thralls.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We did not want to work for those who dwell in darkness, but they forced us to. They would…hurt us, or kill us, if we did not. Your father helped us to escape, and we fled to Gondolin.”
“And built a house.” He wishes he could see it. But Nana has already told him that it is gone, long gone, and there can be no going back. Like his father.
“Yes, and built a house. But because we were thralls in the Dark One’s mines, some people think that we serve him now.”
He frowns, and the injustice of it strikes deeply at his heart, because Nana is kind and loving and strong and anyone who thinks ill of her must be none of those things and the very thought of it is horrifying. “That’s not fair!”
“No, it is not. But we have endured worse.” She kisses the top of his head, and her arms tighten around him. “You would have been lord of a great house, someday. You would have been a mighty smith, like your father. But even though you are not a lord nor a smith, I am thankful that you will grow up in peace.”
Erestor wishes he could have seen his father. He must have been mighty, to be the lord of a great house. But his home here is something great, too, built by Nana and the others, and the outside is mismatched cast-off stone but inside it’s snug, and warm, and there’s a place enough for everyone. He couldn’t imagine greater.
When they arrive home, Orothiel is tending the pea plants. She used to be a soldier, Nana said, but she’s ever so good at gardening.
“No luck,” Nana says, as they pass through the garden, and Orothiel shakes her head, glowering.
She ushers Erestor inside and sets him to practicing his letters, again, on a piece of birch bark, and tells him to mind Orothiel, for Nana has work that must be done in the city.
A lady shouldn’t be a laundress, Dagnis once told her, and Nana replied that a bodyguard shouldn’t be a bricklayer.
What should I be? Erestor had asked, and Nana had only said, Yourself.
Today, she kisses him, once more, before heading out. “Practice your letters well. You will meet your father someday, and he will see that we’ve raised you right."
Erestor knows he oughtn’t to fight.
He’s heading home after bringing a noonday meal to Dagnis and Dael, and as he walks through the dusty streets he feels something hit the back of his leg. A stone, not thrown with much force, and more of an annoyance for the mark it leaves than anything. He keeps walking, and another hits him, in the back. And another, and another.
It’s been three years since they tried apprenticing him, and no one’s gotten any friendlier. There are children, here, in the Havens, but their parents don’t want them talking with him, and it suits him fine. Truly.
Their rulers have children too, he’s heard, twin boys, but he’s never seen them. When they grow older, they probably won’t be allowed to talk to him, either. They probably wouldn’t want to, even if they could.
It doesn't bother him in the slightest.
He keeps his pace steady, down the road, towards his home at the outskirts. If he goes far enough, they won’t follow him.
More steps, more stones, and then a whispered voice behind him. “Why does he not say something?”
Another voice. “Probably incapable. The Folk of the Hammer are deformed.”
Erestor freezes in his tracks, heart pounding. He shouldn’t turn around. He knows better than to turn around. He should keep walking, but the voice keeps talking.
“I don’t know why they’re permitted to live among us.” Erestor knows that voice. Nordir. The wheelwright’s son. He does things like this, when he hasn’t anything better to do. Responding would only give him satisfaction. “The taint of evil is written on their faces.”
Erestor’s fists clench, and his willpower collapses. He whirls around. “It is not!”
Two boys, one older, one younger—that one still holding a stone—stand some ways up the road, glaring at him. The older one smirks. “Is so! They can’t even behave properly.”
Angry tears prick his eyes. “You don’t know how to behave!” It’s not that difficult. Dagnis doesn’t like people talking to her from behind. Dael won’t share in any food until you eat a piece first. Orothiel stutters, and her voice comes slow, but all you have to do is be patient. Nana can’t sleep unless her back’s touching the wall.
“I know better than you! At least I’m not a thrall to the Dark One.”
With a snarl, Erestor launches himself at him, not caring that the boy is twice his size. There’s a sharp pain as the younger one’s stone hits him in the ear, and a rush of coppery heat in his mouth as Nordir strikes out at him, but he swings his fists for all he's worth and he thinks some of the punches make contact. He's got his eyes screwed shut against an incoming blow when something—bigger and stronger than either of them—seizes him by the back of his shirt and pulls him away. And keeps on pulling, until he's dangling in the air, his toes just brushing the ground. Across from him, his assailant is in much the same predicament, terror written across his face. Behind, the younger one has made a run for it.
