Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Amid Shadows

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.