Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

There are collections of oral accounts from all three Eldarin kindreds concerning fear of the sea. It was commonplace, when darkness reigned. There is one in particular that I’ve always found fascinating, a Noldorin account from a scout in Finwë’s company, one of the first Eldar to arrive at the Great Sea, that claims that confusion preceded the terror still to come, for those first Eldar had no notion of what the sea even was. In the dark, the sky was indistinguishable from the sea, and they believed they had come to the end of Arda and were looking out upon the Void, which chewed endlessly at the world in the shape of foam-crested waves.

There were stars. They glinted oddly inside the waves, but glint they did, and someone suggested that the underside of the Void is where the stars went to rest, once they’d wheeled out of sight. “We believed we were looking upon the cradle of stars.” Somewhere is a ledger with that in the margin of notes on from a lecture I’d attended, still a girl, of the Lambengolmor. The lecture hadn’t been dull, not at all, but this image arrested me, and the marginalia emerged almost involuntarily while my mind toiled upon vowel shifts.

Someone brave stepped forth. They were a brave people, the Eldar. Still in the infancy of our race, they had already withstood so much. Someone brave stepped forth and walked to the tickling edge of the sea. It was cold, but the Void would be cold, would it not? It was cold but it was also gentle. He laughed, this brave venturer, as the Void lapped his feet—this cold ether that swaddled the slumbering stars—and fooled into complacence, forth he went to where the waves did their gnawing work. He was knocked off his feet; the undertow (though there was no such word then) pulled him under.

“Have you ever put your foot under the rocker of a cradle?”

(There is a note showing that the speaker smote his fist into his palm, one, two, three times, laughing.)

The venturer died. His body was cast upon black rocks a short ways away, gnawed bloody by the Void. And as surely as a love of the stars had through formative light captured the hearts of the Eldar, so were, by the sight of his blood, those hearts gripped by terror of the sea.

When the society of the Noldor collapsed, it was the wives of its great princes who remained behind to salvage what we could: Indis, Nerdanel, Terentaulë, and me, Anairë. When the last traipsings of the exiles’ feet diminished upon the road, we stood in the Royal Square and darkness fell fully upon us for the first time. They’d taken all the torches and lanterns, and the place was thick with silence. We’d been bold in the crowded dark, but left alone—left behind—the silence choked us. We did not know what was yet out there, if what had destroyed the Trees might descend next upon us. We scarcely dared to breathe, stricken by a primitive terror of predators in the dark. When I imagine the scene now, I imagine the thin wail of an infant braving forth what the rest of us felt but didn’t dare to utter, but Terentaulë’s arms hung emptied at her sides, filled only hours before by Telperinquar’s plump, squirming body before Curufinwë took him away. Wet splotches were spreading over her breasts.

Just the wives were left. The infants were gone.

She was beginning to panic, whipping left and right, no longer certain in the darkness where the road descended into the Calacirya, the road they’d taken. Even the palace was but a grayish intimation at one end of the square. She was panicking in silence, her arms at her sides waiting to be filled. She started to run and came up hard against the base of a fountain. I heard her breath hitch in pain.

“Light.” That was my voice. “First we need light.”

Nerdanel was gathering up Terentaulë, her daughter-in-law. She didn’t shush her; she didn’t comfort her. The silence was deep already, and there was no comfort. She was holding her the way she used to hold her fourth-born son, the wild one who’d been born half-mad. She was making her arms into something soft and safe to rail against, until the agony in Terentaulë’s empty arms subsided.

“Go,” she said to me.

I’d never moved through the dark before. I calculated the position of our house relative to the pale shape that suggested the palace and began to make halting progress, like walking through the forest and coming to a sudden stop to find your nose an inch from the spiderweb you’d just now seen. The dark was a massed, formed thing; I kept waiting for my face to press against it, to feel its creeping tendrils in my hair. I stopped and waved my hands in front of me; they came against nothing. I began again, arms extended still, and my foot stepped into a hole made by a missing cobblestone, and I pitched forward to the ground, my wrists jarred and my arms made raw by the harsh touch of stone.

This was the dark. This was what our ancestors pushed through on their way to the sea.

I rose. No one called after me; I realized that I’d held stoic silence as I fell. I went onward, feeling with my toes now, parting my hands over and over again in front of me as though I swam through dark until I kicked a step and clambered on hands and knees into a house that offered no relief of familiarity. I waited for my eyes to adjust as they might to a dim room, but nothing eased forth from the darkness: no furniture or doorways or objects discarded; no breath of light from another room to throw the shapes of this one into relief.

I trailed my fingers along walls and unseated (and caught) objects and exhaled the pain of barked shins and stubbed toes. I found the stairs, then the hallway. I rolled on my feet to keep the silent, like I used to creep away from my sleeping children’s beds. It was like being clapped underground but that thing pressing in from beyond where I knew the windows should be: it was the sky. I counted the doorways and tried not to see where the windows should be. One. Two.

Three.

Four. My bedroom—arms fumbling through air filled only with darkness—and now to the right to my bathing chamber. There was a skylight overhead; the darkness made the room into a crypt. The Treelight had always been thin, so elevated above the plain and with only the skylight to admit light, and I’d enjoyed bathing in the quavering light of candles. I fumbled at the vanity table; bottles of herbs and soaps and lotions rang against each other. Cringing, I yanked my hands away. The drawer, the drawer-pull, then the fumbling inside, awaiting the dull rattle of waxy cylinders—

But they were gone, the candles. My husband (or someone?) had taken them.

We accustomed quickly. Nerdanel—who had, after all, spent much of her life listening to the heretical musings of Fëanáro—remarked that we were living as we’d been intended: “Eru Ilúvatar awakened us in the darkness of Endórë, after all,” she said. “Our bodies grew used to the constant light as bodies will soften to any indulgence, but we are built to survive the darkness.”

The filthy cloud Melkor spewed to cover the stars also receded and we had their thin light again, enough at least to rime the most perilous edges of things with a faint piping of silver. We found candles and torches and braziers, and we discovered that all manner of things could give light: rags, dried grasses, the wood furniture of abandoned houses. Paper, lovingly crafted for books and left in stacks on the desks of exiled scribes. I wondered that I did not feel more regret for sacrificing it for light.

We found more people. Every day, more came forth. The hill, they said, wore a corona of firelight from the torches we arrayed around the royal square, so they knew there were people there, and they guided themselves by the light of the Mindon Eldaliéva, which—darkened at first as though in shock from the ravages of Melkor—had returned along with the light of the stars. After the first people arrived, summoned by the traces of torchlight against a backdrop of darkness, we drained the fountain and built a bonfire there: a beacon to all who were left in the lower city and upon the plain and who would come. The first people were made hesitant by the dark but the ones who came later came with greater confidence. Perhaps it was as Nerdanel said.

Coming into the light, they wept. Our humanity had become caught up in the shape and sight of ourselves, and the sight of feet and hands and faces brought the full weight of what we’d lost. We gave each new arrival an hour to grieve and then we found them work to do. We’d taken our hours too, the Four Queens, as they called us. By the time I’d returned from seeking (and not finding) the candles, Terentaulë’s empty arms were gesturing in the direction of the orchards that had been lately giving greatest yield, for after light, we would require food. Indis—who’d lost her children to exile and her husband to death—was gathering weapons and armor from the private collections in the palace (the public displays had already been raided) so that we might defend ourselves against what we still feared in the dark. Nerdanel was taking inventory of the supplies we had and identifying the nearest forges and workrooms to fashion what was missing, beginning with torches and lamps.

There were a few men among those left behind but most were women, women who loved their land and had secure enough in their husbands’ and children’s love for that land (and them) to stay behind, confident they would stay too. We did not speak of that grief, of being subsidiary to a cause, worth abandoning to serve an ideal less formless than the breath passing our lips. Many arrived, certain they would find their husbands/daughters/sons among the people of the corona on the hill. We gave them an hour to search among our faces and to drift to the edge of the reach of our light, to peer into the darkness beyond, to stare and wait—and then we found them work to do.

I was in charge of those assignments and of keeping the records of who went where and did what. I’d been a scholar, a linguist, before the Darkening, and never before had the uselessness of my work stood so starkly as it did now. Nerdanel was a craftswoman and Terentaulë an arborist, both with skills ready for practical use; once a great athlete among the Vanyarin people, Indis instructed the people in the use of sword and shield and our fear, though still present, was managed at least. We’d still received no word from the Valar and were too few to spare a messenger to Máhanaxar, and we didn’t know what to expect from the dark, so we proceeded with the expectation that we’d be required to defend ourselves. But I—I stood in their midst and didn’t know what to do with my empty hands and my brilliant, useless mind.

It was Indis—sweet, diplomatic Indis—who assigned me as our tender new society’s first bureaucrat: recording, tracking, assigning, and monitoring the many tedious, minute workings of our village atop Túna. Perhaps she believed my husband’s skill might have translated to me. It had not: In the first days, I was whelmed beneath the sheer volume of tiny tasks and fumbled like a drowning swimmer clawing to reach the surface. There was confusion and shortages because of me. I had always felt a secret disappointment in my husband, when he was still his father’s seneschal, for not striving for more; in those first dark days, I realized and appreciated the full breadth of his accomplishments. On the night he joined in slaying Eärwen’s people, I spoke my apology to the wind and bade Manwë—for I had betrayed no one and no thing—to see it whispered into my husband’s ear.

As I grew into my role as the village bureaucrat, I began a list known only to the Four Queens, shared and expanded upon at night (or what we assumed by the cycles of our body to be night) when we sat around the brazier in what had once been Arafinwë’s topiary garden. Without light to sustain them, the lopsided rabbits and hounds were beginning to dwindle, until the leafless boughs began to resemble ribs jutting from their sides. Nevertheless, we gather there each night, away from the others and under the pretense of council.

What Our Husbands Took from Us
candles
lanterns
torches
dried food stores
preserved food stores
beer casks
wine
flints
knives
horses
healing herbs
swords/armor/weapons
surgical kits
wagons/carts
liquor

Not all of the liquor. Arafinwë had been fond of distilling his own rum and had several casks fermenting when he marched off with the rebellion. Nolofinwë and I used to cringe privately at how awful Arafinwë’s rum was, but with nothing better on offer, we found it at least turned over the darkly comic underbelly of our situation.

“Fillet knives!” Nerdanel was raging, louder than we’d been in a while. (For nothing had stricken us from the dark; we were becoming bold.) “For cutting the bones from fish! They cleared all the inns and taverns of them. I suppose they mean to defeat Melkor with an army wielding fillet knives.”

She took a swallow from the bottle and passed it to Terentaulë.

“It’s not like we have fish to fillet,” I said.

“We had dried fish,” said Terentaulë, interrupting herself to swig from the bottle. “But they took that, all of it.”

The bottle came into my hands. None of us had liked fish overmuch when we’d had the choice of it, especially dried fish, but it’s unwilled absence suddenly loomed symbolically large in our minds. I drank.

“We could,” I said, passing the bottle to Indis and wiping my lips on my sleeve in a way that I would have scolded my children for doing, “send a party to Alqualondë. We are gaining our strength here and are more organized by the day. It may be able that we can offer aid to them, and they may have systems and resources that would be of aid to us. We have long been friends with the Teleri.”

“They might have fish,” Terentaulë remarked in her low, smoky voice, “even dried fish. And fillet knives.”

“It would be a dangerous venture,” said Nerdanel. “In the dark, and we don’t know what might yet be out there.”

“It would be no more dangerous than the Great Journey.” Indis always spoke softly and yet with the merest whisper commanded silence. Nerdanel, having just accepted the bottle from her, let it hang between her knees. Terentaulë stopped joking. We all listened. “We have ventured far farther, in the dark and under threat of the Dark One, than from Tirion to Alqualondë.” Indis rose to retrieve more wood for our fire, and I knew she was giving us time to think. I heard her break a branch twice over her knee before she returned and cast it into the brazier.

“We do need to be concerned about our food supplies,” Terentaulë remarked, and I felt the popular favor tipping toward my idea, a sensation as thrilling and unnerving as though the ground had tilted beneath my feet. This was a love of power, I suppose; too much and I might trundle after my husband, down the road and into exile.

“Your great friendship with Eärwen can’t be anything but a benefit to us,” Nerdanel said, and there it was: It was decided.

