Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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.