S.A. 1352. Ost-in-Edhil.

Celebrimbor’s gloves were heavy enough to at first shield the snowflake from the heat of his hand. It had lighted on his palm, gentle as a tamed dove. It was perfect. Eight lacy arms held proudly aloft; a little octagonal heart more precise than if drawn with ruler and protractor by the most meticulous of engineers. Celebrimbor held his breath as he drew it to his face to study.

There was a shout of joy and the heavy traipsing of feet as three children of varying sizes waded through the knee-deep snow. Their parents, wearing tolerant smiles, followed, the mother carrying a saw. “Down here! Down here!” called the smallest of the children. “It was right down here!” Tonight was the Festival of the Trees, the night when each household would welcome a small evergreen tree into their home as a remembrance of the green life of seasons past and hope for the spring to come. Each tree would be adorned with dried fruit, ribbons, bells, and feathers. It was a Sindarin tradition, brought by Galadriel and Celeborn from Doriath.

Celebrimbor glanced back at the snowflake on his palm. The filigreed arm that propped it upright upon his hand was beginning to melt into the fabric of his glove.

Until last year, Galadriel and Celeborn had presided over the outing to cut trees for the Festival. Each family brought their tree for a blessing, and each child received a small trinket to hang upon its branches. But Galadriel and Celeborn had departed, and it was Celebrimbor’s role now to stand and wait for each tree to be dragged up and slung at his feet, to place his hands upon it and pronounce his blessing. Behind him, a handcart was bright with small wrapped packages, one for each child in the city.

Surely they could tell, Galadriel and Celeborn’s people! Surely his smile was too stiff, his blessings too rehearsed, to convince them that he embraced this tradition as warmly as Galadriel and Celeborn had. He certainly didn’t oppose it—a version of it was practiced throughout Middle-earth, and loremasters had traced its practice as far back as Cuiviénen—but he would much rather be busy with work: slogging through the snow, selecting trees by the straightness of trunk and distribution of branches, wielding the saw. He felt awkward with nothing to do with his hands. They lay folded at his waist, a posture that seemed to hide its inauthenticity behind dignity at least. He couldn’t even dash off on the pretense of cutting his own tree. His people would gift him with one they’d chosen for him and were probably even now sneaking into his house. Tonight, he’d have to feign surprise and delight when he found it in his parlor.

Last year’s tree—his first as Lord of Ost-in-Edhil—had contained a nest of spiders that, due to the warmth in his house, hatched early and in abundance. A year later, he was still brushing away cobwebs found in unlikely places. Nightly, he still checked his sheets.

The snowflake on his palm was sinking rapidly now. He imagined he could see it quavering as its crystalline finery became ordinary water once more.

Annatar romped past, led by the hand by a small girl. There was nothing contrived about him; he flopped on the ground, impervious to the snow, to cut trees for the less rugged families; he hauled trees upon his shoulders until his hair was clotted with sap, always laughing as he went. He’d helped Celebrimbor with the spider situation last winter, understanding as perhaps no one else could his mortification at what seemed an inauspicious omen and his dread of seeming ungrateful for this symbol of lordship bestowed by his people. Many of the tokens in the handcart behind him were of Annatar’s making.

The snowflake was a droplet of water now except for a tiny fleck of ice that, as Celebrimbor watched, was quickly subsumed. “It is but the way of the world,” he said to the shivering droplet on his palm. “All things end.”

“That is just the sort of Yule sentiment I’d expect from you.”

And there was Annatar, before him, an arm slung around the tree balanced on his shoulder. He’d shed his cloak and went in a fine embroidered tunic surely being ruined by dirt and sap, but the steam of his breath came with laughter. He flopped the tree at Celebrimbor’s feet. “Your blessing, milord!”

The couple standing behind him had arrived two moons earlier and had long before survived the wreck of Nargothrond, both of them broiderers, Noldorin, and plainly unused to the vigor demanded by the tree tradition. The father’s hand was on the shoulder of his small, wan son. All of them looked as awkward as Celebrimbor felt as he patted the tree and went through the recitation of well wishes for the coming year. Annatar waited, and when Celebrimbor had finished, hoisted the tree back to his shoulder and led the family to a cart that would return them to the city, talking loudly of the warm wine and bonfires that awaited them within its gates.

Celebrimbor glanced back at his palm but, heedless of the snowflake as he spoke the blessing, he’d smushed the perfect dome of the droplet into a damp smear on his glove.

~oOo~

F.A. 463. Nargothrond.

The tree at the center of Findaráto’s halls dripped with light. It was carved of silver-brown stone, so skillfully that Tyelperinquar, upon first encountering it, had expected it to sprout real green leaves. But the leaves that arrayed it in the spring and summer months were woven of silk dragged across from Aman in trunks, the fabric so delicate that it lifted upon the barest draft and gave an impression of wind realistic enough that, when returning from the stifling heat of his father’s forge, Tyelperinquar would look upon the tree and feel a cool breeze upon his skin.