My great friendship with Eärwen. I tamped down the emotions that arose in me at the thought of her. There was something unnerving about the thought of Alqualondë, of her, still unspoiled in my memory by the darkness. Yet Alqualondë had been the darkest city in Aman, situated beyond the Pelóri. The resplendent avenue of light that spilled from the Calacirya across the sea would be gone but the city itself—lit by lamps and soft-glowing pearls and still pools that, in imitation of the cradle of the stars, captured and refracted starlight by many multitudes—would be the least changed. There would still be the beacons, the ships strung with lanterns, the shadows behind the dunes—

“Unless she has gone with him,” Terentaulë took the bottle and pointed with it. “Arafinwë.”

“She won’t have,” I said. “She’ll be there.” My voice was dreamy, somnolent. I hadn’t Indis’s power. I was lost in the clamor of planning for our journey, to pass between the Calacirya and emerge as near as I could to my irretrievable past.

But the next day, Arafinwë returned.

We had requested a meeting at the culmination of work for the day, asking people to come to the square when their hourglasses had nearly run through. I requested that those skilled in cooking prepare a meal for all in gratitude for their attendance; none of us took for granted the acceptance of yet another obligation in our schedules for the day. My request met with grumbles and sighs beyond what one can expect from the characteristically temperamental cooks.

“We are running ever lower on food,” one explained huffily. “These kinds of expenditures—when by necessity we must exceed the usual rations in order to ensure that all are fed—squander what little we have left.”

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth until I could smile and say, “Trust that the meeting is important and aims to solve the very problem you described. I am grateful that you have chosen to apply your skills to solving this problem for us,” and walked away before further argument could test my patience.

In truth, I was restless, having spent the night before sleepless and tossing in my bed. We survived here only through our work: by plunging daily into a routine of tasks and surfacing only when we were exhausted enough and then only to eat a small meal before collapsing into sleep. We left no time for the invasion of grief, of memories, of doubt. We attacked the problems our little new society faced in lieu of glancing back upon the troubles of our past that we would now never solve and forever regret.

But Eärwen—Eärwen was firmly in the past, the deep past, untouched—as I have said—by the dark. I clutched at her memory like an oyster upon a pearl, hidden in secret recesses: memories grown soft and lustrous to swaddle old hurts, beauty grown out of pain. I never thought of my times with her—I forced myself never to think of my time with her—but she was buried within me nonetheless. I pressed my solar plexus at times, the place where my pearl grew, imagining myself held upright, respectable, even admirable because of that secret luster within me. To wrench it--her--out now, of all times—?

As I made my rounds for the day, tallying production and shuffling workers from one job to the next, I wondered if I would be permitted to go to Alqualondë. I had a young girl who, when she could be spared from Nerdanel’s bellows, was learning my work, but she was far from ready to function on her own, even if Nerdanel didn’t require her. Yet I was a scholar of the Telerin language and tradition; my “great friendship” with Eärwen was one of the diplomatic threads connecting my people and hers—it made sense that I should go.

I should go, came the thought. I am one of the Four Queens. I should insist upon it.

But then the reasons began to surface as to why I could not, should not: a crisis in the supply chain for the glassworks, my apprentice’s voice shaking as she fumbled instructions to a surly chemist before I interceded, a broken axle on one of the few wagons that had been left to us, a dwindled apple harvest and the damned temperamental cooks nearly shouting at me as I suggested substituting pears? grapes? peaches?

And reasons I could never speak aloud and dared not even think.

The time of the meeting came and people began to flow from their kitchens and fields and workshops toward the fountain-then-bonfire, now converted a second time into a platform for address. They came wiping their hands, removing aprons and gloves, stretching sore muscles. An hour of labor had been shaved from their days, but their anxious eyes contained no gratitude for it. They stood awkwardly with little to say to each other, for even offhand, innocent comments could trigger painful recollections. They wanted busy hands and exhausted minds chased free of thought.

When the inflow had slowed to a trickle, Indis climbed onto the platform and said, “We regret that we had to call your early from your labors today, but we cannot overstate our gratitude that you were willing to come and listen to us.” The crowd stepped closer to hear her, and she turned and nodded to me.

Our status was uncertain here. I was the wife of the last High King—albeit disputed—while she was the wife of Finwë, abdicated but undisputed and now dead. I sensed in the exchange of glances and shifting of feet when I took my place the old factions, that not all were willing to relinquish Indis as their queen. She sensed it too and stepped back at my side. “The idea we bring to you was Anairë’s. It is just that she speaks of it. We have always valued merit.”

We. The Noldor—from a golden-haired Vanya who could have fled long ago to the adamantine halls of Valmar and the sheltering of the Valar but who had stayed alongside my husband—her son—and counseled him as king. I reached over and squeezed her hand. “We will have no factions here,” she said. Her voice was neither loud nor stern. “We will return to judgment of ideas on their merits, not on bloodlines and marriage. Those things matter no longer; they have forsaken us and we shall not honor them.”

She stood aside.

“People of the Noldor,” I began. I tried, I really did, to emulate the comfortable authority of Indis, but I found myself reverting to the overenunciated and slightly pompous speech favored by my husband. “Long have we trusted the Teleri as our allies and friends. It is time to both call upon and offer reaffirmation of that friendship. I have consulted with the other queens, and I have suggested that—”

There was a ripple in the crowd, a turning of heads, and I sensed I was losing them. I used to cringe when Nolofinwë became louder and more archaic at such moments, and here I was poised to do it myself. “I have proposed, and the others of the queens have agreed”—I barely stopped myself from saying ratified—“that we should approach King Olwë—”

“The prince!” I heard someone exclaim, and I was confused. All heads were turning away now; the people were shifting away from the platform and constricting into two groups, making an avenue down their middle that led between the road and the platform.

Arafinwë rode into the circle of torchlight. He’d had a gray mare, not particularly spirited but loyal and enduring. Her footfalls were arrhythmic with lameness; the pristine white clothing in which he’d departed the city—clothing so white that it seemed to reflect what small light there was until he appeared to glow—was dulled by dust from the road. He brought no baggage, and exhaustion slumped his shoulders: exhaustion in he who had once been the most indefatigable of us, the most tenacious in hope and love. He’d never stopped loving Fëanáro. He’d never stopped believing in—and working toward—the reunification of our people. His braids were ragged. One of his riding gloves was missing, the wedding band beneath capturing the torchlight so that his slim white hand bore a brand of flame.

A wordless cry and Indis ran to him. The hope none of us dared—the return of a child—had come to her unlooked for. He dismounted and it was plain to see that it was her strength that held him upright for those first moments before he mastered his buckling knees and adjusted his tattered cloak and lifted his eyes to the three of us on the platform.

From the road behind him, other horses and riders were emerging from the dark: a haunted, pale people, gaunt, with eyes overlarge in their faces.

“Amil,” he said. He stood on his own now but held both Indis’s hands in his. He looked again to us. “Sisters.” He turned to the silent, staring people in the crowd. “My people. My Noldorin people.”

Arafinwë did not like to speak in front of groups. He would sing or play a small guitar he’d fashioned or playact, but he did not like to give speeches. He would push one of his brothers or his son Findaráto or the small, vibrant Eärwen in front of him. “They do not want to hear from me.”

The voice that spoke now might never again sing or playact or laugh. “My Noldorin people. There are no words for what I have seen.”

After Fëanáro made the Silmarils, he stopped coming to the Lambengolmor for many years. Many had been waiting for any reason to despise the most eminent of the Noldorin linguists and had it in his sudden neglect of the guild he himself had founded, claiming his fame had made linguistics—the science behind the very trait that defined our people—no longer worth his while. What worth were words to one who had tamed Light? Nolofinwë, who always sat beside me at meetings, as he had from the earliest days of our courtship, would periodically glance over his shoulder at the door to see if his brother might yet appear.

One day he did.

We took our seats to find he’d already arrived, the first there as had been his wont, scribbling in haste in a ledger. (Many claimed he wrote the papers he was to deliver in the minutes before the meeting began.) Nolofinwë stood in the aisle for a moment, watching his brother, before he took his seat beside me.

You should go to him. Part of me wanted to whisper those magnanimous words but always I was terrified to interfere in their relationship, like pushing my husband closer to a roaring fire.

Fëanáro’s linguistic work had lately concerned neologisms, namely the coinage of new words and their connection to the oral histories many of our folklorists had collected. He spoke on neologisms that day, leaving the ledger—as he always did—at his seat. He did not stand behind the podium but neither did he stride wildly, as many scholars did. He stood in front of it, upright and his hands open and imploring, his eyes overbright as though made so by the Silmarils.

“You see, our people made real what they saw and experienced through the making of words. In that way, they created those things—confined them phonologically and semantically within certain boundaries—from what was otherwise an abstraction of experience. Take death—when they named death and defined it, they put it apart from life. But there is nothing in death that requires it be so. It was the neologists who made a thing apart from our experience as Quendi, a thing to grieve. Had they drawn the boundaries otherwise, we might recognize the dead even now among us.” He swung out his arm at those of us who listened before him.

He was mad. I was careful not to let my glance slide toward Nolofinwë, sitting stiffly beside me. He’d laid the pen he used to take notes carefully on the paper.

“But it is the prototype, is it not? What the Valar tell us of the cosmogonical act is that Eru Ilúvatar brought the universe into being with a word: Eä. Let it be! With that word, Eru Ilúvatar drew the confines of the universe. A different word and different boundaries and reality would look different. We might all push up from and then fall back to the earth, akin to the trees—”

There was a burst of laughter, choked off when the laugher realized that Fëanáro was not making a joke. A few people shifted in their seats to look for who had laughed, trying to shift their embarrassment for the illustrious Fëanáro onto that unfortunate boor. Fëanáro did not dignify the laugh with so much as a hesitation.

“With this notion, we may—”

“Are you claiming that we have the power of The One to create with mere word?” someone shouted from the crowd.

I never knew who it was. Decorum required questions be held till the end, and many lectures were given where the audience nearly hummed with all the squirming and scribbling of suppressed questions; I’d been behind the podium once when this happened, and a terrified sweat was pooling in my shoes beneath my heavy scholars’ robes by the time the question session arrived and they unleashed the full force of their disapprobation in the form of questions upon me; it was the only time I wept after giving a lecture, at home, in Nolofinwë’s arms while a newborn Findekáno wailed hungrily. There was an uncomfortable shuffling at the solecism, and I thought Fëanáro would plunge ahead, as he had with the laugh, but this time he paused. His brow knit in confusion, and I remarked the irony that the heretical Fëanáro would be unseated by a breach etiquette, before he remarked, “Why of course.”

Ours were an enduring people, and we’d withstood much in the form of suffering and death on the Great Journey, but the words we had for kill and death were inadequate for what Arafinwë had to describe to us. To our people, he would not speak of what he had seen. He became faint and had to be led by Indis and Nerdanel indoors, into his own house, at which point he straightened, and his unbalance was revealed as a ruse. He was braced by something in the midst of his exhaustion, having ridden for days without stop to reach us. (The poor gray mare collapsed upon being taken to the stable, we were later told.) But there were not words for what he had witnessed.

Nerdanel and Terentaulë were driven mad by it, suggesting words ever more outrageous until Indis held up her hand and, in the halting voice of a small child telling a story with his tiny store of words, Arafinwë related what he had seen.

We sat in silence after, in a circle in the room where we used to let our small children play in the middle of the floor while Eärwen and Arafinwë and Nolofinwë and I (and sometimes Nerdanel and Fëanáro) drank wine and told each other the kinds of stories we hoped the children would not understand. Terentaulë had put a cluster of candles in the center of that floor. One by one, in silence, they went out, leaving us in darkness we could not bear to relieve.

Fëanáro would have had much to observe of the coinage of new words in the days that followed. He would have had copious notes to take.

The question of sovereignty came up soon after Arafinwë’s return. He turned immediately to Indis, but she answered him with the same slow shake of her head as she’d once answered Nolofinwë. “No, my son, my heart. I will stand beside you always, but this is your duty to bear.”

