Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 22: Clean-Up

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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.