Leir didn’t like being in other people’s homes. Not as a guest anyway. He’d climbed into plenty of windows in the middle of the night when he was called Flaithri but that was just to spend time with girls. That almost always ended with an angry father or a shouting butler; either way was much more fun than simply being someone’s welcome guest.

Nothing in the room was his. Nothing on the grounds was his. This removed any opportunity to feel free or excited. If he owned the house he was sitting in he’d be finding out how far up the walls he could scale, which balcony he could fall from and still land on his feet, and which table was best for bending a woman over.

But the house was Maeglin’s. So he was sitting alone in a room, orange and white hair dripping from the bath, bouncing a small handball off the floor to the wall and then right back into his palm. Mindlessly, waiting for something to happen. At any moment the ball might turn into a bird and fly right out the cracked window in a show of the universe’s improbability.

His sword was hanging from the back of a chair up against the wall. Above it was a framed painting of three horsemen and their dogs on a fox hunt. Leir always liked the fox better than the hunters and decided that this particular painting showed the three men in utter failure; they’d never find the fox and it would go on forever being the cunning master of its forest.

They were about to be in a civil war.

Iluvatar would make the right decisions. Which meant Leir would ride at his side or stand down all the same; whatever the sylvan required. Leir caught the ball again and squeezed it, watching the seams threatening to burst under his grip. He’d already dispatched a messenger to the temple historians. They had his uniform, his medals, the armor that had been crafted and measured especially for him years ago. At one point they’d been publicly shown and only taken out of the temple shrines when needed. Now? Since all the betrayal? Probably hidden away in a store room. And he’d sent a chamber man off to find Elemmire. So when there was a rap at the door he knew it was one or the other; either his belongings coming to find him again, or the ethereal woman come to speak with him.

“Come in,” he said in an almost songlike timbre.

He glanced over at the door as it cracked. Elemmire. The door swung open fully and allowed a gentle cross breeze to pull in from the windows.

“Hello,” he greeted her. There was a half empty bottle of wine on the floor next to his chair. “Want to get drunk?”

It was, in many ways, the worst sort of homecoming.

( Not what he had expected. )