I had known Arafinwë since he was a child. Nolofinwë and I began our courtship shortly after Nolofinwë’s majority, when Arafinwë was yet a young adolescent, still very childlike for his age. He had none of his older brothers’ intellectual fortitude, nor did he have the imposing physicality of his parents. He was small and golden, curious about people and inclined to benign prying. He never forgot a detail about a person he met, like when he brought me sunflowers for my begetting day that first year because I’d once mentioned enjoying them, offhand, to another young lady in attendance at a dinner where Arafinwë was permitted silent attendance. I'd scarce noticed him.

He became an accomplished horseman, I suspect to avoid studying the martial arts—devoid of purpose but practiced for the sake of history and purported pleasure—that were expected of most nobleborn boys. He was modestly skilled at music, less so at art. He had no interest in writing (although he learned it flawlessly and occasionally contributed papers on political theory, I suspected at his father’s bidding), but he could learn an oral song or story at a single hearing, having a bone-deep intuition for the complicated meters and formulas that made up this ancient and dwindling art. I once bought him, for his begetting day, a book of collected folktales that I suspect he never read.

It was impossible not to adore Arafinwë. Even Fëanáro felt—and did not bother to hide—affection for his youngest brother. When Arafinwë announced his betrothal to Eärwen, what I felt was the relief akin to the sensation of gravity, a giving over of the small exertions of daily living to some unseen, commanding force, for both so effortlessly earned the love of others that their eventual partnership surely fulfilled some natural law. Their wedding was one of those dazzling moments in our peoples’ history, for it symbolized the joining of the three kindreds and the actualization of what so many had suffered the Great Journey to achieve. The songs made for that day were less about love than triumph.

Arafinwë turned to me now. Sometime in the last few days, Indis had coaxed him into bathing and neatening his hair, but the fever-bright horror in his eyes persisted. I recalled the lambent madness in Fëanáro’s eyes after he made the Silmarils and was reminded of that: the witnessing of something our feär were not built to endure yet had.

“I would give the crown to you then, Anairë,” he said. “You are his—Nolofinwë’s—wife. He was our king; you were our queen. It is only fair that you continue in that role.”

As I shook my head, the thought flickered through my mind that this title had, just short years before, prompted strife and discord among the Finwions, even to the edge of violence. How lightly it was proffered now and how lightly cast aside! “No, Arafinwë. He took whatever claim I might have held with him when he chose to follow Fëanáro rather than stay with me. Your mother is correct: The duty is yours to bear.”

We held a brief coronation ceremony to mark the passage of authority from Nolofinwë to Arafinwë, via our brief de facto rule. Coronations were supposed to be highly scripted affairs involving multiple blessings from multiple Valar, but Máhanaxar remained silent, and the blessings upon Arafinwë’s reign were given instead by any of his people who wished to come forward and do so. Some brought small offerings—all that was left to us was small—and others spoke fumblingly of his constancy and the way forward. No one spoke of hope. The madness in his eyes was quenched in the sorrow that shimmered there. Indis spoke last, of Finwë and his aspirations for the Noldor when he chose to lead them forth on the Great Journey and of his joy at the birth of his youngest son. We all knew that Finwë had never imagined that lastborn son as king, much less crowned with the fickle light of torches the only barrier between us and the dark. But the analogy of the journey in the dark was lost on none of us. Is that where we were going now?

In the end, he knelt upon the bare earth, in a semicircle of wilting flowers and shriveling fruit—the enormous generosity of our people—and though he cast his eyes earthward, the reflection of torchlight in the tears in his lashes made his eyes seem filled with fire.

Beside me, Nerdanel had stopped trying to hide the tears she’d been surreptitiously wiping away.

It was Indis who placed the crown on his head with a kiss to his forehead.

The day after the coronation, we met by candlelight in one of the counsel rooms in the palace. We placed the candles in the corners to banish the shadows and drew the drapes. The dark beyond the windows was still a fearsome thing.

I brought a list of our increasingly dire needs, from my daily rounds: Food was becoming scarce—we’d experienced our first crop failure, presumably due to the lack of light—and hopelessness was elbowing past the carefully contrived industry into which we’d all thrown ourselves. Three craftspeople were not at their posts this morning, having gone into the darkness and not returned. There was a need for basic contrivances—for wagons and knives and lanterns—that the exiles had taken with them and that we struggled to find the skilled labor to replace. And we were quickly exhausting our fire supplies, now that they were in constant use. Arafinwë listened to my report, nearly impersonating the earnest, bright eyes that recalled the young boy I’d once known, but when I finished, he said nothing of what I’d presented.

“Anairë, what have I heard about an expedition to Alqualondë that you suggested?” He had none of the bearing of a king; he leaned forward onto his elbows and shoved his sleeves up from his wrists and fidgeted with a pen. Terror still flickered behind his eyes; what he had seen in Alqualondë could not be forgotten and was triggered by what was now mundane about our existence: fire, the scent of smoke, crowds of people. It gave him a feral look, and I wondered how long before he too bolted into the darkness, seeking the comfort of oblivion save the stars, a rebirth of sorts.

"I don't know whom we would spare for it," I answered, meaning to return quickly to the matter of apples and wagons and torches. "I suggested it when I was yet naïve of how great our need would become and how quickly. And it is great; it is taking a full day now for our foresters to venture out and back in search of firewood and torchwood. And wax for candles, we have exhausted what we harvested already from our hives and—"

"I understood that the expedition to Alqualondë was partly to address these needs." He had dropped the pen and begun drumming his fingers in a galloping rhythm on the tabletop. He'd bitten his nails to the quick; the sound was padding, fleshy.

"As I said, Arafinwë, I don't know whom we would spare to—"

"Why, that seemed plain to me." He sat back suddenly in his chair. "It should be you. Aren't you the one whose friendship with Eärwen is subject to such renown?"

He tipped his chin at me. His fingers were still drumming, near-soundlessly, as his overbright eyes locked with mine. I nearly laughed. Hadn't I been rehearsing the arguments in favor of my attendance on this very mission when Arafinwë had arrived and, one might reason, removed some of the obligations placed upon me, with his acceptance of the crown, as one of the Four Queens? Yet now I flinched from an invitation to the same task?

I often wondered what Arafinwë knew of Eärwen and me. He spoke flawless Telerin without an accent—the envy of scholars of the language, like myself, who studied it for years only to speak it in Alqualondë and have shopkeepers switch unbidden to Noldorin—but it was more than that. He moved within their culture with the same joyful ease as a dolphin in the sea: an air-breather, purportedly, and of our own kind, but effortlessly liminal. Surely he knew of the lax customs surrounding love between the same sex; surely he knew the Telerin word that translated into Noldorin most accurately as friend-love, a word that many a naïve Noldorin scholar had asserted showed the precious weight given to friendships among the Teleri (usually with some speculative eloquence about their long estrangement and great love for the Noldor). But it was nothing of the sort. It was a literal love between friends—both romantic and sexual—embarked upon before a marriage and sometimes resumed after the years of children. It applied equally to both sexes, although mixed-sex friend-love was rare—though never unheard of, Eärwen told me once. Nothing was unheard of among the Teleri, at least as far as love was concerned.

I'd once thought to author a paper—even started upon it—about the word and concept of friend-love and its true meaning, but worried that I was revealing something about the Teleri meant to be secret. Which was a very Noldorin way of viewing it. And worried too what might be implied of me by the intimacy of my knowledge.

Arafinwë surely knew of it. The rumor was that he and Eärwen had practiced a Telerin marriage, with complete physical consummation before the naming of the One and the bonding of their feär, in deference to the Telerin idea—but an incredible tale from the Outer Lands—that feär sometimes rejected each other for reasons known only to the One, and it was best to know if this was going to be the case before assembling one's family and friends for a public wedding ceremony that would have to be annulled once the consummation failed to anneal their spirits. "Imagine! It would be simply mortifying!" Eärwen had explained to me—what it apparently took to mortify one who wore barely existent bathing costumes and undressed wantonly in large groups of girls and— In any case, Eärwen fully believed in the possibility, and Arafinwë had purportedly gone along with the Telerin tradition without complaint for her sake. And if he adhered so willingly to the marriage custom, surely he knew of friend-love too.

But knowing about these things in the academic sense of an anthropologist who has learned thoroughly and nonjudgmentally the traditions of another people—even living without shock among such practices—and knowing the specific manifestations of those traditions as they pertain to his own wife: I always wondered. I wondered about Eärwen, who was guileless and hid nothing, and what she had told him of us. But surely even Arafinwë could not accept such knowledge, that his wife and his sister-in-law had been entirely committed to friend-love of one another for a full summer and had never truly abandoned—though never since acted upon—those feelings? Surely even sweet, magnanimous Arafinwë could not respond but with shame and dismay?

I considered my words carefully. "I hardly think this is the time for the Noldorin people to petition the Teleri for aid."

"I don't intend that this should be the sole—or even primary—purpose," he replied. "And from what I've been told of your idea, this wasn't your intention either; rather, you saw our role in giving as well as receiving aid. Of course, you were innocent of the situation in Alqualondë when you proposed this, seeing it as an exchange of equals with no debt on either side. Now, I'd say—and I'm sure you'll agree?—that in the wake of the kinslaying, there is a debt, so much that we must go, even if we return empty-handed."

Kinslaying. I flinched at the neologism: It both united the Teleri to us as our brethren—an idea that, before the departure of the exiles, would have been controversial—and dredged forth the ancient Quendian verb slay, once used in reference only to the bodies found in the forest that had been killed by the Dark One. It was a wet, sprawling verb that onomatopoeically referred to the fact that such killings always involved the festooning of trees with the victim's innards. I cursed the linguist who had reanimated that one, even as I knew that our words for death—conveying either civilization or happenstance—were inadequate.

As was debt, I realized: a polite word for a favor owned, now too large and complex for so small a sound. After all, we were blameless in the atrocity at Alqualondë; where was the debt? And yet none of us doubted that it was owned, and many of us questioned if it could ever be paid. And so we let the darkness grow silent and thick upon the road that joined Tirion to Alqualondë, heavy and impenetrable as a velvet curtain fallen shut, when we should have rushed to their aid at Arafinwë's first report.

As it was, Arafinwë did not give me the option of accepting or refusing my own mission. He'd been listening more than I’d realized to my report of our needs and his time for me was short and his instructions brusque. "I offered you the kingship, Anairë," he said. "You refused. As your king, I instruct you to journey to Alqualondë, to make peace with my wife's family as well as can be, and to offer any succor we are able to offer, even if you must take the food from your own mouth to feed theirs." I suspect my eyebrows popped up in surprise; so he had learned something at his father's knee when it seemed all he was doing was weaving frail friendships amid his brothers. He stood. He did not have the small retinue of scribes and pages to attend him as his father and brother had been attended. The chair was not eased out from his backside but barked loudly against the floor; his eyes sparkled madly with horror and exhaustion. "I have much to do to ensure that the Noldor remain, that we may even offer aid or exist to be rebuked."

There is a Telerin story in the oral tradition that when the Dark One took or slayed one of the Nelyar, then those who loved the lost one would cut their hair above the level of the ears, with no thought for beauty. According to the tale, Elwë Singollo decided to accept the invitation of the Valar when he stood before his people and noticed the multitude of shorn heads and the many more where their hair had just begun to grow long again.

"Grief comes where it goes," Eärwen would say, a Telerin adage that, like most idiomatic speech, had the unquestioned weight of tradition behind words that otherwise made little sense. She used it for the frivolous disappointments of life, like denying oneself the final sweet, intending it for later, only to drop it in the dust or to find one's brother ate it first—a typical Telerin plea on behalf of happiness. From what I've read of the saying's origins, it comes from this moment in the history of the Telerin people: that to save his people from grief, Elwë brought them to grief. On the dark road between Tirion and Alqualondë, my mind reverted to the festooned slain, and the shadows beyond the torchlight held by my few attendants took on the twisted features of those who were taken and returned later sometimes in unrecognizable form. Which grief was worse, I wondered, as I lay awake in a tent senselessly erected as a barrier against the darkness: the grief Elwë delivered them from? Or delivered them to?

We timed our journey to pass through the Calacirya as quickly as possible and while freshest in body and mind. The narrowing of the sky to a star-studded ribbon overhead awakened vestigial fears of being trapped, and we hastened through the pass near to the point of imperiling the horses on the uneven ground.

