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Crown Prince Fëanor, Duke of Formenos, stood, chest heaving, in the destroyed, splintered remains of his office.
A copy of a newly-issued Letter of Marque. A report from the captain of the HMS Relentless.
And now — ruin.
A traitor, Fëanor was still shaking with rage. Maedhros is a traitor.
He was always too much his mother’s son — not enough drive, his wife has, not enough power nor will to greatness — and had grown into a fool who went to go play about in the Navy. Who, at nearly every turn, rather than attending to his princely duties, chose the sea instea-
And then it made perfect, terrible sense.
That thing, Fëanor thought viciously.
Maedhros was always closest to his second brother. It used to be common occurrence, in their childhoods, for the question of: ‘Where is Maedhros?’ to be easily answerable by following the sound of Maglor’s excited voice. His wife had indulged them, never scolding them for hiding away or making too much noise, always favoring the eldest and the one they had almost lost. When they had not been quite close enough in age to leave for their schooling together, she had wheedled and arranged for Maglor to go along despite being too young.
And since then, after they had finished their schooling and grown into men — what has Maedhros ever done, but always stand up for his brother’s interests, pled for his brother’s desires? It was his wife and his eldest son who had spent so long arguing to him that Maglor should enter the priesthood, as he had claimed to desire, that Fëanor had finally allowed it.
He should have known better.
An abomination, his not-son has always been. Blind; he has made himself! On the promises of a siren, he had deluded himself into thinking he had what he desired, what he should have had without needing to resort to magic!
The thing given to him in place of the baby truly of his blood — how long has it planned this? The disgrace of the royal family of the Empire! To defile a royal cousin, to bring obvious and inescapable public shame upon the Crown, to let the newspapers and the rabble think they have the right to criticize-
And Maedhros. His soft, swayable heart; his spine without steel, that will bend in the face of true opposition.
Fëanor remembered the siren. How it had sung, to give him a- a changeling child; who sung itself. Chattered, nagged, laughed and played tongue-twister games with his son it called ‘brother’-
Maedhros was not a traitor. Maedhros was bewitched.
Had always been; to love the sea more than his own family.
Fëanor had to save his son.
The most important thing was to ruthlessly suppress the information that the King’s eldest grandson had committed treason.
That was easy enough. Fëanor had long run Tol Eressëa. The captain and crew of the Relentless, and the other ships in the fleet escorting the creature so-called ‘Prince Maglor’ to his doom — those who will not be bought off, only to be sent to the most dangerous postings to die — he has quietly arrested and brought in utmost secrecy to the hidden island prison.
He has charges of treason ready, in case anyone dares question him.
His people reported that, according to the prisoners, they had shared no news and spread no rumors. Fëanor didn’t believe them at first — but no whispers from the docks or the pubs were published in broadsheets, so eventually, he had to.
So that was one problem down.
The next step was to keep track of where his bewitched son was. If he was enchanted into more treason-
But from the scant reports he received — he needed better agents, the abilities of these were atrocious — Maedhros and his suborned crew were lying low. A Letter of Marque, properly official, and all they seized were some independent slavers.
Still trying to disgrace me, are you? Fëanor thought darkly at the siren spawn.
But working against him, however galling it was, wasn’t treason.
Not yet.
Small mercies.
And small pleasures, as well.
His weasel of a brother came to him a full month after the royal agents’ sightings of Fingon in Dover to report that his eldest son had run off, run away from his marriage. Fingolfin groveled and apologized and entreated his elder brother and Crown Prince to believe him, that he had nothing to do with this-
Fëanor got a thrill of amusement from the shock on his face when he magnanimously dismissed the man, professing his belief in Fingolfin’s honesty. Of course his brother had nothing to do with this.
But even that soured — for in the early hours of the morning, Fëanor shot awake in bed, his mind finally putting together the map of Maedhros’s movements.
Haiti. Port-au-Prince. Finrod.
Maedhros, and Fingon, and Finrod.
That sea-demon harlot! Fëanor raged silently into the dark, aware enough of himself not to make enough noise at this hour to rouse servants or guards. This is what I get for letting it sway me to provide my seed for the changeling, not my blood. ‘Would make him stronger’ — as if greatness does not come from the blood! I gave seed, and so it is lust, not loyalty, that drives it!
