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May is upon us at Formenos, and I glory in it even while I call no month favorite. My father railed against such rankings, decrying the instinct of fickle men to put one month or tree or stone above another. I found his words alien in my school days, when I also found it difficult to understand why he, with his love of freedom, saw fit to have me “finished” with the girls of fine Boston families. They hated me for my unlikeness to them. I called them little sparrows for their smooth brown hair and stilted manners and high sweet voices.
Feanor, when he knew and loved me in those days, called them by much worse names.
I appreciated my father’s advice most in motherhood; it was easier to know sooner rather than later not to show even a mistaken hint of favoritism.
We keep happy here, these days—two decades and more since my unhappy education, my dove-grey wool and white collars. Now I am awash with colors: I have my clay, my paints, my many-hued fabrics. My sons sprout like young saplings, brilliant and more delicate than they know.
But I know, and I will keep them from the frost.
To wake in May means, more often than not, that the bed is barely warm beside me. Feanor rises before the sun, hastening to his forge to resume projects that have often kept him there late the night before. I run my fingers over the folds of our sheets, almost as glad to see the familiar indentation of his sleeping as I am to see him. When I rise, I braid my hair loosely back from my shoulders. It is wild—and beginning to grey a little, since I am no longer as young as I was—but with all my sons home, one pair of skilled hands or another will gently guide me to my chair, twisting my ringlets into some semblance of order.
For the whole of our marriage, my husband has kept two homes: one here, in the hill-rimmed Hudson valley, and the other in the grimy streets of New York. I have not been often to the city myself, not because I despise it, but because I despise Feanor’s mood when he is in it. In years past, he stayed there, not for want of society, but for the purpose of standing between his half-brothers and his father, between his father and his step-mother, between his father and the world.
He loved his father dearly; these things were all true at once.
Then his father died.
I put aside memories, misgivings. I dress in an old gown, for it is baking day, and I go to seek my sons.
I begin with the youngest, for they are surely still abed. I find them tucked into Amrod’s alone—two carroty heads close beside each other on one pillow. No doubt they fell asleep whispering secrets to each other, plotting some mischief I shall discover today, too late to prevent it. I smile upon them for a moment longer than their father would allow, and then I tug away the quilt—my own work—that lays over them.
“Bairns!” I cry. “The sun is shining. Where are your faces?”
“We’re not bairns,” grumbles Amras, but his voice is mumbled and childlike with sleep, and I relish the moment, the waking flush beneath their freckles. They are only thirteen, and they are my last children.
“Breakfast is on the table,” I say, because Maedhros (Maitimo, always to me) is home, and I smell griddlecakes.
That gets them up.
Curufin is next, but his bed is made like a soldier’s already, and I know that, were I to venture out to the forge, I would find him beside his father. He is so like Feanor in face and manner that I am often brought back to my youth, looking at him. I wonder if he shall find a girl as awkward and broad-shouldered as I was, and love her for some hidden beauty even she cannot see in her own heart.
I wonder if he is too much his father’s son to be happy.
I am careful of how I wake Caranthir. He has a constant thread of his father’s occasional ill-humor, and none of my other sons’ charms. This is when my father would remind me not to play favorites, and I would chide him for such a warning—for I love my angry, awkward son, who turns as scarlet as Maitimo’s hair whenever he is vexed.
Now, I tap lightly at Caranthir’s door, smiling on his tumble of blankets, the dark swatch of hair that pokes out at the top.
“Breakfast, my sweet,” I call, and he growls in response.
There is no need to wake Celegorm. I used to call him hasty riser when he was a babe, and the habit persists unchanged. I hear Huan’s joyful barking in the fields beyond the lanes of trees along the drive, and I know where my third son is.
Feanor built this house when he was twenty-one years old. I was twenty; I carried Maitimo on my hip and sometimes let him sleep beneath one of the crabapple trees (so much smaller then) while I helped Feanor as best I could. My husband, for all his range of moods, was respected at once for his craftsmanship, and neighbors helped us in return for his smithing. The timbered walls and peaked roof grew before my very eyes.
