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When Maedhros opened his eyes, he knew at once that it was the holidays. There was, first of all, the sight of the walnut-stained rafters overhead, striping the white plaster ceiling as filling stripes a layer cake. There was the mattress beneath him, lumpier than the feather bed in the city, which he had grown to hate for its smothering comfort. There was the window looking west, now rimed with clever ferny frost-fingers, but most of all, there was a feeling of such delicious lightness and rest wrapped around him that he lay still another moment, grinning like a fool with his eyes closed.
Beside him, Maglor grunted into the pillows, utterly miserable at the prospect of waking. There had been a sound that jarred them both from sleep, Maedhros realized—Mother, calling from the kitchen.
Maglor was sharing his bed because Fingon had Maglor’s. Mother had planned to give Caranthir’s tiny corner room to their cousin-guest, but two days before their return home, Caranthir caught cold and had been wrapped up with flannel and plied with ginger tea, and Mother did not want him out of bed.
Celegorm and Curufin’s room was out of the question, and so when they arrived Mother had taken Maglor aside and asked if he minded very terribly sharing with Maedhros.
Maglor couldn’t exactly complain in front of Fingon, and Maedhros knew he minded less than he let on. Maglor had snuck into bed with him until he was ten years old.
In the bed across the room, Fingon sprawled, arms and legs flung outwards, as if he reached for something just beyond his grasp. It was strange to see their orderly cousin in such disarray, but it had also been strange to learn that he was coming to spend Christmas at Formenos.
Maedhros, of course, knew the reason.
“I hate him sometimes,” Fingon had stormed, stumping up and down the length of Grandfather Finwe’s library. Grandfather and Indis were at a Sunday luncheon with some of the City Councilmen, and Maglor was practicing his scales on the harp, and Maedhros had been studying before Fingon’s arrival.
“Hate him?” Maedhros had asked, setting his book aside.
Fingon had blushed darkly, never able to cling to resentment very long. “I don’t—I just hate the way he treats me.” His foot crashed against the floor. “Like a child.”
Athair would have pointed out, with a cunning smile, that Fingon was being very childlike at the moment, but Maedhros was not (and never would be) Athair, and so he clasped his arms around his knees, which were drawn up to his chest in the window-seat. “That must be vexing. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry!” Fingon pressed his fingers against his cheeks. “Oh, goodness. I’m turning all red. I hate when I do that.”
It was very hard, Maedhros remembered, to be thirteen. Of course, he had not hated his father then—he had only missed him.
“Have a biscuit,” Maedhros suggested at length, fishing about for the tin he had tucked at his side. “They cure all ills.”
Privately, he had been a little flattered that Fingon should reveal his temper to him. Fingon was a fine companion, especially with Maglor increasingly engrossed in his music, but he was prone to be a little stiff and reserved. That was the natural effect, Maedhros supposed, of being Fingolfin’s child.
Now, Maedhros tossed aside the bedclothes and stepped onto the chilly floorboards, wincing his way towards the chest of drawers below the window. Once clad in wool socks, with trousers tugged hastily over his sleep-shirt, he opened the door.
Amras and Amrod nearly tumbled into him.
“Bairns!” cried Maedhros, warm all over to see them, to feel two sets of chubby arms vying for pride of place around his neck. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Mamaí said Fingon is sleeping,” Amrod pouted, taking his thumb out of his mouth. At almost seven, he still sucked it when Athair wasn’t looking. “We couldn’t go in.”
“I’m here now,” Maedhros assured them. He gave them each one snug squeeze more, then held their hands down the long stairs. Hopefully their grudge against poor sleeping Fingon would be soon forgotten; Celegorm disliked him enough as it was.
It was Christmas Eve—the air was thick with it. The tree was still dripping snow-melt into the braided parlor rug, and the crates of trimmings were piled high beside it. Amras wanted to stop and snap a needle in two, that he might sniff the wine-rich tang of balsam, so Maedhros paused and let him.
“Now come along,” he urged gently. “I want to see mamaí.”
She was in the kitchen, her hair braided down her back, lifting a pan of scones from the oven. Fresh-sliced oranges dripped juice on the oak cutting board; the oranges were Athair’s own, grown year-round in the glass sunroom beside his forge.
“Ah, Maitimo!” Mother set aside the scones and beamed. “You are the only one who comes when I call. Macalaure lies abed still, I know, and Celegorm is out looking for prints in the snow, and so I have not the satisfaction of waking him.”
He let go of the twins’ hands so that he could step into her arms. Mother was soft and rounded, not beanstalk-thin like most of her sons, and she always smelled like roses, for Athair grew those in his hothouse, too.