Good riddance.
Erestor looks up to find Orothiel peering down at him, bemused. He stares up at her, eyes still burning, and he’s unsure if he should be more ashamed that she caught him fighting or relieved that she’s on his side. She watches him for a moment, then sets him down slowly, gently. He has better sense than to speak.
Nordir is still dangling. Orothiel says nothing. She won't. She doesn't like to speak in public. She stares at him instead with both her good eye and her bad one, the scar across her forehead even redder in the noonday sun. Erestor supposes that maybe it looks frightening, if you aren’t used to it.
Nordir can’t take it. ”I—“
Silence.
"It's not what it looks like."
She stands unmoving as a statue, hand still clenched around his collar. It’s a grip like iron, Erestor knows.
Nordir tries to twist out of it, and when he fails, he plays it off as fidgeting. “I wasn't—"
She doesn’t so much as blink.
"I'm sorry."
Her good eye narrows, and Erestor can see him swallow.
"I won't do it again."
Her brow furrows unevenly around the scar, and after a moment, she sets him down. He glances from her to Erestor and back again before sprinting away, kicking up puffs of dust behind him.
She drops a hand to Erestor's shoulder, heavily, and begins to steer him towards home.
His relief is short-lived, and he looks up at her. "Are you going to tell Nana?"
She raises an eyebrow at him, and a wash of shame burns across the back of his neck. He should own his behavior.
“He said we were all thralls of the Dark One. I—" He's about to say that he won't do it again, but that's a lie. He would do it again. “I couldn’t let him say that.”
Orothiel still says nothing, but the hand on his shoulder gives a gentle squeeze. When they arrive home she heads not for the front door, as he expected, but through the garden, out to the dusty bit of ground behind the vegetable patch.
He has heard that the Secondborn beat their children sometimes, but surely Orothiel isn’t going to…is she?
She lets him go, and stands across from him, silent and unyielding. “Hands up," she finally says.
"What?"
She demonstrates, two sturdy fists raised in front of her. "If you’re going to f-fight, you’ll do it p-properly.” Faster than he can follow, she reaches out and kicks his feet farther apart, nearly overbalancing him. “W-wider stance.”
He gets his balance, raises his hands. She reaches out to take his wrists—gently, in callused fingers—and adjusts the position. “Up.”
She opens her fists and cups her palms towards him, making a target. "Hit m-me.”
It’s like hitting a stone wall. She beckons to him, the meaning clear. Again.
He does it again. And again and again and again, until his arms ache and sweat streaks down his face, stinging where it meets the scrapes.
When she finally drops her hands and gestures him inside, Dagnis has come home, and is perched on a three-legged stool in the corner, peeling turnips. She takes in his appearance with a noncommittal grunt, and turns to Orothiel. “She’ll worry.”
Orothiel shrugs, one-shouldered, and grabs a rag to start wiping the blood and sweat from Erestor’s dusty face. “Don’t tell her.”
Dagnis says nothing to Nana, as far as Erestor knows, but she has ideas of her own. Some months later, he returns from an errand to find her waiting for him in the garden, a sword in hand.
He’s seen the battered scabbard, hung on the wall, but never the blade itself. It gleams silver in the sun, bright and sharp and beautiful.
“I would hope you never have need of this, but a home is only as fine as one’s ability to protect it.” She spends a moment looking at something he can’t see, something far in the distance, and afterward she sighs, and wraps his hands around the hilt. “Let us begin.”
It’s not the best weapon for him—too long—but in the absence of anything better she tells him he’d better work on growing, and soon. Dael sees them at it and after some weeks presents him with a fallen tree branch, shaped into something approximating a sword. It’s better, though she has to make a new one when his body finally heeds Dagnis’s command, and grows several inches practically overnight.
Dael eventually joins them, too, with a pair of knives and footwork so light and fleet that Erestor wants to protest that it surely cannot be real. He starts to speak, and she hooks a foot around his ankle that sends him sprawling.
It’s real. Illusion doesn’t leave bruises.
Erestor never questions it.
He tends the house and garden and takes what odd jobs he can get as an errand boy and learns anything that anyone cares to teach him and diligently practices his lettering, even now, and spends whatever time the others want him to out on the dusty earth, learning to fight.
