Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Storms in the North

The boats can one by one to the shore, rasping onto the sand, barely stilled before their steersmen were bounding from their bows and dragging them up past the tideline. I could never stand comfortably in a boat; even in the swanships on a calm sea, the queasy feel of the tilting floor beneath me made me clutch the railing.

"Raise the lanterns," Eärwen instructed my company, who stood uncomplaining with bandaged hands after a day of weaving nets. The fishermen were spreading their catch onto the beach, and the lights would signal the people of the city to come and claim their food.

I receded into the shadows of the dunes, as before. The people came forth in near-silence, but the conversation swelled a little as they began to cook and eat their fish. They gave generous gifts of food as thanks to the fishermen, who surreptitiously passed it on to children and the wounded. Eärwen dug amid the slimy pile to make sure that the choicest fishes went to the families most in need of them. The line of people from the city flowed until the beach was nearly full.

A song began of the type that we Noldor called a drowning; the Teleri did not classify and names things as we did, and it was simply a song to them. We called it a drowning because, in it, the focal character always drowned at the end and arose in the next verse as someone new so that the song threaded among lives the way a dolphin bobbed through the waves. The song was passed among many singers, branching into many strands all sung at once upon the beach to the same tune but with different words, all rioting against each other at the same time until it became a roar of sound matched to a single rhythm. Like much of Telerin art, the form blended the joyful and sorrowful seamlessly. Like the sea.

"My lady?" One of my company stood above me, holding out a generous portion of fish. Anticipating my disproval over the size of the portion, he quickly added, "They would not accept our refusal to—"

"No. They would not have." I accepted the plate. "Thank you."

The words of the drowning had become incomprehensible, both by the multitude of simultaneous verses and by the roar of conversation arising around them. It did not matter; the song flowed on, drowned, arose anew in fresh form. No one listened; they cooked and conversed and picked bones from plates of fish that they fed to children. Life spooled on regardless of the attention of those who sang dooms.

I kept to the shadows as I returned to the city so that none would see me leave. The music faded behind me, and the light became muted, still. The lanterns here were still swathed. A light breeze lifted the fabric so that it tickled my arms as I kept to the sides of the streets—not that there was anyone in the city to see me. All, it seemed, had gone to the beach.

I climbed the stairs to the palace and retreated to the scribe's small bedroom. The persistent, thrumming tune of the drowning was caught in my head as I dressed for bed. Faintly, muffled by walls, a bell clanked on a balcony somewhere, alerting to the rising wind. I wondered if a storm was coming, and if it was, if the Teleri would come in from the beach. I imagined them running in with the rain, holding whatever cloth was available over their heads, but it was hard to imagine such a scene without laughter, and while they'd recovered speech and song, there was as yet no laughter.

I lay down on the narrow bed, the tune still churning over and over again in my mind. I did not have the skill to fit words to it; in studying oral Telerin verse, Noldorin scribes had detected certain patterns that made extemporaneous composition possible, even at high tempos, for skilled Telerin bards. But it was not a skill I possessed, to imagine the existence of someone for the fleeting moment of a song. My thoughts began to fit myself to the song: the only person I knew well enough.

Who would I be in such a song? The best bards brought a person forth with just a handful of traits, made them as real as a person you might drink tea with, and then drowned them at the end. I would be—what? A mother, a wife. A scholar. Unskilled with my hands—I could not even knit—but intelligent and ambitious, living in my head most of the time. Unexciting from the outside. Livelier and more passionate, I hoped, to those who knew me. Meticulous and exacting and still nervous when I had to speak before a group. Alive mostly in the words I penned to the page.

I drowned myself in the song: let myself walk the wrong way from the dunes into the tide instead of the city. I was uninteresting: just a Noldorin caricature. But I had no one to replace myself with, for I was an author who could not compose a poem, so the song spun wordlessly over and over through my brain until sleep collected me.

