Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Orders

The day after the coronation, we met by candlelight in one of the counsel rooms in the palace. We placed the candles in the corners to banish the shadows and drew the drapes. The dark beyond the windows was still a fearsome thing.

I brought a list of our increasingly dire needs, from my daily rounds: Food was becoming scarce—we’d experienced our first crop failure, presumably due to the lack of light—and hopelessness was elbowing past the carefully contrived industry into which we’d all thrown ourselves. Three craftspeople were not at their posts this morning, having gone into the darkness and not returned. There was a need for basic contrivances—for wagons and knives and lanterns—that the exiles had taken with them and that we struggled to find the skilled labor to replace. And we were quickly exhausting our fire supplies, now that they were in constant use. Arafinwë listened to my report, nearly impersonating the earnest, bright eyes that recalled the young boy I’d once known, but when I finished, he said nothing of what I’d presented.

“Anairë, what have I heard about an expedition to Alqualondë that you suggested?” He had none of the bearing of a king; he leaned forward onto his elbows and shoved his sleeves up from his wrists and fidgeted with a pen. Terror still flickered behind his eyes; what he had seen in Alqualondë could not be forgotten and was triggered by what was now mundane about our existence: fire, the scent of smoke, crowds of people. It gave him a feral look, and I wondered how long before he too bolted into the darkness, seeking the comfort of oblivion save the stars, a rebirth of sorts.

"I don't know whom we would spare for it," I answered, meaning to return quickly to the matter of apples and wagons and torches. "I suggested it when I was yet naïve of how great our need would become and how quickly. And it is great; it is taking a full day now for our foresters to venture out and back in search of firewood and torchwood. And wax for candles, we have exhausted what we harvested already from our hives and—"

"I understood that the expedition to Alqualondë was partly to address these needs." He had dropped the pen and begun drumming his fingers in a galloping rhythm on the tabletop. He'd bitten his nails to the quick; the sound was padding, fleshy.

"As I said, Arafinwë, I don't know whom we would spare to—"

"Why, that seemed plain to me." He sat back suddenly in his chair. "It should be you. Aren't you the one whose friendship with Eärwen is subject to such renown?"

He tipped his chin at me. His fingers were still drumming, near-soundlessly, as his overbright eyes locked with mine. I nearly laughed. Hadn't I been rehearsing the arguments in favor of my attendance on this very mission when Arafinwë had arrived and, one might reason, removed some of the obligations placed upon me, with his acceptance of the crown, as one of the Four Queens? Yet now I flinched from an invitation to the same task?

I often wondered what Arafinwë knew of Eärwen and me. He spoke flawless Telerin without an accent—the envy of scholars of the language, like myself, who studied it for years only to speak it in Alqualondë and have shopkeepers switch unbidden to Noldorin—but it was more than that. He moved within their culture with the same joyful ease as a dolphin in the sea: an air-breather, purportedly, and of our own kind, but effortlessly liminal. Surely he knew of the lax customs surrounding love between the same sex; surely he knew the Telerin word that translated into Noldorin most accurately as friend-love, a word that many a naïve Noldorin scholar had asserted showed the precious weight given to friendships among the Teleri (usually with some speculative eloquence about their long estrangement and great love for the Noldor). But it was nothing of the sort. It was a literal love between friends—both romantic and sexual—embarked upon before a marriage and sometimes resumed after the years of children. It applied equally to both sexes, although mixed-sex friend-love was rare—though never unheard of, Eärwen told me once. Nothing was unheard of among the Teleri, at least as far as love was concerned.

I'd once thought to author a paper—even started upon it—about the word and concept of friend-love and its true meaning, but worried that I was revealing something about the Teleri meant to be secret. Which was a very Noldorin way of viewing it. And worried too what might be implied of me by the intimacy of my knowledge.

Arafinwë surely knew of it. The rumor was that he and Eärwen had practiced a Telerin marriage, with complete physical consummation before the naming of the One and the bonding of their feär, in deference to the Telerin idea—but an incredible tale from the Outer Lands—that feär sometimes rejected each other for reasons known only to the One, and it was best to know if this was going to be the case before assembling one's family and friends for a public wedding ceremony that would have to be annulled once the consummation failed to anneal their spirits. "Imagine! It would be simply mortifying!" Eärwen had explained to me—what it apparently took to mortify one who wore barely existent bathing costumes and undressed wantonly in large groups of girls and— In any case, Eärwen fully believed in the possibility, and Arafinwë had purportedly gone along with the Telerin tradition without complaint for her sake. And if he adhered so willingly to the marriage custom, surely he knew of friend-love too.

But knowing about these things in the academic sense of an anthropologist who has learned thoroughly and nonjudgmentally the traditions of another people—even living without shock among such practices—and knowing the specific manifestations of those traditions as they pertain to his own wife: I always wondered. I wondered about Eärwen, who was guileless and hid nothing, and what she had told him of us. But surely even Arafinwë could not accept such knowledge, that his wife and his sister-in-law had been entirely committed to friend-love of one another for a full summer and had never truly abandoned—though never since acted upon—those feelings? Surely even sweet, magnanimous Arafinwë could not respond but with shame and dismay?

I considered my words carefully. "I hardly think this is the time for the Noldorin people to petition the Teleri for aid."

"I don't intend that this should be the sole—or even primary—purpose," he replied. "And from what I've been told of your idea, this wasn't your intention either; rather, you saw our role in giving as well as receiving aid. Of course, you were innocent of the situation in Alqualondë when you proposed this, seeing it as an exchange of equals with no debt on either side. Now, I'd say—and I'm sure you'll agree?—that in the wake of the kinslaying, there is a debt, so much that we must go, even if we return empty-handed."

Kinslaying. I flinched at the neologism: It both united the Teleri to us as our brethren—an idea that, before the departure of the exiles, would have been controversial—and dredged forth the ancient Quendian verb slay, once used in reference only to the bodies found in the forest that had been killed by the Dark One. It was a wet, sprawling verb that onomatopoeically referred to the fact that such killings always involved the festooning of trees with the victim's innards. I cursed the linguist who had reanimated that one, even as I knew that our words for death—conveying either civilization or happenstance—were inadequate.

As was debt, I realized: a polite word for a favor owned, now too large and complex for so small a sound. After all, we were blameless in the atrocity at Alqualondë; where was the debt? And yet none of us doubted that it was owned, and many of us questioned if it could ever be paid. And so we let the darkness grow silent and thick upon the road that joined Tirion to Alqualondë, heavy and impenetrable as a velvet curtain fallen shut, when we should have rushed to their aid at Arafinwë's first report.

As it was, Arafinwë did not give me the option of accepting or refusing my own mission. He'd been listening more than I’d realized to my report of our needs and his time for me was short and his instructions brusque. "I offered you the kingship, Anairë," he said. "You refused. As your king, I instruct you to journey to Alqualondë, to make peace with my wife's family as well as can be, and to offer any succor we are able to offer, even if you must take the food from your own mouth to feed theirs." I suspect my eyebrows popped up in surprise; so he had learned something at his father's knee when it seemed all he was doing was weaving frail friendships amid his brothers. He stood. He did not have the small retinue of scribes and pages to attend him as his father and brother had been attended. The chair was not eased out from his backside but barked loudly against the floor; his eyes sparkled madly with horror and exhaustion. "I have much to do to ensure that the Noldor remain, that we may even offer aid or exist to be rebuked."