Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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.