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The molasses jar is firmly corked and crowned with a band of yellow calico. Mother sewed herself a dress of the print when Maedhros was still small enough to roll the pincushion over the floor like a ball, and she marked her canning that year with the scraps.
The molasses jar is very large, and though it has been refilled time and again—Mother grows the sugar-beets in her bountiful garden—the flag of bright calico remains.
Maedhros loves it.
“My love,” Mother says, “Are you ill?” She reaches over, so far that the gravy boat is nearly upset, and presses the back of her hand to Maedhros’s forehead.
He stays very still.
“Not feverish.” Mother clucks her tongue. “But why have you left so much on your plate? You love trout.”
He did. He loved the way that Athair taught him to scale them and clean them, even though Maglor squealed at the touch of slimy entrails. Maedhros loved the crispy skin and tender, flaking flesh. But fish, today—and potatoes, and everything on his plate—tastes only like the nasty grease Athair spread over his lips in the morning.
If you cannot stop biting them, Athair said, you must be trained.
Maedhros did not squirm while he did it. Athair had told him many times to stop, and he hadn’t.
“It is very good, mamaí,” he says quietly, for Athair is right there, just down the end of the table, occupied with trying to get Celegorm to finish his peas. “But my belly hurts.”
Mother looks at Athair too, and then quickly, she takes Maedhros’s plate. “Of course, Maitimo. I shall make you some hot broth before bed.”
He scrubs and scrubs his face that night, until his lips and cheeks are red, but the taste won’t go away.
“He’s a child, Feanor! Let him chew his lips for a few years—he’s barely done sucking his thumb!”
“He is my son, and he cannot be seen to be nervous,” Athair thunders back, almost making the door shake against Maedhros’s ear.
“You bite your lips, and your nails, and tug at your hair, and a dozen other habits I could name.” Mother sounds angrier, almost, than Maedhros has ever heard her, and he stays only until there is the sound of something smashing.
He never sees the ointment again.
“Why aren't you eating on Sundays?” Maglor asks, which means he's been watching—and which is doubly unjust because he’s climbed into Maedhros’s bed again, like he used to do when they were small.
“You don't know what you’re talking about,” Maedhros says scornfully, or as scornfully as one can say with a pillow mashed over one’s face.
Maglor tugs at the pillow relentlessly, like a child clinging to Mother’s skirts, pulling until a response is forthcoming.
These days, Maglor seems both too young and too old to be twelve.
“You gave your potatoes to Curufin,” Maglor insists, “and your bread to the twins.”
Maedhros shifts the pillow away to face his brother. Even in the dark, Maglor’s pale-moon face is accusing.
“You,” Maedhros says, as coldly as he can manage, “do not know what you are talking about. Now, get back in your own bed. You may be a child, but I’m not, anymore.”
Children are helpless, and can do nothing about disappearing fathers, empty flour barrels, and hands and smiles quick to devour the weak.
Maedhros cannot be a child, then, and so when Maglor begins to snuffle as he sobs himself to sleep, Maedhros cries quietly, his blistered hands over his mouth.
They sting, and he is grateful, for the sting distracts from the howling pit of his stomach.
(That night, after he came, after his fingers held Maedhros close, Maedhros scrubbed and scrubbed until his skin was red.)
Rosemary stewed chicken. Hot broth. Crisp pears, when he get them. Hasty pudding, stirred thick and golden-brown with rich molasses. Soda bread. Strawberries, plucked from Mother’s drooping plants. Chocolates, brought by Grandfather Finwe in silver-foiled boxes.
See? There are things that he likes to eat.
Mother does not ask, where did I go wrong, but Maedhros can read it in her eyes.
“Are you having a day?” she asks instead, and if he nods, shamed despite himself, despite the fact that she does not blame him, she will make up a plate for him before the rest come in for dinner. All good, plain foods—nothing too spiced, nothing mealy, nothing with bones in it.
Maedhros has a horror of bones in his food.
She sits beside him as he eats, and when his throat and stomach pulse and jump, almost as if they would flee at the thought of swallowing, she strokes his hair and says, “Small bites, Maitimo. Small bites.”
He half-expects Maglor to complain again in the city, when Maedhros sends his plates away picked-over, when his shirts and trousers—well-fitted in the summer—become looser month by month. But Maglor is preoccupied with sheet music and scales, minuets and musical societies, and he scarcely looks up from his own meals, so quickly does he put them away.
(Maedhros fainted once, one of those Sundays, when the hours were long and cold, and the logs for the fire were heavy.
Maglor caught him as he fell.
Maedhros said, “Please don’t tell her,” and Maglor promised he wouldn’t, so long as Maedhros had his supper that night—all of it.)
When he pokes at his ribs, he can feel the spaces between.