It used to be that the passage through the Calacirya—uncomfortably claustrophobic even when filled with Light—was rewarded on the other side by the glittering expanse of Alqualondë, the city of the lamps. I recalled my first sight of it, thinking the stars had come to visit and repose upon the shores before returning to their heady work in the sky, only the stars were every color imaginable: lamps high and bright upon posts or strung in strands and twined around towers, or the great white stones that flashed warnings to ships at sea, or the bobbing lanterns upon the ships themselves, sliding silently upon dark waters and leaving a trail of light in their wake. As we neared the end of our passage through the Calacirya—the clouds conspiring to occlude even the comforting strip of stars—I began to dread the sight of Alqualondë more than I feared the close darkness of the pass. How would the slain city appear? I imagined all the lamps gone red as blood, a splatter of a city before the black sea.

What I noticed first was the absence of the wedge of Light that emitted from the Calacirya onto the sea. Telerin tradition claimed that holding course upon that stripe would lead one back to the shores where Ulmo first instructed their people and drew them away on their island. In reality, the Light made the water rich with aquatic plants and algae and, therefore, fish: a boon to the fishermen of the nearby city. I'd steeled my heart, knowing that shimmering road would never appear again, but its absence still dismayed me. The sea looked frightful without it.

And then I noticed Alqualondë.

Or rather, I noticed that Alqualondë was gone.

Gone: the colored lights upon the houses, the lamps that lined the streets, the lanterns upon the ships or nodding from the back of the humblest fishmonger's cart. Gone: even the lamps in the windows, held in a small mesh bag as a traditional sign of welcome.

I reined in my horse. Alqualondë, the city of lights, had gone dark.

My eyes roved the shore, trying to find the city, and I realized that the lights were still there but muffled, and for a hopeful moment, I thought that the city was but smothered in fog, as sometimes happened when cool air met warmed water. But the sea beyond was clear, the overbright stars overhead winking upon the points of the waves. And without Light, what would warm the water? No, the city was there; the lights were there, but they were smudged and dimmed somehow, as they might look if an artist had run her thumb across them. On the sea beyond the city, the dark water took that meager light and returned it as the lusterless shine of cheap tin.

I became aware that my hands could not feel the reins they held. I was numb as though the warm blood of my body had been poured out somewhere back in the dark cleft of the Calacirya, and all the objections that Arafinwë hadn't given me time to raise surfaced now.

Your wife, your family—
You were there. You. Were you truly too late? If you were, then why did you ride away?
Why am I looking in your face and not at a letter in your hand?
Are you truly guiltless, Arafinwë? Innocent, foolish Arafinwë?
They are your people—you were so proud of your accentless Telerin.
Your broadmindedness.
Your tolerance.
So proud that you fucked early in your Telerin marriage, broke the laws, subjected yourself to marital pleasures out of purported concern for your wife's happiness. What of her now? She is yours, not mine.

Not mine.

What of her now? This is your family, your mission, your mess to clean. Not mine.
You dare to send me? And what of you?
This is your place, you coward—

When we passed beneath the stone arch leading into the city, I discovered why the lights were so dim. Each was draped in cloth just thin enough to allow a muffled light to emerge. Even the strands that wrapped the towers were overwrapped in fabric now; the wind from the sea caught it and tattered it like cobwebs.

"Douse your torches," I commanded my retinue in a whisper. This was a city in mourning, and the torchlight seemed profane in contrast to the dulled light of the swaddled lamps.

Tirion post-Darkening hummed with activity: desperate and contrived to keep the grief from our gates. Alqualondë wore its grief in stunned, paralyzed silence. Normally, carts rattled in the streets and vendors cried their wares; delicate silver chimes and Aeolian harps played at the whim of the wind. We passed one garden where a wind-gnarled tree, half-dead, usually sported both lanterns and windchimes in abundance. The lanterns were draped in fabric; the chimes lay in rows on the ground. Only the wind dared voice itself in the silent city. It moaned in the doorways and elicited tired groans from the buildings, sounds normally lost in the musical bustle of the city.

The Teleri were famously hospitable. Finwë would tell a story of going to a feast at Olwë's palace and eating nothing once there because he'd been summoned into so many homes along the road and fed oysters and fish stew and the delicate confections of seaweed and wild rice. But today I saw people appear only to shut doors or draw curtains across windows: but hints of movement in the gloom.

We came to the broad stairs that led up to the palace. The Telerin palace did not aspire to the sky as did those of the Noldor and Vanyar; it spread low, no more than three stories, with balconies and rooftop terraces providing as much living space as the rooms within. The design had been a collaboration between Olwë and Finwë, the former insisting on its peculiar aesthetic while the latter managed the mathematics that it might resemble a nautilus shell, spiraling outward from a tower that flashed a pale blue light upon the sea, a message to the mariners that the Telerin kingdom thrived.

That light was not wrapped. It was gone entirely.

There were no guards at the door. Perhaps they had been slain; perhaps the assault the Teleri had already endured had proven their futility. What could happen that was worse than what already had? I knew this wide concourse, open to the sky; I knew these pools and fountains, once playful and now lying still. More chimes lay alongside the path, stretched out in funerary neatness. Each of the myriad lanterns wore its own long cloak of thin fabric.

As I walked, I rehearsed what I would say to Olwë. I'd rehearsed it with Nerdanel and Terentaulë before departing—Indis had been, like me, ordered on a mission to Máhanaxar—and practiced it on the journey to forget the darkness. There was no choice but to lay bare our sorrow and our willingness to atone for our kin. I had heard that when the Three Ambassadors came before the Valar for the first time, Ingwë lay upon his face on the ground, so enormous was his deference; I considered that I might do that but, coming from a Noldo, worried that it might seem overwrought. We were never the ones to defer. I worried that I would weep, then worried that I would not be able to.

The doors to the receiving room stood open. The room beyond had once dripped with lanterns of all colors upon chains of all lengths, hanging from the ceiling. It was said that each household had made and contributed one, some forged of pure silver and others woven nets of humble beach grass. With the lanterns cloaked, the room was now dim and gray, as though mist-choked. I hesitated, looking for a guard or a herald or anyone to announce me, but there was no one. No matter. I squared my shoulders and proceeded forth into the room.

Olwë had permitted a gift of a throne from Ingwë and Finwë: a rock, really, with an alcove like a seat and embedded with ancient shells that remembered the Years of the Lamps. The shallow pool around it used to be filled with lampstones and lit it from below with a shimmering blue light. Now, the throne hulked at the end of the receiving room, the pool around it dark and still. It was empty.

There was one person in the room: a boy, a scribe perhaps, working over an angled scribal desk likely left here by the last Noldorin scribe to serve here, who may well have taken up arms against the very people who'd hosted him. The boy at the desk now was Telerin, his bones jutting from beneath the meager, pale fabric that he wore as a symbol of grief. His hair was unevenly shorn, hanging past his earlobes on one side and barely covering his eartips on the other. I squinted into the gloom. Was he one of Olwë's grandsons, perhaps, the son—or even the grandson—of one of Eärwen's brothers? (Arafinwë had told us that all of their own children had gone with the kinslayers.) Both of her brothers had been slain in the attack; Arafinwë did not know about their children.

I took a loud intake of breath to make the boy look up. "Pardon me? I am Anairë, come from the clean-handed Noldor of Tirion, who did not take up arms against your people but wish to atone however we may for the crimes of our kin. I would dearly desire to speak to your king."

The figure rose from behind the desk. Shoulders jutted beneath a roughspun tunic; slender, bony hands; a tiny, pointed chin; a body that was but a whisper inside its clothing made overlarge by starvation. The hint of—breasts? Surely not, but yes: breasts once made full by the nurturance of five children, sea-green eyes squinting with a grief and exhaustion that might have been a mirror of my own face, fingers twisting and wrapping themselves in the edge of the tunic. Her tunic.

The person before me was no scribe, no boy. She was Eärwen.

When I'd met Eärwen, we'd both just reached our majorities. I'd been sent to Alqualondë to study for the summer; Tirion was oppressively hot that year, and my father believed I'd be more productive outside the city. At first, I'd been proud to associate with the daughter of the king. I knew that my father would see the acquaintanceship as advantageous, and I sought, if not to cultivate it, then at least not to make a fool of myself and, by extension, my family.

But we'd quickly transgressed acquaintanceship, Eärwen and I. We were lovers that summer, falling swiftly into a summer romance that burned brightly in my memories as one of the most joyful summers of my life. I'd met and become betrothed to Nolofinwë not long after, and my joy in the early years of our marriage was boundless. He was a considerate, skilled lover in the way of the Noldor to excel at everything; if anything, the pleasure of long silver nights, sequestered in our bedroom and long-practiced with one another, was more profound than what I'd know with Eärwen. But I'd expected marriage and expected—or at least hoped—that passion would accompany it. With Eärwen—I'd never known such a thing was possible: not only the friend-love or the electric pleasure of being with a woman, but that I would be desirable to one as precious as she. I still caught myself astounded by it: that she'd chosen me. That summer seemed an undeserved gift in my life.

Eärwen and I were never lovers again after that summer, but we remained great friends. Renowned even for our closeness across the boundaries of culture, language, and kindred. We stood at each other's weddings. She was present for the births of all of my children, and I was present for hers. We busied the messengers between our cities with our long, unrestrained letters. I could tell her things that shamed me to imagine confessing to anyone else: about my children, my husband, both my frustrations and triumphs. We spoke of that summer rarely, but we did speak of it. I confessed the fullness of my cluelessness and shock at the Telerin customs I'd encountered—lovemaking behind the dunes, heavy use of sugar-cane spirits, and not least of all, "friend-love"—and my delight in learning the many ways one could make love. "The first time you put your tongue—! I had no idea it would feel that way, that good," I wrote to her once. And she told me once—we were both heavily pregnant with our sons, my second and her first, and drinking juices together on a terrace in Alqualondë—"Your breasts, Anairë—you have magnificent breasts. Magnificent. I've never seen better breasts than yours. I can't even think of them. I did once in bed with Arafinwë and I came so fast he nearly tumbled off the balcony," and we laughed until we sobbed and a concerned servant fetched our husbands from their council to check on us. Naturally, we could not explain ourselves.

In the days after my arrival in Alqualondë, I cared for Eärwen. Her parents, despondent over the loss of both their sons, had departed almost immediately for the Máhanaxar, seeking the aid of the Valar. Her brothers, trained for the one-day abdication of their father, were dead. She steered the kingdom the way a passenger and sole survivor might wrench the wheel of the ship to keep it from crushing itself upon the rocks. Like Arafinwë, she was a third-born child; it was never expected that she would rule. Her life had been permitted to take another course.

She'd eaten almost nothing. Her body numbed with shock and grief, she'd sent what food arrived at her door to the families she knew had lost the most, not considering her own loss—itself grievous—as equivalent or similarly deserving of care. That was the first thing I changed. There was a fisherman who came on the second day. "She was always good to us, the princess," he explained. "My daughter was born without sight, and the princess would sit with her always at the sailing forth and tell her in such detail of everything so that she couldn't help but see it in her imagination as vividly as the rest of us used our eyes. I know—knew—her brothers—" He stopped there and held forth two meager fish. "There is not much now that the Light is gone, but after my daughter eats, I would see Princess Eärwen taken care of next."

A made a broth with the fish much like what she'd made for me when I'd been so sick with Turukáno. I'd convinced her into one of the plush sitting rooms reserved for guests waiting to see the king, but when I took the bowl of broth, I found her missing, working again at the scribe's desk, standing on legs that quivered with exhaustion.

I took her by the hand and led her to her bedroom. We'd said almost nothing to each other. What was there to say? That I was sorry that my husband—with whom she'd shared laughter and friendship—and my children who had called her aunt had become so drunk on Fëanáro's madness that they brought force against her unarmed people? That my people would make it better somehow? How? By trading handicrafts for dried fish? I led her to the big bed she'd shared with Arafinwë. It did not take much force to make her sit upon it. Her bones had begun to show through her flesh; her head tipped forward almost involuntarily with exhaustion, showing the delicate chain of vertebrae in her neck, bared by the brutal haircut.

I tried to press the bowl into her hands, but her fingers refused to close upon it, so I sat beside her and spooned broth toward her lips instead. At first, she refused to open her mouth. "Eärwen, you must eat." She shook her head. The uneven edge of her hair swished against the back of her neck. "You are no good to your people if you starve yourself." At last, her lips parted.

