Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Sea and Sand

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.