Si la mar fuera de leche by Chestnut_pod

Chapter 1

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Vardamir and Tindómiel’s nurse sang the children’s song about Elwing-Who-Called that used “struck” as its rhythmic refrain. Elwing’s beauty struck Eärendil, the Feänorions struck Sirion, Elwing struck the waves, Elwing struck the deck, Elwing’s plea struck the Valar, the Valar struck Beleriand. Even quiet Vardamir, almost too old for the nursery and properly fluent already in the new Adûnaic, clapped along with it.

 

Elros listened from the threshold. Nurse Losseth had a lovely voice, and he dearly wished she would stop singing.

 

“You said this was a song about Attû’s family, but he’s hardly in it,” said Vardamir, always the analyst, once they had finished clapping.

 

Losseth chucked him under the chin. “I’ll sing you the song about your attû riding the wave onto the Lindon shore with his army and his brother behind him, if you want a song all about him,” she said. “But then Tindómiel will say that her grandmother the bird is hardly in it! Whatever shall I do to please you both?”

 

“Sing about Uinen getting seagulls stuck in her hair!” Tindómiel demanded, tugging on Losseth’s sleeve.

 

“All she cares about is birds,” said Vardamir with disgust, but Elros saw him starting to smile as Losseth sang the opening lines about Uinen waking up to gulls in her bed and gulls on her head, Tindómiel enthusiastically burying her chubby hands in her cloud of tightly curled hair.

 

Although when Elros left his morning audiences all he had wanted was to take breakfast with his children, he found that what he wanted now was space and the sea.

 

With the soft footfalls that — a decade after his Choice — had not yet left him, Elros stole away down to the First Harbor.

 

--

 

No one watched what his dear Zamîn called the Erstwhile Royal Sieve, or hunted for shellfish along the single long pier. The natural cove where the ragged ships of the Edain had first landed on their barren and still-dripping Gift was too sacred to play in, too rough to fish in, too secondary to immediate survival to receive honor in daily attendance or architecture. It was quiet.

 

Elros took off his outer robe and sandals and waded into the water, past the breakers, casting a careful eye across the harbor mouth for currents sneaking past the seawall. A handful of kittiwakes nested on the sheer eastern wall, right in time for late spring. Out of long habit, Elros made a note of them to tell the older children about, in case any nest had more than two eggs.

 

That might be less necessary this year, he thought, with the new fishing fleet entirely ready and the first barley harvest planned. Let the birds have their young. Let him, for that matter, reduce the number of falls and cuts he was called upon to treat. He was reminded of the need to establish a boundary to the west -- it was high time to have something resembling a sea border laid out, if only to keep the fishers from drifting into the barrier islands while following the shoals.

 

Perhaps this year he would order them to the north, instead, where whales and seals would provide not only meat but oil to keep the slender stands of saplings clinging to the new topsoil unmolested come winter. Now would be the time to start off, as the great ices began to thaw. He made a note to consult with Galor of the fishers’ guild on the topic. Had they repaired and made ready any of the Great Ships that could withstand such a far voyage? On the other hand, he had no diplomatic relations with the Lady who ruled to the north of Alqualondë. Northeast would be best, then, and perhaps they could seek a trading relation with the Men there.

 

The sun glimmered off the ripples beyond the breakwater. Elros breathed and swayed with the waves. This was his home, his body beyond his self. His people would explore the waters and come back with more food and, once there was food enough, other wonders. No thrum in their bones would drive them where they would not otherwise go. The knot in his chest loosened, and he cast out his mind across the island, looking for those he might know, exploring still the new limits of his new strength.

 

Out to sea, something niggled at his awareness. Elros opened his eyes. The mind he sensed felt -- strange. Familiar yet not. Was there a small craft sent from Aman coming to the wrong harbor? He should warn them, if he could. It approached quickly. He strained his vision to see what could be found on the horizon.

