Chapter 1: The House in the North

The approach to the Yuletide stretches like a path plunging downhill and thronged with candles, and the House of Fëanáro in Formenos is filled with chaos. It is a chaotic house by nature, but this is in excess of the usual order of things. If you were to sit on the hill alongside the house, you would hear it as you might a tumult of wild creatures in the forest: a great crowd of them, each noisy on its own but together? Together, were the hallways not made of the strongest stone, the enormous energy of them would make the walls twitch.

It is a chaotic house by nature, with its madly brilliant master and his seven sons, but this is the weekend of departure for the Yuletide Feast at Taniquetil, and upon that event—itself worthy uproar—have converged several other occurrences that are like storms that meet and throw off weather unnatural and godlike. For one is the literal storm coming, dark on the horizon. Tyelkormo sniffed to the north this morning, one foot raised, alongside Huan (one paw raised), and the clouds are beginning to mount against the stars. Then there is the preparation for the feast itself and the marshalling of trunks and provisions and gifts for relations unseen for a half-year. And then—a third storm insinuating itself into the tumult—Nolofinwë and his family have come on progress this year to Formenos and are staying in the House of Fëanáro and intended to depart, all of them together, in a single carriage and wagon tomorrow, stuffed like a Yuletide cracker filled to bursting with colorful, crinkle-wrapped sweets.

“We have, like, tonight!” That is Tyelkormo, his face reddened and his eyes a little distended as they flicker between the window and the cloudy north and his mother Nerdanel, who is carefully folding a particularly persnickety silk robe of her husband’s that he would allow to wrinkle, intentionally probably. She is carefully folding each side in mirror image of each other, running her hands inside the folds to make sure the silk within is smooth.

“We will make it in time, I assure you,” she says in a voice that plods like the trusty draft horse that never spooks. In this family, Nerdanel would have had to go to Lórien long ago if she did not have a near-pathological patience in the face of constant (seeming) catastrophe. “Are your trunks packed, Tyelkormo?” Tyelkormo is no trusty draft horse; he is a sensitive filly, his ears always aloft and flickering at perils imagined and magnified to dramatic proportions, worthy of flashing his lithe, shapely person across daisy-flecked meadows. With a whistle to his dog and a fanning flip of his golden hair and a mutter about being never listened to in a family of craftsmen, he flounces into the hall.

In that hall, Carnistir is raging, red-faced, after the oil that he warms and uses to smooth his hair. He has discovered how to tame his hair and discovered girls, all in a season. “Surely someone saw it!” His empty hands, palms up, are an accusation and faintly scented with lavender-infused aloe. His suspect is a beleaguered Curufinwë, who is trying to sneak more books into his trunk than he is permitted to bring, trying to defend his name while balancing them under his chin, all while attempting to evade the notice of Nelyo, who is being unreasonably strict about the packing limits imposed by Nerdanel earlier that evening.

“Amil!” comes the shriek from Turukáno. “Curufinwë is allowed to bring more than three books!” He is not, and now Nelyo is coming down the hall with a frazzled, “Wait … what?” and Curufinwë is crying and Turukáno is gloating.

“I don’t have hair oil but I have a powder foundation that might work for you,” said Írissë a voice syrupy with cruelty. Carnistir perceives the jest, and his face flushes red as though to prove its validity.

That quick, Tyelkormo has forgotten his trunk and is slipping past her and down a wide stone staircase toward the front door, to stare apprehensively at the clouds in the north with his chest thrust out in what he hopes a shapely way. Nolofinwë is coming up, and Findekáno, the former coaching the latter on the latest political gossip—for Findekáno has been the whole summer here in the north—and the twins, the youngest, are laughing to drown the rest of the chaos and chasing each other and seemingly unaware of the urgency and ambitions of their kin. Tyelkormo weaves among the all; Huan gets backed up a few steps before being able to descend.

At the foot of the stairs is a Maia—one of Aulë’s judging by his insignia. He wears the full regalia of the Lord of Earth, brown as the earth itself yet seeming to glitter with the promise of treasure, but there is something irregular about him. It is so mild as to be unnoticed by a flouncing Tyelkormo (who in fact doesn’t seem to see him at all). Perhaps it is that his hands are too pampered and clean.

“Hey!” he shouts as Tyelkormo passes in a muttering cloud of disparagements of craftsmen, liberally littered with the kinds of curses that make the soft-handed Maia blink.

Macalaurë is dragging an enormous swaddled musical instrument all by himself. The Maia watches it come, skirking with each laborious tug against the wood floor. “Hey, do you—” the Maia begins, but Macalaurë gives him a piercing, peeved look. “If you’re not going to help me …” Realizing the Maia has no plans to do so—his fattish, soft hands are rubbing together at his waist—Macalaurë emits a snort unbecoming of one with such a voice and keeps skirking his bundle across the floor.

“Your parents, the Lord Feä—” But Macalaurë ignores him, and the Maia is distracted by Írissë coming down the banister, even though she is surely far too old and the dress she was forced by Anairë to wear is fluttering about her knees.

“Your parents—” the Maia begins hopefully when she lands, light and easy as an acrobat.

“Don’t live here.” And she is capering off after Tyelkormo in a whirl of white skirts with a gray streak of dust from the bannister across the seat.

Upstairs, the combined forces of Nolofinwë and Nelyo are marshaling an illusion of order amid their respective clans, at least insofar as they have managed to separate bodily those most likely to come to fisticuffs. The Ambarussa are in the midst, their faces lighted by the excitement of chaos: of Curufinwë’s tears and Turukáno’s self-righteous and loud bloviation and Carnistir with one hand mashed against the side of his head as though to bar the noise but in reality making his hair fan out most absurdly on one side. It will become more absurd as days pass without the hair oil, still unfound. They are hoping for a fight, for bruises that they can find a dozen different and increasingly creative explanations for during the feast. These are the sorts of things that sustain them, little as they are and either underfoot or unnoticed: the sorts of stories that make faces whip toward them and tongues still, leaving a silent space for their little voices. But they are disappointed. Nelyo shepherds a sobbing Curufinwë into his room and Anairë takes Turukáno by the arm in a way that robs him of his pomposity and makes him just a dumb little kid again. Disappointed, the Ambarussa drift toward their parents’ bedroom.

Findekáno is clattering down the stairs, shoulders thrown back with the importance of a mission he’s been sent on by Nelyo, his chin lifted a little higher than his wont as though buoyed by the rumors his father trusted him with. The Maia holds out hands toward him. “Your parents—”

“Don’t live here,” he says. He does have the decorum to throw a “Sorry!” over his shoulder before he disappears down one of a labyrinth of hallways.

As far as the Maia can tell, the house is nothing but children: noisy, squabbling, sniveling, running, undignified children. Fëanáro’s children, known to be imps, and Nolofinwë’s clearly no better. He scratches at a perceived imperfection on his insignia. When he looks up, Curufinwë is frozen on the stairs, his knee raised high in an exaggerated tiptoe that he clearly hoped would go unheard. The Maia sees the porcelain face and silvery eyes and midnight hair and says with relief, “Aha! At last! Where might I find your parents, young lord?”

But in Curufinwë’s mind, his brother Nelyo is so intent on restricting his outtake of books from his domicile that he has gone to such extremities as hiring a Maia of Aulë to guard the passage between Curufinwë’s room and the library. Curufinwë freezes, trying in vain to come up with an explanation of why he is standing so on the stairway when he has been instructed to pack his trunk.

“Young lord? Young Fëanárion? Curufinwë, if I’m not mistaken?” (Now Curufinwë’s jaw drops in a way most certainly not reflective of his intelligence.) “Hey, Fëanárion!” The Maia snaps his fingers; they make a fleshy sound like a toad being dropped on a stone floor. “Kid!”

Upstairs, Ambarussa have slipped amid a gale of giggles into their parents’ room. Fëanáro’s festival robes shimmer on the bed, inviting as a pool of water in the summer they’ve left behind. The elder, Ambarussa—the rambunctious one—takes three running steps and executes a perfect swam dive onto the robes while his mother’s back is turned.

Even the pathologically patient have a limit. Nerdanel, hearing the pat-pat-pat of small feet turns in time to see the acrobatic move. She has spent the last twenty minutes preparing those robes for packing. She squawks.

Ambarto, the younger and conniving one, says, “Curufinwë is crying over books and Írissë stole Carnistir’s hair oil!”

Nerdanel extracts Ambarussa from atop the robes before he begins to backstroke them into further dishevelment. It sometimes occurs to her that these last two were a tipping point, something beyond what was perhaps natural and intended for the Elves. She and Fëanáro have not been able to be as attentive as they should, and with Nelyo gone more than he’s here—

But she has to stop that thought. She holds out Ambarussa at arm’s length. His legs are still a little podgy—both their legs are—and they have her father’s red hair and her husband’s bright eyes. They are the only ones of her sons nearer to the babies they’ve just recently been than to the men they will become. Still, she is aware of the rumpled robes, of time wasted, and grateful when Anairë appears in the doorway to ask, “Nerdanel, exactly how many books are you letting Curufinwë bring?”

“Oh, Anairë—that again?” She passes Ambarussa to her sister-in-law; Ambarto is circling between them, wanting to be picked up. Anairë, to her credit, stoops to scoop him up onto her other hip, even though she groans under their combined weight. “Take these two. Let me handle Curufinwë and Turukáno. Surely we can make terms amenable to all.”

Back in the hallway, Anairë deposits the twins onto the floor with a whoosh of relief. She cracks her spine, a hand on the small of her back. “My word,” she says. “How you have grown! Off with you, boys, now. Go pack your trunks. A storm is coming and we must load the wagons tonight if we’re to make it out before the snow starts.” And off she goes because, somewhere deeper in the house, Nolofinwë is thundering over lost gold hair clips.

The Ambarussa stand in a pocket of stillness. They twist their fingers in a nervous way they have. Snow was mentioned, but even that is not distraction enough from their sudden distress. Finally, Ambarto shifts his eyes toward his brother and Ambarussa squeaks, “Trunks?”

The Maia is still standing at the bottom of the stairs. He has a sour look upon his face, like he’s tasted something bitter, that makes the insignia on his tunic even more out of place than his plump, pale hands. Aulë tends to attract those who would bend the rules, sure, but his followers are invariably jolly in the face of tumult and would just as soon compound it like throwing logs onto an already roaring fire.

Five more children have passed him, yet none can help him locate the lord and lady of the house. He is craning his neck to peer up the stairs and down the many hallways spidering off this high-ceilinged vestibule when she is there, the broad-bodied, placid-faced Nerdanel, ushering a pair of boys (one the boy who’d frozen on the stairs before), each with a stack of books to return to the library.

“My lady!” the Maia chortles and regrets it. It sounds too delighted for the news he is about to deliver, but the Maia is beginning to get what he’s heard the Eldar call “a headache.” Thankfully, it does not seem Nerdanel notices. She smiles and inclines her head.

“I am she. I am sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

Only since the Years of the Lamps, he wants to quip. He does not. He simpers a smile at her.

“It is to be expected!” (He cannot bring himself to lie, he finds. He wants her patient façade to crack just long enough so that she can witness, as he has, the disorder she has allowed to become her normal.) “It is the eve of departure for the Yuletide Feast!” She seems unaffected. “I’m sure all houses are in tumult now.”

She is beginning to push again on the backs of the two youngsters before her. “Was there something you needed, my lord?” He realizes he is about to lose her inside that maze of a house and who knows when she will emerge again. “These two have an important mission to the library that they very much need to complete and which I must oversee.”

“There is some concern, my lady, on this festival night.” He drops his voice, as though not to scare the children. “You know that Melkor has been recently released. We have every reason to believe he can be trusted—”

“I should hope; it was Manwë who released him.”

“Yes, yes! It was Manwë who sent me! Yes! It is just that Melkor does not plan to attend the feast. He will be working in a library in Tirion, and we want to make sure that those residents with valuables in their homes in Tirion take the proper precautions because of … you know. Past transgression. But! I must be clear! I must say again that we have no reason—”

“Of course you do not. But our valuables are here. My husband locks them in a vault.” She is propelling the boys forward again. “He does not share my faith.”

But the Maia doesn’t care about that. He is peering into the house again, smiling unabashedly this time. He was wrong about the headache, it seems. He feels new-sprung from the Music, like he’s conjured a corporeal form exceedingly fair. “Which one is it?” he wonders aloud at the hallways, as though one might raise a hand and reveal to him in which direction Fëanáro’s treasury lay.

Chapter 2: The Wight

The Ambarussa stand in the middle of the upstairs hallway, a little red-headed island in the middle of a thundering highway of relatives scampering for laundry and toilet effects and accessories to borrow, reclaim, or steal. In a family where the question of genius is less about its existence and more about the form it takes in each member of Finwë’s illustrious family, they are exceedingly small and ordinary, and if genius exists in their little, podgy, pale forms, it has not yet exerted so much as a glimmer. They are merely cute, and not even so much of that to avoid being thought annoying.

“Our trunk?” peeps Ambarto to his brother. Both are full of the certainty, common in the young who dwell amid the mature and competent with little exposure to their own kind, that they will be expected to decipher this task on their own, and if they cannot, will be punished in some intolerable way. At the very least, they expect, there will be shame and much huffing by whomever ends up doing the task for them, and then blame for the tardiness precipitated by their incompetence.

They decide to seek help now. The decision is reached without discussion, as a simultaneous realization in the spot midway between their red heads, where they like to imagine there is a little glimmer like a shared thought. They try Nelyo first. He is brisking by, and Ambarussa paws at his sleeve and mewls, “Nelyo!” but he carries on, though he does toss his chin briefly over his shoulder and says, “I can’t right now, loves!” He rounds a corner as he says it and “loves” floats around the wall, just his voice.

They don’t dare Uncle Nolofinwë when he passes with his face set in a scowl; they step against the wall because they are not sure he sees them and might trample them. Írissë appears a moment later, and when they try to waylay her, she rips her arm out of their grasp and snaps, “Why would you assume I am here to help you? Because I am a girl?” Into Tyelkormo’s room she whirls. Carnistir tells them plainly to “Fuck off,” and to ease the sting of his rejection, they whisper to each other when he is gone about the frizz of hair ballooning on one side of his head, pulled unwittingly into disarray earlier and still unrepaired.

“He looks like an airship,” says Ambarto, “with the sails made of just snakes.”

“Black snakes.”

“Dumb black snakes.”

This gives them the courage to go, hand in hand, to the door to Tyelkormo’s room. Tyelkormo’s room is an Arcadia of forbidden joys for a small boy. He has glass tanks filled with all sorts of squirming, clawed, fanged creatures and plants that twine up the walls and crawl toward the windows. These are also filled with creatures; Nerdanel insists he keep the door closed. There are books too, hidden under the bed; not the kind of books that Fëanáro and Nerdanel and their brothers use to line the walls of their rooms but the kind that made him scream when they caught him looking through them and throw a geode at their head. Thankfully, they have two heads, the geode flew harmlessly through the shimmering spot where their thoughts meld. Then there is a lot of candy, which Tyelkormo squirrels away like the literal squirrel that was in his room for awhile till it got into Macalaurë’s hair while he was returning Tyelkormo’s laundry and Nerdanel made Tyelkormo get rid of it.

Írissë is lounging on Tyelkormo’s bed, paging slowly through a craftsman’s handbill for crossbows. One foot hangs off the end of the bed and bobs slowly up and down with its slipper dangling by a single toe. Both Ambarussa wince when they see that Tyelkormo—even Tyelkormo!—is packing his trunk as instructed, layering his fancy clothing with weapons, even though hunting is prohibited in Taniquetil, the animals there friendly and encroaching upon the path like in a storybook. “If my mother even glances in this,” he is saying, “she’ll see my longbow. But I really want my longbow.”

“So take it and your shortbow” is Írissë’s senseless solution that nonetheless appeals to Tyelkormo because he bobs his head in a nod and both bows are buried amid his socks and underthings.

“Tyelkormo?” It is Ambarto, the younger and conniving one. He’s made his eyes glassy and wide like a doll’s; his hands knit and twist in front of him. “Tyelkormo?”

Tyelkormo’s head whips up. He is growing into his face but still ugly in the awkward way of adolescence: his nose having blossomed in his face while his lips remained small and rose-like. He worked over-hard on his hair as a result but lacked the manual dexterity of his kin, and his braids made his skull a complex of ridges and lumps. He would become handsome someday, but this was not a good year for him.

“What!” he blurts. Much of what Tyelkormo says these days seems to be said by blurting, excess exclamation points erupting upon his speech like so many pimples upon his forehead.

“Amil said we have to pack a trunk. We don’t know how to pack a trunk.”

There is an unfortunate whine at the end of Ambarto’s plea. Tyelkormo will soothe the whining of his hound with scraps off the table, but otherwise, the sound—familiar as his own awkward face in the mirror each morning after so many years as one of the eldest of the Finwion grandchildren—sets his teeth on edge. Literally, he grits his teeth, making his face into a remarkably square shape. His jawbones bow out and his chin disappears. Fëanáro could teach basic geometry by it. The pimples become a constellation of small blushes as the blood rushes into his face.

“I would not pack your trunk for you,” he says with the pointed enunciation of the deliberately cruel, “if I was filling it with your dismembered, wolf-mangled corpses.”

Írissë burbles with laughter. The foot off the end of the bed swings harder; the slipper creeps closer to falling but yet hangs on to her toe.

The twins have identical looks of wide-eyed horror. They are at the age where ghost stories, the stories of wolves and beasts in the forest, loom overlarge in their imaginations. Even swaddled in quilts, with soft pillows beneath their heads and their nightlight revolving a silent parade of gentle animal shapes along their walls, they felt the prickle of danger at night and cling to each other, even the tiniest creak of the house causing their hearts to start into alertness.

Írissë grins at the effect her adored older cousin has on the Ambarussa. “Oh just look at the babies!” The slipper falls with a slap to the floor, and she sashays to the window. “If this storm comes like you think, Tyelko, because our dumb parents don’t know how to listen, then we might have to eat the stupid babies on the road to survive.” She pushes aside the curtain so that it looks like she is surveying the storm (which is in fact approaching from the opposite side of the house). “Hey—?” she inquires in a small and remarkably unguarded voice that sends Tyelkormo and the Ambarussa scampering for the window. Tyelkormo wedges himself into the middle for the best view.

Upon the early fall of snow stands an Elf, white-clad and with exceptionally pale skin. His silver hair is unbound and his clothing meager for what the weather would seem to demand. He might be invisible against the white backdrop but that he is dragging a branch laden with thousands of tiny red berries, leaving a scratch upon the face of the snow that effaces the prints of his bare, white feet.

“The Wight!” Tyelkormo breathes.

“Who is he?” Ambarussa, the elder, the bold, rambunctious one, does not sound so bold in that moment.

Tyelkormo’s face flicks toward Írissë, then his twin brothers to be sure they are listening. “The Wight,” he says again, his voice firmer this time with the authority of age. “My father tolerates him living here, in our forest. I don’t know why. I’d as soon send him away, but you know Fëanáro—he always has a place for the miscreants, and he doesn’t recognize the same … boundaries … as most of the Eldar.”

“Boundaries?” asks Írissë in a voice dripping with curiosity. Írissë is always concerned with boundaries; better that she can violate them.

“Yes. You know none of the Eldar would normally tolerate an Elf who used to be an Orc.”

“An Orc?!” Ambarto the younger squeaks out an interrobang.

In truth, neither twin really knows what an Orc is. Tyelkormo himself does not know much, but he’s spent well-nigh five decades at Fëanáro’s knee, hearing all the idiosyncratic and inappropriate matters that compromise Fëanáro’s research delivered in the kinds of blots and splashes that beg the imagination to fill in details. And Fëanáro is himself interested in Orcs and mentions them with some frequency, though generally after the twins have been put to bed, by request of Nerdanel. Such expositions are always delivered with a clinical detachment and in multisyllabic vocabulary that somehow makes them worse, like hearing a healer describe a dismemberment entirely in jargon. The imagination runs wild upon the plains of such coldly flat facts—especially Tyelkormo’s because he knows relatively few of the larger words and so will lie awake and plumb the darkest tunnels of his imagination, dreaming what they might mean (he’d never confess this to anyone)—and Macalaurë does not help either. He has a phenomenal vocabulary and enough training as a historian to convert his father’s research into blood-chilling—if not entirely accurate—fireside stories aimed entirely at terrifying his younger brothers. Carnistir has lately been using their father’s memory stones to record the best—or perhaps worst—of them, and Tyelkormo has developed the unwholesome habit of listening to them ad nauseum when he is stuck inside bored on rainy days.

Ambarussa are little enough to be thus far spared all of this—although one could not live with Fëanáro and his sons for even a few years without some exposure to insalubrious topics—but Tyelkormo clearly believes it time for that to change. It was Nerdanel who forbade it, after all, and he finds himself particularly salty with his mother on account of her too-calm response to his histrionics about the coming storm. The tale of the Wight that he is about to fabricate is a pastiche of these myriad tales heard from his father and brothers.

“Orrrcs.” His voice plummets as deep as it can go, a subterranean growl the sounds of which alone conjures the imagination of something eyeless, warped, and creeping. “Yes, children. The Wight, he used to be an Orc.”

“That can’t be,” says Írissë, but her voice lacks its flippant note of conviction.

“It happened like this,” Tyelkormo goes on. “That one down there, the Wight—he was captured by the Dark Lord when our people were still at the lake. He was one of the first to go. Melkor didn’t know what he was doing yet. He hurt him too deep, or maybe the Wight was weak … but he died, died there in Melkor’s dungeons, and he came here, to Aman, to the Halls.

“No one knows why Námo released him. He was new at it too, I suppose, the reembodiment business. He remade him a new fair body, all in white. But they say—they say that his feä is still corrupt, still remembers the dungeons, and it is only a matter of time before that darkness inside him? It overwhelms him and he goes mad and does the Dark Lord’s bidding again.

“My father likes him for what he knows of Orrrcs. My father is interested in those. So he tolerates him in the forest—for now. And the Wight, he drags out those branches full of those dumb bitter red berries. They’re poisonous if you have too much, just ask Curufinwë, he likes them and ate a bunch and was on the can for days!”

Poop jokes derail Tyelkormo easily. He laughs, too loud, and the pale Elf below tips his face up toward the window. His eyes are milky, occluded, like one who has no need of light, having learned the feral art of survival by scent and sound alone. Four pairs of hands scrabble to pull the curtains across the window, and it is hard to know who is squeaking with fear; maybe it is all of them.

“Maybe he is bringing them as decorations. The branches.” Írissë’s arms, bare in her short-sleeved dress, are as riddled with bumps as a fresh-plucked chicken. “They are a traditional Yuletide decoration. That’s what my mother says.” She tries to recapture her earlier swaggering attitude but her voice is watery, wavy.

Tyelkormo sighs. “I just hope I am not here when he decides to go mad. I don’t know that any of us, even Nelyo—even Atar—could save these little guys.” He places a suddenly fraternal hand on each of the twins’ heads.

Outside the window, they all imagine they hear the sound of branches dragging in the snow: scrrrip. Scrrrip. Scrrrrrip. And a littering of tiny red berries left like droplets of blood.

Chapter 3: The Little Jerks

Curufinwë Fëanáro Finwion has not thus far entered our tale, for he has been otherwise engaged. He has not borne witness to the tumult of packing trunks or the harbingering of the coming storm or the Wight or the Maia of Aulë with the incongruously soft hands. He has been at work: not in the forges or his workshop or his laboratory—not precisely speaking anyway. He has been busy in the kitchen.

Fëanáro is as brilliant in the culinary arts as in all others, but these he attacks with a dutiful surliness that do not mark his other creative pursuits. He has had these seven sons; it is his responsibility to feed them so as to maximize their growth, but he misses the days when supper consisted of a rabbit, a few potatoes, and a pinch of herbs cooked in a single pan over a campfire, just enough for Nerdanel and himself. Adding to his displeasure is the addition of his half-brother’s family. He had not wanted to host them on their progress; he’d gone so far as to confirm there was space enough for them all at the two inns in the village of Formenos, but Nerdanel had insisted. One could not have a sprawling, overlarge house—the consequence of engineering and architectural experiments, he’d pointed out, fruitlessly, not an inclination to harbor houseguests—and turn out one’s own family to an inn. According to Nerdanel.

And so the kettles on the stove are his overlarge ones, and each time he sights them, annoyance stings at a deep, unreachable place in his brain. Fëanáro at work is a whirl of activity, but his kitchen is as neat as a surgical theater, and the apron he wears a spotless formality.

Preparing the final meal before a long journey is a particular grievance to Fëanáro. Seven sons accumulate an endless parade of leftover foodstuffs, and Fëanáro detests waste. Therefore, each small container of pickled parsnips or curried turkey or chocolate-dipped cranberries must, in some way, be incorporated into the final feast lest they spoil before the family’s return. The result is several stridently boiling kettles containing a mélange of flavors that would challenge and delight the palates of Tirion’s most discerning epicureans. All of it is spiced to a high degree of heat for—after his name—Fëanáro cannot abide food without heat and finds it bland. He is a connoisseur of hot chilis and grows a rainbow of them in pots in the solarium. There is a single small saucepan off to the side, simmering merrily, that does not contain chilis. Fëanáro disdains people who cannot tolerate hot-spiced food, believing them to be dull and feeble, and he does not ordinarily accommodate them at his table—he has had his share of apprentices who stash food like squirrels in order not to starve at his table—but he has a soft spot for his two youngest sons, who cannot tolerate hot-spiced foods and whom he never expected to have (and so treats with an unguarded, uncharacteristic tenderness) and whom he claims are still developing their palates. Theirs is the supper, specially made, in the small saucepan.

