Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

What They Took

As I grew into my role as the village bureaucrat, I began a list known only to the Four Queens, shared and expanded upon at night (or what we assumed by the cycles of our body to be night) when we sat around the brazier in what had once been Arafinwë’s topiary garden. Without light to sustain them, the lopsided rabbits and hounds were beginning to dwindle, until the leafless boughs began to resemble ribs jutting from their sides. Nevertheless, we gather there each night, away from the others and under the pretense of council.

What Our Husbands Took from Us
candles
lanterns
torches
dried food stores
preserved food stores
beer casks
wine
flints
knives
horses
healing herbs
swords/armor/weapons
surgical kits
wagons/carts
liquor

Not all of the liquor. Arafinwë had been fond of distilling his own rum and had several casks fermenting when he marched off with the rebellion. Nolofinwë and I used to cringe privately at how awful Arafinwë’s rum was, but with nothing better on offer, we found it at least turned over the darkly comic underbelly of our situation.

“Fillet knives!” Nerdanel was raging, louder than we’d been in a while. (For nothing had stricken us from the dark; we were becoming bold.) “For cutting the bones from fish! They cleared all the inns and taverns of them. I suppose they mean to defeat Melkor with an army wielding fillet knives.”

She took a swallow from the bottle and passed it to Terentaulë.

“It’s not like we have fish to fillet,” I said.

“We had dried fish,” said Terentaulë, interrupting herself to swig from the bottle. “But they took that, all of it.”

The bottle came into my hands. None of us had liked fish overmuch when we’d had the choice of it, especially dried fish, but it’s unwilled absence suddenly loomed symbolically large in our minds. I drank.

“We could,” I said, passing the bottle to Indis and wiping my lips on my sleeve in a way that I would have scolded my children for doing, “send a party to Alqualondë. We are gaining our strength here and are more organized by the day. It may be able that we can offer aid to them, and they may have systems and resources that would be of aid to us. We have long been friends with the Teleri.”

“They might have fish,” Terentaulë remarked in her low, smoky voice, “even dried fish. And fillet knives.”

“It would be a dangerous venture,” said Nerdanel. “In the dark, and we don’t know what might yet be out there.”

“It would be no more dangerous than the Great Journey.” Indis always spoke softly and yet with the merest whisper commanded silence. Nerdanel, having just accepted the bottle from her, let it hang between her knees. Terentaulë stopped joking. We all listened. “We have ventured far farther, in the dark and under threat of the Dark One, than from Tirion to Alqualondë.” Indis rose to retrieve more wood for our fire, and I knew she was giving us time to think. I heard her break a branch twice over her knee before she returned and cast it into the brazier.

“We do need to be concerned about our food supplies,” Terentaulë remarked, and I felt the popular favor tipping toward my idea, a sensation as thrilling and unnerving as though the ground had tilted beneath my feet. This was a love of power, I suppose; too much and I might trundle after my husband, down the road and into exile.

“Your great friendship with Eärwen can’t be anything but a benefit to us,” Nerdanel said, and there it was: It was decided.

My great friendship with Eärwen. I tamped down the emotions that arose in me at the thought of her. There was something unnerving about the thought of Alqualondë, of her, still unspoiled in my memory by the darkness. Yet Alqualondë had been the darkest city in Aman, situated beyond the Pelóri. The resplendent avenue of light that spilled from the Calacirya across the sea would be gone but the city itself—lit by lamps and soft-glowing pearls and still pools that, in imitation of the cradle of the stars, captured and refracted starlight by many multitudes—would be the least changed. There would still be the beacons, the ships strung with lanterns, the shadows behind the dunes—

“Unless she has gone with him,” Terentaulë took the bottle and pointed with it. “Arafinwë.”

“She won’t have,” I said. “She’ll be there.” My voice was dreamy, somnolent. I hadn’t Indis’s power. I was lost in the clamor of planning for our journey, to pass between the Calacirya and emerge as near as I could to my irretrievable past.