After a few spoonfuls, she took the bowl from me because I could not feed her fast enough. The spoon clattered to the floor and she gulped directly from the bowl, her throat working beneath her scrawny neck. When she finished, she left the bowl tipped to extract every last drop. Her eyes were squeezed shut, as though in bliss.

The bowl dropped from her hands. It hit the plush rug beside the bed and rolled harmlessly across the floor. Her trembling fingers, cupped still as though holding onto the bowl, clawed into fists. She bit her jutting knuckles; she raked her hair and pressed her fists into her eyes, but the sobs that wretched forth would not subside.

I drew her down to the bed and cupped my body around hers while she wept. I said no word, made no sound. She deserved to scream until the stars fled from the sky; I deserved to bite clean through my tongue if that's what it took to keep silence. My hands held her hands, as tiny and frail as fallen nestlings, while the pillow soaked her tears.

It did not take long for her to fall into sleep.

I extricated myself gently from beside her, meaning to go to the desk in the king's hall and see what she had been working on. But arriving at the door, a thought came to mind, and I stopped. I was Noldorin, one of the people who had attacked this city. Everything from my raven hair to my tall, upright bearing to the clothes upon my back—worn as they were by travel—spoke of my heritage. What might others think, if they saw me in the hall, saw me in the king's receiving room? I realized that I would be perceived as a threat to them, to these kind and gentle people who had once accepted me so unquestioningly into their midst, awkward and uptight though I'd been.

I receded from the door, the way a wave runs back to the comfort of the sea, compelled by its own weight. Briefly, I'd imagined myself making amends to the Telerin people through my labor, through my hard-earned skills in administration. By subjecting her people, as I had mine, to the deliberate forgetting of their grief by way of distraction. Eärwen would awaken and find solved the problems she'd toiled over so fruitlessly. There would be food and light and productive work again. People weaving nets and building ships and pushing their carts of oysters along the streets. One by one, the shrouds would come off the lamps. The city would gleam again on the margin of the sea, a scintilla against the black sides of the Pelóri. I could never heal their grief—I would never want to, for that would mean that the dead would be forgotten—but they'd push past it with me at their fore: a Noldo, redeeming her people through her unselfish commitment to healing the hearts of the Telerin people before even considering her own.

Unselfish. I laughed bitterly at myself and my cowardice, so great that I could not bring myself to rejoin Eärwen on the bed. Instead, I lay myself upon a sofa, too small for my long legs, and allowed the weariness of my journey and the unremitting sorrow of the dark to drag me into sleep.

But not a dreamless sleep. In my dreams, I walked the road with my exiled family, north along the beach where the mountains crowded unto the edge of the sea itself. There was Irissë, tall and dark-haired, looking so much like me that I flinched for a moment, fearing that my arrival in Alqualondë had been the dream and I'd in fact departed with my husband, amid the exiles and kinslayers. But no, there was a wild spark in her eye that had never been in mine; the wind toyed with her hair as it never did mine, ever constrained as it was by pins. She was looking out into the sheet of darkness where the horizon hid. The lamps of the stolen ships bobbed gently beyond the beach. She, who had never been on more than a punt on a pond, was willing—even eager—to board one of those ships and seek the congealed darkness where the sky met the sea.

I awoke with a start. Eärwen still slept, her body a wisp in the bed. I rose from the sofa and returned to stand in the doorway, wondering how my daughter could long for unseen, dangerous lands and I feared this, that I might give offense in my attempt to help. The hallway before me was familiar, made uncomfortable not even by the darkness—for Alqualondë had always lain in shadow—but by the treachery of my kin that made that darkness a perilous thing.

I stepped forth.

For hours, I worked over the papers Eärwen had left on the desk. Like Tirion, Alqualondë had been decimated, though not by exile but by murder, and the workings of the city stalled as will a wheel crushed on one side. A murdered fisherman fed fifteen families, who in turn provided for the needs of many more with their crafts and skills. Those families now hunted ineptly in rowboats, their own labors abandoned and other families left without and attempting to compensate. She been trying to make a diagram to balance the myriad needs of her surviving people among the ones who were left, constructing artificially what had once been managed by want and need in the way that animals in a landscape achieved a balance among themselves driven by hunger and satiation.

She'd made many copies, discarding each in turn when it became too cluttered with notes and erasures. Her handwriting slumped into illegibility as exhaustion and frustration took stronger hold of her. On her most recent effort, the lines careened wildly and the writing trailed off into nothing.

Sudden tears stung my eyes. I imagined her, day after day, in front of this desk, trying to save her people with pen and paper, turning away those who would feed and care for her to those she claimed were more deserving, growing thinner and wearier and—

"What have you done?"

She stood in the doorway, tiny in her dress, her shorn hair uneven around her ears. Her eyes were sunk into shadow; her shoulders were thrown back and her hands fisted at her side. "What have you done?" she asked again.

It was a question with many answers. What had I done? I had attempted to untangle her dilemma; I had done that. (And I'd begun to succeed, at least: The problem was the shortage of fishermen, who'd experienced higher rates of mortality in the initial assault on the ships, and the lack of ships for those who remained to use.) But I was also stricken with the urge to scream at her that I'd done nothing, that it was the sin of my husband and, most of all, his half-brother that had taken the lives of so many of her people. I'd braved the darkness to come to her, to decipher the papers on the desk before me; that was what I'd done!

But if I allowed time to spool backward from there, what had I done? Was there a moment, done differently, that might have changed things? A time when I should have spoken but stayed silent, should have acted but held still? A moment when I could have unequivocally insisted to my children that they must always value the lives of the innocent above all else? How could I have known that such an unthinkable possibility would ever be needed? What could I have done to ensure that they'd stood with the innocent Teleri rather than, to a child, joining their father in his headlong flight at his brother's heels?

Surely there was something.

But how to answer that, how to tease forth that moment from the millions that made up our peaceful life before the Darkening? How to hold that moment forth to Eärwen as an answer? How to make amends?

I chose, as perhaps my people always had, the answer with the least moral complexity. I held up her papers. "It's the fishermen," I said. "And the ships. Fix that and the rest won't be perfect, no, but will begin to fall into place."

It took a long moment, but love of her people brought her forward and to my side, the dim, shrouded light bringing her eyes from their shadowed hollows—reddened, swollen by tears—skipping from mine to the papers I pushed toward her. It was love of her people that made her listen, staring intently at her aborted diagrams so that she did not have to look at me; it was love of her people who brought her to rest against my side.

The fleet of swanships had once been the marvel of Alqualondë, scrubbed so white by industrious mariners that they were nearly luminous; a forest of masts swaying against the star-bright sky. I'd been aboard the ships before, with Eärwen's brothers, and knew the feeling of elation that came with soaring across the water at the speed of the wind.

The boats dragged down to the beach by the fishermen Eärwen had recruited were so pathetic in comparison that I felt a sting of shame that, after being robbed by my husband's people, his wife should witness this moment of their shame. Rowboats, barges, a few children's sailboats, two oared sculls that were used for navigating beyond the mouths of rivers. And as we stood in a clump and surveyed our "fleet," the unspoken plight: Most of the nets had been aboard the ships in the harbor, the ships my husband's people had stolen.

"It is a beginning," I offered at last, feeling I must say something. Eärwen strode away, down the beach, to inspect the boats. The fishermen began to shift from foot to foot, looking at their hands, and I knew they sought a way to disperse.

I followed Eärwen. "Are they seaworthy?" I asked. She was inspecting one of the sculls, her hands on her hips and biting her lip. She shrugged and moved to the next scull, lifting its bow and dropping it almost disdainfully back to the sand.

I remembered earlier (that day? who knew, without the Trees), when we looked over the diagrams together, the feeling of her at my side: her hip against mine, the warmth of her body. She hadn't been the Eärwen I remembered and loved, but how could she be? Nonetheless, as we pointed to the same place on the page and our hands brushed, there was hope, wasn't there? That the love between us hadn’t been irreparably destroyed by my husband and his half-brother?

I was less sure of that now. She turned to face the sea, her back to the boats. Desperately, I pressed on, running my hands over the scull as though I knew what I was assessing. "If they are in disrepair, I will send my fastest rider back to Tirion. We have woodworkers, and they are not shipbuilders, but a enough of your shipbuilders survived that my woodworkers could act as apprentices, as assistants, and—"

"No." Her voice was abrupt in a way I'd never known Eärwen capable of speaking, sharp as a slap. "My people can never be indebted to your people again. You see how it served us last time."

She progressed down the row of boats, lifting some or tipping them to inspect their hulls. Stung by her words, I hung back. She had reached a tiny sailboat, big enough for maybe three children. Even in the dimness, I could see that it had been brightly painted, although the paint had chipped with age and enthusiastic use. Its stern was labeled with a name: Seahawk, childishly simple, although the script was an elaborate, swirling Tengwar, not the Sarati that many of the Teleri still used when required to write.

Eärwen dropped to her knees, shoulders shaking, beside the boat. Made wary by her earlier outburst, I edged quietly behind her. She sobbed now into arms folded onto the side of the boat. "I cherish this little ancient thing," she wept. "And I want to burn it down."

The Seahawk was a gift from the high prince Fëanáro to the sons of Olwë, Eärwen's brothers. He did not construct it—there were some things even Fëanáro could not do—but the finest shipwright in Alqualondë was commissioned to do so, and Fëanáro named the boat, inscribing the name in the Tengwar script he'd just invented. The story as it is told is interesting because its meaning is construed differently whether told by a Noldorin or Telerin speaker. The Noldor use the little boat and its elegantly written name as one of many symbols of the unity between the two peoples, something they were eager to establish after their sundering with the Vanyar. The Teleri, however, take a comic approach to the story, using Fëanáro's insistence on the Tengwar—which no one yet used, even among his own people—as droll example of his stubborn brilliance. Fëanáro was beloved by the Teleri—the first son of their old friend Finwë—and he was almost mythic to them.

One by one, the fishermen dragged the boats into the sea, launching them directly from the beach. As though pitying them, Ossë had kept the sea calm, nearly as flat as a pond, but as soon as all had passed the breakwater, a brisk wind arose and carried them south to where the fish used to feed when there was still Light to spill through the Calacirya. They took all of the boats except the Seahawk.

Eärwen wept long, kneeling at its side. When she stopped, I longed to comfort her, to gather her into my arms and return with her to the palace, to tuck her into bed and feed her soup as I had when I'd first arrived, but I was not brave enough to dare to touch her. At last, she tipped off of her knees, fell over onto her hip, and sat with her legs extended to her side in the sand. She stared out at the sea.

"You can sit beside me, Anairë," she said, wiping her eyes with the backs of her wrists. "I'm sorry about before."

"Don't be!" I rushed to reassure her, but she silenced me with a quick shake of her head. "You were right to look to fishermen and ships and nets as the source of our trouble, but that's not it. That's not our trouble at all."

She slid her hand down the side of the boat, leaving blue flecks of paint on her palm. "They used to act so stupid in this thing. I remember them trying to sneak out on it during the sailing forth and nearly crushing themselves between two big ships, because they were trying to hide from our father. And then them trying to shoot fish with arrows. Or the time they brought up a baby shark on it and nearly killed— They never used to let me on it. But I stole it once along with Eallindalë—remember her? her family hosted you your first time here?—and we sailed it all up and down the beach. They were furious. We laughed so hard at them running up and down the sand and waving their arms like that would bring us to heel. Your husband went out on it once, when he was just a little boy. He got seasick all over himself.

"My father used to say that our people were the sea and the sand. We were the sea; yours were the sand. Separate and different but at the end of each, where we meet, impossible to separate from one another. You can go into the waves, even now, and they are filled with sand; you can feel the sand beneath us and it is filled with sea." She pressed her hand to the damp sand, and a little water welled up between her fingers.

"Even him. Even … Fëanáro." Her eyes darted to mine and quickly away. "He is still mixed up in us. He was right that much of what we have, we owe to you. He was right in what he said, though maybe not in what he asked for it. I don't know." She brushed the flecks of blue paint from her palm.

And you and me? I imagined myself asking it; I imagined her turning to me and the depth of the kiss between us and the tiniest kindling of joy in her grief-darkened heart, caused by me.