But tonight he feels impatience even for them. Tyelkormo traipsed through the kitchen at least four times to conspicuously watch the sky from the back door, until Fëanáro barred him from the kitchen without giving him the satisfaction of reporting on the storm. There have been seemingly one thousand small inquiries from Nerdanel and Nelyo and Anairë. Then there were the twins—of the mild-spiced food in the special saucepan—who came unabashedly whining that Macalaurë was not allowing them to listen to a story he’d recorded on a memory stone and was playing for his cousins. The twins, knowing their father’s astonishment at their existence and resulting softness towards them, whined overlong about it and the unfairness of it and how Turukáno was being allowed and Turukáno was a real baby, until Fëanáro lost his patience and snarled, “If Macalaurë says no, it must be really bad. Now get!”

He has been snarling all day: at the endlessly traipsing Tyelkormo, at Curufinwë wanting some book, even at Nelyo inquiring if he could help. The twins left him with no doubt. He was in a foul mood, and as was his wont, he blamed it entirely on his half-brother.

Tomorrow, in a pair of conveyances, they would travel to Taniquetil. He would travel, along with his wife, half-brother, and sister-in-law, in the opulent carriage Nolofinwë had been taking on progress. The children would follow behind in the overlarge wagon that he used to ferry about his sizable family. The wagon was in dire need of new shocks, and the seat cushions were worn thin, but he would have preferred—and even intended—to travel in it, with the children. There, he could converse with Nelyo about their research, and Macalaurë would inevitably smuggle in a little flute or something nice to nap by, and he could quiz Findekáno on his studies and dwell on his shortcomings, and the twins would clamor into his lap and fall asleep with their little red heads under his chin. There would be noise and bickering and a range of unpleasant smells. But again, Nerdanel intervened and said it would look “odd” to ride in a dirty, shambling wagon with the children when he had a seat in one of the finest carriages in Tirion. So he would be feigning attentiveness to Tirion politics, politics that he had moved from the city to avoid. He is wearying of it already, and it hasn’t even begun.

So Fëanáro is short-tempered by the time the kettles of food are set out on trivets along the trestle table and the small stampede of relatives begin to arrive. The twins’ saucepan he sits at the end, where they can easily reach, with their bowls beside it that are stamped on the bottom with matching images of chipmunks.

The noise rises immediately. His family is large and noisy, but that noise takes on a different quality when his half-brother is here, a more swaggering, contentious air. Some of his sons are trying to impress and outdo their cousins; others are already wearied by the imposition of so many near-strangers into the sacred space that is Formenos: a place made to be entirely apart from the southern politics now literally in its midst. Nerdanel is doing her best to impose her calm upon the gathering, but it is like pouring a teacupful of water onto a bonfire: noble but ultimately ineffectual. His half-brother’s family are beginning with their unmannerly demands for salt and black pepper.

“I,” says Fëanáro with a marked deliberateness, “have seasoned the food as it is meant to be tasted.” His voice can scarce be heard above the noise, and after a few minutes, he watches Nerdanel slip into the kitchen and return with salt and black pepper.

“This is too spicy,” he hears Írissë whine to his thirdborn son. “I am going to burn my mouth!” Írissë is possessed of one of those unimaginative temperaments, Fëanáro believes, and makes a dramatic show of edginess to hide her mediocrity. Her inability to tolerate spicy food further cements this impression in his mind. Naturally, Anairë begins immediately coddle her, and Nerdanel shoots him a sharp look. She’d provided him with a meticulous list of preferences and restrictions the evening before, when he used the preparation of ingredients as an excuse to avoid part of his half-brother’s first evening in his home. Her list he’d immediately put in the compost.

Carnistir comes in, looking wild-eyed and with half of his unfortunately coarse hair sailing out from the side of his head. Turukáno begins bickering with him almost immediately.

The twins appear last. Only Tyelkormo as a child was capable of becoming so tightly wound so quickly. They feed off of each other like a pair of storms colliding over the sea. Feet that small should not make such a pounding, and their little high-pitched voices arc over the rest of the noise and become an incessant backdrop that is the auditory equivalent of a bright light shined directly into the eye. It sounds, to Fëanáro, not like words but like a nonstop Eeeeeeee, eeeeee, eeeeeeeeee!

Írissë tries to grab one as he passes and says, in the cruelty-honed voice mastered by little girls used to getting their way (and who suddenly aren’t), “The Wight, the Wight is going to eat you!”

One goes under the table, where an alarming snarl suggests one of Tyelkormo’s hounds has been interrupted at its repast, and the other pounds away in the opposite direction, still shrieking Eeeeeeeee eeee!

Nelyo—Nelyo, bless him—corrals them both, one in each arm, and they are almost instantly calmed by whatever he whispers in their ears. “But we can’t! We can’t eat spicy food!” That was Ambarto, the younger, conniving one. Fëanáro expects his youngest child to follow in his footsteps in oratory; he is persuasive, even though his rhetorical strategies thus far consist primarily of whining and yelling.

“You know Atar made you a mild dish. Go look for it and serve yourself some. He put your bowls right next to it.” With that, Nelyo sends them on their ways.

Macalaurë and Findekáno have gotten into a bottle of the spirits that Fëanáro makes every year from berries harvested from the junipers that grow in his garden. They are singing a traditional Yule feasting song but changing the words to make them inappropriate. He hears soup become poop and mitts become tits. Judging by her wide eyes, Anairë has also overheard. She is wading through waist-deep children—including the twins clamoring for their mild dish—to reach her son. Her nephew she won’t dare, but Findekáno will receive a sharp twist of his ear, assuming she ever manages to cross the room.

“Where’s our mild dish? Where’s our mild dish? Where’s our mild dish?” What Ambarussa lacks in eloquence, he makes up for in force. He does not need to push so rudely past others, but doing so conveys the urgency of their mission. “Where’s our mild dish? We can’t eat spicy! Everyone knows that!”

Nerdanel appears at Fëanáro’s side then, a bowl of stew in her hands. It is the hottest one, made with crispy fried duck and the last of the autumn’s berries, into which he’d poured the fullness of his culinary gifts. “You haven’t eaten yet,” she says. For a moment, the twined aromas of spicy and sweet soothe him almost into calm. The noise around him fades. Curufinwë’s elbow catches him in the small of the back, where he’d pulled a muscle last week lifting something in the forge, but the pain too is muffled like under feathers. He feels his mouth smiling at her, at Nerdanel, fiercely beautiful in ways no one else’s eye is keenly honed enough to appreciate. Only his.

And in that moment, everything will be okay. The carriage ride to Taniquetil will pass. She will change the subject from politics and even shape the conversation to allow him to talk about his work.

Taniquetil will be okay. As okay as it can be, anyway. She will make excuses for him when she must; she will hold his arm like anchoring an airship to the earth. She will steer him toward the Ainur he will be able to bear to see.

She is looking around the room. “This is going to be a lot of dishes to wash …” and he almost laughs. She is granting him a reason not to linger overlong with this half-brother.

The sprawling wings of his house were experiments in engineering: in using deceptively delicate materials, perfectly poised to bear the weight they were given. The Noldor used to build with heavy blocks and planks; much of Tirion is constructed that way. It was Fëanáro who untangled the play of forces that allowed his domicile to rise light and fair as the trees themselves, slender branches seeming to balance the sky. That is Nerdanel, what he learned of her: how to take the small and strong and make a soaring, protected space over him. He is in the process of spinning these thoughts into words of gratitude to her when something erupts into the place of peace she has made for him.

“—on purpose!” is all he hears. It is the voice of his second-youngest son, Ambarussa. He still marvels that children’s voices can go so high; it seems beyond even the range of their tiny vocal cords. The sound needles in his ear like a drill, and the contentment Nerdanel had bubbled over him collapses as sure as if he’d taken an axe to frail wood.

The twins each have a chipmunk bowl cupped in his hands. The lower lips of each pooch out in that sign of discontentment that, like crawling and grasping and whining, it seems small children do not need to be taught but arrive with instinctually planted in their brains. The saucepan has a telltale trickle down its side; someone has been served out of it, yet the twins’ chipmunk bowls are empty.

“If you want mild-spiced food, little baby,” says Tyelkormo in that taunting voice that Fëanáro hates, “then someone’s gonna have to barf it up. You’re too late. It’s all gone.” And behind him, Írissë smiles around the food she is shoveling enthusiastically into her mouth.

It would have been easiest for Fëanáro to take both hands and shove the kettle of spicy-sweet fried duck stew onto the floor. That was the end result, and perhaps it would have been less rage-inducing to simply see his hours of work and the sustenance made for his family turned into a stain on the carpet that would still be a ghost underfoot when the offending twins were grown men. But as it was, Ambarto—the younger and less forceful one—shoves Tyelkormo in the belly. It produces little effect. But when Ambarussa—the elder and rambunctious one—shoves his twin into their brother Tyelkormo, it is like the first innocuously bouncing pebble that unleashes a landslide. Ambarto, startled by the shove, drops his chipmunk bowl. It hits a leg of the table and shatters. Tyelkormo must shift a foot to keep immobile as demanded by his pride; one of his age and firmness of stature cannot be unseated by the tiny boys raging before him. But his foot comes down on a piece of glass—containing the chipmunk’s insipid little eye—which would not have been a problem, were he wearing shoes, but Tyelkormo stopped wearing shoes several summers ago, an affectation he picked up from Oromë and which Fëanáro hates. After all, this is not a house of Oromë; it is a house of Aulë, and pursuits are undertaken here that would burn and slice and dissolve the feet from the legs of one foolish enough to go barefoot.

But Tyelkormo is barefoot, and the chunk of glass with the chipmunk’s insipid little eye painted on it goes into his foot, and this is more pain than he is a man, so he hops and howls. He bumps into Curufinwë—as noted before when he struck his father in the back with this elbow, circling the table to ladle each option into a single bowl in hopes of besting his father’s own culinary prowess using the raw materials given by Fëanáro in what he imagines to be clever combinations—and Curufinwë sloshes hot soup onto Anairë, who yelps and flails her arm and knocks over a bottle of wine. The wine—not great stuff but also not the quality that anyone wants to see dumped unceremoniously across the table—glugs out into a growing puddle on the tabletop. Anairë grabs for the bottle, but it is wet and spins out of her hands and onto the floor. It douses Macalaurë on its way down and paints a pink stripe down the front of his white shirt. He yells more than is warranted; it is not a great shirt, but he is a dramatic. His hands fling high. Nolofinwë, always seeking to fix things and goaded now especially by first his wife’s yelp and now Macalaurë’s not-inconsiderable bellow of offense at the ruined shirt, lunges with a tea towel to save the day. He even yells, “I’ve got it!” in a way that, centuries later, will come to Findekáno’s mind when he hears that his father has rushed off into foolish, singlehanded combat with Morgoth. There is no way that that single tea towel has “got” anything.

But out of the way he shoves Carnistir and Turukáno, stunned silent from their bickering, each bouncing off of an elbow as he soars, tea towel extended, toes pointed and braids fluttering most picturesquely, to save the carpet from the assault of red wine. And he does; in surveying the aftermath, not a drop marred the carpet on his side of the table. Carnistir thumps harmlessly into his mother; Turukáno is not so lucky. He is not a particularly athletic child, and being flung upon the elbow of his exceedingly athletic father sends him a considerable distance through the air, wheeling and shrieking. He catches onto a kettle of the duck stew, the tempting aroma of which has only just recently lulled Fëanáro into a false sense of calm. He drags at its edge as he falls and upends the entire thing onto the carpet with a clang of the kettle and a wet slosh of stew.

There is a sudden stunned silence much like the muffled sound in one’s ears after the assault of a particularly strident noise. Even Nelyo is unmoving, unsure of where to go first in this Rube Goldberg of a disaster. Only Nolofinwë is even moving, patiently plowing back the wine from the table’s edge.

Around Fëanáro, all sense of calm and contentment and hope have disintegrated. As he watches his half-brother mop away the wine to save the ugly threadbare carpet of his host’s home, he whirls in the direction where the mayhem began. Ambarussa’s hands are still planted in the center of Ambarto’s back. Both boys’ eyes seem to take up half of their faces.

“Look what you did, you little jerks!”

Fëanáro is not unskilled in unkindness. He can make a person feel small and forge self-doubt with the same easy grace as he makes gems. He is not even necessarily opposed to insults, but they must be crafted insults, made as one makes an arrow to exploit the weakness in one’s opponent’s armor. This unthinking and uncreative insult sounds the full depth of his frustration. Both twins blanch, a smattering of freckles like paint flecks upon their faces.

Nerdanel brushes past him and takes a pudgy arm in each of her hands. “It’s bedtime,” she proclaims.

“This isn’t fair!” squeals Ambarto. “He—she—” A finger waves at Tyelkormo and Írissë, who at least has the good grace to stop gulping her stolen stew.

“We’ll discuss it later. Say goodnight, Ambarussa.”

“Good night, Ambarussa,” Ambarto quips before they are dragged from the room.

Chapter 4: Serpents and Soft Hands

Meanwhile, two Maiar stand upon the chest-high walls that encloses the village of Formenos. The House of Fëanáro, apart from the village and viewed at this small distance, glitters like the Itseloktë that rises in the eastern sky early at this time of the year. Though its windows are aglow with the frantic preparations of its many residents and guests, from afar, it is as steady and calm as a ship safe in harbor.

Iniðilêz rubs his soft, pampered hands together as he contemplates it. He’s discarded the robes and insignia of Aulë; he wears now a nondescript cloak suited to the weather—the wind is beginning to whip ahead of the impending storm—and a knit hat that he stole from a little girl in the village. He is no more a Maia of Aulë than he is the artificer of Eä, though he is a Maia. In the earliest eons after his manifestation from the thought of Eru, he’d been sharply contemplative, if lazy—not given to the labors that delighted his brethren-in-thought, although he always had a critical word for how the labors of others might be better accomplished for his convenience: a decrease in clamor or a softer living space. When Melkor began to first incite his chaos into the Music, Iniðilêz became one of the first to rise, to hop with delight amid the notes of the Ainur, shattering them in the way of a small impish boy crushing snails underfoot. He’s also a kleptomaniac. Small items find their way into and disappear amid the doughy folds of his hands.

With him is Dušamanûðânâz, blowing warmth into prehensile fingers that seem to have one joint too many. Even the kindest among the Ainur wonder if Dušamanûðânâz was fully formed in the mind of Eru, or if he was a whim briefly cogitated in between the contemplation of weightier matters, rather like thinking, just before bed, of a craving for ice cream or considering about quitting one’s work and traveling the world as a stowaway on transport ships: little more than a flash of neurons gone quickly dim and forgotten. Dušamanûðânâz seems borne of such a flash in the mind of Eru. He has never been able to manifest coherently in corporeal form as his brethren can. He might have a humanoid head and animal body (or vice versa) or mismatched hands or hair or scales in improper places. Now, for instance, he has a thick, alligator-like tail protruding awkwardly from the top of his trousers (which he has lowered slightly to accommodate the tail, leaving several inches exposed of a disarmingly human buttcrack) and a thick, primordial cant to his otherwise human face, including a pair of lower incisors that nip across his upper lip. And of course the arthropodic fingers, like centipede legs.

“Aaah, this is it!” says Iniðilêz, flourishing a pudgy palm at the Fëanorians’ house.

“What is?” Dušamanûðânâz replies.

“The House of Fëanáro! The jewel in the crown! The gilding on the manuscript! The cognac in the glass!”

Metaphors are lost on Dušamanûðânâz. He is a metaphor for so many things himself that perceiving their aesthetic employment is rather like knowing the actual sound of one’s actual voice. “I like cognac!” he exclaims, though he’s never tasted it. He is thinking of Campari.

Iniðilêz ignores him. “I’ve seen it, inside. Everything we could possibly want will be in there, enough to make the Great Melkor at last notice us. Gemstones and jewelry and ingots of raw metal—”

“Toys!” exclaims Dušamanûðânâz with a spray of his overlong fingers.

“—lampstones and mechanical contrivances and those memory stones no one can shut up about—”

“His renowned collection of pornographic manuscripts!”

Iniðilêz casts his partner in crime a disgusted look. Rows of scales have begun emerging from Dušamanûðânâz’s face. “You stupid animal!” Iniðilêz yells. “Just be ready to go tomorrow night!”

“Tomorrow?”

Iniðilêz grins. Now it is his face—his perfectly human face—that is transformed and beastly. “Tomorrow, yes, yes. I have their assurance that they will be leaving early tomorrow. By tomorrow night, there will be no one home to know or care what we take.”

“Tomorrow …” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice is just a slither now, lost on the rising wind.

Chapter End Notes

A Note on Names

I am no linguist. (This is no secret.) I’ve “invented” a few names for this story, by which I mean that I’ve plundered the resources kindly made available by actual experts on Tolkien’s languages and incompetently twisted them to my own purposes.

As always, I’ve done my best. I’m probably wrong. If you know better than me and think you can do better, have at it! I’ll revise to reflect your changes.

Itseloktë: the easterly star cluster known as the Pleiades. Its Sindarin name, Remmirath, is well-known; Parma Eldalamberon XII gives the Qenya name as Itselokte. Yeah, I literally tacked on a diacritic and went with that.

Iniðilêz: The soft-handed Maia, using the word for “lily” and an inflexional ending for names, as described by Helge Kåre Fauskanger on his page on Valarin.

Dušamanûðânâz: Iniðilêz’s coconspirator, named using the word for “marred” and an inflexional ending for names (see reference above).

Chapter 5: Attic Exile

Nerdanel is renowned for her patience. Her epithet “the wise,” she often thinks, is less about actual wisdom and more about the patience to let wisdom come. Seven sons and Fëanáro’s tantrums and a tangle of family grudges, enough to fill a book, and she stands in their midst with her gentle mannerisms, slow voice, and beatific smile, carefully restoring order in the way that, with slow hands, Eru might have sorted the raw stuff of the Void and made it into stars and water and earth. She casts aside the dark and the unnecessary so that those around her feel their true purpose flourish. The wise. It is not without reason that Fëanáro credits her with half of his success.

But Nerdanel is after all a human. And this has been an incredibly stressful ordeal: the arrival of Fingolfin’s family (after a long expectation of the event that was punctuated by Fëanáro’s clandestine attempts to secure other accommodations for them that Nerdanel had to constantly undo) and the preparations for the Yule festival amid the pending storm and the constant collision of personalities that is the emotional equivalent of throwing stones at a crash cymbal. More than once, Nerdanel has had the creeping thought that, if they were to all try harder, there would be less frenzy for her to calm, less chaos for her to set to order. And then it is hard not to take it personally.

As she leads the Ambarussa away from the disastrous dinner, she can feel the impatience rising within her. It feels like a waterskin must feel to be filled: a climbing distention that cannot be relieved until disgorged. She forces her body into calm. Act calm and become calm. (A lesson she has taught to Fëanáro, that he does not use, and several of her children, that they do not use either.) She makes her hands clasping theirs relax. Her thumbs stroke their skin, still soft and babylike, to remind herself that they are the youngest and far from the only ones to blame in the escapade that just unfolded. But her feet stomp a little louder on the stairs than necessary, and she walks a bit faster than she knows is comfortable for their little legs to keep up.

On the way, she gets the whole story, delivered in half-sentences:

“Tyelkormo started it!” That is Ambarussa, the older one who makes points like a rock thrown through glass. (Much like, ironically, Tyelkormo.)

“All he wants to do is impress Írissë!” Ambarto is more eloquent and perceptive, more like Nelyo but physically fearful.

“And she’s dumb and rude!”

“She doesn’t like spicy food! And she has bad manners and won’t just pretend like you told us we always have to do at feasts!”

“We don’t either!”

“But we’re little and she’s not and Atar made that dish special for us!”

“And Tyelkormo stole it!”

“He stole it and gave it to her, and then he took some himself, and they ate every last bit of it, didn’t even leave a ladleful for us to share.”

“So we would have had to go hungry!”

“And now we’re the ones who are in trouble, which isn’t fair!”

This brings them to their bedroom, its closed door decorated by a pair of copper foxes shaped by her father and engraved with Ambarussa and Ambarto. “You are in trouble”—she makes her voice slow and sweet—“because you struck your brother first—”

“We just pushed him,” Ambarussa interrupts.

Nerdanel detests being interrupted. No matter how angry he is, Fëanáro will let her finish—his face growing increasingly lined with rage—and would not dare to interrupt. He did once, too, early in their relationship, and never did it again.

She closes her eyes and feels her eyelashes quiver against her cheek.

“I am not arguing with the two of you. You are out of line, and it is time for bed.”

“But we’re hungry.” Ambarto keys his voice into a pitiable note, and with his little lip pushed out, she almost does feel sorry for him.

“I’ll have Tyelkormo bring you some bread and jam.”

“Not Tyelkormo!” yells Ambarussa and there it goes, the impatience: It is neck-high now, and she can feel her pulse beating there, too fast. She ought to breathe deep and slow it, allow her thoughts to catch her actions, but in that moment, it feels satisfying to enact something that, for once in her life, will make her own evening easier.

“You will read quietly in your room then until Turukáno comes up, and then you will go to bed. We have an early day tomorrow.”

“Turukáno!”

“Yes. Turukáno. He will be staying with you tonight—”

“But he pinches us and he’s mean!” Interrupted again.

Her eyelids flutter closed. The impatience is ear-high; she can feel them burning.

There is an attic to the house where the family stores the items it no longer uses but can’t bear to part with, or the broken things it intends to fix (but hasn’t), or items still useful but too large to occupy their everyday living spaces. One of the latter is a metal-framed couch that folds down into a bed. Nerdanel herself has slept on it many times, when Fëanáro is restless with one of his new inventions and paces their bedroom without coming to bed; she knows it is comfortable. Outwardly, she is a paragon of calm as she leads them by their tiny, soft hands to the stairs to the attic.

“The attic!” Ambarto gasps. He is afraid of the attic as he is afraid of many things. Ambarussa, on the other hand, yanks his hand from hers and stomps up the first three steps before turning to face her.

“Come on, Ambarussa!” he barks. “Who cares? Let the monsters eat us, then she might feel sorry for sending us hungry to bed in the cold, creepy attic.”

Nerdanel feels a twinge of regret, but she is a parent many times over and knows that walking back a consequence now will embolden them and create a ripple effect of repercussions over the next several weeks of their journey that she will come to sorely regret. A night in the attic might be what they need to remove one chaotic element from her coming ordeal.

Ambarto is crying. He makes it to the second step before turning back. “We’re sorry …”

She closes her heart to his tears. “It’s too late. Go get ready for bed, and I will send Tyelkormo with bread and jam in a few minutes.”

“You suck,” says Ambarussa. His little face is almost as red as his hair. “All of you suck.”

“That’s a terribly unkind thing to say.” As soon as the words are out, Nerdanel wishes she hadn’t responded. Ambarussa is eager to seize on any reaction—even the most insipid, boilerplate reaction she could have possibly given—as further excuse to escalate. Which he does.

“I hope we never see any of you again!” His voice rises to a scream at the end. Ambarto glances at him in alarm and then, to Nerdanel’s surprise, his little face hardens too. He shares, it seems, his brother’s sentiment on the matter.

“Me too,” he whispers.

Nerdanel has trouble feeling her feet. This has escalated most inappropriately. The wise? Hardly! She hears the same feeble admonishment—idiotically ineffectual before and even more so upon repetition—pass her lips, just in a slightly more wounded tone: “That is terribly unkind. You would be sorry if you woke up tomorrow and didn’t have a family.”

“No we wouldn’t,” says Ambarussa, some of the fury gone from his voice.

“Then say it again. It is the season of wishes. ‘Say it three and it may come to be.’”

“I hope you jerks all disappear!” says Ambarussa, and Ambarto echoes in a thin little voice, “I hope you all disappear.”

Nerdanel’s hand trembles as she closes the door upon them. “Goodnight, boys.” She hopes they cannot hear the tears in her voice.

Chapter 6: The Storm

Late that night, the resplendent House of Fëanáro slowly dims, its windows going dark one by one, like the heavy eyelids of a sleeper nodding in its chair, until the last—Nerdanel and Fëanáro’s room—winks out, and the house slumbers.

No one sees the storm begin. Even Tyelkormo, with his vigorous sniffing the wind and scrying the horizon and thrusting a spit-wetted finger into the air, lies flopped on his belly, enclosed by dogs on all sides, snoring powerfully. The last to retire, Nerdanel and Fëanáro—the former busy late with packing, the latter with dishes—lie back-to-back, subtly dissatisfied with each other. If Fëanáro had turned to hold his wife as was his wont, he would have seen the first flakes of snow meandering down; as it is, he is fixated on how he will survive the journey by carriage tomorrow when his tolerance already feels crumpled and broken.

The twins cry themselves to sleep—the jam and bread brought by Tyelkormo left symbolically untouched despite grumbling bellies—and observe nothing.