 

And there --  

 

From out of the west flew a pelican, white and black against the blue sky, growing ever larger as it neared. As high above him as the spire of a tall ship’s mast, it banked hard to the left. Down it went in the lancing way of its kind, wings half-spread and then scissoring closed in the moment before impact. Elros stumbled back in the water, but the pelican bore through the waves a body’s length before him, the water hardly disturbed. It surfaced after only a moment, gular pouch shedding spray.

 

Bobbing on the water before him, the bird raised its wings, shaking spangles into the air, their span greater even than Maedhros’ height, Elros thought, and certainly his own. No wild thing had ever come so close to him. Its eyes nictated and then cleared, and Elros found them grey, and deep, and sad.  

 

“Lady,” he said. The pelican said nothing.

 

Elros looked into Tindómiel’s eyes, and Elrond’s, and his own. Poetry aside, he found little in them to inform them.

 

“Are you here as a messenger?” he asked, the push and pull of the waves around him suddenly coercive, threatening. “Lady, does your coming foretell a crisis?”

 

The pelican said nothing.

 

“Lady Elwing, does danger fly behind you? Or some great news out of the West? Have the Valar some command for the Men of Númenor?” Elwing-- the bird-- his own-- she looked baleful, riding the ebbing swells, those eyes set impossibly into her knife-bladed skull. The shifting sands had rooted Elros’ feet to the seafloor and, indeed, he felt restrained, as an arrow nocked yet not set to flight, like a horse tethered in sight of water, but kept away.

 

The pelican said nothing. If Elros moved towards her, he would be up to his neck in the swells. She rose and sank with each breaker that reared up and fell behind him. Elros found he could hardly hear their crashing.

 

“Why are you here, Lady?” he asked, finally.

 

The pelican said nothing.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

A strand of soup kelp nudged against his hand, and he grasped it unthinkingly. Winter’s child Tindómiel preferred the crisp, crackly sheet weed, but Vardamir had eaten it as his first solid food and loved it still. That polity to the north of Alqualondë had sent it, along with guest sea-farmers, somehow surmising their plight. The lead grower had carried a letter with recipes written in Cirth that tasted of childhood, and a feather for signature.

 

“Have you nothing to say?” His throat tightened. The bird made no sound, no motion, but her feet were working hard below the surface to keep her from drifting towards shore on the swells. Elros could see them sculling furiously.

 

“You’ve never come before,” he said. “Even though--”

 

Though songs were sung about her by her own grandchildren. Though a hundred children and infants had been rescued from starvation by the arrival of her people, sent to them with sea vegetables and oyster banks made by artifice. Though Galor had used money that might have been for food instead for burnt Umbar to paint her face and hands on the figureheads of his boats.

 

“Why are you here?” he asked again, his voice rising, hardly noticing as the hard-fought kingliness was knocked away by the waves and the swelling tide in his chest. “Why are you here? Why?” he cried, and could not stop crying out the word, though he hardly knew what he was asking any longer, only that any reply would not answer what he meant.

 

“Why?” he almost screamed, and flailed the rope of kelp he still clutched against the water, coming within a hand’s breadth of her great beak.

 

At last, she moved, a startled snap of her head, and Elros smacked his hands against the water, beyond words, as she lifted off, her wings coming up in sharp angles and then boneless curves, her feet pushing against the water.

 

It was not until she was high into the air, so far away she might have been a gull or a tern, that Elros found it in him to call after her, “Go, then! Go!”

 

The waves tugged and pushed at him, unsure if they wished him to be swept out or forced back to shore.

 

He was still standing in the water, the tide risen to his collarbones, when he saw the curled prows of the Elven murre-ships, come on schedule at the full moon to trade.

 

Though he ran in a manner unbefitting a king back to the King’s House and made a greater than normal effort to speak with each merchant captain as they made the climb from the Second Harbor, the pelican who had flown ahead of them was not there.

 

Chapter 2

Readers, please note that this is the chapter in which the warnings about offscreen infant death and children in danger appear. 