Oh, if only he was content to live here contently! Instead, he must follow the jealous wound that bears his mother’s name and years of his own dark grief. He follows it to the city; he lets it direct the upbringing of our sons.
These are things I need not think so much of, in May.
In May, Feanor sends for Maedhros and Maglor, who study in New York, and they come home to stay. Feanor, too, ceases his visits to that heat-smothered place, unless we travel as a family.
When my sons are gone, I miss them so much my heart might break if it had not long ago learned what little use such breaking is.
I come into the kitchen with my hair already springing loose to see my two eldest sons exactly where I expected them. Maitimo, too handsome to ever look ridiculous, has tied one of my flowered aprons around his lean hips. Maglor lounges on the settee, a crumpled sheet of music in his ink-stained hands.
“Maitimo,” I cry out, when he tosses a griddle-cake so high in the air I am sure it shall stick to the ceiling, but he catches it lightly with the flat metal turner and turns to grin at me.
“Hungry, mamaí?”
“Save them for your brothers,” I say. “I have enticed them here by food alone.”
He laughs, and I can see it in my artist’s inner eye, a sound that takes shape with the same copper brightness of his hair.
Maglor smirks from where he sits, blowing me a languid kiss in greeting, and I can feel their happiness at being home. Maglor’s gladness is a steady candle-flame, for he has a life and many loves in the city—art and music and his poet friends. But I know—though it is never discussed—that Maitimo is unhappy to spend months away from Formenos, even though (I hear) he has many admirers, commands the fencing lawn, and manages his father’s affairs deftly.
He is beautiful, my eldest. Beautiful, even when sleeplessness is bruised dark under his eyes. I say nothing but his name when he returns to me like that, and I stand as tall as I can to meet him halfway, stooping as he must to put his arms around me and rest his head against my neck.
A day in the fields or at the anvil does not weary him as do the months he spends in the city. When he is home, he laughs light and often, walks with a quick stride to match his father’s, and has endless patience with his younger brothers’ quarrels and demands.
I have learned to welcome his touch—the press of his hand in mine, even the bittersweet comfort of his exhausted embrace, for he shares few secrets with me aloud. He never even told me of his first heartbreak—that task fell to Maglor, whom I call by the softer Scottish Macalaure, ever the closest confidant of all my children.
“He has lost a love,” Macalaure told me, tender and musical, when I mourned over a smile of Maitimo’s that was too brittle to fool me. “She was a sweet girl, but she no longer called on us, this last season in town.”
“Did your father force them apart?” I asked, hushed, for that is always and shamefully, my first fear.
But my Macalaure shook his head. “Maedhros broke it off himself. I think he found himself too attached.” He paused, then added, with a poet’s precision, “Too much in love.”
My tongue felt heavy in my mouth at such words, but I managed to say, “Too much in love?” with all the incredulity I had expressed against Mahtan, when he tried (only once) to forbid me to see Feanor.
I tell myself that I do not know where Maitimo learned to cut off whatever parts of himself betray a need for independence or...or what I suppose he would call selfishness. I tell myself I do not know, and it is a lie.
I have no more time at present to muse on his past heartaches--and I had no time to ponder it then, for Maglor spoke mere hours before a family fracas between Feanor and his half-brother. Now, the twins and Caranthir descend the stairs like madmen, demanding their fill. Plates are shuffled around the table like playing cards, and then Feanor and Curufin storm in smelling of woodsmoke and searing metal, with soot on their faces and the firelight still captured in their eyes.
“Hands!” I bark, and Feanor lifts his eyebrows at me.
“Beloved,” he says crisply, “How many times have I washed my hands dutifully without being reminded?”
“Never enough,” I retort, and whirl away, but he catches me and kisses me, and my sons all cheer.
If I could choose a moment to preserve, to seal in amber and be far more selfish over than Maitimo could ever be, it would be this one.
