Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Sole Survivor

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.