There, Not Back Again by eris_of_imladris

Chapter 2

“We mustn’t let the air in, Primula darling,” said Mirabella Took, resting one hand on the rolling pin as she used the other to grab the ball of dough out of her youngest daughter’s hand. “The air will make it spoil.”

“But how could air spoil anything? We need air to breathe,” the lass answered, watching as her mother’s deft fingers pounded the dough until there was nothing in there but what was supposed to be. Her fingers smoothed out all the faults, making everything just right before she turned around with a smile.

“It’s the way things are,” was Mirabella’s simple explanation before she folded the dough and began to split it into parts, handing a small string of it to Primula. “Now take this and make it into a long rope like a snake. Roll your hands like this – no, your fingers need to be straight out, don’t bend them or you’ll get the dough under your nails – and just do an easy roll, forward and back.”

Primula watched as her mother rolled forward and back, but her own hands were too small and the dough was too thick and gooey, and even though she tried to do what her mother said it kept getting under her nails, and then she had to keep stopping to pick it out even though her mother was already weaving some of the finished strands together, and then she had to clean underneath and she didn’t have anything to do it with but her tongue….

“Get your tongue out from there,” her mother said, and Primula quickly placed both hands flat on the table, reaching for the bread. “Go rinse your hands and then you can come back and work with this.” She ran off to the well, looking for her siblings before coming in. She thought she might have seen Asphodel down the hill with some of the children old enough to go to school, but she couldn’t be sure. Lots of hobbit girls had dresses like that, even some of the girls Primula’s age. She had begged for one, but was told she needed to learn how to make it herself just like her sisters had.

By the time she got back inside, her mother stood by the bigger piece of dough, weaving what looked like a flower crown out of it, but with bread instead of flowers. Primula wiped her hands on her apron and when she put them on her own bit of dough again, she noticed that it was smoother than when she left, and more like the snake her mother had wanted. Had she helped?

If she had, she said nothing of it at all, simply continuing on her project and offering Primula more feedback. She started by copying her mother’s movements exactly, but then she wondered if there was something she could do to make her super extra proud, and she started to make a shape of her own.

“What did you do, dear?” Mirabella asked her daughter once her own bread was in the oven. The girl stood proudly over a lumpy log of bread with thinner sticks coming out of it, topped by uneven clumps.

“It’s a tree person from your stories,” Primula beamed. “See, here’s the trunk,” she pointed to the part that she hadn’t changed much from what her mother had made, “and then there’s some branches and leaves.”

Mirabella looked like she wanted to say something, but instead she scooped up the little bread tree and put it on a baking tray. It went into the littlest oven, the one just Primula’s height where she could watch it starting to rise.

“You really liked that story, didn’t you?” Mirabella said.

“Of course,” Primula replied. She wouldn’t quite admit that she had personally checked every tree by Brandy Hall, asking a question and waiting politely for an answer, before admitting that there were no living tree people on her family’s property. It hadn’t deterred her, though – whenever her mother told her favorite bedtime story she thought of where the tree people might like to go, and she tried to match that with the areas around the Shire that her siblings frequented. Did they go to school? Maybe that was why people spent so much time there, because she knew trees would take a very long time to talk.

The tree loaf was part of supper that night. Primula kept a close watch as other dishes surrounded it, her mother’s pretty round loaf and the fish from the river and the brightest, freshest vegetables, and everyone was in a hurry to get their hands on the tastiest things. It was one of her father’s dinners, after all, known for a groaning table and many people around it, including her six older siblings: Rorimac, the eldest, back from his studies; Amaranth, the pretty one and everyone knew it, even though Primula did somewhat look like her; then her other brothers Saradas and Dodinas and Dinodas, her youngest brother named as if her father had run out of names. Even Asphodel was there, seven years older and only interested in growing up fast.

Last to arrive was her father, the great Broadbelt Brandybuck himself, settling down at leisure before observing the odd-looking loaf of bread. “What is that one?” he asked, not quite ready to reach out for it.

“Ask your daughter,” Mirabella said, and just from her mother’s glance, Primula knew she wasn’t supposed to say anything about tree people at all. Her siblings would just laugh, but her father was a whole different story. He had to be fancy, and he had no time at all for tree people.

“I made it,” said Primula quietly, hoping to impress her father by serving him some of her loaf. She leaned over the table to try to grab the knife, only to knock over the little cup of tea her mother made special for her, extra sweet.

“It’s all right,” Mirabella said, taking one rag from the kitchen and handing another to Primula. The little girl scrubbed at the tablecloth, listening forlornly as the conversation began to move around her and the food flowed by, but no one was tearing her bread into bits to eat it like they did with her mother’s. It just sat there like a decoration, like no one had even realized it was food.

Sure, some of the leaves were a little lumpy, and one had a big seed sticking right out of it that had burnt and curled over in the oven, but it was still her bread, and it was still pretty like she knew the tree people would be, if only she could find them.

She stayed behind to help her mother clean up, and she kept staring over at her little loaf until Mirabella plucked it off the table (leaving some of the leaves behind) and set it down on a cutting board. “See how the branches are hard and break when you cut them? These wouldn’t be tasty to eat,” she said, cutting them away. When she cut through them, they did seem like branches, all splintery.

Primula was about to ask if she had done anything right before her mother spoke again. “But the middle’s nice and sweet just like you,” she said, taking a big bite and mmmm-ing like it was the best bread she ever had.

“Are the tree people really real?” Primula asked as she bit into her project, a little hard but not bad.

“I don’t know, what do you think?” Mirabella asked, only to receive a vigorous nod from the child whose mouth was full. “I think they may be too, but they don’t live here by Brandy Hall.”

“Maybe one day I’ll go out and find them,” Primula enthused, spraying crumbs out of her mouth.

“Good little girls don’t talk while eating,” Mirabella said, her tone changing entirely. “And there aren’t any in the Shire either, where you’ll go once you’ve got a nice husband.” Primula took that as a cue to scamper off with the rest of the trunk, eating it as she looked out her window, wondering if there was a whole wide world of tree people out there that she was never ever going to get to know.

“Your mother told you of the Onodrim?” the elf asked Primula, eating just as neatly as if he had an invitation to the finest hobbit-hole in town.

“The… you know of the tree people? Have you ever met them?”

“No living man has,” he replied, gratefully taking another slice of the bread. In the years since, she had learned why the tree bread had failed – too little dough on the leaves and branches, too much in the trunk, but she still hadn’t figured out why it was so bad to believe in stories. Some said it was her mother’s Tookishness coming out in her, as if it was a bad thing to be part of the family which her sister Amaranth married into with much fanfare.

“Not even someone like you?”

“Not even me, I am afraid,” he said, biting into the bread. Primula was proud that there was still a little crunch, still enough to make just a few crumbs. Maybe not everything was ruined, after all.

“They might still be out there,” she mused, the little girl still inside of her dreaming, wondering how the elf would react.

As things turned out, it was not a scold or anything like that. Instead, he let out a bark of a laugh. “You remind me of the one who helped Durin’s folk reconquer Erebor,” he said. “Always getting into things, if I have heard right.”

Even in the midst of everything that had happened, Primula couldn’t help but smile.