The wind, which has been steady and ominous, abruptly dies. The darkened house gives a groan as of relief. Carnistir and Írissë stir at the sound but do not waken. The first snowflakes come next, fat and feather-light, as charming as the shreds of tissue that represent snow inside the glass baubles one can find in the market at Valmar. If one were the inspect the first snowflakes, fallen upon the arm of one’s coat, one would observe that they’d proceeded from the Fanyamar to your sleeve with delicate crystals unscathed, so gentle was their descent.

Within the hour, though, the timbre of the weather changes as the storm that has been all day pressing from the north comes suddenly galloping down, hemmed by the mountains to the east and driving the wind before it like quarry flushed from its den. The house braces itself with a ripple of crackles. The trees make a miserable sound and scrabble at each other with their branches. The snow is no longer amiable and soft; it is the fine, driving blitz of shattered crystals, deceptively small but stinging. Were the house still awake and alight and Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz still upon the walls of Formenos, they would have been able no longer to see the splendor of the House of Fëanáro. It has been obliterated by the snow.

In the village of Formenos, the carriage master Roccowë, occupying the very rooms that Fëanáro had intended for his half-brother before being vetoed by Nerdanel, sleeps restlessly. He has not liked the look of the northern horizon and is keenly cognizant that he will be entrusted to convey the two Noldorin high princes, their wives, and the bulk of the Finwëan grandchildren south for the Yule festival upon whatever roads present themselves tomorrow morning. The state of the Fëanorian wagon is not much of a concern—it was built in the north with the bulk and wide wheels intended for traversing slight snowfalls—but the royal carriage Nolofinwë has made his progress in thus far was constructed for the pleasant paved roads of the sunny south, not the rutted dirt tracks of the north, with the added challenge of a handspan of snow upon them.

The sudden resumption of the wind also sends a cascade of small cracks and pops through the inn. Roccowë staggers from his bed—kingly, comfortable, yet he has been uneasy upon it—to the water closet. He abstained the night before from all wine and spirits, having instead the gas-infused flavored water popular in the north among miners who cannot dare inebriation. There is a small window high over the toilet, and he rubs his eyes several times before realizing that the blearing of the lamp across the street isn’t because of the lingering sleep in his eyes but because of snow come so sudden and thick that a light mere yards away is reduced to a golden haze.

This is how, deep in Telperion’s hours, Roccowë winds up pounding at the door of the House of Fëanáro. The wagoner and his two footmen he has dragged already from bed, amid complaints of sore heads (they were not so abstinent as Roccowë), abruptly silenced when they saw the snow, already deep enough to cover their booted feet. At that point, they became equally frantic.

It is Nolofinwë who answers the door. “Are you mad, man?” His eyes are narrowed with sleep and there is a pillow crease across his face. “Wake this house full of children and you might as well kick over a hive of bees!” But when Roccowë explains that if they do not leave within the hour, the snow will become too deep to cross without a sleigh, and (Roccowë carefully emphasizes this part) he will likely be stranded in his half-brother’s hospitality for several days or even longer, then urgency impresses Nolofinwë as well, and he disappears wild-eyed back into the house, yelling to wake the world.

This instigates a repeat of the earlier madcap preparations: clothing hastily donned, trunks slung down the stairs, gifts heaped high, items present at bedtime suddenly gone missing and the ensuing accusations and bickering, all amplified by the surreal sense generated by enacting all of this in the middle of the night. Both Fëanáro and Nolofinwë are bellowing at their respective children, suddenly and sickeningly aware in their irritation at the bellowing of the other of the implications of not making it onto the road ahead of the worst of the storm.

At last the trunks are loaded. “Count the children!” Nerdanel calls to Nelyo. It is a milling mess of brothers and cousins jockeying for the best seats and Nolofinwë’s servants pressing into the fray and footmen loading the wagon with luggage and provisions, but he counts ten heads plus himself, skipping the servants in his uncle’s colors, which makes eleven. He calls this number out to his mother, who is satisfied to give the command to leave. He does not notice that two of the heads—belonging to the wagoner’s two footmen, garbed nondescriptly for winter—peel away and do not join the crush of children trying to push into the wagon all at once but take their positions, one each on the back of the wagon and carriage. Then the whip cracks and there is a tense moment when the wheels stick in the snow, but slowly they begin to turn, the snow creaking underneath their treads, and with the winds of the storm pressing at their backs, the Houses of Fëanáro and Nolofinwë depart into the dark and the snow, south to Taniquetil.

The royal carriage is amply provisioned, swaddled in deep furs and with velvet drapes that hide the snow and muffle the howling wind so that it might be a placid summer’s day outside, except for the occasional skidding of the carriage wheels on the road. Nolofinwë calls almost immediately to the footman for mulled wine, which is delivered into their hands, steaming fragrantly and perfectly spiced. Fëanáro turned up his nose at Nolofinwë’s need for a servant to pour his wine, but he does not turn up his nose at the wine.

But Nerdanel remains uncharacteristically edgy. Her impeccable calm is tarnished and frayed, like a soft and delicate fabric after being trailed on the ground. She sips at her wine but it does not calm her; she sets the mug aside. There is a whisper of a draft from around one of the velvet drapes. She tweaks it and tightens her furs around her shoulders, then sheds them entirely for being too hot. She tries the wine again, but is sets like acid at the base of her throat.

“We are completely safe, I assure you.” Nolofinwë has detected her unease and attributed it to the road conditions and weather. “Roccowë is the finest driver in Tirion and has experience with all manner of weather.”

“You forget, Brother, that we also have experience with all manner of weather conditions,” Fëanáro reminds him, but he’s on his third mug of wine, and the admonishment is almost affectionate.

“It’s not us. It’s the children,” says Nerdanel. It is not, but that is the closest she can put her finger onto her unease. She crosses, uncrosses, recrosses her legs.

“The children are fine,” say Fëanáro and Nolofinwë in unison, both deep enough in their cups not to notice the irony.

“The wagon is ugly and old but that is precisely why it is safe,” Fëanáro elaborates, gesturing with his cup. “I’d challenge any in Tirion to build its like.” He ladles himself a fourth cup of wine, splashing more into the proffered cups of Anairë and Nolofinwë. “You and I traveled through much worse, in much worse conveyance, at their age. Once we make it over the southern pass, the snow will subside, and the journey will be easy from there.”

“It is not the safety of the wagon,” says Nerdanel.

“It is because I did not put the dishes away,” Fëanáro offers in a voice with no room for uncertainty. “And you did not make the bed.”

“It is neither the dishes nor the bed.” Nerdanel feels impatience rising again, the second time in a day, niggling at her like a small child tugging at her hand while she’s preoccupied. She traces the source of the feeling. Fëanáro and his precious kitchen, his precious dishes that must be washed and put away just so. And there it is: the kitchen, the dishes. She waits for the impatience to rise again toward her husband and his self-centered cluelessness, but nothing happens.

“No, that’s not it,” she whispers.

“Try to sleep,” Anairë suggests, ever the practical, seeking to shortcut through life’s difficulties. “By the time you awaken, we’ll be over the pass and the storm will be behind us again.”

But it is the kitchen … no, not the kitchen but the dishes. Not that they weren’t put away; Nerdanel would leave them out every night if it were up to her. It is a waste of effort to put something up just to bring it down again. It is Fëanáro’s idiosyncrasy that the kitchen be left just so. She closes her eyes, as though she were taking Anairë’s advice. She sees a bowl shattering on the floor. She pulls the memory backward, like drawing something out of the water. The bowl reassembles, nestled in small hands. There is a chipmunk printed upon it.

And there it is: the impatience again, of being squeezed on all sides too long and too loudly by the inconsideration of others. This particular offense was not egregious, just badly timed. She really should have been angry at Tyelkormo, or perhaps Írissë. At best, they both knew better; at worst, they incited their young, hungry kin to outrage. Instead, she remembers the feel of tiny hands in hers, of the steep, close stairs leading to the attic, of the defiant, tremulous footsteps of the twins—

The twins. In the attic. The twins in the attic whom she never roused to depart.

“Ambarussa!” she screams.

Chapter 7: Ainur with Filthy Feär

The Ambarussa wake up late the next morning. The snow is still coming down fast and thick outside the small dormer windows, filling the room with a milky, slightly opaque light. Without speaking, they decide to wait in bed for someone to come up the stairs to get them; the thought shimmers in the space between them. They will also pretend not to hear if someone calls from the bottom of the steps but make that person climb the stairs—which are not short and are steep—and will pretend to be asleep and make that person wake them.

Ambarto thinks the idea that, if the person is not kind about it, they will pretend to be dead, which is a favorite tactic when Tyelkormo or Carnistir are sent to wake them because they like to grab and shake them. So the twins do what anyone would do under such circumstances, go limp and slack-jawed, and stop breathing. When the chosen brother runs off yelling to the nearest parent that the twins are being obstinate, they arise and follow after, scrubbing their eyes with sleepy little fists, to ask what all the yelling is about.

While they wait, they share the jam and bread from last night, which has gone stale, and get the fold-out bed deliberately full of crumbs, which will serve their mother right the next time she stays here to give their father peace for his contemplation and creativity and has to change the sheets because of the exile and shoddy dinner she forced upon them.

They wait. And wait and wait. And wait and wait and wait. No one comes.

At last, hand in hand, they descend the stairs and poke their heads around the corner. The hallway is a row of shuttered doors like eyes and lips sealed upon secrets. Their stockinged feet make the barest of sounds on the floors and stairs as they descend to the next level. In the kitchen, last night’s dishes still dry on the racks, so their father has not arisen yet, for putting away the previous night’s mess is the first thing he would do (or more likely send one of his sons to do). The big stew kettle dries centermost, and the surviving chipmunk bowl looks lonely amid the bigger-sized dishes of their relatives. They avoid looking at or thinking of either by going into the dining room

The dining room still smells of the stew that Nelyo was only partly successful in scrubbing from the carpet; there is a pungent undernote of soap beneath a spicy, meaty miasma still thick in the air. A clean tablecloth covers the trestle table, so fresh that it is still creased, and someone has arranged breakfast settings. There are two bowls of fruit. The place settings are unused. The fruit is untouched.

On near-silent feet, they go to the vestibule and open the front door. The snow is knee-deep and drifted higher in places; a sugary fall of it sprinkles through the front door and across the vestibule floor. The snow and wind have subsided from their mid-night wildness. The snow comes down, heavy, falling in fat, wet flakes direct from cloud to ground. The road to Formenos and away south toward Tirion are unblemished by tracks. “They didn’t leave,” Ambarto observes, “else there would be tracks on the road.”

“And they would’ve eaten breakfast first,” Ambarussa adds. “No way would Tyelkormo go out on the road hungry!”

The shimmering spot between them nearly glistens like a newborn star or like the sharp spark that leaps from your hand if you touch metal after scuffing feet on the carpet. It is a keen-edged, elated thing, but still small and cautious. Neither of them wants to be the first to give voice to it. Both listen behind them; their ears would swivel back if they were beasts. They tease apart the silence of the house, waiting for the shuffle of a foot or a breath or a snicker. They wait for their families to jump out, hands waving, and scream, “Surprise!” It would be some elaborate punishment for what they said to their mother. They are convinced that, of all the ways their family might treat them the morning after what they have already, in that shared spark of thought, capitalized into the Great Stew Incident, it will not be one of mercy and kindness. Their own undercurrent of guilt and their ever-abiding conviction that, by being the youngest, they are also the most disappointing brooks no room for any reaction but one that punishes.

However, there is no sound behind them. They close the door and meander through the labyrinthine hallways, calling the names of their relatives. “Amil! Atar! Nelyo! Uncle Nolofinwë! Turukáno! Tyelkormo! We’re up now! You can come out!” They pretend to be naïve of the spite at the heart of such a trick. They do not say they are sorry.

Finally, after wandering all the halls and surreptitiously checking the best hiding places, they find themselves back in the vestibule, before the front door. Neither wants to say anything. Ambarussa is pushing his feet into the little drifting of snow on the floor. The silence is so absolute that they can hear the plop of snowflakes piling up beyond the door.

“We’ve done it—” Ambarto begins at last, and the seal broken off the silence, Ambarussa finishes for him:

“We made our family disappear!”

The House of Fëanáro in Formenos is a sprawling playground to a small child left untended. It doubles into and hooks back upon itself like a maze inside one of the puzzle books sold to children in Tirion for long journeys on the road; it is filled with tools and substances and materials that are hazardous and irresistible. There are all the projects—most unfinished, all usually untouchable—that mark it as the home of brilliant, idiosyncratic minds. And of course, there is the forbidden: Fëanáro draws looser boundaries than most of the Noldor (themselves as a people disinclined to hard-inked borders), a predilection that only intensified after Curufinwë began to grow and Fëanáro no longer expected to again become the father of young children, and it is Nerdanel and Nelyo who keep the twins within a smaller, more age-appropriate sphere. But all of those closed doors and locked cabinets and unreachable shelves are suddenly brought deliciously within the grasp of their small hands and bright, curious eyes.

Within the first hours of their freedom, they manage to commit the following:

First, they breakfast upon stored biscuits dipped in caramel. They have watched Fëanáro and Nelyo make caramel many times. Theirs is a little smoky and they scorch one of Fëanáro’s favorite saucepans in making it and they briefly light a dishrag on fire, but it comes out in syrupy—if slightly grainy—and more importantly prodigious quantities.

Fueled by sugar, secondly, they conduct a thorough investigation of who is the more proficient wrestler. They accomplish this in their parents’ vast bed. Fëanáro and Nerdanel both would be proud of their deployment of the scientific method in making that determination. They keep score with one of Nelyo’s quills with tick marks on the wall.

(Ambarussa wins.)

Third, they douse the long lower hallway—which descends at a slight slant toward the wine and root cellars—in soapy water and slide its length in their swim clothes to see who can touch the far wall the fastest and without breaking any of their parents’ art pieces placed upon tables at intervals along the hallway. Ambarussa earns the better time but breaks two vases and so does not triumph this time. Ambarto runs for a fresh quill to keep score because Ambarussa broke the tip of the last one.

A little worn out from their exertions, fourthly, they use the ladders in the library to access Fëanáro’s top-shelf collection. The ladders, which glide from shelf to shelf on casters, are usually strictly off-limits on pain of dish duty for a full fortnight. (And that this is a restriction that applies only to them—not even insipid little Curufinwë—has rankled since they learned to read two summers ago and have done quite well at it and yet are still denied full access to the library.) At first, they ride back and forth on the ladder, taking turns running each other around the library, but as aforementioned, they are coming off their sugar high from breakfast, so their enthusiasm flags quickly. The ladder is not as fun as it seems; not nearly as fun as the soapy floor in the lower hallway. Ambarto notices a book titled The Erotic Avari; he has no idea what erotic means, but he knows Avari are Wood-elves, and Wood-elves hold a particular mythic fascination for the twins, who imagine their lives as wholly Noldorin except that they dwell in a treehouse. If given a choice of domiciles, both twins would choose a treehouse. However, once opened, they do not spend long with the book and page through relatively quickly once they realize that its pictures are all of mushy, kissy stuff, all conducted sans raiment.

“Eww,” says Ambarussa as the back cover falls closed.

They abandon the library and refuel with the dregs in the caramel pot, hardened to a taffy-like stretchiness and sticky enough that they temporarily glue their teeth together.

Reenergized, fifthly, they raid Macalaurë’s costume closet and play a game called Monsters & Mayhem, which needs no explanation being exactly like it sounds.

Sixth, they use the contraption that Carnistir made to carry the laundry from the bedroom to the lower levels for washing like a rollercoaster for their toys. Then they use it like a rollercoaster for each other.

Finally they sit down and enjoy a chocolate fountain lunch, dipping in pieces of the various fruits that Fëanáro set out for breakfast. When the fruit becomes unsatisfying—and the fountain is still churning out sheets of sweet, liquified chocolate (they suddenly become evangelists of their father’s waste-not mentality and are determined to finish a portion Fëanáro stored labeled for dessert for twenty)—they make popcorn over the stove and dip that instead. The dining room becomes so smoky that they carry the fountain and the popcorn bowl into the living room.

The living room opens on a patio piled high with snow and still bears evidence of their disappeared family: a book belonging to their father, Írissë’s discarded dress shoes, Nerdanel’s sketchbook, Macalaurë’s alto recorder, a stack of books Turukáno hid, intending to recover and pack them later. And centermost, on the low table where the twins color and Nelyo taught them to read and Fëanáro props his linty socked feet while writing scathing letters in answer to articles published in the Tirion linguistic journals, is one of Carnistir’s memory stones.

Carnistir is the understated genius of the family. The middle son, he is the practical fulcrum upon which the wild, savant brilliance of his kin balances. He is no scholar, his voice rasps like a jay on a cold morning when he tries to sing, and his skill in the forge goes little beyond fireplace pokers and plowshares, but his misanthropism is so deep and his social awkwardness so profound that, in avoiding other human beings, he has unlocked a little cupboard deep in his brain and found it well-stocked with practical and mechanical acumen. Much of his energy, then, is turned toward devices that simplify the tedious and everyday—that is his family’s perspective—and (from his perspective) allow him to avoid interacting with others and to remain in his room for the longest duration possible.

His current obsession is the memory stones. It was Fëanáro who began to explore the possibilities of crystals to store memories and project them distances to others, but as was Fëanáro’s wont, he was easily diverted—in this particular case, over an argument in the Lambengolmor’s linguistic journal about the theorized evolution of Valarin from an ur-language. But he’d taken thorough notes for once, and Carnistir was able to employ them to pick up his father’s work where it left off, at least as far as replicating what he’d done so far and nudging his work bit by bit in a progressive direction.

Carnistir is completely uninterested in using crystals to communicate with far-flung persons. In fact, he can imagine little that would be more unpleasant than being forced to talk with someone when distance has granted him a polite reprieve from feigning social nicety. However, he is intrigued by the notion of using crystals to store one’s speech. In his utopian vision, he communicates exclusively with his family through these crystals, dispatched from his room upon a series of mechanical robots programmed to proceed to a specific relative’s quarters, drop the stone, and then come back. Later, the robot will retrieve the stone, which may or may not contain a message back from its recipient. How much easier communication would be if he didn’t have to go into it dreading an argument or an emotional response, if the thick walls of Formenos came between his preferences, demands, and decrees and his family’s reaction to them!

His family has coopted his work in unexpected ways. This bothers him not as long as his own intentions remain attainable; Fëanáro, after all, describes creative achievement as more akin to a bacchanalia of vultures than the thin-air giddiness of a single soaring eagle. Nelyo uses the stones to record lectures on the dull topics he enjoys and thus maintains both a political career in Tirion and a series of apprentices scattered about Aman who are also interested in dull scholarship. Tyelkormo has secreted one away and takes an image of himself each day and likes to watch them in progression as proof that he is growing into his nose and not becoming uglier each day like Carnistir claims. But Macalaurë has produced the most popular usage by far: He records his songs and stories onto them and thus finds the ad nauseum demands for performances no longer devour his composition time.

Beside their bed, the twins have a stone that plays Macalaurë singing and strumming a lullaby on his harp. This does not enthrall them. Macalaurë singing and strumming is part of the background noise of their lives. Their parents are the only ones who activate it, on nights when they are too busy for a bedtime story. It is the stones they are forbidden to see or listen to that capture their imaginations in a vice that they could not escape from if they wanted to. Last night, for instance, the family gathered in this very room to listen to one of Macalaurë’s stories that has been much gossiped about in Tirion. It is not his finest work, but it is of dubitable taste and sensational enough that it commands a level of attention that a masterpiece could never hope to attain. The whole family gathered to hear it—except the twins, that is. The gathering was carefully contrived to transpire while it was believed that the twins were playing and distracted by an early Yule gift they were permitted to open. When they heard the house fall quiet by degrees around them, their feet were set to wandering, the way a beast will become restless by the silent, charged air preceding a storm. But they were met at the living room door by Macalaurë, who told them, “This isn’t really for you. When you’re a little older,” before gently closing the door in their faces. Around his knees, they saw literally every person in the house gathered around the memory stone. Even Nolofinwë, who’d expressed disapproval of the topic, was there. (“If my people are discussing it,” he was prepared to say, if challenged, “then I should be likewise conversant.” But he was not challenged.)

But the memory stone is there now, on the low table, unguarded. AINUR WITH FILTHY FEÄR, says the base that cradles the stone, carved in Macalaurë’s artless majuscule. The stone is smudged with fingerprints from much watching.

Ambarto adds his caramely, chocolately ones to the haze. The stone between their beds is activated with a touch, and he assumes this one will be as well. He is not disappointed.

At first, it is Macalaurë’s voice coming from the stone and they scoff. They don’t like to believe that their brother is terribly exceptional. But quickly, they are rapt.

Macalaurë is a master impersonator. He can soothe like Nerdanel, bellow like Tyelkormo, and simper like Curufinwë. The twins have been tricked by him more times than they care to recall. The voice now is no longer Macalaurë; it is the harsh accent used by some of the Ainur who do not often incorporate as Elves and speak primarily Valarin. These were the Ainur who (according to Fëanáro’s theory) primarily flocked to become Melkor’s servants, lacking interest in and empathy for the Eruhíni. The gravely voice surely cannot be their brother. Ambarto almost chickens out and touches the stone again to shut it down, but Ambarussa grabs his hand.

“I have brought a delivery of thraaalls, milord,” says the one with the gravely whine. At this, the twins gasp. They do not know what the word thralls means, but it litters the edges of stories they are not allowed to hear, and they can imagine.

“How many you got?”

(Like his father, Macalaurë always depicts Melkor as having exceedingly poor grammar.)

“Two dozen, milord. Enough to haul the coal.”

“I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna need three dozen, thralls enough to haul the coal and push the carts.”

“Three! But milord! You told me two!”

“You question me? You? Who’ve been scroungin in the murk and dressin up like Eönwë and smoochin with Gothmogûz? I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna give ya to the count of ten to get outta here and start bringin my thralls before I make a grinder outta ya and toss ya to my Balrogs.”

“Alright, milord! I’m sorry!”

“One, two—ten!”

And there is a roar like of flames rushing to fill the dark vacuums that still lurk at the heart of the world. The noise is such that it hides the twins’ doubled gasp but not the shriek of the poor Igasêz, rendered into devil’s food. They both scramble back, crabwise on hands and feet, smooshing chocolate-dipped popcorn into the mistreated and tired living room carpet. Ambarto is mewling, and it is Ambarussa who thinks first to thrust out his hand and stop the memory stone in its recitation, leaving a popcorn studded smear of chocolate across its face, and to throw back his head and yell, “Amiiil!”

Chapter 8: I'll Wait

Pushed onward at the cusp of the storm, the royal carriage cannot stop without stranding its occupants on the upward climb into the southern pass in the heart of a blizzard. As it is, the roads are bad and the snow is fierce, but behind them is a wall of white. They thunder at the verge of an obliterating bedlam of wind and snow. Fëanáro pawed the curtains aside, ready to give the order to turn around, but when he saw what lay behind him, the command died in his throat and he clasped the curtains shut again.

Between Formenos and Tirion, a hook of mountains peels off the Pelóri and curves inward toward the west. While far from as imposing as the Pelóri, this little spur nonetheless offers adequate altitude to break most storms from the north, thus sheltering the warm southern lands that flourish under the Light of the Trees. But until the carriage and wagon cross this pass, their occupants are at the mercy of whatever weather presses from behind.

Fëanáro is frantic, half-shouting names and establishments he knows just beyond the pass who will render aid. Nolofinwë is, as ever, trying to keep pace. Nerdanel says nothing. She stares at the curtained window like there is something to watch while Anairë pats her hand. Every now and then, at a break in Fëanáro’s increasingly elaborate schemes, she says softly, “I’m a terrible mother.”

“You are not,” Anairë reassures her in a voice too matter-of-fact to be reassuring. “We left in chaos and many things were doubtlessly forgotten. For example, it just occurs to me that I forgot my hand cream.”

Eventually, silence falls in the carriage, which clatters along at speed, every now and then skidding to one side or the other and causing the passengers within to clutch at the seats, the curtains, anything near at hand. They feel their ears muffle, then pop, and they must plant their feet to keep from sliding rearward as the carriage struggles through the final ascendancy of the mountain pass. The carriage master yells at the horses, and the carriage slows and slows and nearly stops … then they tip forward and are coming down the other side of the pass.

At the base of the pass on the south side is a village containing the depot from which much of the transport between Valinor and northern Aman originates. The carriage has not even halted before Nerdanel and Fëanáro have disembarked at a run for the station.

The depot is a maelstrom on account of the storm—a light snow has begun to feather down from over the mountains—and the pending Yule holiday. Passenger wagons heading north have been delayed, and the station teems with families sitting upon trunks and eating out of baskets, and transports laden with gifts intended for Northern relatives queue, horseless, awaiting the improvement of conditions so that they can ferry their cargo northward and hopefully on time for the festival.

“We need passenger transport north,” says Fëanáro, having pushed to the front of the line. There is a commotion behind him, but he ignores it. “Something fast and light.”

“Won’t happen,” says the depot master, whose sleepless eyes are showing whites all around and who has begun dropping subjects of sentences as a timesaver. “Pass’s impassable.”

“It is not,” snaps Fëanáro. “We just came over it.” He knows they barely made it, even at the cusp of the storm that plans to rage for another day yet, but his small sons, accidentally abandoned, would excuse even more dramatic fictions if he believed it would secure transport.

“ ’ve got a man on the mountain. Says the snow is calf-deep and coming fast.”

