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It is a mild winter, and that makes Nerdanel angry.
In the two decades she has spent at inexorable Formenos, her garden has extended its reach. Once, it occupied only the neat rows on the south side of the house; now it has an outer field, spread over the rising ground behind the barn. She plants her winter vegetables there, and harvests them as late as Christmas: onions, turnips, even potatoes.
Nerdanel hates her husband.
Oh, damn it all, it isn’t so. Didn’t she hold his stiff body against hers, just last night? She smoothed his hot brow under her hands, she murmured words he seemed not to hear. Feanor’s grief burns like a fever, and though he will not speak of it, she knows it consumes him as an inward fire, gnawing and cindering his very heart.
She must wonder if he has any love left in him, now that his father is gone.
If you could hate him, you would have done so long ago. The bitter knot of tension in her chest does not ease as she stoops, tugging at a particularly stubborn turnip-top. Two rows, facing her, Maedhros has straightened up, his laden basket balanced at his hip. She is sure without meeting his eyes that his face wears its habitual look of gently strained concern.
(When did that look come to belong to him? In winter, she thinks she knows.)
“Mother,” he says. Then, when she does not answer—“Mamaí.”
“What?” she snaps, wanting to hurt, and he flinches, because that is Maedhros: everything that is cruel hurts him. Feanor knows this too.
She rocks back on her heels, loathing herself. “I am sorry, Maitimo. I am short-tempered this morning.” She gropes for an excuse. “I barely slept.”
He nods. “Then you should return to the house. I can finish here. No trouble.”
“The air is so close in there.” Nerdanel breathes deeply of this air, which is fresh and sharp with coming snow.
A beat of time passes. Maglor would mark it by lifting his finger from the strings of his clairséach, treating silence as its own sound.
Maedhros asks, “What can I do?”
“What am I to do?” Nerdanel returns. Alone with her eldest, she can spare a little desperation. He is so tall; his cheeks are rosy in the cold. He has grown up, her frost-bitten boy. They survived with Feanor gone; why can she not stand strong with Feanor here? “Your father is making me mad, and I do not know…”
Maedhros crosses the rows, careful not to trample the straggling roots, and sets his basket down. Then he wraps his gloved hands around her wrists.
“I am worried about Athair, too,” he says, looking down into her eyes. “But I fear I am useless. I do not think you are.”
“He has shut himself into his soul.” Nerdanel is angry, and terrified, and selfish. These are trapped inside of her, one on top of the other on top of the other. “For grief, this time.”
Instead of betrayal. Maedhros’s lips press in a thin line; they are both thinking of the summer before last.
“The season must be difficult.”
“It is for all of us.” Nerdanel sighs. “That is the trouble, Maitimo. What of your grief? Or your brothers’? How are you to tend to it?”
He does not answer; he clears his throat.
She says, “He finds new ways of leaving us.”
Her son lets her go. “Please, Mother. Don’t—”
“It is wrong of me to do this. To speak so openly.” There is bounty under their feet; the clouds that lower do not threaten, as yet, a dangerous storm. Her sons are grown or half-grown; Feanor cannot come as near to breaking them now as he did when he disappeared into the night ten years ago.
(His gun at Fingolfin’s breast suggests a different answer.)
“You must not shut yourself inside your soul, either,” Maedhros echoes, slowly, as if he chooses the words with care.
“Ah, my love. No danger of that.” She reaches for him, flecks a clod of earth away from his coat. “But I shall take your advice, I think, and return to the house.”