Fingon was seen in Dover — but also briefly, and only by description, upon the deck of Maedhros’s ship during the attack on the Relentless.
The siren pretending at royal blood had bewitched Maedhros to love it over his true family. But it has bewitched Fingon and Finrod to fuck him. To bring disgrace upon the Crown. To spread sodomy amongst the royal blood. Unnatural lusts-
It has two of them, does it have both at on-
Fëanor murdered the thought and threw it from his mind.
Just as well it was caught with Arafinwë’s son and not Fingolfin’s, he made himself think instead. Arafinwë has involved himself in no politics. If Fingon had been caught-
An even greater disaster. It didn’t bear thinking on.
Does it get worse with time and proximity? he brooded, though, in the daylight, over an incensed letter from Thingol, sent with speed from Menegroth. Maedhros — I did not see the danger to him soon enough. But it was far away in the New World for a time, closer to Finrod. He went back to his post after that return with speed. And Fingon did nothing contrary to me before it was more than halfway back to England.
He would have to move fast, then.
Taking back what he could from the siren jumped in importance over how to break it’s magic, for now.
But in this, Fëanor found a frustrating dilemma.
How did you forcibly recall a prince of the blood without using Crown resources, and people who would talk? Would question? Maedhros was no longer an officer in the Navy. The King’s Letter of Marque had freed him from his commission. He could no longer be ordered to return through unremarkable channels.
Sending a Navy ship after the King’s grandsons would cause a scandal. Besides, Navy ships had better things to occupy themselves with than privateers on their own side. They had an Empire to patrol, foreign ships to stop and sink and seize.
And there was the siren to consider. Any sent after Maedhros could fall under its spell. It would do him no good to give the thing more power to hand. Why, it could beguile itself a fleet!
Fëanor lost many hours’ sleep over that thought.
What a fool. What a thrice-cursed-bedamned idiot fool he was-
Curufin, he reminded himself, thinking on his treasured youngest son. I have Curufin. That was not foolish. I have the son I need, now.
But still. How to get Maedhros, without endangering his or his son’s reputation?
In the end, the solution was simple and elegant, just as Fëanor liked best.
What was a privateer, but a vaguely-respectable pirate?
Set a thief to catch a thief, Fëanor thought, savoring the final success of his plans now in sight. Set a pirate to catch a pirate.
What did pirates care for but money? He had plenty.
And who would believe a pirate, who claimed to be hired by royalty? Even if they did try to sell such information, the source was tarnished. Tainted, with opportunism and criminality. Power-grasping rabble, scrambling for something above and beyond their place.
It was perfect.
Now to find a pirate.
…Which was harder, than he had initially thought, flush on anticipated victory.
The Navy, it turned out, was good for at least one thing.
But other inquires bore better fruit.
There wasn’t much information about sirens but the usual run of sailors’ tales. Beautiful, bewitching, drowning creatures that sang to lure men to their doom in deep water. The usual remedy was, apparently, wax earplugs.
There were no stories about how to save someone from long-term enchantment. From subtler magics. Nor of changeling siren spawn that seemed human.
Fëanor dug through every royal library. Every collection of folktales he could find and acquire.
Even, humiliatingly, personally, though in disguise, down by the waterfront. The old sailors and the lore-women knew nothing.
His agents returned the same: nothing.
“It has my son!” he finally ended up shouting, at some old weathered crone in a shack above fishy salt-wrack, during a low tide on a foggy Channelside midnight. “I want it dead!”
The woman scrutinized him.
“Love is a powerful thing,” she said after a moment. “You want a dead siren? You want the Kraken.”
“The Kraken,” Fëanor said flatly. More sea witchery.
She rolled her eyes. At him.
“The pirate,” she said.
Now, that was much better.
There was quite a lot of inflated twaffle about the pirate captain called ‘the Kraken’ when he went looking. Butcheries, blood and terror and atrocity — the usual rumors of the scared and the weak and the unprepared.