Doors still slam in his face, but nothing can help that. Since the incident with Nordir, the other children have kept themselves to mumbled comments, when they say anything at all, and he hasn’t had cause to use his fists. He practices all the same, and grows taller, and stronger, and one evening in late spring Dagnis has just praised him for a particularly skillful dodge when a strangled cry from behind him sends a shard of ice tearing through his heart.
Nana stands just to the other side of the garden wall, hands over her mouth, and now he understands what betrayal looks like, because he sees it in her eyes, and the tears that fill them are mirrored in his own.
He had known they trained in secrecy, but he hadn’t known it would hurt her.
Maybe he is evil.
He starts toward her, but Dagnis stops him with a hand to his shoulder, and the look she gives him is gentle, for all that she stands in his way like an iron gate. “Go. Fetch some water from the well. I’ll handle this. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
As he’s leaving to run his errand, he hears Dagnis’s voice—“We didn’t want you to worry”—followed by a sob. He walks faster, after that.
That night, from his bed, up in the loft, he can hear the low, deliberate tones of Orothiel’s voice, speaking more words in one night than he’s ever heard out of her, and Dael’s musical lilt. Dagnis’s voice, harsh and hoarse, cuts through it all. “You would leave him helpless? Greater strongholds than this have fallen. Angmir, please—”
Erestor puts his fingers in his ears and rolls over to face the wall.
He’s shaken awake well before dawn, and looks up to find Nana above him, fully dressed. Her better hand carries a sheathed sword. “Come,” she says. “We need to fix your footwork.”
Five years later, when the evil night comes and the screams ring out from the western wall and the flames turn the starlight red against the stones, he understands the fear. Nana pulls him out of bed half-awake and shoves his clothing into his arms and it’s only after he’s pulled on his boots that he notices the others all have weapons bound about them. He smells the smoke and hears the shouting and knows better than to cry, now, no matter how much he wants to.
He has no weapon, save a wooden stick. Swords cost more than a laundress and a laborer’s wages combined. It would do no good anyway, he thinks dumbly, for how badly his hands are shaking.
They’re about to leave the house through the back window when Dagnis spies too many shadows across the garden wall, and they take the front door instead, crouched, Erestor yanked half-dazed between Nana and Orothiel, and never making a straight line.
Dagnis takes an arrow to the throat at the end of the lane, and he barely has the time to register it before he’s jerked away, and they’re off and running again through the night.
Dael falls when they’ve nearly reached the southern bulwark and by firelight he sees that it’s an Elf holding the sword. Orothiel guts him and in the split second before he’s running again Erestor thinks he sees terror on their enemy’s face.
He runs where the others bid him, not thinking about where they might be going. He can’t think. It’s all sounds and flashes of light and there are bodies in the streets and buildings ablaze and none of it can possibly be real but there’s a part of him screaming that it is.
The washhouse sits at the southeastern edge of the city, and Erestor finally recognizes its hulking roofline, there in the dark, and realizes what the plan must be. The wash channels run with cold, clear river water, and they make for a way past the walls that’s less visible than climbing.
They’re no more than fifty feet from the threshold when another group of people—women, children—tumbles out into the courtyard, pursued by half a dozen armed men. Nana pushes him against the wall they’re crouched behind, points at the ground. Stay here.
He nods. She catches Orothiel’s eye and they charge forward, swords raised. Erestor watches the blood spill red and wet across the cobbles and can’t believe that the hands that spilled it are his mother’s, for she is kind and strong and good, and he’d never thought her capable of killing. But she does, and when it’s done she beckons him onward, and shoves him into the washhouse and leaves bloody handprints down his cloak. Even the river’s swift current is helpless to remove them.
They emerge sodden and horror-struck on the other side of the wall and flee to the marshes, slipping in the mud and stumbling through the tall reeds. It’s near dawn when they finally stop, and Erestor’s feet and hands have gone numb with cold.
“We’ll rest here,” says Nana, and she holds his hands between hers to try to warm them. They’re red, and he wants to pull away, and he hates that he wants to pull away, and he hates that she’s looking not at him, but at the western horizon, where the city smokes and dies. “It’s not us they’re after.”
Erestor follows her gaze looks back on the place he’d thought of as his home. Not his, he realizes, for he wasn’t able to protect it.
It’s only then that he starts to cry.