Nolofinwë and Anairë have threaded through the crowd and hover awkwardly behind Fëanáro and Nerdanel. Nolofinwë is doing that wavy thing with his fingers that he does when he wants to get someone’s attention to speak but doesn’t want to interrupt. “Fë— Fë—” he begins futilely a few times. He pokes and tickles the air.

“There must be something,” says Fëanáro with the appalled chuckle of one accustomed to solving complex problems and appalled when others cannot do the same. “A runnered sleigh?”

The harried depot master feigns a sympathetic twitch around his eyes. “’Fraid the last sleigh went over an hour ago. Probably passed it coming down.”

“Fëanáro.” Nolofinwë finally gets out his half-brother’s full name. He draws him aside in that gentle, diplomatic way that makes people think of the kingship when they see him and that has caused so much tension between him and Fëanáro. “Brother, we will not get back over the pass until the storms subsides, and then they must clear the road. Why don’t we head into the village and get rooms at the inn? And when the road is passable again, I am sure they will accommodate you with their swiftest conveyance.”

The depot master is not surreptitious about tipping his ear toward their conversation. He hears “inn” and seizes on the half-heard idea. “ ’ve got a list of accommodations in the village!” he trumpets, eager to get this frantic pair off and unblock his line. He produces a booklet that helpful Anairë begins to immediately peruse.

“Oh! This one serves a traditional Yule breakfast! The children would enjoy—”

In the midst of them in Nerdanel. She has said nothing yet, though as always, she has heard and observed all. Like a mountaineer watching for wisps of snow and listening for chuffing ice to herald an avalanche, she perceives that if she does not act otherwise, she will be borne along with the slide when it comes, into rooms at an inn and a traditional Yule breakfast: a cozy, complacent fate that seems in that moment more intolerable than death. Fëanáro is putting up a spirited fight to Nolofinwë’s suggestion, but a lack of transport is as absolute as it gets—even south of the mountain, the snow has begun to dust the ground—and Nerdanel can see that they will spend the coming days in one of the inns, either the one with the Yule breakfast or the one with the sauna that top Anairë’s list.

“Sir, please,” says Nerdanel to the depot master. She does not have Fëanáro’s bluster or Anairë’s cool command or Nolofinwë’s authority, but there is an urgency to her soft words that momentarily quiets the tumult around her. “As a mother, I beg you. Whatever is in your power. If there is a broken sleigh, we will fix it. If we must go on foot and meet one on the other side of the pass—” she straightens her shoulders—“we have gone farther in worst, Fëanáro and I. It is my sons. My little sons. I must get home to them, to Formenos. I will do whatever it takes.”

The depot master’s face has gone slack. The roister around them stills. Heads are turning. Fëanáro stops mid-shout; Anairë’s finger stops over a hovel that doesn’t even offer private baths.

“Please,” Nerdanel implores in a near-whisper.

The depot master’s mouth flaps for a moment before he recalls the duties of his profession and recovers his brisk efficiency. He whisks out a list of arrivals and departures and pores over it. “Milady,” he says. “I may have—we are all full.” He has recovered his manners and, with them, the subjects of his sentences. “I have a sleigh going two days hence to Formenos.”

“That is too long. I cannot wait that long.”

He returns to the list, his fingers running up and down its timetable. “It is simply not possible!” he mutters. His finger fixes on something. “But wait. I may have a sleigh coming in tonight, late. We may be able to make room. I cannot guarantee—but if you wish to wait here …”

“I’ll wait.”

Anairë chooses the inn with the breakfast. They must get the children into a warm room with a hot meal. Nolofinwë is seeing to their trunks and having the royal carriage stored. Fëanáro clasps both of Nerdanel’s hands in his.

“I don’t—” he says. For once, he is fumbling for words.

“I know. But the other children need you, so that I can go to the twins.”

“I should go!” His swagger briefly reasserts itself but withers quickly. He cannot bring himself to say that he is hardier than she, even though they both know that is where he was headed. In the midst of sorrow and fear, they press their foreheads together and laugh. They both know this is not true. She has nurtured the lives of seven sons and remains yet unflagging at his side.

“I brought a palantír,” he says. “It doesn’t work fully yet, but it may be that I—”

They both know that it doesn’t yet work at all. She kisses him on the mouth. “I’ll wait on the sleigh,” she says gently.

She watches her family pass through the doors of the station and into the swirling snow. Carnistir and Írissë are arguing again, Tyelkormo is speculating on hunting conditions in the snow, Anairë is trying to excite them about soaking tubs and southern fruit for breakfast, Nelyo and Nolofinwë shepherd all with brisk efficiency. Fëanáro departs last and looks long at her before he goes.

She takes a seat on her trunk and begins to wait.

Chapter 9: Try Magic

Evening falls and the snowstorm slows to a gentle whirl of fat flakes, the snow has drifted waist-deep in places, and Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz contemplate the House of Fëanáro.

“This is it,” Iniðilêz says in a whisper that comes out like a hiss of steam from some foul volcanic fissure. He has been waiting for this moment for a long time, since he cavorted in the footsteps of Melkor during the Great Music. Since the aforementioned cavorting was ignored, Melkor selecting for his special retinue those Ainur of fire-form to grace the halls of Utumno, Iniðilêz was left behind, to wait upon first one Vala and then another, first on Almaren and now in Valinor, successively unseated from positions always by his petty thievery and general waspishness. It was not for lack of trying on the part of the Valar; they pitied him, but pity extends only so far when one discovers one’s servant coining the concept of a black market so as to peddle heirlooms from one’s house.

With Melkor’s release, he applied again to serve the Dark Vala, but Melkor seemed again not to see him, selecting this time mainly Maiar from the service of Aulë.

Iniðilêz intended to win Melkor’s attention at last. When he arrived in Melkor’s hall and presented all of the treasures of the Fëanorian vaults, he would be noticed at last, and when Melkor rebelled again—and, Iniðilêz knew, Melkor would rebel again—it would be Iniðilêz carrying his standard back into the bitter north.

But this first required gaining entry to the deserted house and then discovering and opening the vault. Iniðilêz does not expect much resistance; Fëanáro may be the greatest of the Noldor but he is still but an Eruhín, and Iniðilêz’s sorcery is strong.

Gaining entry, though, will begin with something more brute than magic. Iniðilêz produces a crude metal bar and raises it to Dušamanûðânâz, who garbles with laughter and raises his own to clink them together.

Speaking of Dušamanûðânâz, today he wears a visage like one of those squash-faced cats, though hairless and earless. In fact, his entire body today is shiny, white, and wriggling, like a grub fresh from the dirt, and even in shoes, his feet leave moist prints wherever he passes.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz wade through the snow to the Fëanorians’ front door. Normally, they would slither and creep, but there is a deliberate boldness in their step. Iniðilêz kicks the snow in sprays that rattle back to the ground, sounding like a handful of glass beads cast upon a wood floor. Dušamanûðânâz flops and rolls until Iniðilêz scolds at him to “Cut it out already!” on account that he is getting even more soaked and leaving the snow slimy in a way that Iniðilêz finds nauseating. They stride up to the front door. A giggling Dušamanûðânâz even knocks upon it and pretends to talk to an imaginary servant, bowing and simpering, “Why yeees, we would ask entry to the house of your great lord! Why to rob him of course! Of everything needed for a plum position in Melkor’s administration!”

Iniðilêz thwacks him. “Shaddup!” he barks and goes to work with the prybar.

Inside the house, the Ambarussa are washing the dishes.

They have availed themselves of every manner of forbidden fun this day and come back around to the kitchen where their day began. There, instead of Fëanáro’s tidy scullery, they found caramel-caked pots, heaps of ingredients, trails of chocolate upon the floor, and about two dozen spoons once used and never reused for stirring and mixing and serving. Both turned away and grasped the hands of the other, a brilliant idea for more mayhem poised on the edges of their minds—but no idea would come. For several long minutes, they wracked the deepest troves of their most rascally wishes—but nothing.

So they washed the dishes.

Perpetually underfoot and benignly clueless—and therefore annoying—the twins are accustomed to washing dishes, for it is their usual sentence for all manner of misdemeanors. If they do it poorly or incorrectly, Fëanáro makes them redo their work—all of their work, not just that which he found unsatisfactory—so they are good at it too. Ambarto is just coaxing the last of the hardened caramel from the bottom of their father’s saucepan when they hear the knock.

With matched gasps, they flick their faces toward the front door.

“We should—” Ambarussa begins, even as Ambarto says, “It might be Amil.” He remembers too late to forbid hope in his voice.

And they know it is not their mother. Amil would hardly knock on the door of her own home, but they are keenly aware that they are in charge of the house and so the laws of hospitality are theirs to honor. After the snowstorm, they reckon in shared thought, it could be stranded traveler in need of a hot drink and a place to sleep, and they would not dare besmirch their family’s name by ignoring such a request. Many times has their father welcomed such travelers to their table and fire

Nonetheless, they walk on quiet feet. Indeed, it seems that if they are to be heard, then it would be because of their hearts thundering in syncopation to each other, roaring like pistons in a machine, and seemingly very loud in their ears.

The knock does not come again. Decorum suggests a minute should pass before a second knock to give the host time to don appropriate garb and make his way to the front of the house, but if not answered by then, a second knock is polite in case the first was not heard. Both boys pause at the entry to the vestibule. All but the kitchen where they were working is dark, yet by the thin wash of Telperion’s light, they can see the snow is still coming down outside the front windows. The front door—locked and latched firmly—does not seem as though it could have been knocked upon. It does not seem they could be anything but alone.

But then they hear a scratching. A low creaking groan, as of wood being forced. A clatter of something metal falling and a hiss that sounds like a curse. More creaking. Then, “Blast these locks!” in a voice that sounds like the whisper of a snake’s belly across dry grass.

“Try magic!” comes an eager, oddly wet-sounding voice, and the lock—bright brass with an elegant keyhole at the center—begins to glow purple, the color of a zap of lightning.

“Blast!” comes the second curse, and the lock fades back to brass.

In Valinor, there is no notion of theft. But the Eruhíni, shaped by Eru with the full vision of his Eä in mind (not the ideals of the Valar), were given a guardedness against dark things, even if those things do not yet have a name. The twins understand in their atavistic cores that someone seeking to force entry to their home is not seeking hospitality but to claim that to which he does not have rights. And his voice—his voice ripples like a wet feather trailed up their backbones.

They do not even stop to shiver. In opposite directions, they peel away from the door, kindling to light every lamp that happens into their path. Fëanorian lamps are enlivened by breathing upon them—usually just the gentlest of exhales—but these they puff upon frantically, and the lamps sparkle to exceptional brilliance, as though answering the twins’ urgency. Light ripples out and up from the front door, tumbling out onto the new-fallen snow and painting long, cragged shadows behind each tree.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz recoil from the door they’ve barely dented. Dušamanûðânâz drops his prybar again. “I thought you said no one was home!” His voice is the simpering snarl of a beast that showed teeth and now anticipates a beating.

“There’s not supposed to be anyone home! I heard it from the cozened lips of Nerdanel herself!” Iniðilêz manages to maintain a frantic authority even through his distress, and Dušamanûðânâz quiets back into his place. “Maybe they decided to wait out the storm? Let’s go!”

The levity is gone from their step. They slosh back through the snow, kicking their knees to their chests to get away as fast as they can, expecting at any moment that Fëanáro himself—who, rumor has it, rehabilitates old weapons from the Great Journey to fighting condition—will throw his shadow upon them from the opened front door, something lethal at his hip.

They are gone, leaving a gash in the snow blanketing the lawn in front of Formenos when one of the shadows wriggles and bulges, then splits into a fresh blot of dark upon the snow, one whose footfalls are so light that they do not so much as dimple the snow. This shadow skitters to the edge of the wood and melts into the darkness there.

The twins, inside the house, quake under their parents’ bed. From the forest, they hear a new sound that freezes their blood: the scrrrip scrrrrip scrrrrrrrip of dragging branches.

Chapter 10: Egg Salad and Cabin Fever

A three-bedroom suite awaits Fëanáro, Nolofinwë, and their families, ensconced in a cozy, turreted inn overlooking the town square of the little village of Falquopelë. True to predictions, the worst of the storm broke upon the spur of mountains, producing just enough snow on the other side to lightly frost the village. The Light of Laurelin—diffuse but unmistakable at this distance—spangles merrily on alabaster-draped eaves, and curls of woodsmoke unwind prettily upon the barest of breezes. The room is piled high with quilts, and a fire crackles affably in the fireplace. A shelf of classic Noldorin novels in matched bindings resides on a shelf along one wall, and a pot of mulled wine simmers over the fire, lending a sweet spiciness to the air.

Fëanáro immediately and wordlessly shuts himself into the coat closet with the memory stone he’d dug out of his trunk on the ride over.

Nelyo and Anairë assign sleeping quarters. Nolofinwë and Anairë will have one bedroom. They put Fëanáro in the other with Curufinwë (he does not respond to their knocks to confirm or reject the suitability of this plan). Nelyo defers receiving the third. Macalaurë is not so mannerly; he accepts and is dragging his trunk and his harp into the third bedroom before the question is fully asked.

Nelyo arranges himself and Tyelkormo, Findekáno, Carnistir, Turukáno, and Írissë around the communal living space. Írissë he assigns the couch on account of her being the only girl and the only one with legs short enough to fit. The couch is not overlarge. The other five he places on bedrolls on the floor.

The size of the three-bedroom suite—which elicited gasps of delight when they first entered—constricts like a fist squeezing down upon something soft and vulnerable now that they fully realize how many people it must house.

The fireplace, they learn, puts off less heat than the picture windows overlooking the green put off drafts.

Macalaurë emerges and serves himself a cup of wine and declares it heavily watered and dumps it on the fire in a fit of pique and reduces the flame (and heat) accordingly.

Which causes they to discover that the draft of the chimney is poor, when Tyelkormo—amid much bragging about how he can start a roaring blaze in wet, green wood—musters only a feeble, smoky flame.

“I’ll read us a story,” says Nelyo. There are few things, he has learned in his decades as the eldest grandchild, that a good story read out loud will not fix. But the books, when he takes them down, are disappointing abridged versions. Naturally, all that has been cut is what makes the story worth reading

It is also hard to see them through the smoke, so his excellent reading voice is diminished as he squints at the words on the page.

Anairë calls for room service. In her decades as an aunt and mother, she has learned that there is little that a tray of good, hot food will not fix. But the kitchen informs her that, due to shortages in south caused by increased exports to Taniquetil for the festival and shortages from the north due to the storm, there is toast, hardboiled eggs, and maybe a few crudités to be scrounged.

“And mustard!” adds the chef. “We can adorn it all with mustard!”

While they await the tray of food, Tyelkormo reads from one of the abridged novels. He is the only one who seems able to tolerate them, and the smoke. He likes the directness: how something happens, then something happens because of that, and so on—the same straightforward cause-and-effect of a stone plonking down a hillside. Írissë drops next to him and heaves a sigh.

After being ignored for several seconds, she follows up with, “Aren’t you just a little worried about them?”

“Who?” It takes Tyelkormo a moment to wrench is brain from the story, where a sword-girt hero is fighting a slavering wolf in such pared-down language that the book might be an instruction manual on how to slay a wolf in heroic style.

“Your brothers.” After a moment of no response: “The Ambarussa. They’re so little.”

“Since when do you care?” he asks. The book is getting good. In fifteen dizzying words, the hero’s head is in the wolf’s mouth.

She huffs. “You’re not the least bit worried about them?”

Realizing he isn’t going to find out the resolution to the head-in-mouth conflict uninterrupted, he claps the book shut. “No. I’m not. And here’s why. They’ve pushed it too far this time. Whatever happens to them is their own fault. And besides! It’s Formenos! It’s a dull little village in the middle of nowhere. If they haven’t managed to get themselves killed under my father’s feet in the forge or by pranking Carnistir, they’ll survive now just fine.”

Írissë does not look convinced, but she says nothing and Tyelkormo returns to his book.

A moment later, the tray arrives from the kitchen. Even Anairë and Nelyo can’t convincingly feign enthusiasm for the egg salad on toast they make with ingredients they find there, but everyone eats. And some complain about the food, some about the chill in the suite, some about the smoke. Some protest the location of their bedroll, and proclamations of boredom are oft-heard. All are weary, hungry, and cold and in too-close of quarters. Of all of these things, they complain.

But none suggest they should just carry on to Taniquetil without the Ambarussa.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks to Lyra for her help with the village's name Falquopelë.

Chapter 11: Peaches

The next day dawns clear and bright in Formenos: a cloudless sky and such a fall of snow that Laurelin’s light is reflected and magnified as though by a dozen mirrors. The twins have passed the night under the comforter on their parents’ large, soft bed. Despite their fright, both eventually slept, passing into restive dreams of branches adorned by red berries and a kaleidoscopic whirl of magic.

They creep to the kitchen and the pantry. There is still sugar for caramel, but the thought of more sweets makes both their throats feel sticky and tight. There is jam but no bread. There are herbs and spices galore but no game or vegetables to use them on. Fëanáro, as ever striving for excellence in all things, truly excels at emptying the larder before departing for the south each year.

There is a little flour for pancakes and some dried blueberries. The twins have watched Nelyo many times make pancakes for them, shaping the batter on the griddle in Tengwar spelling their names, and they impersonate what they remember of his concoction, always managed with cheerful conversation or a bright song. But even in silent concentration, the pancakes come out too thin, near-blackened on one side and underdone on the other. The blueberries are gritty and get stuck in their teeth. Worse, making such a simple breakfast strews a mess across Fëanáro’s spotless kitchen that, at the mere thought of cleaning it, robs them of some of their appetite.

“We need to go to the market in the village for supplies,” Ambarto suggests when, despite their hunger, neither can choke down the breakfast they labored to produce. Indeed, they have discovered themselves short on more than just food. When their families packed to go to Taniquetil and, from there, to overwinter in the milder climes of Tirion, they packed the last of the soap cakes, shampoo, and even the baking soda mixture they use to clean their teeth. The twins—who couldn’t have cared less for these things before and would have claimed to prefer remaining filthy—are suddenly aware of how their comportment reflects on them. Not the adults who care for them. Not Amil and Atar and Nelyo but them, and they are keenly aware that they can be found to be competent householders or descend to the lowly status of wild animals, living in their own filth and foraging for vittles in the surrounding forest.

So before they leave for the village, they use the last shriveled sliver of a soap cake—found in Tyelkormo’s water closet—to clean themselves. They comb their hair and braid the other’s back from his face. They put on their circlets that pinch their heads and that they usually avoid wearing at all costs. They go to their father’s jewelry box—it says something of Fëanáro that he keeps sapphires to spare in Formenos but not soap—and put on necklaces and rings oversized for them and ostentatious but that they, in their young naivete, hope will convey their importance in the village and make them look older than they are. They put on robes a bit too dressy and fur cloaks and matching mittens. They have not matched—deliberately—without the intervention of their mother or brother ever before in their lives. Last, they put on the snowshoes left in the mud room off the vestibule for early storms just like this. Normally, Nelyo wrangles the straps and buckles of these annoying contraptions for them. It takes them awhile and several trials to get it right, but get it right they eventually do.

They release the locks and ease open the front door. Like soft, furry critters emerging from their burrow, they peek carefully around the edge of the door.

The snow is piled in rolling, deep drifts: soft folds of spangled velveteen. The last gasps of the storm and the wind that followed have effaced the footprints of Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz, and without such signs, both twins are content to relinquish what they heard the night before to overreactions of their imaginations. They smile at each other, open the door fully, and step onto the porch.

Ambarussa notices them first and gasps. Ambarto notices them second and clutches his brother’s back. All along the house, someone has left branches full of red berries, yet (not accounting for the erasing effects of wind) there are no footprints of one who left them.

“The Wight …” Ambarussa whispers.

“What do you think it means? The red berries?” Ambarto has started to show a glimmer of the familial curiosity. If he can hold the question in his abstracted little head, he might even look up the question in his father’s books when they return.

“Dark magic mostly likely …” Ambarussa has none of the familial curiosity but much of the familial certainty.

But they are householders now. Householders face all manner of perils in order to keep their homes protected and provided for. They square their shoulders within their cloaks, and Laurelin’s light catches on their jewels and their circlets, and for a moment, they look if not larger in physical stature, then larger in bearing, like a pair of young princes set out on a quest.

Their snowshoes leave a wide shuffling track across the lawn. There is a low wall there and then a slight hill that descends to the village of Formenos, behind its own high stone wall to protect it from marauding wildlife, an assemblage of stone cottages huddled on the southern bank of a sparkling ribbon of river becoming milky on its edges as it begins to freeze.

Meanwhile, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz have taken up residence in a stone cottage and hung out their shingle, advertising

JEWELRY
CLEANED
FIXED
BRITENED

in what they hope lends them enough of an aura of respectability to avoid suspicion. They are both wearing the robes and insignias of Aulë once more, although how one serves Aulë—the local deity of handicrafts—to “clean and briten,” much less repair, jewelry with hands that end in a pair of fleshy flippers, goes politely unquestioned.

They are speaking Valarin together. With Fëanáro and his brood gone, they trust that none will care to decipher words with the lámatyávë of a pair of crash cymbals being flung down the stairs. Since the night before, they have come again and again to the quandary of the House of Fëanáro, making not so much as inching progress in explaining it. Dušamanûðânâz brings it up again. In addition to the flippers, his face today tapers into a weevil-like snout that has the effect of making his voice come out like meep meep meep. “Do you think we can spring the lock, boss? On Fëanáro’s house?” he asks. It comes out sounding like a squeaky hinge—a squeaky hinge on a tiny, tiny door, like for a rabbit or something else cute—but Iniðilêz—though annoyed by it—is not confused by it.

“How in Utumno’s depths should I know!” Iniðilêz is tired of answering this question. He rubs his pate—a habit when he is feeling irritated—and then stops. He can’t even stand the spongy touch of his own hands. “I ensorcelled it with my full power—nothing!”

“Do you think Fëanáro did his own sorcelling?” Dušamanûðânâz asks. “Maybe that’s why the lights came on.” He hesitates but Iniðilêz doesn’t answer. “Are you sure she said they’d be gone?”

“Does it look like I have brambles growing out my ears? Of course I’m sure! She said it clear as day.” He puffs out a sigh. “We’ll keep watch on it. And we’ll just have to force our way in when they time comes. Fëanáro must have put some charm on the house—I didn’t know he had it in him—that stops the locks from opening by sorcery. No mind. I’ve got a pair of strong arms!” He lifts his arms and bunches up his flaccid biceps and puts a grimace on his face.

“Me too!” says Dušamanûðânâz, flopping his flippers around. “Well, normally I do …”

“No you don’t!” Valarin in Iniðilêz’s voice when he’s angry is like a shard of glass dragged across a slate. “Tomorrow you’re just as likely to be an eel! Or a sea cucumber! Or a pea plant, for the Master’s sake!”

Meanwhile, the twins have reached the village gate, disentangled their feet from the straps of their snowshoes, and left them propped against the wall. Mere hours after the ending of the storm, Noldorin ingenuity has seen the streets cleared of all but a thin coating of snow, enough to allow purchase without becoming icy. Homes and shops are adorned with hundreds of the small luminous stones their father invented, and they are far from the only patrons out in their finery. Travelers waylaid by the storm and village residents brightened for the festival mill through the streets, drinking mulled wine and hot beer from pewter mugs. The twins purchase all of the essentials: flour and potatoes and carrots and soap and salted meat. They are laden with their purchases—a pair of householders stocking up for the months-long hibernation of winter—when they spot the woman in the carriage.

She is clearly from the south, as is obvious from her dress—a thin, supple silk tolerable in such a climate only because of the lush fur cloak that nestles under her jaw and then all the way down to swirl around her feet—and her clipclopping accent. She was diverted from her journey north by the storm, and from the back of her carriage, she is trading jewel-bright jars of preserved southern fruit. There is a small, eager crowd milling around her, holding jars of mangoes and peaches and pineapples up to the thin light and admiring the varying shades of citrine, a color all but absent from northern winters.

“Peeeaches …” Ambarto breathes in a voice no longer the commanding tone of a householder out on routine errands but the plaintive wish of a child desiring something sweet for Yule. Peaches are a particular favorite of the twins, especially Ambarto. They jostle into the crowd gathered around the wagon. Ambarussa, the more forceful and fiercer of the two, stretches his arm between a broad-hipped matron and a young huntsman squabbling over the last jar of starfruit, and with fingertips alone, procures his brother a jar of peaches.

Meanwhile, at JEWELRY CLEANED FIXED BRITENED, it is a slow business day. Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz step into the street. Dušamanûðânâz cranes his neck, his weevily snout waving, in the direction of the woman and her jars of fruit. “Wonder what’s gone on down there,” Iniðilêz mutters.

The innkeeper from the establishment originally reserved by Fëanáro for his half-brother’s family, then employed by the carriage master Roccowë, is returning with a satchel full of preserved fruit to give to his children as Yule gifts. He is humblebragging to Formenos’s other innkeeper about attracting the notice of not one but two high princes by complaining about his ill treatment by both. “And then they canceled the reservation—no! Not even that. Didn’t cancel but stuck me with this taciturn carriage master instead who buggered off in the middle of the night.”

“The middle of the night! How odd! Those Finwions are, though, odd.”

“It was the night of the storm. He was taking the whole lot of them over the mountain and south to Taniquetil. Left in the middle of the night. They’re either halfway there by now or mighty cold stranded on the mountain.”

