Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Done

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.