Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Receding Lights

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.