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz don’t even feign disinterest in the passing conversation. Iniðilêz’s eyes bug out like a pair of lanterns and Dušamanûðânâz’s head is roiling and morphing to make way for a flappy pair of bat ears.

When the innkeepers pass, Iniðilêz rubs his hands together with a soft squelching sound. “Empty. It’s empty. We go back tonight.”

Back at the southern woman’s fruit stand, Ambarto is clutching his jar of peaches and waiting shyly his turn to hear what she will accept from him in trade. Ambarussa is stretching for a jar of pineapple.

Behind them is a sudden breath of cold. It is like backing up to a precipice and feeling rather than seeing the plummeting fall, the certainty of death. The hair lifts on their necks. It is their turn at the counter to pay for their fruit, but a hand snakes around from behind them and comes to rest there: a bloodless, pale hand, its fingers tipped with the livid red of berries.

Ambarto gasps audibly. Ambarussa’s hand snaps back from reaching for mangoes, and both boys turn slowly, eyes widening in fear as they take in the white-clad arm, the narrow shoulders, the tall bearing, the gaunt face and eyes whitened as though blinded.

The Wight.

The peaches slip from Ambarto’s grasp and shatter against the ground, spraying golden fruit and juice across the snow. “Hey!” cries the southern woman at seeing her wares so mistreated, but neither twin is there to hear her. They are tearing as fast as they can through the streets and to the gate, certain the Wight is howling at their heels, neither daring to look behind him.

Chapter 12: The Second Demise of Igasêz

Ambarto can’t stop thinking about—and mourning—the peaches. In the time it took them to buckle on their snowshoes, it became clear that the Wight had no interest in pursuing them, and they were left to clump back home feeling rather foolish. Ambarto grieves less for not having had the chance to eat the peaches and more for thinking about the little gobbets of topaz-colored fruit strewn across the snow: fruit fed literally by the Light of Laurelin, fleshed out to sugary fullness, and hauled all this way to Formenos only to be broken upon the road and left in the snow to spoil. It seems a shameful end for something so long-nurtured into sweetness to be discarded, untasted.

Neither twin wants to articulate what both feel, the pallid shine in the space midway between their minds: that life without their family isn’t as carefree as they imagined. Both are hungry and have a pantry full of provisions, but to mix and knead the dough to bake the bread to make even a cheese sandwich seems effortful. They are accustomed to a kitchen full of delights to sate every hunger: fruit just waiting to be savored, bread to be cut, meat to be carved. And even these small chores they’d sighed over and believed themselves prevailed upon.

It is Ambarto who finally opens the bag of flour to begin the bread. He has watched his mother do this many times. Ambarussa watches his brother for a few minutes before setting a pot of water on the stove and beginning to boil some bones to make stock and cutting some potatoes for soup.

After the intensity of their scare, the Wight is suddenly far from their thoughts, removed to a distance of absurdity. The man is terrifying and clearly an escapee from Mandos or a part-Orc or something similarly hideous (of this they have no doubt, with Tyelkormo as their expert source), with his overlong limbs and pallid skin and blind-white eyes, but neither can disabuse himself of the sudden conviction that they overreacted in the market, and not just because of the peaches. (Although that is part of it.)

Ambarto at last gives voice to this. “We should be eating peaches right now.” He punches the dough. Ambarussa echoes his frustration with a thwack of the knife that splits an innocent potato into two.

Outside the house, it is not the Wight who approaches.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz have none of yesterday’s swagger. Even after overhearing the conversation between the innkeepers, they are guarded, keeping to the shade of the trees to watch the house before hazarding an approach. It is silent and still, the windows dark and shuttered. The whipping wind has already erased all but a dimpled memory of the twins’ snowshoe tracks. There is no carriage or horses; none of the banging doors and shouting voices and running feet that mark the House of Fëanáro.

“This is it,” says Iniðilêz. “They’re gone.” He buries a doughy elbow into Dušamanûðânâz’s side. “Go check it out.”

“Who? Me?” and the slap of Iniðilêz’s hand across his face is near-simultaneous with the smack of dough onto the board as Ambarto leaves it to rise.

“Yes! You! Why do you think I brought you? Not your brains, surely!”

The twins drift into the living room while they wait for their bread to rise and stock to boil. It is a mess, with the sticky remnants of their caramel breakfast from the other morning, the cast-asides from their mischief, and in the midst of it all, the memory stone with the awkwardly scratched title at its base: “Ainur with Filthy Feär.” A curtain hangs across the door to the patio to keep out the drafts, admitting only a thin bar of Laurelin’s light into the room from the gap between curtain and doorframe.

“But!” says Dušamanûðânâz from behind the trees. “Magic!”

“Magic didn’t get me far yesterday, did it?” Iniðilêz snaps. “To the Void with magic! This is magic enough to get us in.” He holds aloft the prybar. “While you’re doing that, I will be preparing the full power of my sorcery to open the vaults.” He waves his mittenish hands in the air like he is rubbing a smudge off the sky.

(He’ll be preparing nothing. He’ll be enjoying a jar of pomegranates that he swiped from the southern woman’s cart when she wasn’t looking. Dušamanûðânâz likes pomegranates, and he doesn’t want to share. His “sorcery” is a small beer in the roadhouse of magic, squirreled under the counter as far from the glittering, chiseled, top-shelf bottles as one can get, but he’s still more powerful than Dušamanûðânâz, whose “magic” is being constantly squandered as involuntary shape-shifting. Right now, he is all wiry bones like an egret but with the pop-jawed, bug-eyed face of a deep-sea fish.)

Dušamanûðânâz prances from foot to foot, lifting his knees high above the nonexistent water, until Iniðilêz loses patience and shouts, “Git!” He gits, before he is delivered another slap.

The twins have begun to tidy the living room. They are cleaning their own mess and even putting away Curufinwë’s books and straightening Tyelkormo’s heap of unmatched boots and organizing Macalaurë’s scattered sheet music by song, then instrument and vocal range.

Dušamanûðânâz approaches the front door, but remembering the recalcitrance of lock and wood, has a rare flash of insight. With high, bony steps, he creeps around to the back of the house to see if there is another way in. With all those children, he reasons, Fëanáro must have built numerous ingresses.

“What is a mezzo-soprano?” Ambarussa asks. “Should that go above or below a soprano?”

“Below,” answers Ambarto. “I think.”

There is a wide stone patio, cleared of furniture, its fountain drained and its gardens mounded under a quilt of snow. And there is a door, south-facing to let in the small Light of the Trees that comes this far north. A glass door. Dušamanûðânâz giggles, a garpling sound like he’s swallowing a minnow and glad to have it, and grasps the prybar like a dance cane, an effect enhanced by his high, marching step. He leaves a row of tracks like punctures in the snow.

Ambarussa is sorting mezzo-soprano sheet music for the Váralindalë between the soprano and contralto parts when he happens to glance up and see a shadow pass across the curtain that covers the patio door. The shape is like a stick insect, if a stick insect was bipedal and itself carried a stick. The heart-skipping flash of alarm alerts Ambarto before his brother’s subdued gasp does.

The stick insect is still making a gulping laugh in its throat. It is fumbling at the door. The twins hear the scratching sound of something trying to find purchase on the smooth-sanded wood of the doorframe, then the jangle of something metal being dropped and an utterance, in a very human voice, of a word that would get them in trouble even with Fëanáro for saying.

Ambarto echoes his brother’s gasp.

Ambarto is the twin who overthinks—in the manner of his elder brothers and his mother and Curufinwë—and his mind is now turning over some fabulous schemes that he lacks time or courage or both to enact. They always involve schematic drawings and imported materials. Ambarussa is not so burdened. Taking after Fëanáro and Tyelkormo and Carnistir, his actions sometimes precede his thoughts, arriving in his brain only after his mouth has opened or his hand has shot out.

In this case, it shoots out toward the memory stone, outstretched fingers sliding just enough on the face of the stone to set it back several seconds from where the twins stopped it in a panic.

“I have brought a delivery of thraaalls, milord."

They know the voice is Macalaurë’s, but surely the dulcet tones of their renowned brother could not be rendered so noxious except by swallowing a handful of gravel peppered with tacks, could they? The boys feel the same creeping revulsion as before—tensing, knowing what is coming—but the shadow beyond the curtain also freezes.

“How many you got?”

How could Macalaurë know the voice of Melkor? Yet this must be what it sounds like, no? The stick insect’s shadow melts against the doorframe, convinced also.

“Two dozen, milord. Enough to haul the coal.”

“I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna need three dozen, thralls enough to haul the coal and push the carts.”

The stick insect’s shadow is making little jumpy motions, like he doesn’t know if he should run or hide or stand still and listen. The twins—even knowing where the recording will end up—find they are enjoying his little paroxysms. With a swipe of his fingers up the side of the stone, Ambarto even turns up the volume.

Igasêz’s voice, brimming with horror, explodes into the room. “Three! But milord! You told me two!” The shadow noticeably twitches and then goes still. Dušamanûðânâz is not intelligent, but he has the same kind of reflexive survival instinct of brainless things that survive in the mud.

“You question me? You? Who’ve been scroungin in the murk and dressin up like Eönwë and smoochin with Gothmogûz? I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna give ya to the count of ten to get outta here and start bringin my thralls before I make a grinder outta ya and toss ya to my Balrogs.”

“Alright, milord! I’m sorry!”

“One, two—ten!”

As poor Igasêz’s agonizing screams echo off the living room walls (and how did Macalaurë know how to scream that way?), the shadow shoots like an arrow in front of the curtained glass door and into the snow. Responding to the sudden terror, his body has suddenly morphed into a tadpole-like shape. Most of him is a fleshy tail but a pair of rudimentary legs pedal at the snow. He squirms for a long time before his legs lengthen enough that he may toddle at full speed back to Iniðilêz. His mouth is opening and closing soundlessly like a carp yoinked out of its pond. He doesn’t even notice that Iniðilêz’s pasty hands and face are pink-stained by pomegranate juice.

Iniðilêz stops in the middle of licking a finger like a pale—now pink—sausage link. “What in Utumno is it now?” Iniðilêz’s first reaction to anything is always to be irritated by it.

“He’s here!” One would think that Dušamanûðânâz’s voice might have froggy tones but he peeps like a bald nestling with its eyes sealed shut.

“Who?”

“Melkor!”

This gets Iniðilêz’s attention. He thinks of little else but Melkor. (Not even stealing, which he does without thinking about it.) His eyes go wide, and he peers around the tree to try to catch a glimpse of his lord perhaps exiting the domicile. “Are you sure?”

“Ay! It was his voice, no mistake. He was wanting thralls …”

Iniðilêz is thinking. He is the intelligence in the outfit, but when he thinks, his face wears the labored expression of a machine allowed to go to rust and dust grinding to action. At last, he pops his pinkened finger aloft in the air, a sure sign that he has had an insight. “He knows about the vault! He knows about the vault, and he’s trying to break it. Bet ya anything! And he needs thralls … well, the thralls are for getting into this impossible place.”

“Yeah but the guy, the guy getting the thralls? He got tossed to the Balrogs.”

“Balrogs …” Iniðilêz has never seen a Balrog. He pokes his face around the tree again, hoping for and dreading a glimpse. “Dušamanûðânâz, do you know what this means?”

“Nope, afraid I do not.”

“This means that if we get in first, if we break into the vault and present what we find of Fëanáro’s shiny, mysterious things to the Lord, then we will rise high in his service. Even his servants, even his Balrogs, cannot help him! Imagine what he will think of us when we do—”

Iniðilêz leaves the question hanging. Dušamanûðânâz’s mouth carps open and shut a few times before he asks brightly, “What will he think of us?”

The doughy slap is not of unbaked bread upon the board, but it makes the man crossing the snow between Formenos and the House of Fëanáro on snowshoes made of ash limbs—a man so pale, even to the centers of his eyes, that he passes all but invisible—stop and lift his head to listen.

Chapter 13: Sleighbells and Mummery

The chaos in the depot at Falquopelë is dwindling as the travelers hoping to venture north across the mountains and into the fallout of the snowstorm have either given up and returned south or dispersed to one of the inns in Falquopelë or a nearby village. Nerdanel does not give up. She sits on her trunk, rising only to add a shawl or put one away or to remove an apple or a bit of bread. Every few hours, she goes to the counter and speaks to the depot master in a low, urgent tone. She is not one for fierce, flamboyant gestures, but she clutches the edge of the counter, and her knuckles are white.

“Nothing yet, lady” is the depot master’s answer each time. “Road’s blocked and no hope of being cleared anytime soon.”

People passing in and out of the depot see her and feel sorry for her. She is not a weeper and keeps always her dignified bearing, but the lines on her face and the schooled, subdued way she speaks—like it’s taken her the full three hours since she last went up to the counter to prepare herself to be civil—suggests the urgency of her case. Many who see her would have done something to ease her plight, but there is nothing to be done.

On the second day—this is around the time that the Ambarussa are encountering the Wight in Formenos and dropping the peaches, and Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are conspiring to return to the house a second time—she rises and takes a piece of bread, quite stale by now, from her trunk. She sits back down and bites it, only to leave it aside with only the faintest indentations from her teeth. She strides up to the counter.

There is no quiet insistence this time, no carefully wrought patience, no fingers clutching the counter. No, her hands splay and her voice is insistent and loud as she declares, “It has been two days.”

“Lady, the road is closed. There is noth—”

“My little boys,” she says.  “My little boys are back there, in Formenos, alone. They are home alone, doubtlessly terrified and hungry. I will get across that mountain.”

“Lady, there is no—”

“I don’t want a wagon. I don’t want a sleigh. What I want is the name of the best woodcarver in the village who can fit me to a pair of skis.”

“Lady, that’s madn—”

Tears in the eyes of Nerdanel Mahtaniel are rare like finding a diamond glinting in the garden soil. They give a bright, fey look to her eye. The lift of her chin is defiant and haughty enough to cow even her defiant and haughty husband, were he there. “Then let me be mad. I will go to my sons. Let me perish in the snow! I will perish in trying to reach them.”

“Lady, I can’t—”

“His name, please.”

“—let you risk yourself like—”

“This is not your choice. What is his name?”

“—on a deadly errand like—”

“His name!!”

The depot has fallen quiet. People are not even pretending not to stare at Nerdanel and the depot master.

Behind Nerdanel, a small wisp of a man has appeared. He has long fingers that seem to flash through the air like fireworks. His hair is tied back in a knot, and there is an ancient crud of facepaint around the edges of his hairline and jaw. “My lady?” he says in a voice whispery from disuse. “My lady, I—” He touches her arm.

“What?!” She reels at the unexpected contact, as though a spark had touched a stub of a fuse.

“My lady, I couldn’t help but overhear. Your conundrum.” Long, slender fingers on her arm draw her away (to the visible relief of the depot master). “Let me introduce myself.” His voice is gaining power with use and is now reedy and sweet, like notes played on a wooden flute. “I am Quildë the Dumb.” And there he flourishes his hands and pauses, his eyebrows raised expectantly.

Nerdanel’s head tips a little. “Quildë the … Dumb?”

“The Silent Sorcerer? The Marvelous Mummer? The Quiet Quendi?” Suddenly, his hands are padding against empty air, boxing himself into an imaginary structure. His eyes pop wide and his lips purse as it squeezes in upon him. Nerdanel finds herself wondering—vaguely and briefly—if she is watching a man being actually crushed by invisible powers before she shakes her head and says,

“You said you could help me?”

“Oh! Yes!” His voice is whispery again, as though the frantic, ticklish miming has sapped the power of his voice. “I could not help but overhear … something about your sons? You are trying to reach your sons?”

“Yes. They’re home … my little sons. Home alone. I … left them.”

There. She has said it. In her hours in the depot, her mind has turned over and over who to blame. She has settled a dozen times on Nelyo for miscounting and Tyelkormo for causing the uproar in the first place (for from a distance, it can no longer be the small Ambarussa who should have been blamed and punished) to Nolofinwë for rousing them so early to the storm itself—and therefore Ilúvatar himself—for dumping so much snow so early. But it was her fault all along. She sees that now.

“I left them home alone.”

Quildë the Dumb clucks his tongue. “Such a pity and a shame. I know that the depot will not risk a sleigh, much less a wagon, over the mountain but—” He gestures with a palm at the depot door. Beyond it, a flimsy-looking red sleigh bedecked with bells—the kind used to give southern tourists rides in the snow—waits in the street. A pair of legs in striped stockings protrude from under it. “We have procured a sleigh from a local farmer and are making the repairs to get it at least across the mountain. We have a performance, you see, in a northern village, and we must—” Nerdanel is aware suddenly that the black cardigan Quildë wears over a white shirt patterned with black hearts—both are very shabby. She can see the hasty stitches holding rips shut, and the weave of his cardigan is pulling loose at the elbows. “We must make it. I cannot return to my father’s fishing boat at Avathar. Therefore, would you wish a ride from a ragtag bunch of mummers, we have a single seat left and would be happy to oblige.”

Sleep-deprived and half-mad with stress, the mime’s carefully wrought formal speech perplexes her for a moment before she realizes what he is offering. The high prince’s wife, she who could wear her weight in gems and command a procession in the diamond-dusted streets of Tirion, would she care for such extravagances, is left speechless by two twists of metal topped by a few slabs of particleboard and the raggedy mummer who proffers it. “Me?” she hears herself squeak. “A ride? You’d give me a ride?”

He presses a hand to his heart and bows slightly. “It would be our distinct honor.” And she catches him in an embrace that nonplusses them both.

Chapter 14: A Roast by Any Other Name

You’ve doubtlessly heard of the forge-moth: a moth once of pure powdery white wings that, upon the arrival of the Noldor, in regions where forgework became common, evolved over the course of years to a darker hue that would allow it to lie undetected upon the forge walls, to eventually dance and die among the flames. The moth was a wonder to Noldorin naturalists, who marveled in their eternal lives that something could change so quickly for no greater reason than to lie quietly and undisturbed near to what it loved.

Natural philosophers had long noted that nature provided all in twain, in wondrous and hideous aspect. Dušamanûðânâz is the hideous aspect of the same principal as the forge-moth. He lies in wait against the snow, curled and plumped and legless as a grub. The coiled fat of his body keeps him warm, and the dingy paleness of his body keeps him camouflaged. Iniðilêz had the brilliant idea to stay and attempt to observe the exodus of Melkor and the unfortunate Igasêz—just a corpse now, his spirit having fled the torments exacted upon it—to extract what information they could to best serve their lord (and avoid the same fate). Now, Iniðilêz huddles behind the mounded form of Dušamanûðânâz, stiffened against shivering and exuding a slow trickle of magic to keep himself hidden. The snow is so white and omnipresent that the white of it is beginning a kaleidoscopic whirl behind his eyes: amoebic shapes squirming amid each other, breaking apart, rejoining, a thousand shades of white bubbling mitotically in meandering patterns across the snow and—

“How odd!” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice is like an eruption of gas punched out from between two flaccid folds of dough.

“Shut it,” says Iniðilêz. “It’s just snow blindness.” The amoebae pinwheel faster behind his eyes. His certainty that Melkor has assumed some sort of incorporeality to flee the house is proportional to his irritation, both growing exponentially as a bacterial rot.

“Right you are, boss,” Dušamanûðânâz replies. Silence resumes, the wintry kind where you can hear the tiny crumpling fall of snowflakes. Then a slurping laugh. “But it looks like two little children, the snow blindness!”

“Shut it!”

“The detail—just remarkable! I can even hear its snowshoes, the snow blindness!”

At this, Iniðilêz rouses himself to look over the hump of Dušamanûðânâz’s thorax. He is drawing back his podgy fist to drive it into Dušamanûðânâz’s even podgier body when he realizes that Dušamanûðânâz isn’t describing snow blindness after all but two actual children in actual snowshoes, making stumping progress from the house to a squat stone outbuilding near the edge of the forest. Iniðilêz blinks away the amoebae. The children are identically dressed but in different colors. They are small, the age of running noses and peeping voices. An annoying age. A helpless age.

Iniðilêz pokes his finger repeatedly into Dušamanûðânâz’s back, leaving a trail of dimples. Dušamanûðânâz squirms. “Those are Fëanáro’s twin brats!” And with a slow dawning realization, he understands that he and Dušamanûðânâz have been had. Melkor was never here. It was some trick they effected on the thickskulled Dušamanûðânâz. Iniðilêz casts an irritated glanced at his partner.

Dušamanûðânâz gawps and confirms all that Iniðilêz is thinking. “But Fëanáro’s not here!”

“Exactly!”

“Then … they’re not here either?” His mouth is drooping to take up more of his form as he thinks.

“No, dummy! They’re right there!”

“Then Fëanáro is home? What a shame! I sure wanted them jewels!”

The Ambarussa, shuffling through the snow to the outbuilding that houses the family’s cold cellar, assume that the wet whumping sound they hear is a mass of snow dropping from a tree. They don’t look back to see the whirling gauntlet of Iniðilêz’s small, fat fists pummeling Dušamanûðânâz into a quivering, furred shape against the snow. They have decided that, if they must spend Yule alone (and it is increasingly clear that they must, that the curse they uttered was a powerful, possibly permanent, one), then they will at least have a roast. Fëanáro always makes a roast for the Yule, and while they have no idea how to make a roast, they had no idea how to do many of the things they’ve now done and wordlessly reached the decision to at least try. Amid the gargantuan briskets and shanks, they find a single small roast, so small that they wonder why Fëanáro would have stored such a cut, and it seems meant to be.

They retrace their steps back to the house, stepping between their footprints to make a pair of parallel tracks in the snow. Ambarussa cradles in his hands the roast just big enough for two.

Meanwhile, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are slinking toward the house. Dušamanûðânâz, now that he’s not being beaten, has regained enough control to fade his fur back to white. Long of foot and tooth, he resembles a snowshoe hare—or what Eru’s rough draft of a snowshoe hare might have looked like before he threw the sketch into the Flame Imperishable and began again. Iniðilêz is again sweating tiny trickles of magic, enough to keep himself invisible. Were one to look at his spot in the snow, one’s eyes would be needled by a denser-than-expected nest of sparkles that nonetheless seem to contain no light.

They creep to the window.

The kitchen beyond is impeccable and gleaming with an array of implements forged by Fëanáro himself. The twins are standing, each on a chair, working at the heavy block in the center of the room. Their backs are turned to the window. One is cutting herbs with a small knife—the herbs themselves line the windowsills of the kitchen and give the sense of peering through a small jungle—and the other is rubbing the herb mixture into an unimpressive lump of meat. Neither is speaking, but the space between their identical red-haired heads shimmers with their shared thoughts.

“It’s just like I told you,” hisses Iniðilêz to Dušamanûðânâz. “They’re all alone.”

Ambarto is the one using the little knife to carefully pare the herbs, pungent and verdant with life, into a rub worthy of the small but fine roast they’ve chosen from their father’s cellar. Honed by Fëanáro’s own hand, the blade is whetted to a sharpness that cuts painless and silent as a whisper; the knife itself is bright as a mirror. In fact, Ambarto is about to send a giggling thought to Ambarussa, remembering how they caught Tyelkormo studying his pimples once in the reflection of a kitchen knife while he was supposed to be peeling apples for sauce, but the surface of the knife catches something strange in reflection that pulls him up short.

He can see one of the kitchen windows as a winter-white rectangle, and the stoic little pots of herbs along its lower margin, and something creeping and strange moving behind them.

Without pausing in the rhythm clop-clop of his knife, he nudges his brother with his mind. Ambarussa, who ever acts before thinking, sees what Ambarto has spied and gasps. His eyes pop wide and round and he lets out a reflexive bleat: “Atar!”

Taking his lead, Ambarto echoes, “Atar! Which one is the tarragon again?” He peers through the door as though watching for the father who isn’t there, who is leagues away behind an impenetrable wall of snow.

The shapes beyond the window sink away, but Iniðilêz wears a smile like a ragged blade. His hands are softly squelching against each other with delight. Just as Ambarto spied him in the reflection in his blade, so Iniðilêz spied the flicker of terror in the small boy’s eyes and noted the stiff set of the other boy’s shoulders as he tossed his blatantly fraudulent cry to his absent father. “Tonight!” Iniðilêz crows. “We return tonight.”

Dušamanûðânâz casts a puzzled look at the window. His rabbity teeth have grown long, and his words lisp out from behind them. “But the kidth are thtill here in the houthe!”

“Who cares! They’re just two dumb little kids! If anything, we’ll add them like a pair of red-headed cherries on the rim of the cocktail of riches we deliver unto our Lord.” His hands squirm.

“Cherrieth! I like cherrieth! On ithe cream. I’m not allowed to have cocktailth. I get thilly.”

Iniðilêz ignores him. “We’ll come back tonight, in the silver hours, the time when small boys are in bed and afraid to come out. And we’ll come in.” He raises his prybar. Dušamanûðânâz raises his and grins around the teeth now curving under his chin. Delicate as though they were wielding champagne glasses, they clink them together.

Chapter 15: Meanwhile ...

In the inn in Falquopelë, the parley of the Finwions has knotted into constant squabble, like a strand of festive lights drawn from a box, interminable and tangled. As one argument cools, another kindles from its ashes, ignited by the final tossed-off snarks and the pounding irritation over all the constant arguing. Every person in the three-room suite utters these four words at least once. (Except for Fëanáro, but he will return to our story in a moment.) And so the argument tumbles around the circumference of the three-room suite with a near centrifugal force.