Read Chapter 2

Aeglosbes, trading Murre-Admiral, bore the usual two letters to Tar-Minyatur of Númenor from King Olwë of the Swanhaven and the High Serenity of Avallónë, and one to Elros, from no signatory. 

 

She had also brought a stylus of engraved whalebone for Vardamir, who was bashful with her; and a smoothly formed soapstone snow goose for Tindómiel, who adored her and insisted on endless stories from the Lossoth with whom Aeglosbes had lived and traded before her death and removal to Valinor. 

 

Elros glanced through the letters from Olwë and Serenity Erusérë -- further discussion of turning a relationship of aid into one of trade, and some fine-tuning of the plan with the palantíri -- then at the unsigned one and finally to Aeglosbes, who stood watching him steadily while rolling up her gutskin correspondence pouch.  

 

“I thank you for your dependability and willingness to serve as messenger, as always,” Elros said. 

 

“Thank you, my lord,” replied Aeglosbes. “As ever, it is a privilege to visit the Isle of Gift.” 

 

“Where do you go from hence?” Elros asked. 

 

“To Forochel, my lord, to trade in oils and furs during the thaw of the great Icebay, and to see the great-great-grandchildren of my sworn sister, who yet remember me and welcome me home.” 

 

Elros nodded, reminded of his thoughts before the-- arrival. Forochel and the Icebay were a long voyage indeed, but they avoided the problem of the north shore of Aman and its ruler. 

 

“If you are willing, some ships of Númenor might seek your services as a guide this summer, in search of winter oil. Our sailors are respectful and will not presume upon the inhabitants or take more than is needed.” Though, he thought, our need is still great. 

 

Aeglosbes nodded. “I will think upon it, my lord,” she said. “I am unaccustomed to treating with my family as a merchant admiral, yet taking some apprentice sailors upon my own dear Nais and giving over a part of my hold to them would not test guest-right.”

 

Elros thought a moment. “Perhaps that is a better option,” he mused. “As you know, our ships are not yet tried beyond our near coasts, and we do not know the Men of the northern lands. I shall see to it that Galor Guildmaster comes to you, to speak about taking on learners and to discuss payment in kind or labor.” 

 

Indeed, Elros thought, that was a more prudent course of action, requiring less investment of sailors and ships, and Aeglosbes was both kind and diplomatic to offer it. She looked stern, however, or perhaps her round, brown face was merely thoughtful.

 

Very formally, she said, “Your Majesty is aware that other friends of the deep swim straight to the north of his island, and they may be reached at less cost of time and danger than where I go for reasons of the heart.” 

 

Elros inclined his head. With equal formality, he replied, “We are aware,” and no more, and knew himself for a fool. 

 

Aeglosbes bowed slightly, and said nothing. Elros let out his breath in a rush and slid incautiously down from his throne, which still gave him splinters at unfortunate intervals. 

 

“Friend Admiral,” he said, once again informal, “I see you have brought gifts for my children, and they will be all delight to see you.” 

 

A fool he might be, but a fool he was now free to be. Tindómiel would be delighted by new stories. 

 

--

 

The traders stayed until the new moon. With Aeglosbes, Elros drafted missives to Alqualondë and Avallónë, while Zamîn dictated to him what was needed and what could be provided in trade. Little, as yet, but more each season. 

 

Alone, he stared at the letter to “Elros,” an activity far less fruitful. The Lady to the north had sent three ships loaded with great sacks of loam and a dry, crumbly compost material, and her letter contained a description of how to layer scrap fabric and soil and compost for immediate and successive planting. This technique, the letter recounted, she had helped develop for sandy and marshy soils at the mouths of Sirion, which she expected would work equally well on compacted soils and bare rock. 