I bake ten loaves of bread, three pies, and two round stones’ worth of scones. There is flour in my hair, but Macalaure has knotted it back in a chignon that, were it flourless, would surely rival the fine coiffures of my two sisters-in-law.
I rarely see them. Yet today, when my face is red with the heat of the oven, I think of them, and the thought seems to bear ill fruit.
Hoofbeats sound on the road, then the drive, and then through the window I see a blue carriage trimmed with silver rounding the corner of the house.
My pulse pounds in my ears. I know the carriage; it carries my husband’s half-brother.
I have not seen him since Finwe’s funeral. Before that, I stood with a scream dying in my throat while my husband pressed the hollow eye of a pistol against Fingolfin’s breast. A fracas, I belittled in my mind this morning. It was--it is--so much more.
What madness brings Fingolfin here?
“Maedhros!” I shout, and when he does not come, I find Amras, who has been hanging about the kitchen in hopes of a scone. “Where is Maedhros?”
“In the stables,” Amras answers, looking terrified. “Alexander threw a shoe.” At first I think he has seen the carriage, and knows what it means. Then I realize my face must be a sight to behold. I realize that my face has frightened him.
I run out the backdoor of the kitchen along the flagstone walkway, hoping against hope to reach the stables before the sound of Fingolfin’s arrival reaches the forge. I find Maedhros with Alexander’s hoof in his hands, hammering the nail in through curving iron with practiced care. Alexander—Macalaure and Celegorm always fight over who may name our many animals, and when Macalaure wins, they bear the name of Greek heroes—is still and docile.
“Maitimo,” I say, as he finishes. He looks nothing like the starched, be-silked creature who arrived late the night before last, with his hair smelling of expensive oil and his trousers fitted like a second skin. Now his hair is pulled back behind his ears with a leather thong, and he wears old burlap breeches tucked into high riding boots. Still, he is the one I would choose to receive Fingolfin.
“What is it?” His brow creases with concern.
“Fingolfin is here.”
He needs no further explanation, which is half the reason why I came to him. He dashes out of the stables ahead of me, his long stride outpacing me at once.
Fingolfin is just dismounting from his carriage when we reach him. He is sleek and smooth, despite a two-day journey north. His hair is beginning to grey—no silver touches Feanor’s yet, and I wonder why. Why is Fingolfin the one who shows his weariness and age?
Why am I?
“Nerdanel,” he says, and tips his high hat. His eyes shift to Maitimo, who looks like a blacksmith, because, I suppose, he is. “Nephew.”
“Uncle.” Maitimo is all charm, whether he wears a tailcoat or a cast-off leather vest of his father’s, halfway open down his chest, as he does now. “What a pleasant surprise! Are you and your family well?”
“Fingon is in perfect health, yes,” Fingolfin answers, implying that Maitimo’s interest is only in his dearest friend.
It is a marvel (and a blessing) to me that such a warm friendship exists between the two eldest sons of a divided house. Fingon is like another brother to Maitimo, as close in some ways as Macalaure. I imagine Maitimo enjoys the companionship of one who is milder mannered than any of his nearest kin.
Of course, I say none of this aloud.
“We quitted Valinor Park with the same regret as always,” Maitimo is saying, with such sincerity I am almost ready to believe him myself. “We—” and then even Maitimo’s charm falters, for Feanor has joined us.
He wipes his hands on a soot-stained rag, and his eyes spark and snap. Yet, to my surprise, he smiles.
“Fingolfin.”
“Feanor.” A muscle in Fingolfin’s jaw twitches.
“I thought you intended to call yesterday,” Feanor says, and my eyebrows lift despite myself. This was planned? I hazard a glance at Maitimo, but though he hides it better, I can tell he is as surprised as I.
“I did.” Fingolfin is angry. “In New York. Then I learned, three days ago, that you had left for Formenos.”
“So we did. How sporting of you to keep your appointment—as best you could.”
