Winterlights by Elleth

Baked Apples

For prompt #8: Sweets and Treats. Nellas and Niënor share a treat.

Nellas' storage shelf is garlanded in dried herbs and elderflowers, in neat apple-rings strung to dry, there are baskets of dried berries, nuts, and jars of honey and butter as her especial treasure. There are cured meat and smoked fish, roots and tubers, grain, a veritable squirrel's winter stock. And among all the bounties of the passing year sit apples, still whole and good, but soft and pitifully shrunken, wrinkled like old men's faces.

"What do you want with these, risk spoiling your larder?" asks Niënor, puzzled. Nellas merely smiles and shakes her head, blowing her a kiss, taking the apples. In the evening she stuffs them with honeyed nuts, even surrenders a gracious flake of butter for each, and bakes them in the fire's embers. Niënor watches, intrigued, for Dor-lómin was poor and Morwen's orchard plundered to the last, the bee-hives carried off, and the hazel-thickets stripped. If there were any stories of baked apples from before her birth, Morwen never told them, but the smells wafting at her drive out dark thoughts and soon enough, eating with relish, there is a smear of honey dripping down her lips. Nellas kisses it away with sticky lips of her own.