 

Elros had first worried that the earth might hold strange worms or beings unknown to them. One of the farmers had told him it was just as well, though: plants needed such things. Then he had worried that they might be worms of the wrong sort, as the escaped horses of the Noldor had been the wrong sort to the grasslands they grazed to the roots. A different farmer had pointed out that there were no such worms here, unless they could eat basalt. Finally he had worried that they did not have sufficient scrap fabric, until Zamîn had reminded him that the instructions said they could use kelp, and that if he wanted the dirt to be of any use this year, he should stop fretting and let the farmers get on with it. 

 

He took Vardamir and Tindómiel out to work on the soil once it was laid, as much as a nine-year-old and a just-five-year-old could work. He remembered, in snatches, pushing down the beet seeds that were almost all that would grow in the garden of the little Queen’s House of Sirion, where the king tides left sea rubble almost to the gate. The greens had been so salty that soups made with them had needed no other seasoning. Vardamir whined a bit at being taken away from the scrolls and codices Aeglosbes had brought --the seeds, Elros thought, of a royal library-- but no child could resist getting thoroughly muddy with no repercussions at all, and even Vardamir was a child yet. 

 

It would also be well, Elros thought, to let them love the dirt here. A childhood on the sand and ever-changing marshes by the river endlessly running away to the sea had given Elros no strong roots. 

 

There was enough soil in the ships for a foot of it on three acres, and Elros in consultation with the farmers set it all with mushrooms. They helped trees grow, the farmers told him, and more trees they must have. Moreover, there had been two children with rickets among the families that moved inland, and the mushroom fruits might help. Wheat would have to wait for a proper irrigation system, and root vegetables might disturb the new soil too much. The corner he kept back he set with beets anyway. It was a small strip, and closest to the salt winds of the sea. Guiding Vardamir’s soft hands the right distance into the soil, while Tindómiel drenched the seeds and them with her bucket, he noted how different the act seemed with no light to illuminate each grain of earth. Simpler to tell the difference between seed and soil.

 

Elros thought perhaps that a fourth ship full of pure and practical survival was not a fluke. He admitted he had thought the wondrous ship carrying sea vegetables in tanks of glass might have been, that first year. And the third year, the school of ships wallowing low in the harbor carrying whole boulders encrusted with mussels and oysters. Even the sixth year, when Aeglosbes had brought nineteen Sindarin healers who accepted no payment for teaching each ship-clan everything they could in a year, and left behind them chests of medicines stamped with a feather and star -- and had taught Elros himself that he could do more than lay his hands upon his people and will them healed. 

 

A fourth ship deserved a letter in response, perhaps. 

 

Even the King’s House had not the fuel to waste on staying up dithering over a message. Elros rose with the dawn, Zamîn breathing softly behind him, and walked out onto the great living rock terrace that spanned the front of the King’s House. By early sunlight, he wrote the simple facts of the new plot.

 

We have a species of mushroom carried by chance on a barrel in the hold of the Rôthzôr that has fed that ship’s families well these ten years. We washed the fruits in buckets of freshwater and sprinkled the suspended spores over the newly laid earth. The chief farmer of that ship, Zâinabên, tells me that the mushrooms will make a lace underground, which will guide the roots of future trees to be planted in late autumn and, in the meantime, strengthen the bones of such children as cannot have fresh fish regularly. Melons and cucumbers have been planted alongside to provide shade and shelter and hold the soil against wind. Zâinabên will keep notes which will be copied and sent back with Murre-Admiral Aeglosbes at this time next year, for the mutual enrichment of our knowledge. 

 

Elros laid down his quill. It looked already to be a bright day, perhaps the first truly hot day of the year. A decade, and at last he could tell the weather from the sky at dawn. A decade, and at last he felt sure each of his people would eat when the cold came back. 

 

In a rush, he picked up his quill again, and wrote, I taught my children to plant beets. 

 

Then he folded the letter thrice, and returned to bed. 

 

--

 

“There must be about seven score baskets immediately ready, and we can set ourselves to making as many more as possible before your departure, if you truly think they will sell. Overcharge for the small ones, of course.” 