As though she sensed my thought, she looked again at me and asked, "And you, Anairë? Why did you stay behind? Why didn't you follow your husband and all of your children on your people's righteous quest?"

"Because of you," I said without thinking. "I stayed for you."

She watched me in silence for a long moment before she asked, "Have I really meant that much to you?"

And there it was: the old fear. The fear that the love for her that I'd long cherished and held in my heart—imagining, if I was truly honest, that when the years of the children were past, then we might love one another again and share our lives apart from our husbands—was more mine than hers. That my people's relative uptightness around matters of love and sex had caused me to assign extra meaning to what, for Eärwen, had been just a summer dalliance, one of at least as many as there had been summers before she'd settled on Arafinwë.

My voice was that of the shy girl I'd once been, stepping onto the beach in a bathing costume for the first time: "Of course you have."

We watched the sea for a long while. The waves were coming in stronger now with the wind Ossë had made for the fisherman. We could see their tiny lights upon the dark water to the south of us, could occasionally hear their calls and whistles to one another. They were one with the stars—impossibly bright—behind them.

Slowly, Eärwen tipped until she leaned against me.

The tide rose and the sea licked at our toes but left the Seahawk alone, as though Ossë too wasn't sure how to feel about its reappearance there on the beach. My arm circled her tiny shoulders and, growing brave, drew her tighter against me. The waves washed my feet and left them wet and cold and lightly brushed with sand.

When the fishermen returned, the Telerin people came down to the beach to share in the catch. Someone had started a fire, and most cleaned and cooked their fish right there. I watched how they arranged themselves: The children were fed first, then the weak and grieving. There were few unshorn heads in the crowd, and they held back until last, when there was little left to take.

I kept away, out of the reach of the firelight, in the shadow of a dune. Eärwen did not try to dissuade me when I wordlessly stepped aside as her people began to arrive. I watched how she took their hands, held many of the women, who wept upon her shoulders. She held an orphaned child on her lap and fed him bites of fish from her fingers. Already a petite people, they were left scrawny from hunger, their cut hair making their heads look overlarge, like the heads of reeds bowing over bodies as slim as grass, bending but unbroken by the storm.

Instead of letting the fire gutter when all the fish was gone, they brought more driftwood and piled it high until the beach was nearly as bright as it had been when the Trees yet lived. I remembered Tirion in the firelight: the shifting shadows and the reddish glow making the colors of the Royal Square look sinister. But I'd seen this beach by firelight many times before. The dunes were dichromic—orange and black—and the light from the fire danced upon the water. The people sat in a circle, facing the fire with the shadows at their back.

They sang. They sang songs of the Great Journey, songs that were full of cautious hope but, too, with a bitter note of grief. They sang an ode to firelight that I'd never imagined was still remembered—I'd only read it among the folksongs collected by Noldorin loremasters—that personified a battle between shadow and light. They sang in gratitude to the fish that had fed them and the stars that had guided the fishermen. They sang in memory of those they'd lost: another, I'd assumed, forgotten song. The dialect was old, using a word that had become their word for monster. They sang in memory of those taken by the monster.

In the Seahawk, still marooned upon the beach, a trio of children played, grief salved by play as only children can be. The pointed at the dark horizon and shouted about the lights of the Valar that they saw, rising above the edge of the sea.

"Pardon me? Miss?" The child had the flawless manners and language of the Noldor; his cut hair still rippled with the memory of braids. The fine embroidery of his tunic suggested he was a noble's son, perhaps having been fostered to the very people who would later slay his family. "Miss, Princess Eärwen wanted you to have this."

On a wooden trencher, he presented me a filet of fish, speckled with the pungent herbs that grew in the sandy soil behind the dunes. At the scent of the herbs, my stomach let out a shameless brrr of hunger.

"Princess Eärwen is kind," I said, "but I am not hungry." My stomach grumbled at the lie. "But she—" I pointed to a young woman who sat alone, her long hair conspicuous— "she didn't eat." She hadn't; she'd offered her plate to a young man with three clinging children who'd given his entire portion to them. "Please offer it to her, if you'd be so kind."

I watched him scamper across the sand and offer her the trencher. Surprised eyes darted toward the dunes as she accepted the food, trying to find her benefactor amid the shadows, but I was already slipping away, back toward the palace and the dimmed lights of the city.

The room that had belonged to the Noldorin scribe employed to report on Olwë's court was not hard to find. She'd—I almost smiled when I found a lone formal gown left in the closet—taken her books and left her ledgers behind. I almost smiled again at how Noldorin was the assumption that one's books were included in the order to "travel light," but the realization that the documentation of the history of the Teleri wasn't important enough to take quickly sobered me again.

There was a lantern on the desk with a Fëanorian lamp inside. The lantern had a sliding door that controlled the amount of light released into the room but also star-shaped cutouts along the top that, when opened, threw an array of stars across the ceiling. Winding a small crank caused them to circle slowly as they did in the sky. It was a child's lantern; I'd had one for Findekáno in the timid years of his early youth, when he'd refused to sleep without it if the drapes were shut. In typical Noldorin fashion, the constellations were precisely rendered, pivoting with Telumendil at their center. Findekáno's had been as well.

I found bedclothes in the chest at the foot of the bed and quickly assembled them upon the feather mattress; she'd taken all of her nightdresses, so I stripped to my underclothes and slid into the bed. I stared at the stars slowly careening across the ceiling. My mind ached with all there was yet to do, but the bed was soft—if narrow—and it did not take long for me to sleep.

I dreamed of Eärwen. I dreamed of her as she'd been when I'd come here in my youth, only she stole the Seahawk with me and not Eallindalë, and she was standing at its prow holding a line that ran to the sail. The wind pressed her dress against her body and whipped through her unbraided hair, yet unshorn by grief. I could see the impression of her collarbones, her nipples, the dimple of her navel. The fabric was as thin as water. The boat rocked us in a rhythm like lovemaking.

I awoke pressing my hips into the mattress, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the meal I'd missed.

The company I'd brought from Tirion reappeared the next day while I worked in the receiving room with Eärwen. I felt a momentary pang of guilt—I'd forgotten they even existed—followed by a wash of gratitude to the Teleri and their inestimable hospitality, for they'd all been taken in by local families and sheltered and fed despite their dark hair, plodding accents, and Noldorin garb.

To their credit, they knelt before Eärwen and bowed their heads. No one apologized, but if I hadn't found the words, how could I expect they had? They did offer their service to her, one by one, eyes still averted.

She regarded them for a moment, half-turned with her elbow flung over the back of her chair, and I remembered her bitter refusal of my own offer, citing the price her people had paid for our friendship after their arrival. But this time, she nodded quickly as she turned back to the papers we'd been working over. "You want to serve? Then you can help with making nets."

My company showed, if anything, too much enthusiasm and gratitude for the opportunity. Nets were typically made by the older children among the Teleri; it was hardly a suitable task for skilled adults. Among the Teleri, it was almost a rite of passage to join what they called "netting parties," weaving nets as they sang the ancient songs that instilled the nets with strength beyond the strength of the rope alone and taught them to drift where the fish lay most plentiful. Copious amounts of rum were smuggled into such parties, as I'd learned in my summer here was typical of any activity involving young Teleri, and instead of diminishing the quality of their work, the intoxication that soon resulted deepened the song and made the nets, if anything, stronger and more effective.

I'd gone once or twice during my summer here; Eallindalë was a bit too old for netting parties but still attended from time to time for nostalgia's sake and brought me along. It was not a difficult task, but I remembered the way the ropes had pricked and chafed my hands and how I was swiftly excused by my hosts to sit to the side with a large glass of spirits to assuage my pain. And though I have a fair voice, I could not impersonate the songs they sang, which carried at their heart the rhythm that drove the sea.

My company situated with a group of Telerin adolescents to show them the craft of netting, Eärwen and I returned to our work. I studied her as she bent over the papers she'd placed between us: the familiar face wearing an emotion I'd have thought impossible for her to manifest, like someone was costumed as her. Yet with that glittering joyfulness peeled away, the core of her beauty stood forth, and I could not glance at her face without my eyes lingering upon it: with hunger and grief, no longer pretty but my Eärwen nonetheless, and she was beautiful. My mind skipped to my dream the night before and away: As we sought to heal her shattered people, I could not entertain even the possibility of something like that. It would be a long while before she was ready for such a kind of love, and it would serve me well to emulate her restraint. I resigned myself to this.

We were crafting letters to the Valar and the Vanyar, begging aid and alliance. Eärwen's parents had set out for Máhanaxar, but were aid forthcoming, it should have arrived by now. We could only assume they, too, had been lost or the Valar—perhaps experiencing their own form of grief—had refused their plea. I had considered proposing a similar letter to Arafinwë, accepting the allegiance and aid he'd offered and formalizing our friendship once more, but I could not imagine how I might ask for such a thing.

The Teleri had never fully embraced literacy. While their noble-born children learned to read and write in both the Sarati and Tengwar, and certain trades taught a limited literacy intended almost solely for accounting, the tendency to document and collect that typified the Noldor—and characterized to a lesser extent the Vanyar also—had never afflicted them. But all of the Teleri knew a dizzying array of songs and most could compose extemporaneously. They had a series of formulas for various purposes, from epic stories to messages, that aided in the memorization of long flights of speech never recorded into writing. Their fishermen remembered years' worth of catches, weaving the numbers into patterns unbound by the mathematical rules learned by Noldorin children.

I, on the other hand, had been taught fully in the literate tradition of the Noldor. I thought more easily with my pen than my voice, and I converted Eärwen's words into the sort of written text expected by the Valar and Vanyar and likely to gain the result we sought. Normally the message would be sent by a trained messenger, who would recite it upon arrival, but all but the Teleri tended to regard these messages with patronizing amusement (I did not tell Eärwen this, but it seemed she knew), and without debate, we'd both accepted that a written plea would serve better.

At last, the letters were complete to both of our satisfactions and all that remained was to make a fair copy. I did not have nearly the scribal skills of the Noldorin woman who'd served in Olwë's court—I'd paged through her ledgers and admired her lettering so fine it was like poetry poured forth as ink, recounting the results of debates and the decisions of kings—but if I took my time, my hand was fair enough.

I uncapped the scribe's ink—she'd left several near-empty bottles in obeying Fëanáro's order to travel light—and began carefully shaping the letters. Eärwen watched me work in silence, her face drawn downward into a frown, her eyes gone misty and distant with thoughts I dared not probe. I pretended the letters required more concentration than they actually needed.

"Have you sensed—" Eärwen began and then stopped. For a long moment, there was only the distant, ever-present whisper of the sea, as silent as our own breath. "Them?"

I knew who she meant: my children, Nolofinwë. I'd used the growing sense of distance with Nolofinwë to pardon, in my own mind, the inappropriate dream I'd had the night before.

"Your husband? Your children?" she asked, as though I could possibly question her meaning.

I nodded and let the execution of an elaborate flourish buy me a few extra moments of silence while I collected my thoughts. "Yes," I said at last. "I feel them like … like when a wagon used to depart during the silver hours and would keep a lantern lit to signal other drivers? The way the light would get smaller and smaller as it went down the road." I kept my eyes on the page; my penstrokes were flawless and firm. "But unless something blocked it, it never disappeared. It was still there. Faint and far."

"It is the same for me," she said. "I feel Arafinwë; he is not far, in Tirion. But my children? Although I would say it is like when a ship goes out to sea. The mariners are singing their songs to summon the current and entice the fishes, and when they depart from the harbor, you can still distinguish the voices you know. It was that way at first. I'd feel Findaráto, bright like Helluin when he first rises in the east, and the sweet song of Artaher, and Angaráto and Aikanáro like the crashing waves and the dancing flame, and Artanis as livid as a fanfare. But then the ship slips further away, and you hear them, but their voices are just a muddle, like many reduced into one. And then—"

She did not finish. She did not need to. And then they are gone. Silent.

I shook my head. "We will always hear them," I asserted with a confidence I did not feel. "They are our children, and they remain a part of our world, exile or no."

