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Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.
It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.
They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.
They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.
Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.
They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.
The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.
The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
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imeanforever
"Do you mind if I try a healing song on you?" Promise asks the orcs.
They do mind. No Elf-magic, thank you.
imeanforever
She thinks this is their prerogative. Is Maedhros going to make her do it anyway?
He is not.
imeanforever
Right then.
"If you would rather die than be sent south or risk him deciding to do something that isn't sending you south, that is up to you. If you would prefer to be sent south than let him kill you I need your real names."
"If you would rather die than be sent south or risk him deciding to do something that isn't sending you south, that is up to you. If you would prefer to be sent south than let him kill you I need your real names."
All but one give their names.
And he has someone escort them all out, the one who did not agree separately.
He seems to prefer that she doesn't. "There's still some time in the day. Music lessons, or do you want time alone, or do you want to talk?"
"They must have standing orders to give a recruitment talk to anyone they meet who's not an Elf. Us they mostly just spit at and scowl at. I have the transcripts so you can look through them if there are specific things you want to ask about."
"It amuses the Enemy sometimes to order his soldiers to carry out some atrocity - in that case, burning a village and nailing all its inhabitants to trees around the area - and then to order them to put away their weapons and settle down peaceably, so when we track them from the site of the crime we find innocents. And I suppose they are innocents. Just following orders."
"What would you do, in my place? Let them go whenever their orders do not currently involve the rape and torture and slaughter of my people?"
"I can't. They can be delivered telepathically at a range of hundreds of miles."
"Does that answer your question?"
"I am not a good person. But in my place you either died heroically very early or you stopped being a good person or you stopped - making decisions at all, stopped trying to steer the world."
"You can say what's on your mind."
imeanforever
"I bet it would be very tempting to say that even if there were a thing you could have done, somewhere in there, that I don't know about, which would have made it better."