 

Zamîn spun, as always. Today it was dog and goat hair at the precious spinning wheel -- thread for blankets then, and a day for negotiating rather than striding about at the task of “hands-on ruling,” as she called it. Three days before the new moon, the straggling ship captains looking for goods or gossip were thick as sandflies on kelp. Elros cast a weather eye at her audience from the threshold. Linyahísë and Ferneliltë, a ship captain and her caravanner wife who traded into the Tirion hinterland, were in rapt attendance. Such was ever Zamîn’s effect, he thought fondly, even when she was scheming to defraud curiosity-seeking Amanyar for the sake of Númenor’s nascent industry.  

 

“Call them artisanally handcrafted, fairly traded sea noodle baskets,” Zamîn continued. “Or if you can think of something other than ‘sea noodle,’ do it; but I don’t think ‘thongweed’ sounds any better, and your type already think we are so quaint and childlike, so why not give the customers what they want.” 

 

Linyahísë and Ferneliltë wore that particular expression of mildly chagrined avarice that Elros saw not infrequently on those Noldorin traders the reborn Sindar and Nandor suffered to join the murre-fleet. Elros decided to stay behind the door a moment and see more.

 

Ferneliltë opened her mouth, but Zamîn continued.

 

“If you can cause a fad, so much the better; upon your successful return I will ask the families if they can spare a child or three to take up square-knotting and make some pleasantly useless trinkets for selling; that sort of thing is quite possible nowadays.” 

 

“Your Majesty,” Ferneliltë broke in, but Zamîn added more carded hair to her distaff and rode over her.

 

“I do understand, captains, that even twelve-score baskets would fill but a fraction of your hold, and that you mean to go on buying with ship’s biscuit what heirlooms my people saved from Beleriand. I assure you, however, that Númenor’s early troubles are nearly over, with the refitting of our own Great Ships nearly complete, and it seems quite possible that this trade shall no longer strike us as profitable.” 

 

Here she paused and bestowed upon them a smile of such glimmering serenity that Elros thought gleefully of Elrond at his most heraldic.

 

“Perhaps, even so, a more gainful relationship can be found should you succeed. Númenor certainly intends to become a center of craft, and why should Aman be deprived of our works? A royal patent for an exclusive trade in handicrafts to Tirion would be a fine thing.” 

 

Linyahísë and Ferneliltë exchanged glances out of the corners of their eyes. Elros wondered if Elrond would be able to sense the edges of the thought-arrows that must be darting back and forth between them. He thought he knew something of their direction nonetheless: what potential, they must think, in being granted a patent from a land that had been tended from jagged rock into almost-fruitfulness in what must seem, to them, the blink of an eye. 

 

“My lady queen, it would be our great honor,” said Linyahísë, making a pretty courtesy. 

 

Zamîn flashed them another dazzling smile and inclined her head slightly. The spinning wheel whirred on. “May our collaboration be rewarding, Man-friends. I shall have our secretary draw up our terms immediately. Now, our share of the profit on the baskets: put absolutely all of it towards best-quality sailcloth. If there is none to be had, then a large quantity of tough hempen thread will suffice. And, as we are partners now, I shall expect that a share of the profits from the heirlooms my people give you will be yielded to them as well, as is proper. I anticipate your return and our subsequent partnership.” 

 

Elros judged this a fit moment for an entrance. 

 

The traders jumped and made their bows, and behind their lowered backs, Zamîn winked at him. 

 

“Good morrow, captains,” he said, and struck his kingliest pose. 

 

“Good morrow, Your Majesty,” they replied. There was a moment of quiet, then Ferneliltë ventured to add, “We are lately discussing terms of trade with your lady wife, should you like to review them.” 

 

Elros made an expression of the eyebrows he had learned from Gil-Galad, and said merely, “Tar-Zamîn rules in all such matters and her judgement is our own. We should like to speak with her on matters of state. Excuse us.” 