Fëanáro is not involved. He is still locked in the coat closet. There was an attempt to hang coats in there; he piled them outside the door. This touched off an argument between Turukáno and Tyelkormo about respective paternal reasonableness. Curufinwë, from time to time, slips from the suite and returns with pliers and tiny hammers and once a coil of copper wire, and a slim pale hand emerges from the closet, collects his purchases, and then snaps back inside.

And Nerdanel perches upon a wooden bench in a flimsy sleigh that is ascending the steepest part of the mountain, the pair of horses floundering in flank-deep snow and the runners creaking ominously beneath them. None want to think of what would transpire if the sleigh founders here so they sing, bright, reedy songs that are whipped off upon a brisk wind. Nerdanel does not join in the song. They offer to teach her, but she smiles a tight, close-lipped smile and persists in silence. Like the others, she imagines the sleigh foundering, but in her mind, this is not the tragedy. She simply presses on.

Chapter 16: Not a Brave Man

The poet’s wisdom will claim that a terrified rabbit grows so overcome by its panic as to become all but literally petrified: motionless in the face of that which threatens it, as easily plucked from life by a fox or a hawk as you or I would pluck an apple from a tree.

But the hunter’s wisdom will contend that rabbits are not so simple. That they will run and evade. Scream. And when pressed, they will fight.

The Ambarussa stand for a moment at the block in their father’s kitchen, petrified, yes—but just for a moment. They hear the plans of Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz, for they are all but shouted outside their window, and swiftly their reaction is that of the rabbit: to flee, evade. To zigzag their way to safety. Surely someone in the town will take them in! They remember, briefly, that they are small and still delightful. They could make their eyes round and voices high and be taken in without question, and no one ever need know that they were forewarned of the theft of their father’s vault. In fact, they know, blessings will be counted that they were not home.

But the urge to flee and shriek for aid are as ephemeral as a snowflake on the tip of the nose. It is Ambarussa who, at last, speaks aloud what has stirred in both their thoughts, faster and faster like a sea-fed storm: “This is our House. We have to defend it.”

The twins are not yet the age when they will be pressed into deciding upon a talent to nurture. They enjoy all the playful whimsies of young children in a house of artisans, an admiration for colored pencils and xylophones with a rainbow array of bars and soft clays made of flour and salt, and they indulge in these in a dabbling, unfocused way permitted by their youth. Their drive—inherited in twain from their mother and their father—is swathed like their hands and cheeks in the softness of childhood. Maturity has not yet honed it.

But present it is, and beginning to stir. They sideline the pencils and rulers on their father’s drafting table with a sweep of their arms. When Nelyo goes to the grocer in the village, he brings them what he calls “big paper” back, intended for cuts of meat but ideal for their sprawling imaginative drawings. They unroll and cut a sheet to the dimensions of the drafting table, and Ambarussa secures it at the corners while Ambarto hones their colored pencils with a tiny knife. And elbow to elbow, colored pencils pinched in their fingers, they bend silently to their task.

When their work is complete and they back away from the drafting table, they are delighted to perceive that all that they need for their plans is easily at hand. Such is the unintended advantage of being the children of craftspeople: Items which are poisonous and perilous and dangerous, honed, and hot are readily at hand, tucked alongside extra stores of soap or a dustmop or the rag bag of unmatched socks. Scurrying like a pair of ants through the warren of their parents’ house, they marshal what they will require. Only one thing is missing. Tremulously, they confer. Will they dare proceed without it? They will not; they will need to return to the village.

On this Yuletide eve, smoke from many chimneys curls like silvery quillwork against a woolen-white sky. Each cottage is frosted prettily, sparkling around the eaves in the late day’s light. There is a growing hush upon the streets as the people go in to their dinners, the candlelit windows casting rosy patchwork upon the snowy streets. The twins hesitate as they pass some of these windows, which frame scenes of conviviality and kinship: chortling delight as guests balance tottering towers of packages as they clasp in hearty embraces. Lively music tinkles into the street. Open doors exude the fragrance of Yule roasts and buttery pies and sweetmeats dusted with cinnamon.

Around the town’s small square, merchants are beginning to douse the lanterns in their windows and draw drapes across the festive displays glittering within. They are departing for their own homes and dinners. The twins observe with relief that the shop they need remains bright, even gaudily so, cocooned in strands of lampstones and with tall candles bristling in each window beneath a corona of fire. It is Ambarto, the careful, crafty one, who pauses outside the door. He has hidden a quill and scrap of paper in his cloak, and he removes them now. Ambarussa, drawn like a moth to the flame to the temptations of the shop, steps one foot across the threshold before withdrawing to wait, jostling in place, for his brother to finish scribing the note in a careful hand impeccably trained by Nelyo.

And then they go in.

The shopkeeper smiles indulgently. She is used to small boys perusing her wares with whispering urgency, darting from shelf to shelf, display to display, with a frantic, subdued joy. She is clad as a Noldo but with touches of oddity that reveal she comes from Taniquetil. Her golden hair is wrapped in a long, many-hued scarf; chips of bright gems march up her ears, each with a tiny glowing heart. The Ambarussa hold a whispered conference with each other; coins are counted and weighed against different possibilities until three rockets are selected from the shelf and brought in the boys’ small hands to her counter.

“Is he in tonight?” Ambarussa asks. He is trying to imitate the brazen confidence of his father, leaning one elbow on the counter (he is so small that the elbow ends up around his ear), as though inquiring as to the whereabouts of a Maia is regular for him. The handsome, youthful-faced pyrotechnician is a favorite of their father, and many afternoons have been wiled away in boredom-induced games amid the rockets and crackers and sparklers as their father and Olórin prattle about chemical reactions.

“Not tonight,” says the Vanyarin shopkeeper as she carefully records their purchases in her ledger. “It was his turn to cook our dinner.”

“But he is in town? He did not go to Taniquetil for the feast?”

“Not this year.” Her eyes have narrowed slightly, the look adults get when children show in inappropriate degree of curiosity. Ambarto, the more sensitive of the two, perceives a glimmer of misgiving in her eyes and steps in to supplant his brother’s place. Macalaurë himself could not arrange his face to be more pitiably innocent, or so Ambarto likes to believe. With wide, blinking eyes, he smiles up at the woman and proffers the scrap of parchment he wrote outside the shop.

“Would you give this to him, please?” The hand offering the note is tentative and unassuming, and the shopkeeper can hardly refuse, though she purses her lips in a mild show of disapproval.

“Would you like a bag for your purchases, my young lords?”

“We will use our satchel and thank you. We hope you enjoy your holiday dinner with the Lord Olórin.”

Outside, the light of Laurelin to the south of them is beginning to visibly wane. Ambarussa grabs his brother’s hand, fearing they have tarried too long; the silver hours are nigh, and they have much yet to prepare. Ambarto shoves the three rockets into their satchel as they hasten, puffing tiny mists of breath, back to the gates where they have left their snowshoes. Just three days ago, they would have whined help out of their mother or Nelyo; now their fingers make quick work of the tangle of buckles and straps.

The cold is deep, and the snow creaks beneath their feet as they run, breath coming hard, back toward the house that sits like a tumble of blocks just in sight of the town walls. Conscious that Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz might be lurking in the violet shadows that reach for them across the snow, they keep close to the forest’s edge this time, weaving amid the small trees beginning to push up at its edges. Aspens, pale as bone, crowd close. The twins, in their haste, do not notice that the circumference of the boles expanding. Now there are birch trees, their papery bark peeling in strips colored salmon and soot, and maples laden with next spring's samaras. The branches clot overhead, choking off the last dribbles of light. They do not notice that the wide places between the trees form a sort of path, and the path leads them deeper into the woods.

Until they arrive in a clearing. The Treelight is blocked by the forest to their south, and the stars overhead seem brighter. Ambarussa has taken the lead, as he is wont to do, and when suddenly the trees fail, he stops so abruptly that Ambarto crashes into his back.

There is something peaceful about the forest that brings them to a halt, motionless except for the breath steaming from their mouths. Ambarto’s mind skips back to his mother’s embrace and the safety he used to feel when swaddled in her arms. The forest is like that. It rocks him and sings. Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz, he knows instinctually, cannot penetrate here. The slender aspens behind them are formidable as a company of soldiers. Around the clearing, in a ring near to a perfect circle, evergreen shrubs grow, livid with fat red berries.

Suddenly there is a faint rasping sound, the sound of something being cut away in slow strips. Both twins whip in the direction of the sound. At the far end of the clearing, a silver-white head bends to a task, a stone blade in his hands. His flesh is so pale he seems to rise from the snow itself. He wears a tunic with sleeves that, despite the cold, come only to his elbows. As he straightens, Ambarto perceives that it is one of their father’s old tunics.

The Wight.

His milky gaze falls upon them. Both gasp, and Ambarussa’s arm flings in front of his brother in an instinctual gesture of protection. The Wight is tall, his limbs so thin that the joints swell upon them like galls upon a sickened tree. His face is graven with shadow, and Ambarto remembers what Tyelkormo said of him dying under torment. He wears the memory on his face. A stone blade dangles from his hand. There is no doubt that, within a matter of seconds, he could spider across the clearing and the blade would be at their—

“Tidings on the Yule,” says the Wight in heavily accented Quenya. The lines on his face melt into a shy smile.

“Huh?” Ambarussa’s flung-out arm droops a little in surprise.

The Wight crosses the clearing, not with the preternatural haste of a many-legged thing but with a gentle deliberation that calls to mind the growth of the forest itself: the rising of the trees from samara and seed, and the creeping encroachment of the forest upon the meadow. There is an inevitability to him. The twins’ mouths hang open; the winter air is icy upon their tongues. And that quickly, the terrifying shape looming from the shadows becomes, when closer scrutiny brings a measure of familiarity, just a heap of harmless fabric, something soft and comforting even.

“Ti—dings,” Ambarto manages when the Wight is standing before them. The tunic is definitely their father’s; the blade is crude and shaped of stone but sturdy and well-honed.

“Would you like to come to my tent? I just put on a kettle of wild apple cider.”

A minute later, each twin’s hands wrap a clay mug of steaming cider. The hide walls of the tent open at the top to vent the smoke from the fire that crackles merrily at its heart. Though firelit, the tent is somehow not dim or shadowed. The place seems very bright, and it is warm. The twins did not know how cold they were till now. Their hands and arms tingle and itch with the returning warmth. There is no furniture, but the furs piled upon the packed-earth floor are abundant and warm.

The Wight serves himself last, using a ladle shaped from leather. He casts a pinch of fragrant herbs upon the hot surface of the cider; when the twins take a tentative sip, the cider warms their bellies and the herbs suffuse heat through their limbs. The itching in their skin subdues. The Wight settles himself opposite them, and in the genial light of his fire, it is hard to remember what in his face they found terrifying.

He begins hesitantly. “When you see me,” he says, “you can say hello. You do not have to be afraid. I am here by the leave of your parents. I mean your family no harm.”

“Our … parents?” says Ambarussa, and by gentle degrees, the boys coax the Wight’s story from him.

Tyelkormo was not wrong when he claimed the Wight was one of the Avari, perished in the Outer Lands. But when Ambarussa blurts out the tale of his captivity by Melkor, the Wight laughs. “I did not even make it across the Hithaeglir,” he says, "much less to brave the terror of the Dark One, as your grandfather did." There is a slight pinkening of his cheeks—a blush, Ambarto realizes, if that can be believed! “I am not a brave man,” he confesses. “I quailed at the shadow of the mountains and retreated to Ambaróna. My life there was good. Safe. I had a wife. Two children—a daughter and a son. I awakened the trees there and heard what tales they told and learned the lore of the earth. It was a slow, delightful life.

“But from safety comes an ignoble death. I was fetching water from the river when I slipped and cut my hand on a rock. The wound festered, and my feä forsook my body. I died. My trees, they beckoned me, but there was a voice too, from over the dark waters … The voice promised I would reunite with my wife and children if I obeyed its summons. I could not abide in loneliness. I am not a brave man. I followed the voice.

“But when the Gods here remade my form, and I walked anew, I found myself in this strange land, separated from my family by the dark waters. I mean to go back to them …” But he trailed away.

“My father!” Ambarussa interjects. “My father knows the Telerin mariners, and they would likely lend or even give you a ship!”

The Wight shakes his head sadly. “Our people are very different. Your parents have been kind to allow me to abide on their land, but my kind do not use the metals taken by torment from the earth. We use only what the earth places at hand: stick and stone. I could not return to my family in one of the ships of your friends. It would be a betrayal of all I believe. But your parents have not left me without hope.”

He leads them out of the tent and to the shape he was working over when they arrived. It is a canoe, carved from a single fallen log, and beautifully adorned with carvings of the forest, his life. His marriage to a woman whose hair coils among the leaves. A tree clasped in friendship. Two babes delivered to his arms. A stern god, his hand firm upon the Wight’s shoulder. And a tossing sea with a canoe small upon it, all stitched into a single story by a backdrop of forest.

“The work is fine,” Ambarussa pronounces. Ambarto, silent, runs his hands over it, feeling no crack or failing to admit so much as a drop of water. “It looks ready! When will you leave? We will help you port it.”

The Wight shakes his head and fades back to his tent.

He is pouring another cup of cider when they follow, sipping at it plaintively. Ambarussa, ever bold, rushes forth to put a hand on the Wight’s shoulder. “Did you hear me? We’ll help! We’ll help you port it to the river, then out you’ll go to the sea!”

“That is the problem,” says the Wight. “The sea.”

Ambarto is gentler but just as eager. “The sea is easy to find! The river is right down in the village, and it spills into the sea. All you have to do is ride the current! Our father has a map; we’ll show you!”

“The problem is not finding the sea. It is sailing it.” A pause, then, “I am not a brave man.”

“But your family—”

“I should have taken haven in my trees, as I was summoned to do, as my people have always done.” He clasps his head in his hands.

“But you didn’t.”

“Yet I should have.”

The twins hesitate. They are unaccustomed to the problems of adults; these are conducted over their heads and do not seek their counsel. The Wight’s preoccupation with his past failing reminds them of their own petulant stubbornness that they enact when they wish for the attention of their mother or Nelyo or anyone kindhearted enough to coax them back to reason.

Ambarto reaches out a tiny hand to place upon the Wight’s shoulder. “You should have? Maybe. But you didn’t. And now you have the choice to return to your family or not.”

“And frankly,” says Ambarussa, “living in our father’s forest? Is not your best life.”

“But what if I die again?” says the Wight.

“What if you do?” says Ambarto, who cries as grazed knees but is suddenly bold about dying. “If you don’t try, you know you stand no chance of returning to your family. If you do try? Well, you might die. Or you might not. But you’ve died before, and you survived that, didn’t you?”

The Wight pauses, and the boys can see he is mulling over what they have said. But then he rises and holds the tent flap open for them.

“It is late,” he says, “and time for small boys to be in bed.”

But as they depart the clearing, Ambarto looks back and sees the Wight standing alongside his canoe. His hand trails it.

Chapter 17: Battle Plan

The twins unfurl the battle plan on the low table in the living room, pinned at each of its four corners by a metronome, a jeweler’s loupe, The Erotic Avari, and of course, the memory stone that plays Ainur with Filthy Feär. As Laurelin’s golden light reposes and the silver light of Telperion rises to replace it beyond the patio doors, the twins scurry to enact the plans carefully drawn in colored pencil. They cook a fresh pot of caramel and lug palantíri as heavy as medicine balls. They juggle am armful of fragile vases, melt down a pot of soap, and Ambarussa is once seen fumbling with a crossbow. There is a delicate operation involving three piranhas. At last, they meet back where they have begun, small chests heaving from exertion. They stare into each other’s eyes. The air shimmers. They are ready.

Ambarto lifts away the four disparate paperweights, and the plan noisily furls itself anew. Ambarussa picks it up and carries it scepter-like into the kitchen.

For a moment, they stand in tense readiness, their nerves singing like one of Carnistir’s experiments with electricity. Ambarussa’s nose twitches first, rabbit-like, then they are both aware of the aroma of the roast they put in the oven earlier. The scent is identical to that which seeped from the light- and love-filled houses in the village, and it has an effect on the twins like dragging a warm blanket from their feet to their chins and snuggling beneath. They both become aware that they are ravenously hungry, and a timid peek into the shimmering maw of the oven reveals that the roast is perfectly cooked and ready to eat. But even more than hunger, the scent kindles a yearning for kinship and love and tradition. While the roast rests on the block in the kitchen, they dress the table fit for a progression of the King, with a pair of gilded candles and plates bearing the eight points of their father’s star sigil. Ambarto folds a pair of livid crimson napkins into a pair of birds rising, wings outspread; Nelyo sought many times to teach him how to properly set a table, but he whined and squirmed until even their brother—usually patient to an inhuman degree—grew frustrated and desisted. Ambarto is pleased that something of what Nelyo taught was retained; he feels a pinch of guilt for the whining and the squirming, only to discover that what Nelyo proffered he wanted after all. Ambarussa delves for and finds the good silver cutlery to replace their usual pewter implements, designed to withstand the hard use of seven sons. Ambarto has put on a pot of wine to mull, and when it is warm, he fills two goblets while Ambarussa, bearing the honor of the eldest, carries forth and then carves the roast.

They sit opposite each other at the middle of the table. Normally, their parents would be at the heads and an array of brothers and apprentices and cousins on either side. Tonight, they are alone.

They join hands, and Ambarussa speaks the Eruhantalë. He gets the ancient Quendian inflections almost right, given the amount of wriggling and eye-rolling that typically attended his linguistics schoolwork. At the end, the silence hangs heavy, somnolent with the scent of food and wine, yet they do not release hands. At last, Ambarto breathes deep, and the shimmer between them grows still. “I would like to have our family back. I know that this prayer is for recognition of blessings and gratitude but … whatever curse we wrought, it was wrong for us to wish it so. If we must bear the consequences of our foolery then we must, but Eru Ilúvatar, if you can find it in your plan to bring our family back, we’d very much like to see them.” And so the shimmer becomes sound.

Earlier, Ambarto brought a memory stone that contains a recording of Macalaurë on the harp, playing a traditional hymn to Eru, composed before the Quendi learned of the intercessionary Valar and began directing their hymns to them. The hymn was about the wisdom of what the ancient Quendi called the slumbering season—the winter—a time of rest that, in their lust for ease and plenty, the Quendi would have foregone had the seasons been theirs to set. The twins set to their supper, experiencing some of the attrition in manners typical of hungry small boys given a plate piled with food. They say little, and the music sparkles through their minds as they eat.

Ambarussa is cutting a third slab from the dwindling roast when they perceive it: a whisper of static and the scrabbling fingers of electricity behind their eyeballs. He gently sets down the knife and touches the memory stone to silence it. The slumbering season has ended.

Both twins creep to the front door. The keyhole boils with violet crackles like lightning. Iniðilêz is trying unsuccessfully again to ensorcell his way into the house. Ambarto, who more often pauses to wonder, ponders why it should be unsuccessful. It is simply a brass lock, in the innocence of Aman wrought with less care, perhaps, than a plowshare would be. It should not withstand any of the Ainur, even one so cloddish as Iniðilêz. But before he can think much more of it, Ambarussa is gesturing to him, then dashing to the back of the house. The plan has begun.

“Blast it!” The voice has the snappish quality of a weasel that beheads a coop full of chickens and forgoes a single bite of meat. “You! Go around the back and get in that way. It’s that big pane of glass; you can break it with a stone then let me in.”

“I wonder why your magic isn’t working.” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice suggests the kinds of creatures that hunker on the verge of the sea within reach of unsuspecting footfalls and squirt poison when stepped upon.

“That’s not your damn concern! Just go!” Iniðilêz snaps.

“Okie.” Like the brainless bottomfeeder, Dušamanûðânâz lacks the wits to perceive when he’s being misused. He ducks his head and goes. Ambarto hears the diminishing sounds of slushing as he wades off through the snow.

In Iniðilêz’s voice, he perceives the fraying of something between the two Maiar. It’s the way a saddle girth will show wear, he thinks to himself. It will hold on by force of habit, enough seem reliable and secure, until it holds on no more. And then it will dump its rider when going over a fallen tree in the forest. He makes note of this.

And then he scuttles to the top of the ladder propped against the wall beside the front door. The façade of his parents’ home is adorned with a stained-glass rose window devised by Formenos’s most skilled glassmaker. It shows the wheel of the seasons in resplendent hues that, at the Mingling, bathe the vestibule in a patchwork of shimmering colors. At its center is the eight-pointed star of his father's house, done in glass colored like flame. Because Fëanáro abhors the use of servants but equally the wasting of much of his time in house-chores, it is also constructed thus that the panes, once unlatched, swing inward for easy cleaning. Cleaning the rose window is typically a chore assigned to the tallest sons and slowly relegated, by force of seniority, to the youngest. Ambarto has cleaned it many times and is familiar with its mechanisms.

The ladder has a shelf at the top from the handy series of inventions devised by Carnistir; upon it, Ambarto has placed one of Curufinwë’s small braziers and one of Tyelkormo’s fishing poles. He exhales gently upon the coals, which first blush, then brighten, to a livid red. At the door below, Iniðilêz has given up on sorcery and is working at the lock with his prybar and a stream of invectives of the kind typical of graffiti upon the privy walls in Angband.

Ambarto reaches up and loosens the lowermost mechanism on the rose window.

Meanwhile, at the back of the house, Ambarussa has taken up a conspicuous place on the inside of the glass patio door. He has kindled all of the lamps in the room and drawn back the drapes so it is impossible not to be seen. He is the braver of the two, and he is terrified. His ankles rattle inside his boots as he stands, weaponless, listening to the crescendoing tread of Dušamanûðânâz slushing through the snow. He wishes he’d brought at least the carving knife from the dining room, but it is too late to even run back. All he holds in his hand is the switch he just flipped, leading to a portable heating element that Fëanáro takes when doing offsite repair work. It snakes from his hand, out the top of the glass door, and its crystals blaze to life along the roofline. Slush slush slush—and Dušamanûðânâz stands before him, just a pane of glass between them.

Short of assembling one of the pyrotechnician’s signs that blaze with the many-hued products of chemical reactions within twists of glass tubes and advertising his presence, Ambarussa could not have announced himself more plainly. All the same, Dušamanûðânâz gets to work on the door with his prybar, oblivious to the small boy standing a mere arm-length away. Ambarussa shifts a little, then fidgets. Then waves his hand, does jumping jacks, turns a cartwheel. Dušamanûðânâz has assumed a form alike to the mindless creatures that huddle beneath the sand, cracking their shells only long enough to uncurl a flaccid tongue into the sea to lick even stupider, more unfortunate creatures from the currents. He is gray and quivering, nonskeletal; his body invaginates around the prybar when he tries to use it. He curses. The squelching notes of his voice echo loudly enough in the shell that encases his head that he does not hear the perilous crack overhead. He leans harder into the prybar until the gray mass of his body almost subsumes it.

Anyone who lives in a cold, snowy clime knows the perils that snow and ice present at egresses. The slightest intimation of warmth—it doesn’t even have to nudge the mercury above the freeze-line—will cause the snow to slough and curl from the eaves like overgrown fingernails until, overcome by its own weight, the curlicues of snow let go, pulling with them all of the snow and ice amassed on the roof behind them. It is not uncommon, at the height of winter in the north, for the debris slipped off the roof to pile to the tops of the windows. Normally, the tragedy of such a release at the moment one enters or exists a door is prevented, in the north, by barriers that withhold and divert the snow and ice. Upon their return this evening, Ambarussa climbed to the roof and removed these from over the patio door.

Ambarussa walks to the glass door and raps on it three times. After a moment of twisting himself upon the prybar, Dušamanûðânâz looks up. The lust in his face is that of his invertebrate prototype upon sensing something wounded and ordinarily beyond its ken, borne helplessly upon the waves toward it. Both hands press the glass in unbridled desire, leaving a pair of humid handprints. His nose turns up, piglike, from the same pressure, and the fog of his breath momentarily obscures the curdled mass that is his face behind the glass.

The snow overhead, goaded by the heat from the element run along its edge, lets go. Now do not think of an innocent shower of snow, tossed from the hand of a playful child at the fleeing shape of his friend, when imagining what such a disgorgement is like. The snow there has become annealed by the freeze-thaw cycle and honed by the wind to slabs that would suit equally well for use in armor. These slabs are peppered with icicles, keen as blades. This is what showers upon Dušamanûðânâz.

It seems like it might never end. His body writhes inside a blizzard’s worth of raining snow and stinging ice drawn down from the roof. When at last it ends, punctuated by a final icicle that lodges itself inside the fold atop his head like an exclamation point, Ambarussa is gone and Dušamanûðânâz is so angry that he seizes the door handle, meaning to tear his way inside with brute strength alone. The door—which was never locked—whips open. A small avalanche of snow and ice tumble inside, and Dušamanûðânâz flips ass over tin cup like a gelid acrobat, flopping upon his back with a sound like dropping a handful of dough upon the board. And he is … sticky. Unnaturally sticky.