But I knew exactly what she meant and could feel my connection to them diminishing even as I claimed it would never disappear. She was right: Their voices—the individual feels of their feär—were muddled. They were now but the Children of Nolofinwë, in concert, no longer each with his or her own distinct note. Even Nolofinwë was becoming harder to hear, a bass note subsumed beneath their collective song. I found there was suddenly much about him that I could not recall: the way he would sigh over long work, the quirk of his mouth when he was trying not to laugh at something the children had done, the way his hand would weasel under my pillow and the way I had to fit my own around it. I remembered them the way I "remembered" history I'd only read or heard in song. They were no longer palpable, no longer features of my life.

I wiped my eyes before the sudden tears dripped and ruined my work.

"Anairë—"

"I am fine," I insisted. "The letter is nearly finished now."

She took the pen from my hand. I almost protested that the ink would gum in the reservoir, but then she put her arms around my neck and fitted her face against my throat. There were many things I'd forgotten, I realized; this was one of them. The way, that first summer, she would embrace me at our departure with a tiny kiss on the neck—

Only this was not departure. I don't know what it was: a beginning? a revival? I felt her lips against my throat, never pressing into a kiss but against the throbbing artery as though reminding herself that not all she loved were gone from her. I wrapped my arms around her and drew her fully into me so that the lengths of our bodies were touching: hearts, hips, awkward knees and raveling feet.

Her lips on my neck drifted to my mouth.

"Arafinwë," I said weakly.

"Who was it," she whispered, "who came to me? To us? My brothers lay dead upon the quay, and Arafinwë did not so much as stop for them. He saw the horror and turned away."

"He sent me to you." I felt a sudden bizarre need to assert this, to forestall betrayal of he who had orchestrated this very moment I'd craved since I departed Alqualondë that summer so long ago.

"He did. He sent you to me."

I succumbed to the kiss.

It was not overlong, nor did we become whelmed with passion. If this was a ballad, we would have made love there and then, and the touch of the other would have healed both our broken hearts. But the grief was still far too near: her slain people and the receding lights of our children. Nolofinwë. Arafinwë. A lifetime littered with small errors in judgment—things unspoken or permitted to be spoken—that, in the presence of a more courageous heart, might have subtly diverted what our people would become. But we kissed, and we held each other for a long while, and though the grief still battered against us, cold as sleet and hard as hail, we stood a bit stronger against it because of each other.

The boats can one by one to the shore, rasping onto the sand, barely stilled before their steersmen were bounding from their bows and dragging them up past the tideline. I could never stand comfortably in a boat; even in the swanships on a calm sea, the queasy feel of the tilting floor beneath me made me clutch the railing.

"Raise the lanterns," Eärwen instructed my company, who stood uncomplaining with bandaged hands after a day of weaving nets. The fishermen were spreading their catch onto the beach, and the lights would signal the people of the city to come and claim their food.

I receded into the shadows of the dunes, as before. The people came forth in near-silence, but the conversation swelled a little as they began to cook and eat their fish. They gave generous gifts of food as thanks to the fishermen, who surreptitiously passed it on to children and the wounded. Eärwen dug amid the slimy pile to make sure that the choicest fishes went to the families most in need of them. The line of people from the city flowed until the beach was nearly full.

A song began of the type that we Noldor called a drowning; the Teleri did not classify and names things as we did, and it was simply a song to them. We called it a drowning because, in it, the focal character always drowned at the end and arose in the next verse as someone new so that the song threaded among lives the way a dolphin bobbed through the waves. The song was passed among many singers, branching into many strands all sung at once upon the beach to the same tune but with different words, all rioting against each other at the same time until it became a roar of sound matched to a single rhythm. Like much of Telerin art, the form blended the joyful and sorrowful seamlessly. Like the sea.

"My lady?" One of my company stood above me, holding out a generous portion of fish. Anticipating my disproval over the size of the portion, he quickly added, "They would not accept our refusal to—"

"No. They would not have." I accepted the plate. "Thank you."

The words of the drowning had become incomprehensible, both by the multitude of simultaneous verses and by the roar of conversation arising around them. It did not matter; the song flowed on, drowned, arose anew in fresh form. No one listened; they cooked and conversed and picked bones from plates of fish that they fed to children. Life spooled on regardless of the attention of those who sang dooms.

I kept to the shadows as I returned to the city so that none would see me leave. The music faded behind me, and the light became muted, still. The lanterns here were still swathed. A light breeze lifted the fabric so that it tickled my arms as I kept to the sides of the streets—not that there was anyone in the city to see me. All, it seemed, had gone to the beach.

I climbed the stairs to the palace and retreated to the scribe's small bedroom. The persistent, thrumming tune of the drowning was caught in my head as I dressed for bed. Faintly, muffled by walls, a bell clanked on a balcony somewhere, alerting to the rising wind. I wondered if a storm was coming, and if it was, if the Teleri would come in from the beach. I imagined them running in with the rain, holding whatever cloth was available over their heads, but it was hard to imagine such a scene without laughter, and while they'd recovered speech and song, there was as yet no laughter.

I lay down on the narrow bed, the tune still churning over and over again in my mind. I did not have the skill to fit words to it; in studying oral Telerin verse, Noldorin scribes had detected certain patterns that made extemporaneous composition possible, even at high tempos, for skilled Telerin bards. But it was not a skill I possessed, to imagine the existence of someone for the fleeting moment of a song. My thoughts began to fit myself to the song: the only person I knew well enough.

Who would I be in such a song? The best bards brought a person forth with just a handful of traits, made them as real as a person you might drink tea with, and then drowned them at the end. I would be—what? A mother, a wife. A scholar. Unskilled with my hands—I could not even knit—but intelligent and ambitious, living in my head most of the time. Unexciting from the outside. Livelier and more passionate, I hoped, to those who knew me. Meticulous and exacting and still nervous when I had to speak before a group. Alive mostly in the words I penned to the page.

I drowned myself in the song: let myself walk the wrong way from the dunes into the tide instead of the city. I was uninteresting: just a Noldorin caricature. But I had no one to replace myself with, for I was an author who could not compose a poem, so the song spun wordlessly over and over through my brain until sleep collected me.

I dreamed of fire on a different beach, of Irissë's hands feeding the flames. It was her turn on watch, for the nights were too cold where they were to allow the fire to die. Her brothers had, naturally, tried to spare her the obligation of a watch but she'd sworn at them using the kinds of words I'd never spoken and taken the middle watch to spite them. She was facing north, the Pelóri hanging overhead at her left hand, the snow at more than the peaks but trailing nearly to the beach. The bitter-cold sea left great gobs of foam on the beach, and she rubbed her hands in the direction of the fire; it seemed the dampness never left her bones these days. To the north, the play of starlight on ice gave the sky a greenish hue. Every now and then, the sky flickered with the intimation of lightning and a storm to the south.

I awoke to a violent crack of thunder like the sky over the palace had split in half. Without the Trees and our clever Noldorin timepieces, I did not know the hour, but my mouth was sticky with deep sleep. Thunder poured across the sky like a storm surge from the sea will claim an entire expanse of beach.

I rose from the cot, filled with sudden uneasiness. I wrapped the sheet around myself and went barefoot to the broad balcony behind the king's receiving room. The sky was orchid, livid with lightning that darted from the fat bellies of clouds to the sea.

Eärwen leaned against the railing, pressing forward as though striving to see something in the far distance. Her short hair stuck to her neck; it was as I'd imagined, and they'd been caught in the rain. A drowning of their drowning. I almost laughed. I almost turned away. I took my place beside her at the railing. The scent of lemon rose from her, used to scrub the stench of fish from her hands.

"Something is happening," she whispered to me. "Do you feel it? Ossë is mustering against someone."

In the ceaseless pulses of lightning, I could see the clouds trundling north along the coast. Toward my children and hers, lying in a ring around a fire, defenseless and cold. To the north, the lightning forked over and over until it almost hurt to look upon.

We both knew who Ossë mustered against. Fëanáro had turned his stolen ships into the open sea. I imagined those ships as they'd been at the sailing forth, pale against the dark sea, canting wildly into the crevasses between swells. I reached for my children and felt them, faint and far, but they were not afraid. It was as I'd seen in my dream.

"They are not aboard," I whispered to myself. Eärwen overhead me and nodded.

But the sons of Nerdanel were. I had little love for Fëanáro, who'd always faulted my husband for something far beyond his control, but I'd known his sons in the innocence of their childhoods and saw them as Nerdanel must. The men they became—even what they'd done here in Alqualondë—could never efface the bright-eyed, eager children they'd been, not to a mother. Of this, I could say nothing to Eärwen. But I grieved for the terror of the boys they'd once been, of the sudden wakefulness I knew had stricken Nerdanel, far away in Tirion.

The rain came then, vigorous as though a bucket had been overturned above us, roaring against the roof that covered the balcony.

I could no longer bear to watch the storm that tore at the sea. I turned to return to bed, but Eärwen caught my hand: "Not yet," she said. Her damp hair was forming little curls along her forehead and neck.

"The storm …" I began, but she kissed me silent.

We ended up in my room, in the narrow bed that had belonged to the Noldorin scribe appointed by my father-in-law to serve in her father's court: one dead, the other missing. The lightning came only as a faint flicker under the door, the thunder and rain muted. She kissed as one starved for love—her body atop mine—and I responded in kind. I had not succumbed so senselessly to passion since Nolofinwë and I had been most intensely trying for Irissë. Somewhere in the roar of sensation that was my body, I was vaguely aware that my legs were indecorously splayed, one calf pressed across Eärwen's back to grind her against me. She was pawing away the sheet in which I'd wrapped myself, whimpering her pleasure once my breasts were bared to her kisses.

I'd forgotten something about myself in my song. I'd forgotten this.

Did it make me interesting enough to be worthy of a Telerin bard? I doubted it—to love one like oneself was hardly notable among the Teleri—but it made me worthy of her, and that was all that suddenly seemed to matter. Nolofinwë had become the faintest wobble of a sound, somewhere upon a beach far to the north, waiting for ships that may not now return, but he was gone to me. The years of our lives together were over.

Eärwen and I eventually came to rest at each other's sides. The narrowness of the bed, the bedclothes kicked upon the floor did not matter. We were twined as one together, our heartbeats slowing in time with each other as, outside, the storm at last subsided.

Then came the day of my drowning.

Time was lost in the darkness, the hours marked now by need: hunger, thirst, sleep. There was food on the beach each night, or what we now called night. I sometimes fancied that the Trees might blaze to life again: Laurelin at her zenith as we slept in what we would have sworn was the night. I kept still to the shadow of the dunes My company helped and were fed and brought food to me. I left when the songs began. Some nights, Eärwen came to me; other nights, she did not.

Arafinwë stirred in my thoughts. Anairë, our need here grows greater. What word from Alqualondë? But I could not ask for a share of their meager daily catch, even to save the innocent among my people. Our suffering in Tirion seemed small, a child's sandcastle beside the Pelóri that was the ongoing Telerin grief. Eärwen—herself still emaciated and rarely taking her full share of food—slipped away one afternoon, and I learned later that she'd attended a funeral for a woman who'd died of grief, her husband and only son having been slain by Fëanáro's people. No—I stared it in the face—possibly my husband's people. Possibly Nolofinwë or one of my sons or even my beautiful, fearless daughter, whose vision had become my dreams. I watched her feet pick carefully over ice in suede boots made for riding in the forests of Valinor. I inspected her white, bruised body and hands that quaked with cold. She would have taken up a sword beside her brothers.

For two nights after, Eärwen did not come to me.

Other such deaths would follow, I knew. Better to die of hunger than that. From behind the dunes, I watched as some of the people who came to the beach each night seemed to diminish, growing almost translucent so that it was possible to miss seeing them unless looking directly at them. When they began to look that way, I knew they'd shortly stop coming altogether.

I did not have the words to ask the aid of a people who suffered so because of us.

Eärwen and some of the other noble ladies began to take meals to those who would no longer come to the beach. I sent my company to the kitchens to prepare those meals. The lemon juice they washed with after preparing slabs of smoked fish and seaweed salads stung their hands made raw by weaving nets, but they did not complain. When my use as a scribe was unneeded, I worked beside them.

Then came the day of my drowning.