But in the winter, impersonating the trees in the world above, the silken leaves were taken down, and the bare branches arched against the high ceiling of the central hall. Usually, it remained that way until the weavers began to bring the flags of silk with the coming spring, but this year, Findaráto had given permission for something different in honor of the Yule celebration being held in the central hall.

Tyelperinquar could scarcely contain his excitement. He wanted to bounce upon his toes, and his fingers kept twisting together. He splayed his fingers and shook his hands at his sides, as though he could dispel the excess energy like water. His cousin Findaráto was much more comported. He kept touching Tyelperinquar’s arm to calm him. The Nauglamír and the gold crown of Nargothrond rested light upon him, and he used the gem-crusted chalice of wine in his left hand to sketch in the air as he spoke. Wide-eyed and casting glances back over their shoulders, as though they could not look away, the people of Nargothrond congratulated him on the splendor of the tree.

“I can take no credit,” he said gently, “for it was my cousin Tyelperinquar’s idea and labor.”

Again and again he said it, seemingly never tiring.

And Tyelperinquar would bubble, “I can’t either! My grandfather decorated an oak as such when we lived in Formenos.”

The stones were smaller than lampstones so that the light was more concentrated, and the mesh nets that held them were finer—as frail as Tyelperinquar could make them without breaking them—so that the light was less impeded. The thread was silver so that the light—itself as silvery as moonlight—ran upon the mesh and appeared to drip from the branches. Tyelperinquar had lost count of the number he’d made, along with his apprentices, working in secret when his father was absent from the forge. Children challenged each other to count but, giggling, lost their place somewhere around five hundred and chased each other around the silvery bole instead.

The new arrivals had slowed to a trickle, and his father and uncle had not yet come. “Do you think—” he began to Findaráto, but in the way that a good friend will finish the other’s thought, cut him off. “He’ll be here. You know he prefers to arrive when all eyes are on him.” One of his advisors approached, effusive with compliments, and he raised his chalice toward the tree and said, “I can take no credit, for it was my—”

Curufinwë walked through the door.

His Uncle Tyelkormo was busy with greetings, clasping hands and smiling with all the radiance of Laurelin, but his father, Curufinwë, saw the tree and stopped. Tyelperinquar wove and squeezed among the crowd, craning his neck to keep his father’s face in view, trying to read his expression. “Atar! Atar!” he called when he drew closer, and when Curufinwë turned to him, there was no doubt: He was delighted.

He caught Tyelperinquar in an embrace. Tyelperinquar expected a shower of inquiries—when did he work at this? of what material did he weave mesh so fine? how did he brighten the stones so?—but his father’s voice in his ear as they held each other close, neither able to look away from the tree, said, “You are a credit to your grandfather.”

The music, the conversation, the wine that night—he could remember none so sweet since perhaps the first time they’d draped a tree with Yule lights. It was a much smaller gathering then, just his father and grandfather and uncles, but he’d felt full to bursting then with the force of the knowledge that he was loved. He felt that way now too.

He was a long time falling asleep that night. When he closed his eyes, the lights of the tree still swirled pale and bright behind his eyelids. He was restless with satisfaction and giddy in remembering his father’s reaction. Again and again, he replayed the memory of his father’s face softening into pride and love. Again and again, he recalled the warmth and strength of his embrace.

It was like the game young lovers played with flowers, only there was no doubt any longer, and Tyelperinquar whispered into the dark, “He loves me.”

Beyond the door to his rooms, his father and uncle remained likewise wakeful. “Tyelperinquar,” said his uncle, “has become a credit to our house.” He hadn’t always been so, preferring objects of beauty to implements of war. There had been a time for that. That time was gone.

Curufinwë sipped at his whiskey. He stared into a candleflame not nearly as bright as the stones his son had made. At last he agreed, “Truly, he is. I never thought I’d come to be grateful for his delight in childish contrivances, but did you see their faces tonight? He has thoroughly won them over. Through him and his naïve love of them and of Findaráto, we may see our fortunes here rise after all.”

~oOo~

Y.T. 1493. Formenos.

The night was bitter, and the storm had just subsided. The last clouds scudded across the sky, lit faintly from below by the distant Light of Telperion, like tattered rags. The cold was such that stung any exposed skin and shortly set an ache in even the best-wrapped fingers and toes. Tyelperinquar, too big to be carried, shivered inside his cloak.

His father, grandfather, and uncles had become largely taciturn, their once vigorous debates and lively songs subsumed by the rigors of survival in the bitter north. Tyelperinquar had largely stopped speaking, never certain what names or questions or topics would incite anger from one of the men he lived among. It was like discovering explosives by way of a match. He was no longer small and protected by his littleness, and though his mother had returned on two occasions to his grandfather’s house, she departed just as quickly back to the village at Formenos, where she waged a futile war to keep him. His grandmother did not come any longer. He could count on no one’s protection.

