#and stuff.

“I’m no Elf,” Arachon said, with a smile that was a little rueful as they made their way into a wide paved square with a small grove of young birch-trees planted in the middle. “I have no time to waste worrying about what happened years before I was born. Elrond says it was all an Enemy plot of some kind, and he should know.  I’ll spend my time enjoying the peace instead of brooding, and give thanks that I was born in time for it.”

Maglor nodded and followed him on across the square. “Are you going to the Land of Gift with Elros, when the ships set off? I think Elrond said that Halfdan had chosen not to.”

“My beard is already white, and the ships are not yet ready,” Halfdan said and shrugged. “By the time they set off to follow the star into the west, I shall be old and tired, if I am spared to see it. Elenna is for the young.”

Arachon shook his head, sending pale braids flying with a clatter of blue and red beads. “Not for me either,” he said. “Elrond is staying here, so I plan to stay too. I was born in Hithlum, you see, towards the end of the war.”

“I remember hearing that Gil-galad and Elrond had been in Hithlum for a while, after Finarfin broke the Gates of Sirion,” Maglor said.

Arachon smiled. “I was eleven when I met him, in the rubble of my mother’s house after the Vanyar host swept through with their lightnings. Very fine they were, I suppose, looking back on it now, but terrifying to a snotty slave-born brat like me!   But you couldn’t be afraid of Elrond. Or Elros, for that matter, but it was Elrond who took me in and called me cousin. My mother is descended from the House of Hador, you see.”

He did not mention his father. That probably meant that his father or his grandfather had been one of the Enemy’s Easterling Men, who had taken Hithlum and enslaved the Edain who lived there.

“So I might have guessed,” Maglor told him. “You look a little like him.  Hador, I mean, not Elrond.”  They came to a place where there were no buildings yet, only tents that from their design and worn appearance had certainly come with the host from Valinor, and timber stacked inside to keep it from warping in the rain. Halfdan led them through.

Arachon grinned at him confidentially. “I don’t know if it’s really true,” he said. “It might be that my grandmother made it up.  We didn’t have much to be proud of, my mother and I.  But Elrond insists that we are cousins.  He invited Mother to dinner, and she knitted him a hat.  He wears it sometimes, too.”