Meanwhile, at the front door, Iniðilêz has succeeded at chipping the paint on the doorjamb when something tickles the top of his head. He swivels his face skyward, the flesh sinking back to give Ambarto a shuddering look at him grossly wide-eyed and thin-lipped, his eyeballs—showing white all around—roving to find what touched him. It is a key, now drawn out of reach. Iniðilêz jumps to grab it. His fingers graze it, and Ambarto pulls it higher. He jumps higher, propelling himself this time with sorcery, which sizzles from his feet like the trail on a rocket for a split second before fizzling like a doused fire, his magic again mysteriously curbed, like a dog on a leash. Again, he almost reaches the key. He gathers himself for a third attempt, propels himself as high as nature and his podgy legs will allow, watches as one sausage-like finger makes an asymptotic approach to the key, nearer and nearer but never touching—and then he falls back to the front step.

This time, his foot hits a patch of ice, and he continues his descent all the way to his globular ass, his legs jutting in front of him in an ignoble V. A lungful of wind escapes him as a massive OOOF, and he hears smothered giggling from above. The key is back, dangling now just in front of his nose. Simmering with shame, he reaches forward to snatch it before the devilish little Fëanárion entices him to jump for it again.

What he missed, as he topped to his ass, was the first key being abruptly yanked away and quickly, if delicately, replaced by a spare left heating in the brazier. It is red hot when it begins it descent upon Tyelkormo’s fishing line; its cherry-red hue has dimmed a little in the cold air by the time of its arrival, and Iniðilêz fails to notice it. Its heat, however, has not appreciably dimmed. It bites with wounding agony and leaves a pink key-shaped brand upon the powder-white paw of Iniðilêz.

A snow-doused Dušamanûðânâz hears his partner in crime howl as he begins to extricate himself from whatever sticky substance he has landed in. Rage has honed the shape of his body. He has shed the primeval softness of his body and assumed the snicking-deadly acuity of a mantis that lurks beneath a palm leaf to scissor the wings from a butterfly. Having dressed himself this morning to suit his pseudopodic form, his clothes droop upon him, and he wallows in his boots. He extracts his back from the sticky mess he has landed in, scooping out a clump of it on a tarsus, from which it begins to drop slowly. It has a merry amber color that, to an undarkened mind, would call forth the recollection of autumn festivals and the tiny crack of biting into chocolates. It is caramel.

Dušamanûðânâz is not known for attentional prowess. For several minutes, he laps the caramel from his tarsi, until it begins to cement his jaws together, and he remembers he is there with Iniðilêz to rob the Fëanorian vaults. And Iniðilêz is doubtlessly in the house by now. Like most mean-minded things, Dušamanûðânâz possesses a measure of fear for his own safety, and he feels this small part cower inside him to imagine Iniðilêz’s displeasure if he enters this room and finds Dušamanûðânâz wading in a pool of caramel, eating, while the wicked little Fëanárion—just moments ago within grabbing distance of his pedipalps—scampers off to safety. He clambers upright. The caramel has been liberally painted upon the floor all around him. In fact, it covers the entire floor of the living room save a path left by the brat to allow for his own exodus, and even now, the caramel is beginning its glacial crawl inward upon this bared stripe of floor.

Dušamanûðânâz minces across the floor toward it. The caramel, cooled by the inrush of snow and the cold air from the open door, has become very sticky. He walks right out of first his boots, then his socks, already loose upon legs that maintain a human shape but insectile thinness. They leave his tiny, four-toed humanoid feet bared. No matter. He wrenches them from the caramel and tucks them beneath a prehensile arm. He will put them on again once he reaches dry floor. He tiptoes quickly to the ever-diminishing bare strip of floor, where he leaves a fan of caramel-colored toeprints.

“I’m right here!” The little Fëanárion brat is waving from the next doorway. “Aren’t you gonna come and get me?”

The cleared path is now a balance beam’s width. Dušamanûðânâz must hurry, or he’ll be mired in caramel again. He skitters, heel-to-toe, as quickly as he can, the cleared path closing behind him as he goes. He watches it over his shoulder, thinking it is a rather impressive effect. Heroic even, like crossing a rope bridge, his foot leaving a plank just as it falls away. It is like something out of a story. His primal brain tries to conjure a way he might describe it later to Iniðilêz and—dare he imagine?—even Melkor, to impress upon them a valorous mien. A tiny ember of ambition glows within his perivisceral sinus, the same aspiration that first drove his kind to drag themselves from the sea and begin eating each other.

When he crosses the doorjamb, he is imagining the accolades that await him when he brings the Fëanárian jewels filling a little Fëanárion skull to its brim, his compound eyes roving the room to find the boy. Had he been more vigilant of the ground beneath his feet—caring less about the collapsing caramel bridge behind him and vengeance upon the son of Fëanáro before him—he would have noticed how the floor scintillated in the spill of brilliance from the room behind him. As it is, he takes three sweeping steps before the agony of the broken glass embedded in the bottoms of his teensy feet makes its way to what passes for his brain.

Because his steps are so wide, with just three strides, he finds himself marooned in the middle of the kitchen. Shattered glassware spreads like a glittering sea to all sides of him. The immediate pain is such that he jitters away from it and only embeds more glass in his feet. Had he been more intentional in his movements, three large strides could have brought him the rest of the way across the room to the entryway to the dining room. As it is, he highsteps around most of the room as aimlessly as a moth caught inside a lantern, making high-pitched “Hoo! Hoo! Ah! Ah!” sounds as he goes. He swings through a triple pirouette, pinwheels out a series of wings, ends with a tour jeté. Eventually and by pure chance alone, he reels into the dining room and collapses into the chair just recently vacated by Ambarussa during their supper, the soles of his feet bristling glass like a porcupine wields quills.

Chapter 18: Herringbone

Night has fallen, and the flimsy sleigh bearing the mummery troupe of Quildë the Dumb, charitably bearing Nerdanel the Wise, is ploughing through the snow at the apex of the mountain. The mountainfolk, undeterred by the fiercest of storms, have resumed their lives, visiting for the Yule, and the track is sliced by the trails left by their skis and snowshoes. Nonetheless, the horses—a pair of heavy draft animals borrowed from a farmer in Falquopelë—labor and puff to pull the sleigh through the heavy snow. In places, it has drifted across the road to the depths of their chests. At these times, the Elves get out and walk beside the sleigh to lighten the load for the horses, stumping through hip-deep snow.

But now they are descending, and the way is mostly clear. Several sleighs belonging to the mountainfolk have already passed, heading likely to the villages in the north for the holiday. The mummer in the striped tights is driving, and everyone in the sleigh but Quildë and Nerdanel are sleeping.

At first, Quildë tries to coax Nerdanel into a conversation conducted entirely in mummery. Her hands flutter out of politeness and then lie still upon the fur blanket in which she is wrapped.

“I am a terrible mother,” she says. There it is: her fear made manifest in sound wrapped in a cloud of breath. Once uncorked, the words flow unimpeded. “I left them. I left them.”

“You’re not a terrible mother,” says Quildë. His voice hitches on the word not like an adolescent at puberty. With his reedy, piping voice, Nerdanel can imagine why he prefers to mime. “Look at us! You’re doing better than any of us.”

“Am I though?” The wit of Nerdanel is legendary: the way she challenges claims with such gentleness that no one realizes their argument has been eviscerated until they see the parts of it in a tangled heap before them. But now a note of desperation gave her voice a honed edge. “I left them. Do any of you have that on your consciences?”

“Begging your pardon, Princess,” says Quildë, “but we are all of us fathers, and yet do you see any children in this sleigh?” He sweeps his arms open and then makes an exaggerated show of peering under blankets. “It is the eve of Yuletide, and we have all left our children.”

“You know what I mean,” she mumbles.

“I do, I do,” he assures her. “And perhaps that is not a fair parry! But I would rejoin that the persistent fatherlessness to which we have left our children—and essential widowhood to which we have left our wives—is far worse than a single and simple oversight. Save for a sennight each season, we travel the roads of Aman nonstop—and it is hardly as though our profession bestows our family with significant means! Rather they endure also the poverty of those still grasping for success, as we have been grasping for yéni. My children would gladly exchange me for a parent like you, who braves a storm and a rickety sleigh brimming with raggedy mimes to return to them, not those same mimes, who brave a storm only in pursuit of their own glory.”

The sleigh slides onto the level road at the base of the mountain. Nerdanel does not answer Quildë; at first, he believes she has drifted to sleep. But when he reaches over to straighten her blanket, he sees her eyes gleaming wakeful, bright with starlight.

They reach a cluster of buildings too small to be even a village, and the driver stops the sleigh. “The horses can go no farther,” he calls over his shoulder. “We must rest them until morning, but have no fear, we will make the village and the festival.”

The mummers watch Nerdanel disembark, for she cannot—will not—wait. In the back of the sleigh are several worn skis, given them in case they became caught in a drift, so that some of them could return for help. They are ill-fitting on her feet, but she dutifully straps them into place as best she can. When she rises, Quildë says, “It is too far to Formenos,” knowing she will not be persuaded.

“I have gone much farther before. I was younger, but never was I pressed as I am now. I will be fine.” She catches his hand. “Nor will I forget your kindness to me.”

She has not forgotten the striding rhythm that devours leagues of snow as she glides. There are steep hills that she must ascend with strenuous chopping strides, her skis turned in at the heels. Her breath comes fast and hard then, and she sweats inside her winter clothing. But then she slides down the other side, letting her legs rest and her burning face cool in the frigid air. She and Fëanáro used to ski in the winter months in the north to move from place to place, camping overnight under the open sky, dependent on none for their conveyance. She knows the patterns of the stars overhead and where to point her skis to bring her home to her sons.

Another hill. She turns her skis into the herringbone step; her aching legs want to keep the steps short and slow but she forces them to lengthen, bearing her faster to the top of the hill. She pauses just long enough to loosen the scarf around her neck before bringing her skis together and tipping forward to race down the hill. Another barrier between her and her sons slips away behind her.

Chapter 19: Poop and Pendulums

Curufinwë went through a chemistry phase a few years ago, experimenting with potions of varying purpose before deciding to focus on those most successful in causing humiliation to his older brothers. Fëanáro was benignly tolerate of the tincture that made Tyelkormo vomit brilliantly purple when he had too much wine and even mildly amused at the herbs that, when cast in a brazier, not only turned the flames blue but exuded fumes that made Macalaurë sing solely in Spoonerisms. He was less favorable when Nelyo brought to him a pair of bottles, found among Curufinwë’s collection, labeled “Poop Powder” and “Fart Flower,” but he did not place an immediate kibosh on the ideas either—not until Curufinwë tested the Fart Flower on Carnistir before Arafinwë’s begetting day celebration, causing the family to be cooped inside a carriage with the aforementioned “floral arrangement” as they rode from their house outside the city to Tirion. After this, Fëanáro put an abrupt stop to the experimentation, and Curufinwë’s career as a chemist likewise ended. Poop Powder went untested. However, in typical Fëanárian fashion, Fëanáro did not demand the destruction of the offensive potions but merely confiscated them and locked them within his own cabinets, to which the twins now had unbridled access.

Dušamanûðânâz reclines in his chair until he is nearly prone, his glass-studded feet extended in front of him, glittering pinkly. He is left breathless by his harrowing experience. Wincing, he folds a leg onto the opposite knee and inspects the damage. His tarsi, at least, are well-formed for scooping out shards of glass; would that he’d been arthropodic all the way down! With a full exoskeleton! With each sliver that he digs painfully from his own flesh, his rage toward the little Fëanárion boy rises a degree, like the mercury creeping up a thermometer on a hot day, until there is nowhere else for it to go, and it simply simmers at the top. He simmers for exactly fourteen seconds, then he emits a chittering scream, and his body abruptly transforms again, his feet slimming and hardening into the cloven hooves of a sheep. The glass embedded in his feet spews across the floor with the transformation. He bahs in delight.

He leaps to his feet. They clatter like a pair of dancing clogs against the wood floor. “Try me now, you little sucker!” he shouts. Below his knees is the coarse curly hair of the mountain sheep, terminating in the aforementioned hooves, but above the hips, he is still very much crooked and chitinous like a mantis, and to make matters stranger, a fan has begun to unfold from his back like the spine of a dimetrodon.

It is then that he realizes that the table is littered with the remains of the twins’ holiday meal. Meat and wine he shovels between his mandibles before he sees it: the chocolate fountain, set up in the corner, silently rippling with liquid chocolate. Before it, a half moon of sweets for dipping are arranged, untouched, in the finest porcelain of Fëanáro's House; he and Iniðilêz interrupted the twins’ meal before they reached dessert. There are marshmallows and pralines and fresh slices of fruit. And behind it all, a silent waterfall of chocolate practically begging to have its courses diverted by the strategic insertion of a marshmallow embedded with butterscotch candy and wrapped in a banana.

Meanwhile, at the front of the house, Iniðilêz has ripped the key from the fishing pole. The smarting burn across his palm makes him mishandle the key the first time and drop it in a pile of snow into which he must scrounge, elbow-deep, to recover it. His hands, atremble with rage, make him fumble it into the snowbank again, and when he goes to insert it the third time, he hears Ambarto’s little feet pattering away from the door, and in his haste to get inside and grab the little bugger, he drops the key a third time and must punch a third hole into the snow to grope for it.

Ambarto, for all his blossoming cunning, could not have planned a longer diversion if he’d tried.

At last, Iniðilêz is in the house. He slams the door behind him and shouts for Dušamanûðânâz, who is on his third banana in the chocolate fountain. Before him, stairs ascend to the second floor. To his right is a dark hallway. To his left, the double doors to the library stand wide. The room beyond glimmers with light and motion, and he hears the giggle of a child and the fading patter of footsteps.

He lurches through the doorway and is immediately smacked with a ladder.

Curled upon the floor, grasping his injured shoulder, he has a moment to reconnoiter the room. The twins, like all Noldorin children, are expected to study basic physics alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. They learn the forces of motion alongside their times tables and the spelling of diphthongs. They have, to begin with, set up one of their brother Carnistir’s simple motors along the track where the ladders slide that gain access to the upper shelves. This causes the ladders to whirl around the room as though on their own volition. “Clever,” Iniðilêz admits.

From the chandelier at the middle of the room, the twins have set in motion a series of simple pendulums, no doubt using their rudimentary knowledge of the devices to create, in essence, a gauntlet that they clearly expected him to run through. From the floor, the pendulums whisk by harmlessly overhead. One grazes the tip of Iniðilêz’s nose when he turns his head upon the floor, but that is it. They have also hoisted a net full of what appear to be crystal balls and suspended it from the chandelier, which sends light romping around the room in a dazzle that is hard to look upon. Once again, Iniðilêz must congratulate the mites on their use of basic optics as a diversionary tactic. As he nods, the pendulum again brushes his nose.

“The only problem, you little devils,” he says out loud, even though neither twin is in sight, “is that I have studied physics too. Advanced physics. In fact, my master invented physics.” He jabs his finger roofward and just as quickly retracts it, smarting. It has met with a pendulum bristling with thumbtacks. He sucks at the blood and considers his options.

His eyes take in the swinging bludgeons overhead; he keeps time as steady as a metronome. It takes him a minute to calculate it all, followed by a twenty second wait for the precise moment and … he rises! And strolls to the edge of the room and out of harm’s way with the same casual poise as a man meandering through a park on a warm spring day, pendulums grazing by on all sides of him but never touching. And then he sees it.

Nerdanel keeps all of her apprentices’ work, even their aberrant first pieces, being a passionate adherent to the growth mindset theory of education. On occasion, she unpacks the statues with their far-spread eyes and too-high noses and foreshortened foreheads—anatomical blunders that all new sculptors make—and reflects with her students on how far they have come. She’d done this before sending her apprentices off for the Yule holiday, so the twins found an army of mildly misshapen busts in her workroom and conscripted them into the defense of their shared home. Iniðilêz faces one now. The chin is squat and the mouth too wide, but it wears a jeweled necklace of such splendor that he wouldn’t have noticed if the face floating above it was that of Varda herself.

Iniðilêz, recall, has kleptomaniac tendencies that put even corvids to shame. The pads of flesh on his palms seem bestowed by the Music itself to aid in the disappearance of small objects into his hand. Valued or not, it matters little to him. In the village in the past day, he has palmed with equal gusto a pot of lip balm, an opal ring, and a set of Allen wrenches. It is not the object but the taking: the satisfaction of getting away with it, the dwelling upon the confusion and inconvenience he has caused, like a child who kicks an anthill to watch them boil in panicked confusion. But this … this is the aperitif to whet his palate for the bounty that awaits belowground in Fëanáro’s famed vaults. The gemstones are clear but in the mad wheeling lights from the crystal balls suspended overhead, they scintillate in colors he’s not even sure belong to the prism. Forgetful of the pendulums, his doughy hand steals toward the necklace, already imagining the feel of the perfectly carved facets beneath his blunted fingertips.

A pendulum snicks across his wrist, and he jerks it back with a hiss. A papercut! Those imps have given him a papercut across his wrist! Papercuts are maddening because they are never sure if they hurt or itch, and he scratches it before, seeing his white fingers pinken with blood, remembering it is a technically a breach of his flesh, a wound, and he’s making it worse, so he presses it with a handkerchief, but it itches so bad—

“To the Void with it!” He watches the pendulums, calculating, and when the moment is right, snatches the necklace away from the misshapen bust.

Around the room he goes, finding more jewels and precious objects on display. He can only assume that the Fëanárions were staging some kind of art show, probably to show off their collective prowess to their hayseed neighbors, maybe to even lighten their coffers a little. Whatever the reason, their foolish trust in the bucolic virtue of their neighbors to leave such valuables unmolested is Iniðilêz’s gain. One by one, he fills his pockets with the items on the display, occasionally losing himself in his thieving lust and sustaining mild injuries from the pendulums but nothing not worth the treasures that weight his trousers so that he must now hitch constantly at the waistband to keep them from dropping around his ankles. Most of the pendulums he is able to bat away, and they are now swirling around in harmless circles, tightening themselves around the crystal ball-filled net hanging overhead. He does not notice that the pattern of treasures curves inward, following the Fibonacci spiral of the nautilus shell and drawing him to the center of the room.

There is only a single pedestal left in the center of the room, directly below the crystal balls. Hungrily, he weaves amid the last of the pendulums toward it. There is a book upon it: The Erotic Avari. His hands caress its cover. This is not a treasure to simply shove in one’s pocket; it begs time spent with it first. Each page he turns lovingly, unsure if he is more enchanted by the very accurate drawings or Fëanáro’s very revealing marginalia. Within his treasure- and lust-drunk brain, a quavering thought emerges that, after he strips Fëanáro of his treasures, it is this book that will ruin his reputation by slow degrees in Tirion. Melkor will savor it. Each page is a vicious rumor that will swirl with the same predictable course as his twins’ pendulums, doubtlessly set up to guard their father’s treasures, including the incriminating book. (Some of Iniðilêz’s rage toward them has diminished, seeing how truly juvenile they are and unsuspecting of the intellectual gulf between themselves and Iniðilêz, who is, after all, a Maia aspiring to the service of the Great Melkor. Were they here before him now, he would pat their heads before relieving them of the same.) He should hide the book away, but one more page—

What he has not noticed is that the pendulums he has batted, he thinks, harmlessly away have twisted tighter and tighter around the net overhead. What he also has not noticed is the razor-sharp wire of the kind their parents use saw and shave away recalcitrant materials.

Several times, the crystal balls have shifted and settled as the net begins to erode away. He does not notice that either. The rope whispers as it frays; the crystal balls again clatter and shift. One more page.

And then the weight becomes too much. He hears a snap and looks roofward in time for a blue crystal the size of a grapefruit to smash the bridge of his nose. And that is merely the vanguard of the attack. Others follow, small as marbles and large as watermelons, raining upon his huddled body. The book on its pedestal flutters with the wind of their falling, otherwise unscathed.

A brilliant crimson crystal has become tangled in the net and lingers, tottering one way, then the other, before deciding to fall the other and landing right at the center of Iniðilêz’s pate. He falls to the floor, out cold. The crystal balls roll and settle to nestle against him; the pendulums whirl wildly overhead.

Meanwhile, in the dining room, Dušamanûðânâz has nearly exhausted the chocolate fountain. He did not mean to, but it was available, there were bananas (and by the ultrasonic notes creeping into his voice, he has taken on some aspects of a fruit fly), and his tarsi were still sticky with caramel, and it seemed a shame not to combine this with the chocolate to create a turtle-like combination of flavors. He hears the crystal balls fall and pauses, his mandibles chocolate-smeared and his tarsi in fact still plunged into the last trickles from the fountain, and calls, “Boss?” in his buzzing, whining voice, but there is no response. He rises and licks the last of the chocolate from his tarsi.

Because Curufinwë never had the chance to experiment with the Poop Powder, Ambarto could find nothing in his notes about dosage. So he dumped the whole vial into the chocolate. Dušamanûðânâz, upon rising, becomes aware of something happening within him. As an uncontrollable shapeshifter, he is used to his body transforming without warning and the odd sensations it can produce to, say, suddenly have impressively badass batwings shrivel into the velvety, useless skin of a shark or to have his canines blunt into a horse’s teeth in the middle of tearing through a batch of biscuits. But this feels different. This feels like the internal equivalent of an evolution from a guild-based system of handicrafts to the industrial revolution, all enacted within his innards, within the space of just a few minutes. The vast amounts of chocolate and bananas and caramel and marshmallows and pralines that he has eaten are like so much raw material being shoveled into a hopper to be transformed by the gnawing, scorching, grinding, mindless machinery of the factory behind it.

He realizes he has to poop.

Thankfully, there is a privy right off of the dining room. Ambarto has even kindly propped open the door for him so that the glimpse of the sink and toilet within should leave no doubt that he will find relief nearby. Dušamanûðânâz skitters toward it. It’s only five of his galloping steps but he’s still not sure he’s going to make it. And his trousers, which loosened when he shifted to insect shape, have tightened when he swelled into a ruminant body. Tarsi are not good at handling buckles and buttons. At last, he frees himself and collapses with relief onto the toilet.

Among the menagerie Tyelkormo keeps in his room is a tank of piranhas given to him as a gift by Ossë for a recent begetting day. Normally, he sneaks fresh meat from his own plate to feed them. Because of the holiday, they have been forced to settle for fish flakes delivered from a timed feeding system that Carnistir reluctantly developed less for his brother and more for the fish, to which he is partial. As a result, the piranhas are hungry and cranky; it took Ambarussa’s bravery and Ambarto’s cunning, singing a calming song in badly accented Avarin, to bring three of them safely downstairs to the toilet, where they have circled for the last few hours without even the consolation of fish flakes, thus becoming even hungrier and even crankier. As Dušamanûðânâz's butt eclipses their narrow overhead view of the world, they gnash their teeth and decide that this insult is the final straw. They are unwilling to tolerate being pooped upon.

The shriek that Dušamanûðânâz produces is high-pitched and loud enough to awaken Iniðilêz from his stupor on the library floor. He staggers back into the vestibule, head reeling, in time to see Dušamanûðânâz prying the last of the piranhas off a very human naked ass capped by a sheep’s fluffy, fluttering tail.

Chapter 20: In the Time of the Bees

Chapter Notes

As the chapter title implies, this chapter involves honeybees, so phobics beware. You can skip this chapter without losing the thread of the story.

Dušamanûðânâz clutches his trousers at his waist and regards Iniðilêz, who is mottled with bruises, his eyes still swirling in the sockets from the aftermath of his concussion, and Iniðilêz wonders why Dušamanûðânâz is covered in chocolate. His anger is never an arrow, directed at a target, but meanders like a cloud of blackflies to whatever warm-blooded target is nearest at hand. For now, although Dušamanûðânâz has neither burned nor bludgeoned him, that is Dušamanûðânâz.

He cuffs Dušamanûðânâz on the back of the head. “Have you been eating candy??”

Dušamanûðânâz doesn’t have a chance to answer. Both of their heads swivel at the sound of running footsteps in the hallway overhead. A little face framed by red hair pokes over the staircase—who can tell which one it is and who really cares?—and boasts, “Hey guys, we’re up here! Aren’t you gonna come up and catch us?”

An identical face pops out over the staircase on the other side. “Yeah, we know where the vault is—do you? Come on up and you can make us tell you!”

And then they are gone, evident only in the hurried pounding of their little feet.

“Let’s get the little sadists,” Iniðilêz growls.

Carnistir is the most unsung but perhaps most inventive of the Fëanárions, in part because his profound misanthropism would have him replace most human interactions with mechanical transactions. One of his contrivances is a system of laundry delivery that transports soiled items from the rooms of their owner to the laundry shoot that drops to the washroom, then zips the laundry items back upward, clean and pressed, to be folded and put away. While his inventions are often greeted with mixed reviews, the laundry system is lauded by his family for its time-saving properties. No one has to traipse into the basement anymore with a basket on his or her hip. The twins, you might recall, used its network of tracks as a rollercoaster in their heady first day of bachelor living.

Now, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz stand in the upstairs hallway, unsure where their quarry has gone. The hallway extends to each side with door after closed door. The laundry track runs overhead and does not excite their notice at all.

“It smells like a meadery up here,” Dušamanûðânâz observes, not bothering to constrain his excitement at the possibility. One of the advantages of having a primitive brain is its ability to quickly forget, and mead would taste great after chocolate. His ass still smarts from the teeth of the piranhas but the trauma of having his cheeks latched onto mid-poop is frittering away like dandelion fluff in a windstorm at the thought of sweet booze.