“You sent for me,” Fingolfin snarls, and Maitimo stiffens slightly beside me, his shoulders snapping back as if he braces for a gust of wind.
“Did I?” Feanor’s voice has turned cold. Then he recovers himself, and says words I do not at all expect. “Forgive me—you must be wearied from traveling. Come inside.”
Fingolfin drinks tea almost primly. I am reminded of his mother Indis, though he looks nearly identical to Finwe (and to Feanor, though I dare not even think that thought too loudly). He and Maitimo keep up a patter of conversation about the news of New York, and then, after a few more of my children have trickled in, Fingolfin turns and looks silent Feanor full in the face.
“Melkor Bauglir,” he says deliberately, and the air seems to be drawn from the room, “has been commissioned to oversee the completion of the transcontinental railroad.”
Feanor’s hands tightens around his cup so tightly that I think it might shatter. I catch Macalaure’s eyes across the room; he looks haunted, and I wonder how much he knows. He is twenty-one; like Maitimo, he is not a child anymore.
“I had not heard,” Feanor says icily.
“I know you had not. Nor had I, and I was disturbed by that fact.” Fingolfin sets down his empty cup. “I read it in the paper yesterday morning, and left at once.”
“And this was your errand?”
“My errand was not to tell you of this, but to speak of your…desire,” Fingolfin says. His gaze wavers, then refocuses. I believe the two of them could burn through wood and metal alike with the strength that lurks and smolders in their eyes. Did Finwe give them such fire? Or did their animosity towards each other bestow it on them both? “Nonetheless,” Fingolfin continues, “I knew that you would wish for news of Morgoth.”
There is the name I knew him by; it is a twisted variant of great voice from old Gaelic, and Feanor calls him by it with bitterest irony, recalling the man’s powers of manipulation. His presence in our family history has brought me nothing but pain, and anger, sometimes so damaging that it is aimed against my husband as well. I shiver, and I feel my sons turn towards me, sensing my fear. Some wonder at its cause; some do not.
“Wish is a strange word,” Feanor answers. His voice is as flat as a blade turned on its side—which is to say, still deadly. “Yet I suppose I ought to thank you. If he has doings, I would know of them.”
“It is Manwe who appointed him,” Fingolfin says. “And so I came—two days’ journey—to tell you that you were right.”
I do not like Feanor’s smile. I like less how quickly it vanishes and is replaced by the appearance of calm.
“I did not send for you.” Feanor’s fingers drum lightly against the edge of the end-table beside his chair. “But I did send you a message.”
“Through my son, by yours.”
“They are such friends,” Feanor answers, the smile flickering again.
I look at Maitimo, but he is staring at the floor, his jaw clenched.
“I would rather you—” Fingolfin catches himself, before he admits too much. I feel sympathy for him, though I know he would not ask it of me. Or, I think, of anyone. “I will not hinder you,” he says. “I will do everything I can in Father’s stead to assure…Manwe, and others, that you should be permitted to lead a party. That you would be a fair choice to stake a land-claim. I will reiterate”—this, through his teeth—“That I do not believe you to be a threat who ought to be watched or constrained.”
“For all this, much gratitude should indeed be felt,” Feanor answers, which is hardly thanks, but is still a concession from him.
And—for what? My hands clench the arms of my chair. It is not my place to speak, but when have I heeded that?
I open my mouth, yet no words come.
“All this,” Fingolfin is saying, and something has entered his blue eyes that I would call desperation on any other face, “I intended to tell you before I knew of this latest news. Now—”
“Now?” Feanor asks, rising.
“Now,” Fingolfin says, looking up at the elder he cannot quite call brother, “I would go with you.”
It is only then that I find my tongue. Only then that I stand too, not near as tall as my husband, or his half-brother, or any of my sons but the youngest.
“Go?” I demand, and when I see the wheels of explanation turning behind my husband’s angled features, I know I am already betrayed. “Feanor, go where?”