I dreamed of fire on a different beach, of Irissë's hands feeding the flames. It was her turn on watch, for the nights were too cold where they were to allow the fire to die. Her brothers had, naturally, tried to spare her the obligation of a watch but she'd sworn at them using the kinds of words I'd never spoken and taken the middle watch to spite them. She was facing north, the Pelóri hanging overhead at her left hand, the snow at more than the peaks but trailing nearly to the beach. The bitter-cold sea left great gobs of foam on the beach, and she rubbed her hands in the direction of the fire; it seemed the dampness never left her bones these days. To the north, the play of starlight on ice gave the sky a greenish hue. Every now and then, the sky flickered with the intimation of lightning and a storm to the south.

I awoke to a violent crack of thunder like the sky over the palace had split in half. Without the Trees and our clever Noldorin timepieces, I did not know the hour, but my mouth was sticky with deep sleep. Thunder poured across the sky like a storm surge from the sea will claim an entire expanse of beach.

I rose from the cot, filled with sudden uneasiness. I wrapped the sheet around myself and went barefoot to the broad balcony behind the king's receiving room. The sky was orchid, livid with lightning that darted from the fat bellies of clouds to the sea.

Eärwen leaned against the railing, pressing forward as though striving to see something in the far distance. Her short hair stuck to her neck; it was as I'd imagined, and they'd been caught in the rain. A drowning of their drowning. I almost laughed. I almost turned away. I took my place beside her at the railing. The scent of lemon rose from her, used to scrub the stench of fish from her hands.

"Something is happening," she whispered to me. "Do you feel it? Ossë is mustering against someone."

In the ceaseless pulses of lightning, I could see the clouds trundling north along the coast. Toward my children and hers, lying in a ring around a fire, defenseless and cold. To the north, the lightning forked over and over until it almost hurt to look upon.

We both knew who Ossë mustered against. Fëanáro had turned his stolen ships into the open sea. I imagined those ships as they'd been at the sailing forth, pale against the dark sea, canting wildly into the crevasses between swells. I reached for my children and felt them, faint and far, but they were not afraid. It was as I'd seen in my dream.

"They are not aboard," I whispered to myself. Eärwen overhead me and nodded.

But the sons of Nerdanel were. I had little love for Fëanáro, who'd always faulted my husband for something far beyond his control, but I'd known his sons in the innocence of their childhoods and saw them as Nerdanel must. The men they became—even what they'd done here in Alqualondë—could never efface the bright-eyed, eager children they'd been, not to a mother. Of this, I could say nothing to Eärwen. But I grieved for the terror of the boys they'd once been, of the sudden wakefulness I knew had stricken Nerdanel, far away in Tirion.

The rain came then, vigorous as though a bucket had been overturned above us, roaring against the roof that covered the balcony.

I could no longer bear to watch the storm that tore at the sea. I turned to return to bed, but Eärwen caught my hand: "Not yet," she said. Her damp hair was forming little curls along her forehead and neck.

"The storm …" I began, but she kissed me silent.

We ended up in my room, in the narrow bed that had belonged to the Noldorin scribe appointed by my father-in-law to serve in her father's court: one dead, the other missing. The lightning came only as a faint flicker under the door, the thunder and rain muted. She kissed as one starved for love—her body atop mine—and I responded in kind. I had not succumbed so senselessly to passion since Nolofinwë and I had been most intensely trying for Irissë. Somewhere in the roar of sensation that was my body, I was vaguely aware that my legs were indecorously splayed, one calf pressed across Eärwen's back to grind her against me. She was pawing away the sheet in which I'd wrapped myself, whimpering her pleasure once my breasts were bared to her kisses.

I'd forgotten something about myself in my song. I'd forgotten this.

Did it make me interesting enough to be worthy of a Telerin bard? I doubted it—to love one like oneself was hardly notable among the Teleri—but it made me worthy of her, and that was all that suddenly seemed to matter. Nolofinwë had become the faintest wobble of a sound, somewhere upon a beach far to the north, waiting for ships that may not now return, but he was gone to me. The years of our lives together were over.

Eärwen and I eventually came to rest at each other's sides. The narrowness of the bed, the bedclothes kicked upon the floor did not matter. We were twined as one together, our heartbeats slowing in time with each other as, outside, the storm at last subsided.