Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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.