to higher ground by kimaracretak

Chapter 1

F.A. 482

The girl by the river stands with her arms outstretched. She is not quite see-through, not quite present. She is so utterly still, unmoving as the days and weeks pass, that Niënor would wonder whether she were a girl at all.

She is only nine summers old, Niënor, but already she knows that not all creatures are like her. She is only nine summers old, and she has not yet learned which of the others are to be feared, and so she approaches the girl with a heart vast as the sky, a heart that she knows her mother would scold her for not keeping shut.

"You are not a doll," she informs the figure, the fifth or perhaps the sixth time she sees her. "Yet you are not alive. Are you something in-between?" She is not sure what could be between, but the exactness matters less than the rightness in that moment.

The girl does not answer. Nor does she struggle, when Niënor attempts to pick her up, nor does she smile, when Niënor places flowers on her shoulders.

"I think you're cursed," Niënor tells the girl the tenth time she sees her, or maybe the eleventh. "I think you're something else, trapped under all that river. I think if I were a hero, I would break your curse, and let you be a girl again. You could even be my little sister - you look like you would laugh, like my mother never does. I think I would like a little sister like you, if you were alive. I think I would name you after the river, if it wouldn't make you sad and remind you of being cursed."

The girl by the river doesn't speak, but Niënor thinks that, perhaps, just perhaps, she smiles. Unless it is simply the ripples of the water in the wind.

Niënor tells her mother about the girl by the river, just once, when she's nearly asleep and her mother's hands are firmly tucking the coverlet around her.

"Tell me a story," she says, ever hopeful. "Tell me a story of the girl who isn't a girl who lives in the river."

Her mother's hands go very still, and she leaves without even the single good night that is all Niënor has learned to expect before she is left alone.

Niënor doesn't talk about the girl after that, and sees her less and less as the years pass. Sometimes she wonders if she did wrong, telling other people about her. Mostly, though, she hopes that the not-girl who might have been her little not-sister is happy, whatever and wherever she is.

**

F.A. 499

Niënor wakes still half-in the water, sticky with blood and with the taste of her true name burning on her tongue. She had not meant to survive the fall, and yet with the chill of the Taeglin's waters eddying around her legs, she cannot deny that Death had not reached out to take the hand she so desperately offered.

Death would not hurt nearly so much, and still as she lies back against the rocks, taking the time to feel every part of this body that is Niënor, she can feel places where the pain is starting to ebb, places where a soft, leaf-like texture presses warm against her skin instead of blood.

"I wouldn't look down," a voice says, from somewhere down by her legs. It's a child's voice, quick and light like a river that would laugh, if it didn't know laughter was uncalled for in such a situation, and so very at odds with the gravity of her warning. "Athelas has great power, but you were near in pieces when I found you. There is only so much we can do at once."

Niënor closes her eyes obediently, but does not let that stop her from asking, "Who are you?"

"You know me," the voice says. "You've known me for years. Think of the water."

For a moment, everything is blank, and Niënor whimpers at the memory of what it was to not know even her name. And then cool lips press against her forehead, and she remembers the girl who was not a girl, and the voice gives in to laughter. "You were more right than you knew," the girl says. "I am Urwen, called Lalaith, and I was your sister long before the curse laid upon our father found its way to me."

"Then -" Niënor reaches out, hardly daring to expect that her hand would lay firm against her sister's skin, but it does. "Then you've been freed?" In its own way, it seems more an impossibility than her continued life.

Lalaith's hands do not pause in their ministrations, but her voice is thoughtful as she says, "Not forever, I do not think. You broke something when you fell, needed me enough that I could come to heal you. I am not sure I can survive outside the water for long after you are recovered."

Where we you when the worm first fell upon my company, when I let our brother take me to bed? Did I not need you then? Niënor wonders, but it seems unfair to ask, now that she has her sister, for however short a time.

"You'll still be my sister," she promises. Sleep is clawing at the corners of her eyes as the athelas' healing magics wrap softly around her, softer than Lalaith's hands. And as she surrenders consciousness once again, all she can wonder is if Lalaith, too, may be better off without her sister.