“Still my baby, no matter how tall you grow,” Mother said, and she stroked his hair back from his forehead. “Let me look at you properly—it was too dark last night.” She held him back with her hands on his elbows, and she smiled so that the same dimples sunken in his cheeks twinkled in hers. “You are so very, very handsome,” Mother said. “Though your hair wants cutting.”
“I like keeping it this way,” he said, shaking it off his forehead. Several girls at the city dances had implied, of late, that they liked it too, but he wouldn’t say that to Mother.
Mother tucked it behind his ears. “I cannot pretend it does not suit you.”
“Do you want me to wake Maglor and Curufin?” he asked. “I know Caranthir is sick, still.”
“Coughing all night. And he always gets red when he’s feverish.” Mother shook her head. “I think I’ll send for the doctor if he is still ill today.” She turned away and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, as if trying to remember something. “Oh, yes! Yes, you can wake Maglor. Curufin is helping your father with the horses.”
“Helping” with the horses no doubt meant straddling the wall of a stall while Athair cleaned hooves and curried plush winter coats, but Curufin was insistent on spending every moment he could in Athair’s company.
He was only eight, after all.
“What can the twins help you with?” Maedhros asked, to distract them from the flaking heap of scones.
“They can bring me apples from the cellar,” Mother said, “So long as they promise not to run on the steps.”
The twins promised, very solemnly, and were gone. Amrod was sucking his thumb again.
Maedhros climbed the stairs, stopping only for a moment’s regret that he and Maglor—and yes, Fingon—had not been here to chop the tree down and drag it through the snow, singing the bawdier carols and wassail songs that Mother would not allow in the house.
Alas, then, for snow fallen before he could see it—but nothing would shake his happiness this day, and he took the steps two or even three at a time, lungs full of breath that might soon be laughter.
Maglor was still asleep, but Fingon was up and dressed, buttoning the collar of a flannel shirt. Fingon wore a good deal of dark blue, as did the rest of Uncle Fingolfin’s family. Almost as if he had chosen the color, sensible as it was, as a family crest and badge, to counter Athair’s fondness for opulent, flaming hues.
Maedhros shook his head; there was no use in parsing the twists and turns of Uncle Fingolfin’s difficulties with Athair. At least those difficulties had not prevented him from sending his eldest to spend Christmas with cousins rather than brothers and sister.
Athair would never, he realized. If I was angry at him, and eager to be away—he would never let me go.
He bit his lip, and tucked such viperous thoughts into safe darkness, turning this way and that as he sought a way to banish all clouds from the stunning sheeny sky of Christmas Eve.
An idea impish enough to be worthy of Celegorm took him, and the next moment, poor Maglor was the subject of it. Maedhros winked conspiratorially at Fingon, who blinked back.
“Macalaure, my love,” Maedhros cooed, in an imitation of Mother’s voice, and in the same moment, he ruthlessly tore away all the sheets and blankets in which Maglor had cocooned himself. “It is breakfast time!”
Maglor pounded the mattress with his fist, and said a number of words that were not to be said in Mother (or Athair’s) hearing. He fired a pillow at Maedhros next, but Maedhros caught it and walloped him across the shoulders.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Maglor!”
“It is far from eve,” Maglor pointed out, but he tumbled out of bed at last, reaching for the fur-lined slippers Indis had given him. He had not outright lied to Athair about their origin, but nor had he been forthcoming. Maglor was generally quite scrupulous, so Maedhros assumed the slippers were uncommonly comfortable. They were, unfortunately, too small for him to find out.
“Good morning, cousins,” Fingon was saying, as if a pillow battle had not shortly raged just in front of him. He looked a little peaked in the light of day, and Maedhros saw an uncertain pinch at the corner of his mouth.
Homesickness. That, he knew like the back of his hand.
“Fingon,” he said, “Have you ever been skating?”
“No.”
Maedhros smiled reassuringly. Only thirteen. Younger than Maglor, but old enough to be a friend. “This afternoon, we shall take you to the pond. It’s like flying, only possible.”
“Athair says everything is possible,” Maglor pointed out, combing his hair before the small green-veined glass over their wash-table. “If we desire it enough.”
Happiness, then. Happiness is possible.
Maedhros grinned at his brother and his cousin in turn. The sound of his father’s voice downstairs, the sound of his father’s laughter—oh, it was enough to draw them like moths to flame, like fresh snow to the waiting earth.
The holidays passed with dreadful quickness—it had taken only a year for Maedhros to learn that. Yet he would chase the sounds of joy as much as he reveled in wine-rich fir boughs and the glory of the new year, and this day—this morning—would last forever in his mind.
Of that, at least, he was certain.