Eärwen came that night to sleep in my little stuffy scribe's room. As I listened to her breathing deepening into sleep, I made up my mind that I'd ask her tomorrow about aid for my people. We had proven useful here; perhaps we could arrange an exchange and send workers in exchange for fish, seaweed, and rice. Arafinwë had been pressing at my mind with urgency again lately, but I shut him out. Courage, Anairë, I thought to myself as I prepared to drift into dreams of Irissë and ice and the strange lights that ribboned across the northern sky. I awoke each morning, expecting my hands to be numb with cold.

Her boots were wearing along the bottoms. She stepped wrong once and was speared in the sole of her foot with a needle of ice, so she stepped carefully now, feeling with her toes and shifting her weight only slowly. I felt a dull ache of grief; someone had died. None of mine—I would have felt that—but the memory haunted even my daughter, who was affected by so little. She was climbing a hill of ice, sliding back nearly as far as she advanced with each step, wincing at the keen-edged cold even through her mittens as she drew herself up onto the summit. Standing, turning to someone: Findekáno, his breath coming in quick bursts of steam. They caught each other's glance; even in the midst of such misery, they were proud of their vigor. Many in their company could no longer make that climb, but their bodies had been strengthened by the hardship like wires drawn taut. It was Findekáno who turned his eyes forward first, his face relaxing into astonishment: "There are mountains just—" and I had a glimpse of another land, of mountains and a coast curving to the south, before all went dark.

I surfaced from sleep with the screaming gasp of a drowning woman admitting water into her lungs. It was like the Darkening: something so omnipresent suddenly denied that I felt my hands fumbling around me as though I could physically draw it back to me. I bumped Eärwen, the wall, the bedpost hard enough to bruise my hand. Since Findekáno's life had first kindled within me, I hadn't been without the sense of my children, but they were gone, gone, gone. Not dead but denied me, having traversed to the other, forbidden land. It was as Arafinwë had said: The Valar had fenced them apart from us as punishment for their transgression—but they were my children. I did not know what to do with this sudden empty space inside me.

I became aware of Eärwen in flickers of cognizance. It was like childbirth, the way the pain becomes so commanding that all else comes only in bursts, only the pain now was much, much worse. It was the kind that threatened never to end. I became aware of Eärwen, her eyes bulged and her jaw slack as though she might scream if she could find the voice. Then the fumbling emptiness again, and when I saw her again, one hand was clawed into her hair and the other waved in front of her as though feeling for something in the dark.

That was the night of my drowning.

When the song was taken up again, what would I become? All about myself that remained without my children and Nolofinwë had come unmoored and drifted, none of it coherent enough to reshape into a person. I felt as though I'd been made of glass and shattered, yet some of the pieces simply vanished upon impact, and I could never be made whole and would always crumple in upon myself if I tried.

This was the death of grief, something we'd been forewarned of by the Valar as in our nature to suffer but lacking in logic and so scarcely believed. The body could be slain by the slow wasting borne of need: of food, of water, of air, of warmth. The fëa, could be wasted similarly. Ever unspooling upon the thread of time, grief caused it to seize upon a moment and scrabble backward, desperately seeking something in the past it had scarcely known it needed until, suddenly, it did. I was trying to claw my way back to times I hadn't thought to appreciate until now. Findekáno sniveling as a little boy before his cousins discovered his valor. Turukáno pestering me for a very specific and hard-to-find type of pen. Irissë bringing me talentless drawings that I was ashamed to display. Moments when I felt annoyed and wished my children elsewhere and ached now to have back. Grasping, as time roared forward without me, my spirit was torn apart as though by shrapnel in a storm.

There were glimpses of the present in the midst of it: Eärwen, her eyes overlarge and luminous in her gray face, clutching at her chest with hands crooked into claws as though she could open the place where her children had resided and invite them back in. My company, blanched, faces slack, assailed by similar losses as spouses and children passed into the Outer Lands. Broth guided to my face; a taste of fish and salt. Bedclothes, hot and unwashed. My hand, extended, and a light shining pink through it. Eärwen, a solid silhouette, dressing for the day. Hands cradling my head that smelled of lemons.

Croaking out once, "Why am I still alive?" and Eärwen, seated at my bedside, not replying but giving me a look that answered both meanings of the question: Because I cared for you. And to my why, something wordless, vast, eternal: a lingering kiss upon my forehead.

I was still ill when the first exchange between the Noldor and the Teleri transpired. Eärwen had decided, it seemed, to renew the codependence of our people. Without me (but perhaps because of me?) she established contact with Arafinwë. A cart set out from Alqualondë with barrels of smoked fish and crates of fresh seaweed and rice; a convoy from Tirion brought tools, medicine, and workers. There must have been a point on the road where they passed each other. I would imagine hands raised in awkward greeting: the first rekindling of our long alliance.

It would be inaccurate to say that Eärwen and her love for me filled the space vacated by my children and husband. Rather, the love that had been long between us strengthened in the way that the hearing will sharpen with the dulling of sight, or a left hand becomes skilled in the absence of a right: You never stopped missing the absent but something new can arise that you never expected. But there reached a point where, instead of the blackness that had occluded my dreams of Irissë, I dreamed of Eärwen, of her pushing herself up each morning from the bed beside me to steadily go about her errands. Her body, wearied and weak, pushing forward because someone must. I felt the emptiness left inside her by the crossing of her children to the forbidden Outer Lands, and I will never deceive myself that I filled—or even could fill—that void, but I saw through her eyes as she looked upon me: a dull astonishment that I'd come to her. In the midst of everything, I'd come through the darkness to her. My gratitude and devotion that she'd once chosen me—at last, she understood.

How could I not, my first love? I wanted to ask, but even when I was strong enough to totter to the balcony for meals, so my room could be aired and the bedclothes changed, my tongue still lay leaden and silent in my mouth. She didn't say much either, although her strength was growing. She became possessed of a spare beauty—not the frail, breakable look she'd had when I'd first arrived in Alqualondë but the raw beauty of one who'd stripped away all that was unessential and founded her strength upon the remaining essence. Her hair, grown past her ears now, had a slight wave to it that it hadn't when the weight of its length pulled it straight. Her eyes no longer glittered with laughter but were deep with wisdom, like the sea.

When my people arrived in Alqualondë, I dressed to meet them on the beach where they were to be welcomed to the nightly feast that followed the fishermen's return to shore. But when I looked in the mirror, the transparency of my skin—the blue veins giving me a frostbitten pallor—terrified me to where I could hardly subject them to my grief. I removed the gown, put on my nightdress, and stayed in my room.

I heard them in the street as they went to the homes of their Telerin hosts. Their Noldorin accents awakened anew the absent space inside me.

Suddenly restless, I wandered to the balcony where Eärwen and I took our meals. The air—almost uncomfortably warm earlier in the day—had cooled considerably, and the collision of heat and cold was fomenting a storm over the sea to the south. I picked up a shawl Eärwen had discarded across the back of a chair and climbed down the stairs to the beach.

Distant lightning lit the dunes in silver light upon velvet shadow. My legs ached as I climbed them, slipping backward upon the sand, but I pushed forward, suddenly craving the sight of the sea that separated me from my children. And there it was, gnawing at the beach, silvery with starlight where the storm hadn't yet come; as black as the sky where the thunderclouds had already passed.

I slid down the other side, trying to slow my fall with hands but staggering when I reached the flat of the beach. I could see the husks of firewood from the feast and the tangle of footprints in the area around: my people and hers. I went to the verge of the sea and knelt to try to find the difference—the Noldorin larger and shod where the Teleri went barefoot—but I could not.

I rose and walked to the edge of the water. I dipped my hands in, imagining Irissë on the other side, putting her hands in the water while her brothers bickered over something petty about the camp. This was nothing I perceived—Irissë could have been far from the sea, with no thought of me, bickering with her brothers herself, even dead—how would I ever know?—but the image I allowed to grow in my mind was comforting nonetheless. I imagined how her story might go—how all their stories might go—told as an epic adventure in the swaying rhythm of a traditional Noldorin song, the kinds of songs that brought forth the memories of the Great Journey before there was time or care for paper and ink. A drowning: departed from Aman as my children, as the recipients of the blessings of the Valar, and arisen in the Outer Lands as venturers and kings.

It was my own story where I was lost. I still could not imagine in what form I would arise, if not foremost as their mother.

I rose and let the rising wind dry my hands. The storm was keeping to the sea, tumbling to cover the stars and turning the sea to a sheet of volcanic glass, except when the lightning flashed and revealed the waves grasping, grasping, as though to pull back something they had lost.

I was watching the storm when the kiss pressed my back between my shoulder blades. I stiffened even as a shiver ran through my body. There was the ache of absence inside me but, beside it, something new grown alive and strong. A body, addled by the tumults of a storm but suddenly kicking strong for the surface.

Eärwen's arms circled my waist. I felt her face press against my back and the thought came unbidden of the Noldorin tale of the cradle of stars, of the first venturer to dare to enter the unknown that was the sea.

I lifted my hands—cold and bluish though they were—and grasped hers. I meant it to be firm, unquestioning, but my body was still weak. I could only hope she felt the meaning in my touch.

I do, came her thought against mine. I do.

In her arms, I turned until I faced her. Never had her mind touched mine but, suddenly, there is was: something grown previously shaded and stunted by the years of our husbands and children, now stretching toward the feeble, unclouded light of the stars.

Behind me, the storm growled. A surge of water lapped over our ankles. Did it recede? It must have, for time paused for nothing, I now knew, but when she kissed

my mouth, awareness of the storm, of the sea passed from my mind.

Who guided whom up the beach to dry sand? I only felt it beneath my back, almost warm, as she lowered me to the ground. She knelt over me, her beauty stark in the lightning, then softened by the dark, as she drew her dress over her head. She was bare beneath—small breasts and a concave belly and a smooth silver triangle of hair. I clawed out of my nightgown, suddenly warm with desire for her.

Our hands found the places on the other's body that we'd long ago discovered, willfully forgotten, and only recently come to know again. The delight in the familiar and forgotten—of a memory drawn back from the abyss—drew a gasp that might have been joy from my lips that she answered with a sigh—almost laughter. Her thumb graced my nipple, drawing a different sort of gasp from me, before her hand slid lower, delving my wetness before touching me so that an arrow of ecstasy made me call her name to the stars.

When we at last lay spent in each other arms, the storm had passed. The stars were bright and the sea strangely calm, reflecting them in quivering perfection so that it seemed they must be born from its depths. Hand in hand, we rose and walked to the edge of the water and fearlessly passed forth. The movement of our bodies marred the illusion but the sea rose to meet us, to wrap us and keep us. Eärwen suddenly laughed and swooped a hand down into the water, to fling silver droplets against the sky.

And I dove down, arcing along the seafloor, pulling myself forward with the strongest strokes my feeble arms could muster, rising only when my lungs begged for air to find Eärwen waiting for me.

I arose as many things: a stateswoman and a leader of my people. Eärwen's lover and great friend. The mother of my children, always, though that chapter of my life was written, the ink dry and pages turned, and ever cherished. A reason for the survival and allegiance of the Noldorin and Telerin people, entirely witting or no.

Chapter End Notes

The art displayed in this chapter can also be found on Elleth's deviantArt, featuring all stock image credits.

[From the oral tradition of the Teleri, circa 3 FA, collected and translated by Rúmil of Tirion]

When the King and Queen of the Teleri returned to Alqualondë in the retinue of the Valar, they found many things unexpected, and did not find many things expected. When the King and Queen of the Teleri returned to Alqualondë in the retinue of the Valar, they came in the gray clothing and with the shorn hair of grief. They came to a city left in darkness and mourning. They found darkness and mourning but they found more and unexpected too. They were greeted by their daughter Eärwen and shown to the palace where the windchimes were again permitted to play.

They did not find their people hungry.

They did not find the streets silent.

They did find music on the beach that night, and a feast of fish, which they joined. The Valar brought fruits coaxed by the will of Yavanna, but these were gifts and delights, not the succor they'd intended.

They found the first frail workings upon a white ship—perhaps not as grand as the ships they'd lost of theft, then fire, but enough to plow through the waves and keep their people fed.

They found their daughter Eärwen had ruled in their stead with the Noldorin princess Anairë, who had refused to leave Aman, largely because of her friendship with Eärwen.

The found Anairë not at the feast and not in the shadows of the dunes but unwinding the cloth that swathed the lanterns, so that they might light their way.