But with some careful questioning, Fëanor ascertained that, yes, Morgoth’s underlings did spend rather a lot of effort and time asking about sirens.
So notable an attribute this was, of them, that it had been hindering his investigations. His agents had been assumed to be agents of Morgoth, not the Crown, whenever they’d asked about sirens.
Well, Fëanor could laugh in dark humor about this in private. At least now I know the crone wasn’t lying to me for coin.
Contacting the man, discreetly, without word getting out to the masses, was the worst part.
But finally, after far too long, his agents provided him a middleman.
Fëanor went in disguise, naturally. But at least Morgoth’s underling wasn’t so base as to set a meeting in some dockside pub. They meet inland, in a perfectly respectable if cheap and out-of-the-way establishment in Canterbury.
The man himself was so remarkably similar in coloring to Maedhros that he found himself missing the first few sentences the man said. No matter — they had undoubtedly been useless pleasantries.
“It isn’t so often that someone tries to contract our services so intensely.”
“It’s a time-sensitive matter, you understand,” Fëanor said. “A flighty bridegroom.”
The man raised one perfect eyebrow.
“Lord Fingon,” Fëanor elaborated to- Sauron, that was the name of the man he was meeting.
“The King’s grandson?”
“You see why such discretion is required.”
“Certainly,” Sauron said. “Your Highness.”
Fëanor stilled.
“No, no need to worry,” Sauron said, smiling and reassuring. “We made our own counter-inquires, you see. We have no interest in treason, nor the entanglements of politics. Why, I left the Navy over it!”
“A Navy man,” Fëanor examined him critically. He was too beautiful — he knew the kinds of things sailors thought at sea. But maybe there was a magic to it, some kind of protection against sirens. Adapting their own tricks against them?
Now that. That sounded very satisfying.
“Formerly,” Sauron demurred.
“Useful,” Fëanor judged. “The last news of him placed him with his cousins. Lord Finrod, the Governor of Haiti. And-”
How admitting this galled him.
“My eldest,” he admitted grudgingly. “Prince Maedhros. Also formerly of the Navy.”
Set a thief to catch a thief, Fëanor reminded himself. A pirate for a pirate. A Navy man for a Navy man.
“Is that so?” Sauron asked, politely interested.
“He’s a privateer now.”
Sauron chuckled.
“Ah, similar circles! That will be easier.”
Morgoth’s man looked at him, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth.
“But the ocean is wide,” he said. “And easy to become lost in. If you would…”
“What?” Fëanor demanded, when he didn’t continue.
“It’s always easier to find blood with blood.”
It was said flippantly enough that Fëanor was certain this was a test of how much he really knew about ‘the Kraken’.
Sea witchery, he seethed internally — but said aloud, because time was of the essence: “How much?”
Sauron produced a small glass bottle from somewhere, the kind that a few precious pinches of a rare spice might have been stored in once.
“Not very much.”
This is for Maedhros, Fëanor reminded himself as he bled into the glass. These pirates will take their pay and find Fingon, and come across a siren changeling and kill it, and then Maedhros will be free. He’ll come home and finally be the kind of son he’s supposed to be. Fingon will marry Lúthien and Fingolfin will owe me and Thingol will be tied into my plans. And I will be rid of that cursèd sea-spawn for good.
“You seem happy today, husband,” Nerdanel greeted him, when he returned from Canterbury in time for the next day’s tea.
I’ll have to find Maedhros a wife, Fëanor thought, seeing his own, and tried to come up with an unmarried woman who wasn’t either of his brothers’ daughters. He needs heirs. And he should have someone who isn’t taking advantage of him.
“I have solved all my problems,” he told her — and told her. About the siren changeling, about the bewitchment, about searching high and low for the solution, about Morgoth’s man Sauron the evening before, about how everything was finally going to start going how it was supposed to.
The china teapot, full of scalding water, shattered against his shoulder and collarbone. Near-boiling water splashed up his bare neck.
Nerdanel was still screaming incomprehensible dialectical invective at him — something about ‘Makalaurë’ or ‘Mairon’ — as he ordered the guards to take his wife away.
Could nothing just go right, for once?