“My dear,” Indis says carefully (as she says all things—Athair must have warned her what intervention in his sons’ life would bring), “You look quite thin. Are you eating enough?”
What will Athair say, if he knows Maedhros has given Indis cause to worry?
He eats that night, and the night after that, and keeps down what he can.
(Small bites.)
Sometimes it is easier. In the summers, when the fruit is fresh and the meat unbrined, he can have his share of Mother’s familiar dishes (always, she chooses his favorites) and Caranthir’s increasingly impressive attempts at piemaking.
Sometimes it is harder, when fall settles like frost and the carriage wheels rattle away from Formenos. Then, he would so much rather drink until darkness closes in—
(And he does.)
“I have an experiment I’d like to conduct,” Fingon announces. That he says it sincerely goes almost without need of note; it is Fingon, and so he says everything sincerely.
Maedhros arches a brow, amused. “Does it have anything to do with the bushel of vegetables in your arms?”
“It does.” Fingon cannot lift one brow, he must lift both, and he does so now with a look of hopeful expectation. “May I have use of your kitchen?”
Maedhros leads the way. It is not unlike Fingon to “experiment”—but unlike Athair, or Turgon, or even Curufin, his experiments are of a wholly practical nature. He is yet a few years away from proper studies in medicine—a most unjust requirement, Fingon always says—but that has not stopped him from testing different weights of gauze and cotton to find which make the best bandages, or concocting herbal teas that even Maglor, lover of teas, cannot choke down.
Fingon bustles about, lifting copper pots from the walls while Maedhros leans against the windowsill. He comes here rarely; it is the servants’ domain. It is not his mother’s kitchen—there is nothing of her here.
“Tell me,” Fingon says, not looking at him, “What spices you like best.”
“What?”
“Are there any spices you prefer—basil, or sage, or—”
“What is the nature of this experiment?” Maedhros folds his arms, drumming his fingers against the opposite elbows.
Fingon, unsurprisingly, is blushing.
“Fingon.”
“I—” Fingon begins to slice the carrots thinly, staring hard at the knife in his hands as if his life depends upon its purpose. “I want to be a doctor.”
“I know.”
“A doctor must observe sickness that is not sickness,” Fingon says quietly. “I mean, not everything requires a hacking cough and a running fever.”
Maedhros is silent.
“Does Maglor not even notice?” Fingon asks, turning to him at last. “I mean—he—he lives with you, and must see that you eat only a little bread and cheese with your wine, and—”
“It is the fashion to be slim,” Maedhros says lightly, as though he is not naturally so. “You know how much I care about fashion.”
“I care not at all,” Fingon answers fiercely. “But I care about you. Maglor said—”
“You spoke to Maglor about this?’
Fingon is blushing again.
“You fought with Maglor about this.” Maedhros raises one hand to swipe across his brow. “Now I shall hear such nagging, Fingon. All because I do not have either of your hearty appetites.”
“It’s not that,” Fingon says. “You know it’s not.” He slips the carrots into a pan.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I do.” Fingon sounds almost as confident as he probably wants to. “Or I will, if you will just tell me what spices you like best. Then I can make it a proper meal for you.”
It is Saturday. Maglor is at his extra round of lessons. Maedhros has no engagements, not even a dance tonight.
This is as good as anything else.
“You look so well,” Mother says, when next he comes home. His clothes do not sag loose, now, and he has grown three more inches. He is taller, even, than Athair.
Maedhros does not tell her to thank Fingon. That would be saying too much.
Maglor sighs when Maedhros pushes the bowl of broth away. “Not this again,” he says. “Maedhros, you must eat. I don’t care what she—”
“Please,” he says, for that always works on Maglor. “Don’t. I’m just not hungry, Maglor. I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”
“It’s not even food.” Maglor’s mouth pinches like Athair’s when he’s angry, and it makes Maedhros want to bury his head in his arms, so that he does not have to see. “It’s to keep you warm. You're shivering.”
He is shivering from neither chill nor fever. He is shivering because there is a ring, cold in his pocket, that he never wished to take back.
He tastes acid in his throat. He does not want to swallow anything; he does not want to be weighed down.
Biscuits, apples, a slab of meat once a day. Maglor insists.
A bottle of whiskey, when he can get it. Maedhros insists on that.
(Fingon is gone, because they left him. Mother is gone, because she left them. It matters not which way the story is told—there is nothing of them here, and Maedhros cannot bear to swallow it.)
(Mostly, he would rather drink until they reach the west—
—and he does.)
“You must eat,” Mother says one day, when they are both wrist-deep in spongy bread dough. “You know that, don’t you? You must eat, to grow up big and strong.”
He manages, somehow—between her efforts, and Fingon’s, and Maglor’s nagging, and his own desire to do what he is told—to accomplish both.
Isn’t that what matters?
There is no need to consider the spaces between.