 

Ferneliltë snapped her mouth closed, then opened it again, but Linyahísë must have done the mental equivalent of treading meaningfully on her toes, and she held her peace. All four nodded magnanimously at one another until the traders finally nodded themselves out of the throne room.

 

“That never grows less amusing,” Elros remarked, once he was sure they were out of even the pointy earshot of Elves. 

 

“I thought they had best prove themselves once or twice before I let slip that there may be mithril in the mountains of Forostar.”

 

Elros barked a laugh. “Wise with great wisdom you are!” 

 

“More like shrewd with great suspicion,” Zamîn said. She let the spinning wheel whir to stillness and stood, stretching. Fibers rose in a puff around her and caught the light like dandelion seeds in summer. Elros smiled and stepped forward to catch her around the waist while her arms were still up, and Zamîn startled and laughed and wiggled about like an eel. 

 

“Ouch, ouch, my breasts, stop squeezing me,” she exclaimed, and Elros leaned back reluctantly. 

 

“Was Tindómiel bitey this morning?” he inquired. Zamîn sighed. 

 

“No, she hasn’t nursed in days. She might finally be weaning herself; it is about that time.” She pulled a face. “I think it’s my courses coming back.”

 

She thunked her head into his shoulder and made a noise like a sea cow. Elros patted her hair sympathetically and tried very hard to do some arithmetic in his head.

 

“I don’t even have sphagnum stored up anymore,” Zamîn complained, her voice muffled by Elros’ clothing. “It makes one almost miss the brink of starvation.”

 

Elros felt her shudder, and she added, “I don’t mean that.” 

 

Vardamir had hardly even cried after Zamîn lost her milk when he was three months old, and no one else had the food to spare to nurse him except Losseth, and she only because her mite of a daughter had died before she could even be named. Elros tried to count back again -- after that, Zamîn’s courses hadn’t come for years, until suddenly she was pregnant with Tindómiel, quite unforeseen. Though things had been more stable, the whole cycle of fears had gripped them again: the scant crops failing or the cobbled-together royal household abandoning them, and always the worry that her milk would fail again.  

 

Zamîn did not protest when Elros clasped her tighter, though her breath hitched. Elros gave her a small squeeze, and said only, “It really has been almost ten years, hasn’t it?” 

 

Zamîn nodded. “I suppose I was ready when Vardamir was four, but we must have conceived Tindómiel the very instant it was possible. We will have to be more careful this time.” 

 

Another Tindómiel would indeed be a mouth too many, Elros thought, or at least a worry, and he did not realize how tightly he must be pressing Zamîn to him until she made a little noise of discomfort and gently pushed out of his arms. She kept hold of his hand, though. 

 

“We will survive, minalya,” she said. “We can plant your beet patch with pennyroyal too, if it comes to that.” 

 

What more was there to say? Elros gave her hand a squeeze, and she smiled at him, mouth crooked. 

 

“Come look,” she said. “Something is fruitful and the better for it.” So saying, she drew him over to the spinning wheel and the basket of hair. 

 

“This,” she said triumphantly, “is mostly goat.”  

 

Elros bent down to peer more closely at the fibers and the thread on the wheel. 

 

“Such luster,” he said. “How beautiful -- this cannot be from the milchgoats, can it?” 

 

“No indeed,” Zamîn said, gleefully swinging his hand. “These are the work of the Angorodin goats brought over by the Drúedain. They hail from Emerië, where the grasses self-seeded. The Drúedain have kept them well and begun to breed them for our mountains and steep valleys. Never has there been a goat like these!” 

 

 Elros grinned at her. “A new goat?” 

 

“The newest of goats!” Zamîn replied, glowing. “This thread will make a cloth quite unique, and then I will show those jumped-up Tirion merchants the largesse of the Isle of Gift!” 

 

“Is this a gift to us from the Drúedain?” 