But tonight they were as they’d once been. Their laughter seems to chase the final scraps of cloud from the sky, baring the stars. Ambarto and Carnistir carried a trunk between them; Macalaurë started a song that they all joined in a round until the force of their voices seemed to knock the snow from the branches. Tyelperinquar’s father was doused once, and Tyelperinquar cringed, expected anger, but Curufinwë grabbed fistfuls of snow and shoved it down the backs of anyone who dared to laugh. Tyelperinquar would never have dared, but his father grabbed him around the waist anyway and slung him over a shoulder so that Tyelperinquar watched the forest pass upside-down, and the jostling knocked some warmth back into his toes.

His grandfather Fëanáro abruptly stopped. “Down here! It was right down here!” They half-walked, half-slid down the incline and into the clearing, where an oak tree filled the sky with its branches. They stood beneath it in awe. Ambarussa pressed his hand to the trunk and whispered, “It is older than Laurelin and drinks of the ancient pools at the heart of the world.”

The spell broke abruptly, and all over the tree they clambered, adorning it with their father’s lampstones in small mesh nets. Still too small to reach even the lowest branches, Tyelperinquar watched them. His bold Uncle Tyelkormo went to the highest branch, his boasts coming faint and far. The stars seemed to spill from the sky to the earth. Tyelperinquar’s breath caught.

Beside him was a quiet thud of someone jumping from the lower branches, and he found himself swept upward in the strong, safe arms of his Uncle Nelyo. “On Yule,” came the voice at his ear, “everyone gets to hang up a light.”

The stone glowed against his palm as he stretched as far as he could reach and let the mesh net catch on a twig, and there it was: a star fallen and snared, come just shy of the earth.

~oOo~

S.A. 1352. Ost-in-Edhil.

Someone had set a fire blazing, and the warmth of Celebrimbor’s house suffused his arms and legs with heat so powerful that, had he been in the forge, he would have shied from the anticipation of flame. He was not supposed to expect his people to deliver a tree to him, so he had to feign ignorance and go about his routine, shaking snow from his cloak and hanging it in the front closet, trading his boots for warm slippers, and dipping himself a mug of wine from the kettle his cook had left warming over the fire. He used the opportunity to rehearse his reaction. Several of his lords and advisors would be present and several children were selected who hung the decorations of feathers and ribbons and fruit. He knew from experience that his reaction—whether overblown or tepid, seemingly unable to find the golden mean—would become common knowledge throughout the city, and he would imagine every hesitation in speech and every stiff gesture as disapprobation.

He went to his study, sipping his wine just becoming cool enough to drink. There was a polished paperweight on his desk where he could practice his smile and observe his expression under the pretense of opening his letters. He was doing this and whispering stock phrases to himself—“I love how you placed the ribbons! That little bird—what a delight!”—when with a flash of crimson in the paperweight, Annatar was behind him.

Annatar was too gracious to ever mention the awkwardness in which he sometimes interrupted Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor was in the midst of saying, “What a cute little apple!” when Annatar appeared; he took a swig of wine as cover, but it was still too hot, and he had to bobble it in his mouth before he could swallow and say, “Annatar!” And then he hated himself for the surprise revealed by that. At the least he could have tacked on a “Well met.”

“Tyelperinquar, come!” He accompanied the directive with a sweep of his arm that would look contrived from Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor’s heart squeezed at the use of his Quenya name. So many Yules lurked within those five innocent syllables and the delight and love in which it was spoken.

“I’m supposed to pretend I don’t know you’re here,” he whispered.

“I know. But I cannot wait any longer. I have a surprise for you.” He hauled Celebrimbor to his feet.

“A … surprise?” They were walking rapidly toward the parlor.

“Shh!” Annatar warned and then said loudly, “The message says Ereinion will be here at any moment, and I have had the parlor prepared to receive him. We should discuss what—” and then he pushed Celebrimbor into the parlor ahead of him.

The tree was as high as the ceiling and bedecked in bows and bells and feathers and fruits—and lights. The lights poured from its top to dangle from its lowermost branches till they nearly grazed the floor. The lights Tyelperinquar had made for Nargothrond—which ended up eventually pressed amid the rest of the hoard, underneath the stinking body of the dragon—had been improved upon yet again, by Annatar, and the tree was so resplendent that it was hard to look upon, as though it were twined in white flame.

The room was ringed in smiling faces. The children who had administered the decorations bounced and squirmed with uncontainable excitement, watching his face for his reaction.

His tongue flopped in his mouth. “The lights—” he squeaked at last. “The lights. They are—”

He caught the nearest child, a little boy, into an embrace, and the other children piled upon him. He’s laughter was genuine for once. The lords and advisors applauded. That was genuine too.

The gathering lasted longer into the night than Celebrimbor would have expected or even wanted, but he found he was enjoying himself. As he refilled his wine at the sideboard, the room behind him full with laughter and music and conversation, Annatar caught him with an arm around the shoulder. “You have thoroughly won them over.” It was not a whisper; it dared someone to overhear.

With a squeeze of Celebrimbor’s shoulder, Annatar melted back into the crowd.