“Don’t be stupid,” Iniðilêz spits, a split second before the honey-soaked pillowcase, conducted silently along the track from the washroom, smacks into his back. He whips around, which has the effect of getting him tangled in the fabric and thoroughly coated in honey. He squirms to free himself while Dušamanûðânâz—now sporting scrawny human arms capped by a pair of very tiny hands—also tries to free him by pulling in the opposite direction, which tangles him further. The oaths Iniðilêz swears make what the twins have heard from their father and Carnistir sound as nursery rhymes meant for the ears of babes. At last, Iniðilêz is freed, and the honey-soaked pillowcase resumes its journey to a door, which swings open long enough to admit it before closing quietly again. They both stare after it.

“Huh,” says Dušamanûðânâz, and then he is smacked by a second pillowcase, also honey-soaked, and the inanity of trying to get him disentangled recommences.

The pillowcase, freed, floats soundlessly down the track. A door opens to admit it and silently closes behind it. “Huh!” says Dušamanûðânâz before whipping around to glance behind himself, but no more laundry travels the track, honey-soaked or otherwise. “At least it is delicious!” He licks between his tiny fingers with a forked tongue.

“You fuh—” but before Iniðilêz can finish his oath, there is a giggle from the direction where the pillowcases disappeared. Another door is opened, the twins peering out, identical faces stacked one above the other. That door slams shut as Iniðilêz begins to run after them, bowlegged in the attempt to avoid the unbearably unpleasant sensation of honey squelching between his thighs, his arms bobbing aloft to likewise keep it from sticking in his armpits. Dušamanûðânâz lingers, licking the honey on his hands before realizing that he should be following. He slops off after Iniðilêz down the hall.

The door Iniðilêz slams into sets off some kind of mechanism, and a crossbow bolt erupts and embeds itself harmlessly into the opposite wall. Iniðilêz laughs and begins to rub his hands together before realizing how disgusting that feels when they are coated in honey. “Fooled you this time, you little twerps! When I catch you and I’m done with you, the Doomsayer himself will need to identify your bodies by your shivering, cowering feär!”

The room they have entered is very strange. Plants twist along the walls, giving it the feel of a boxlike clearing in an otherwise impenetrable jungle. There are animals too: A parrot in a cage leers at them, and Dušamanûðânâz starts away from the tank of piranhas before realizing these are safely behind glass though eying him as though they know the fate of their brethren. The twins are nowhere to be found.

“Search the plants,” Iniðilêz orders. “They must be hiding in here somewhere.” He begins to bash at the greenery, feeling for little bodies hiding behind.

There is a low droning sound, and both villains momentarily pause, but in the overall strangeness of the room, it does not impress either of them as being particularly sinister. It is Dušamanûðânâz who feels the first tickle against his cheek; he brushes it away and resumes pushing at the greenery with one hand while licking honey off the other. An irritated whine separates itself out from the droning sound, and a bee fumbles its way onto the bridge of his nose.

His eyes cross to meet the compound gaze of the honeybee slurping honey from his nose. The ensuing shriek makes the windows tremble in their frames. It keens on and on like a siren until all the air is wrung from his lungs, and then it ends in a warble. And suddenly they seem like they’re everywhere: bees, stretching forth their little furry feet to claim the honey for their winter stores. The crossbow bolt, you see, did not land so harmlessly. It embedded itself into the glass front of Tyelkormo’s observation hive, leaving a spiderweb of cracks just wide enough to admit a steady stream of first curious, then hungry, honeybees.

Honeybees, you might know, raise up a special generation of winter bees whose purpose is not the marathon-intensity of their workaholic summertime cousins, who gather pollen and nectar until they literally drop dead from exhaustion. Theirs is more a slow abiding existence designed to patiently weather the long winter—or rather, to ensure the queen weathers the long winter. Most will never emerge from the hive, so they are slow in apprehending the opportunity presented to them: of refilling their winter stores in the midst of the winter. But once one realizes what has happened and returned to the hive to jitter out her joyful dance to the others, they begin to exuberantly pour through the cracks to make their hay while the sun shines.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are liberally covered in bees nibbling at the honey that coats them. They react in the way most people react upon discovering that the tickling legs upon them belong not to an ant or a fly but a bee: They sway and flail and stop just shy of swatting, which would guarantee a sting, and these thwarted slaps come out in a warble of distress.

“Just stop. They won’t hurt you.”

Iniðilêz manages to mostly freeze. The twins are standing at the opposite end of the room from him and Dušamanûðânâz. Their smiles are of mischievous pleasure. Beside him, Dušamanûðânâz stops as well, though the occasional twitch betrays both their seeming composure.

“They’re just hungry. They’ll clean you of honey and then return to their colony. They won’t sting unless you provoke them.”

The twin is the younger one. A honeybee, in fact, is crawling up his cheek. He blinks it away when it reaches his eye but otherwise stands fearless. Several other probe at him and his brother, but realizing that they are not honeyed, quickly lose interest and return to Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz.

"They will, however, take their time," he adds.

Thus frozen, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz have little choice but to watch the twins scurry from the room, laughing at they go, while they are thoroughly cleaned of honey by Tyelkormo’s bee colony. Dušamanûðânâz mewls a little when one begins to mine out the honey from inside his ear, but the boy was right: Honey collected, the bees begin to fly off, and neither Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz has sustained a single sting. The bees take their time, though. They are interested in thoroughness, not haste. When there are maybe a dozen remaining, Iniðilêz begins to flick them off of himself, but they are dazed and fattened on honey and not up to the fight. In slow, drooping flight, they return to the hive.

Back in the hallway, neither Iniðilêz nor Dušamanûðânâz wants to admit the full extent of their terror under the bees to the other. They both preoccupy themselves for several moments in plucking at their clothes, restoring themselves to the illusion of order. A bee, trapped under Iniðilêz’s sleeve, emerges and he yelps, then covers it with a cough. “I’m done with that pair of witless little bastards,” Iniðilêz announces, oblivious to the irony in his words. “Let’s just head for the vaults.”

Chapter 21: A Slippery Slope

Down the stairs they thunder, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz, in time to see a pair of small boots disappearing into the dark corridor off the vestibule, opposite the library. This is the curving hallway that slopes gently down to the root and wine cellars, as well as a door that opens at the back of the house and serves as a delivery entrance for casks of wine and crates of vegetables. The door to the outside is made of heavy wood to keep out the cold. The twins have garnished it with a few heavy bars and locks to give it the look of what they imagine how a vault should appear. None of the doors lead to the vault, but Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz do not know that.

Ambarussa earlier constructed a tower of vases and glassware and other fragile things at the bottom of the slope, standing between the corridor and the three doorways, leaving two small portcullises at the base, just large enough for two small boys to slip through. The twins suddenly hesitate. They exchange glances.

Until now, they always kept their contrivances between themselves and Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz. Now they must trust their own alacrity and have faith that the note delivered earlier to the pyrotechnician’s assistant will produce the desired result. Otherwise … the hammering footfalls, the growling invectives: in size and power, they are bested, and neither doubt Iniðilêz’s threats. If caught, the pair of Maiar will be drinking wine from their skulls before Yuletide’s ending, and neither wants to ponder what will transpire between this bookend and that.

“This is it,” says Ambarussa. “We can’t turn back.”

And they both hop forward and let their feet slide out from beneath them. The hallway, heavily greased with soap, sends them sliding toward the teetering vases. Ambarto hears his brother whooping out an exhilarated “Wheee!” before realizing the same sound is coming from him. They can enjoy the velocity, the momentary abstention of control, for only a moment though. They must aim their feet and narrow their bodies to pass through the two openings Ambarussa left. To miss will not only bring their contraption down upon their own heads but, should they walk away from that, lose them precious time.

Many people, in such circumstances, would be overcome with regret at their choices. But they are Fëanárians. What is done is done. For all their skill and power, they know their limits, and turning time is against the law of what they may achieve. They are past the point where they can make a different choice and run to the village for help. They aim their bodies and tighten their arms as small as they can make them, and both sail through the gaps with inches to spare on every side.

When Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz round the corner of the corridor, they see the final vase being tucked into the rightmost gap. Not realizing that the floor is greased, their passage down the sloped hallway is much different, full of wheeling arms and feet trying to scrabble for purchase. They grab at the walls and throw themselves off-balance. Each of them whirls 360 degrees and then starts a second circuit. Iniðilêz smashes into the barrier with his shoulder; Dušamanûðânâz, having completed a full 540, goes in ass-first. The sound is such that nearby birds stir in their nests, and a deer nosing for bark lifts her head and dashes into the undergrowth, white tail flashing. A glass flowerpot clunks Iniðilêz on the head, in the exact spot where the red crystal fell earlier, and Dušamanûðânâz splays into a pile of broken glass like he’s making a snow angel. The rain of glass shards seems to carry on far longer than possible by the laws of physics.

The twins expected this final barrier to serve as a stalling tactic. It does not. An enraged Iniðilêz shakes the spots from behind his eyes and drags Dušamanûðânâz to his hooves. It has not slowed them so much as pissed them off. Both are mostly unscathed, though the same cannot be said for the various attempts as glasswork the various Fëanárians have produced over the years. Now they face the three doors. “That one!” Iniðilêz stabs his finger at the heaviest, adorned with its show of locks and barriers, and from his pointed finger, something pushes that shatters through those barriers. Even he seems momentarily surprised by this, but of course the barriers were not intended to function, only to draw notice and stall the twins’ pursuers. In the latter use, they have also failed.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz find themselves not in Fëanáro’s vault but outdoors. It has begun to snow again, the tiny driving flakes produced in the perilous cold. The twins’ bootprints make a clear trail into the night. Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz follow.

The twins have reached the frozen pond. They leap upon the sled they left there earlier, their momentum gliding them easily across the icy surface. Like the wild things of the north, they have an instinctual sense of the ice and when it is safe to pass. The winter is in its infancy and the ice is yet frail, but it will bear their small bodies with speed upon a sled. They hear a crack sizzling along behind them but give thanks for this. All the better to dunk their pursuers when they set foot upon the ice! The twins land unharmed at the opposite bank, with a small poomp into a bank of snow. As though answering a prayer, the snow abruptly ceases, the cloud cover overhead drawing back like curtains upon a stage, ready for their fireworks show.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz, however, do not fall for the ice, much less into the icy pond as intended. When they reach the pond, they can see the tracks of the twins’ sled. Dušamanûðânâz hovers a hoof over the ice, but Iniðilêz gestures wildly, and they part ways, each of them circling the pond from opposite sides. They come upon the twins as the first firework goes off with a whistle and a crack overhead that sends snow spilling from nearby branches, and they close upon them like the jaws of a trap.

Grabbing them by the scruffs of their jackets, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz hoist the boys onto the broken lower branches of a pine tree. Another firework goes off overhead. This one is purple, and the shadows carved in the boys’ faces are those of terror. Their feet drum, reaching for the earth, but they are well clear of what they can reach, being so small of stature, and their boots only drum the tree trunk in a way that makes Dušamanûðânâz cackle with glee. Iniðilêz is more calculating. As the final firework wheezes skyward and pops in a spray of scarlet, the boys can see the hate in his eyes and realize the tales of torment Macalaurë likes to tell are all true.

“Fire and blades will be just the beginning, boys,” says Iniðilêz. “You think you are clever, but my sorcery will conjure horrors you cannot imagine. I will cover you with bees and mine will sting. I will rain rocks upon your head—”

“And chew your little bottoms with piranhas! And make you poop uncontrollably!”

“—and fill your skin with glass till your own mother won’t recognize you and you’ll glisten like one of your father’s lamps. And then—”

From the dark, something whumps against the side of Iniðilêz’s head. He slumps forward, his face inches from Ambarto’s, close enough that Ambarto can see the rivulet of slobber dislodged by the blow and bowing like a little bridge to stick to the tree. Dušamanûðânâz isn’t even given the chance to wonder before the other half of the double-sided oar clobbers him likewise and folds him into a heap below Ambarussa’s stuttering feet.

The Wight lifts them, first Ambarto, then Ambarussa, with the arms of a father, strong and safe, like he once lifted his own children on the other side of the dark waters. “Let’s get you home.”

Chapter 22: Clean-Up

The twins have a lot of work before them, but they begin in the sitting room so that they can observe through the wide glass doors when Olórin arrives, hieing forth on a fast sleigh with a thunder of Námo’s Maiar fast behind him. Their underworldly mien at first makes the twins cower behind the curtains, but not for long before they step forth and watch openly, hands printing the glass with one more thing they will have to clean, as Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are untied from the tree where the Wight left them, are sealed in manacles of hellwrought iron, and finally flopped across the flanks of two horses with fire-kindled eyes to be borne to the unknown torments of the deepest of Námo’s halls.

One gray-clad guard lingers. He is as hard to see as a plume of smoke, and one’s eyes no sooner fall upon him and he seems to have shifted, changed. “Do you think they bothered the house?” he asks Olórin, and Olórin quickly waves away his concern. “No, no … the family of Fëanáro is not home, and someone had foresight enough to ward the house against foul magic.” He holds a sprig of red berries between his fingers, the same that the Wight had dragged to encircle the house. “Neither would possess the cunning to even get inside.”

None of Námo’s guards glance toward the house but Olórin lingers, scanning each window. He is brightly clad in a cloak of every color, and the snow dapples his black hair. But the twins are gone, cloaked in the curtains and peeking through just a crevice. Nonetheless, his eyes crinkle in his youthful face as he slaps the reins, and they know he knows they’re there.

At first, they are giddy, reliving the night with all of its triumphs and none of its terrors. They gesture overlarge and tell tales of what the other was there to witness. Their memories are florid with metaphors to make the other gasp and similes to snicker. But with Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz whisked away, they quickly become two exhausted little boys with a giant mess to clean. The stories dry in their mouths. Ambarto hands his brother a sponge, and they begin on the caramel.

From the front of the house comes the grating intonations of Valarin, booming loud as fireworks. Both cringe against the floor and stop their ears, and when they dare open their eyes again, the mess is lifting away: globules of caramel hanging like glistening ornaments, shimmering ribbons of chocolate twisting through the air, sparkling shards of glass risen to repair. Even the poor piranhas so reluctantly sacrificed to the twins’ scheme flop anew against the floor and are carried this time to a fresh bowl of water where they are fed the last scraps of the twins’ roast supper and given a view of the whole magical proceedings. Olórin is even kind enough to leave them without memory of the whole Poop Powder incident.

The boys rush to the front window just in time to see the lantern on the back of Olórin’s sleigh disappear into the whirling snow that has closed again upon Formenos. By morning, even the tracks in the snow will be effaced by the night’s storm. It will be as though none of it ever happened.

Except.

Except their family will still be gone.

Yule is the time for wishes, and the twins make their wish that night, as they fall asleep curled against each other in their parents’ bed. As exhausted as they are, they cannot help but laugh at the memories of first their brothers, then their cousins and aunts and uncles, with none of the taint of cruelty and disdain that tend to visit them when they think of their family. And finally their parents, remembered with something different and too large to be confined by words. The feeling swells until they ache with it.

“Just one more day. If the curse can be withheld for just one day, so we can say goodbye …”

The final whispered words of Ambarto, the youngest, as he falls asleep.

Just south of them, Nerdanel pushes through the thin dark hours of Telperion, against the cold and the exhaustion, to clear the final hill before she will glide into the river valley where Formenos lies. A neat line of herringbone steps ladder up the hill behind her. She reaches the top and pauses, and her legs buckle, and she falls to her knees. She tries to rise and falls. She cannot go on.

Her forehead tips into the snow, cooling her face. She takes in a mouthful of snow and presses it into a cake against the roof of her mouth to melt for water. And upon tremulous legs she rises.

As the storm parts and admits the star-filled sky, there in the distance is the river, a silver seam at this late hour. There is the little cluster of lights that is the town. She cannot descry her house; its windows are dark. The fireworks exploded just the moment before, as she tipped into the snow, too weak to go on, and so she is spared her the panic that strange signal would have ignited. She straightens her skis and breathes deeply of the frigid air. She and Fëanáro used to race on hills like this, bent low over their skis, their laughter whipping behind them like a banner, as they grabbed at the other to slow him down. Nerdanel was particularly adept at scooping a snowball as she descended and smashing it into her husband's face. Sometimes he won, and sometimes she did. She smiles to remember it, and then the smile firms. He would not win this race; Oromë himself would not. She bends her knees and leans forward. The snowstorm sweeps between her and her sons then, and the town is lost in a murk of silver. She pushes off down the hill and onto the plain, so fast that the elk bellows with wonder at her passing.

The twins awaken at the Mingling and both hurtle from the bed, neither speaking his hopes aloud. Their pattering footsteps trace each hallway in the house; their hopeful eyes peek into every room.

So frantic are they that they do no hear the whisper of skis glide to the front door. Nerdanel steps inside, panting with exertion and shaking snow from her cloak. “Ambarussa! Ambarto!”

They have converged in the dining room, neither knowing how to express to the other the disappointment of their hopes. When her voice peals through the house, their eyes momentarily light. But they dim again, just as quickly. They find they are not so eager to dash into her arms. The terror is but a part of it. They realize then the wrongness. They are children. They were foregone. Forgotten.

They creep forward.

Nerdanel is frantic, searching the library, when they walk forth to the vestibule. They stand watching. They see how she trembles with exhaustion, the way the snow has first soaked then frozen upon her hair when she threw back her hood for the final push to home.

She turns and sees them.

“Oh boys!” and her delight wavers when she sees their little faces do not light into the expected smiles. “My sweet little boys. I’m so sorry.”

She holds her arms out to them and they run to her.

Outside is the sound of bells but none—not mother, not sons—pay them any heed. Yuletide revelers, most likely, come up to the famed house of Fëanáro to marvel at the strange architecture and the rose window and the lanterns strung among the trees, bright in the Mingled Light. But when the door pushes open, all gasp in surprise as the whirling vestiges of the storm deliver first Fëanáro and then each of the other five brothers through the door, hauling on luggage and shouting and shoving.

“The blue one is mine!”

“I don’t care how dry your hands are, I need my hair oil!”

“Has anyone seen my spare harp strings?”

“Get off my foot!”

“I’m going in the forge all day. All day!”

"You do have more dandruff on your shoulders than there is snow outside!"

“You can share. There’s nothing wrong with the red one.”

"Damn it, who farted?"

“I broke one last night. Has anyone seen them?”

"Not me!"

"Shut up!"

“That’s not even me, you numbskull.”

Fëanáro wades through them and falls to his knees before his youngest sons. He grasps their arms as though to check that they are hale and really there, and then he embraces them one at a time with surprising delicateness.

“How—?” Nerdanel manages to squeak out.

“I took the sleigh, the one you wouldn’t wait for? But from our room at the inn, I rigged one of Macalaurë’s memory stones and reached out to our friends along the way and had them arrange for fast sleighs to wait for us so we never need stop and rest the horses. Hey. You still made it here first.” He shrugs and Nerdanel—sweat-soaked and sleep-deprived—can only laugh as they both bundle the twins again between them into a four-way hug.

The supper that night is not the most splendid ever managed in the House of Fëanáro; in fact, it is cobbled together, saved when their neighbors hear of their return and come bearing breads and desserts that they otherwise would not have had time to make and venison cooked all day. The twins get underfoot and ally with one set of brothers after another against the others. But the timbre is different, and all of their brothers at one moment or another give them a pat or a squeeze that suggests love. Even Carnistir, though he blushes and denies it.

Fëanáro makes a lamb curry with hot spice, but before he adds the peppers, he rummages for the remaining chipmunk bowl and another to replace the one that was broken to set aside two mild portions for the twins. But he finds them both in the cabinet, for the broken bowl was included in the repair that Olórin magicked upon the house. Fëanáro stares at it a long time. “How odd,” he says at last before scooping it full of curry and never thinking of it again.

That night, after the twins have been tucked into bed by their mother and endured a progression of all of their brothers, then last of all their father, Ambarussa slips from his bed. His is restless and cannot sleep. He goes to the window to look at the silver light upon the snow, graven with the scraggling shadows of the forest and set aglitter by starlight.

“Hey!” he calls, and Ambarto scurries to join him.

Upon the lawn, the Wight has dragged his canoe, and from the house emerge their father and two eldest brothers, warm cloaks around their shoulders and tall boots on their feet. Ambarto can imagine their count of three before they hoist the canoe over their heads, grasping its sturdy sides with their gloved hands.

“He’s going!” Ambarussa breathes. “He’s going to the river, to cross the sea!”

The Wight ducks underneath to carry it at the back, but first he glances back over his shoulder and up at the twins. He lifts his hand to them—in farewell? In thanks?

Maybe both. There is no mistaking their emotion as they frantically wave back at him. They watch him trudge toward the town and the river, leaving a path in the snow that the wind has already begun to erase, until they can see him no longer.

~ The End ~

Bonus Feature: The Making of "Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos"

I have to begin by admitting that I am not a big Christmas person. I enjoy the traditions that my husband and I have established in nearly a quarter-decade together. I like some of the music (ironically, most of it is religious in nature) and some of the movies (especially those with only a tenuous connection to Christmas, like The Lion in Winter and White Christmas). But it also falls at the darkest time of the year and after the hardest push in the school year. Also, the schmaltzy, saccharine discovering-the-true-meaning-of-Christmas direction that a lot of popular Christmas productions take is just not my style.

Given that, it probably seems a weird choice to write a novella crossing over The Silmarillion with Home Alone, of all things. For whatever reason, though, the idea would not leave me alone for a couple of years leading up to when I finally started the story in late autumn of 2018. Like a lot of kids who came of age in the '90s, I saw Home Alone in the theater when I was a little kid myself and a peer to Kevin. There is, then, a nostalgic angle.

But as I've come back to the movie (and Home Alone 2, which is also in the regular Christmas movie rotation for my husband and me) as an adult, parts of it really still work for me. Yes, it requires a tremendous suspension of disbelief now, as an adult, that an 8-year-old kid would be left abandoned for several days while law enforcement wrapped gifts and chomped down doughnuts or that a pair of would-be home invaders could survive some of what Kevin subjects them to. Or that they'd believe that Michael Jordan cutout circling on a train set was a real person! I've tried to build some of that suspension of disbelief into my story here as well. But there are elements to the movies that I still really like. For instance, as an adult, I connect with the mom, at least in the first movie, in her desperation to return home to her son. I also love the subplot, present in both the movies, of befriending an outcast and, most importantly, not foregrounding that as an act worthy of accolades for Kevin. He does what he does simply because it is the right thing to do.

By 2018, when I started writing this after having parts of it romping around in my head for a couple of years, I knew that I wanted Amrod and Amras as my main characters. Not only are they the youngest in a big family but there was/is a Silmarillion fanon that casts the Fëanorian twins as pranksters, like the Weasley twins in the Harry Potter series. It is not a fanon I've particularly liked, but it was possible to play with it and, hopefully, complicate it a little here.

I also wanted to highlight Nerdanel's persistence in returning to her sons and the twins' role in gently encouraging the story's outcast, the Wight, to brave the "dark waters" to return to his family. Just like in the movies, the twins' role in this goes unknown by all save them and the Wight himself. And of course, the Ainur with Filthy Fëar "movie" plays on the Angels with Filthy Souls and its sequel in the movies, which I actually found scary as a kid watching the movie for the first time. This sequence in Home Alone 2 is one of the rare instances where I think the sequel is better than the original, and I pulled some allusions from both versions here.

My intention was to finish this in 2018 around the holidays. Like much of my work, the story grew in the telling. I thought the story might end at around 20,000 words; it ended up more than twice that length. Once the holidays passed, it was hard to sustain interest in this story to finish it amidst what was a really difficult school year. I planned to return to it in 2019.

Around Thanksgiving, I began poking at it again. I'd forgotten most of what I'd written--thank goodness I wrote an outline last year--and felt like I was starting from scratch in many ways. The run-up to Christmas after Thanksgiving was especially short this year, but I started chipping away at it in the evenings, expecting that the first days of my school's December break would be perfect for finishing it.

And then then unthinkable happened. My dog Lancelot had been diagnosed with lymphoma back in October, but he was doing well on his treatment plan, and my husband and I had full expectations of enjoying the holiday season with him, followed by a family trip to Quebec City for New Years. Mid-December, we came home from the movies one night, and he was laying on the floor and wouldn't get up. His vet was able to adjust his treatment, but he was no longer improving every day; he was declining, and fast. I drove home from work on the last day of school before break, December 20, and found him again unable to get up. His vet again suggested adjustments to his treatment, but they made no difference this time. For the next two days, we had to carry him outside to use the bathroom, and he could barely lift his head from the floor. On the 22nd, we made the heartbreaking but necessary decision to put him down.

In the midst of all of this, writing a lighthearted holiday crossover story was the last thing I wanted to do, and the story was nowhere near finished. I couldn't bear the thought of coming back to it again in a year, and I knew I wouldn't work on it after the holidays were over, just as I hadn't last year. It turns out, diving into a creative project helped me get through my grief. Between the 23rd and 24th, I wrote about 14,000 words to finish the story, drew the map on Christmas Day, and got the story completed on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

What I hoped to do with this story was to use elements from the two Home Alone movies to write a story that was nonetheless true to the world of The Silmarillion, in a voice that was light and humorous. This story was supposed to be a just-for-fun romp, a little gift to myself and my Tolkienfic friends at the holidays. As stories often do, it ended up being far more significant, for me anyway.

Still, I'm glad it's over and done!

Happy holidays. :)