 

Zamîn tilted her head. “They gifted our house four pregnant nannies and a buck, just as they gave us breeding pairs of the wool dogs. I believe they wish to stay in Emerië, unmolested, and they see that the way to do that is, well, goodwill and conciliation. I say we leave them to it; the loss of Beleriand hurt them as never so many others, they who honored the hills and forests as forebears.” 

 

Elros nodded. The Drúedain had loved their woods and highlands, and if Númenor had not yet woods, they had escarpments to spare, and he had little heart to press a people bound to him through no ties of family or fate into his endeavor of a nation. In any case, he was not yet to the point of needing to distribute land to purchase loyalty. If ever he should be -- well, perhaps he would not; all was yet parlous. 

 

“Well then, Zamîn Ever-Weaving,” he said, rising to his feet and making sure to brush all the fibers clinging to his hands onto his wife’s skirt. “Does this require me to make a new treaty before Aeglosbes departs?” 

 

“No, the goats need experimenting with,” Zamîn said, flapping her skirts to create a hairy whirlwind, grinning wickedly at Elros as he flailed. “But you had better procure a secretary from somewhere and fix our sea-noodle deal to parchment.” 

Chapter 3

Read Chapter 3

Losseth shooed Vardamir and Tindómiel out of the nursery and into the vegetable patch serving as a garden outside. 

 

“Read to her, then,” she said, when Vardamir protested that Tindómiel was a baby and no fun to play with. “I wager that if you’re telling her stories about the fish-birds of Forochel she will listen to you, and then you can tell Admiral Aeglosbes all you have learned about her old home.” 

 

That worked a charm. Elros smiled and held it on his face even as Losseth turned around, set her drop spindle whirring, and raised an august eyebrow at him. 

 

Elros held that even a king could be somewhat informal with a person who had saved his child’s life, seen him covered in regurgitated seaweed, and singlehandedly maneuvered the remnants of the House of Haleth into a position of favor with their ramshackle royal house. Losseth had also made it clear that she was entirely in favor of returning to self-rule for each House if he proved incapable of “living up to his heritage” and “not playing favorites.” Plausibly deniable blackmail was even more conducive to informality, but the eyebrow was really a little much, he thought. 

 

“Are you of the opinion, my lord, that one’s children’s nurse should do double duty as private secretary to the sovereign?” Losseth asked.

 

“There is precedent,” Elros said, repressing a squirm. “My-- mother’s secretary was her nurse when she was young.” 

 

“Should I understand that the position of nurse was one she held before the sack of Doriath, not after Queen Elwing-Who-Called assumed the rulership of Sirion?” 

 

Elros took a moment to be annoyed that Losseth gave Elwing her title and epessë when she could hardly bring herself to address him as “my lord,” and then squashed that emotion as petty. 

 

“Yes,” he said, “However--”

 

Losseth affected not to hear him. “Do you also hold together a terrified band of refugees of dissimilar kindreds, assailed on all sides by diverse evils, using only force of will, personal charisma, an ethic of self-sufficiency, and a magical artifact?” 

 

“Well, yes,” Elros began, and Losseth interrupted him again. 

 

“You do not,” she retorted, and added belatedly, “My lord. You lead a highly determined band of victorious Men whose ancient clan ties were,” she said with a sigh, “Largely left behind in a now-sunken continent. You are assailed only by the forces of nature and are beating those back quite well, you seek trade partnerships and have trade partnerships to seek, and your force of will and personal charisma are as may be.” She gave him a fishy look. “The prototype palantíri have not yet arrived.” 

 

Elros gritted his teeth. He supposed it was true. Númenor was cut off from any enemy who remained, and if they were also cut off from what remained of Middle Earth, that was not forever. Losseth’s own leanings aside, the ship-crews seemed to be a far more salient mode of identification than the shattered remnants of the Houses of old, and there were no Elf-kindreds to complicate things further. The Drúedain -- well, but they were Men too, and kept to themselves. 

 

But was not the situation still terribly precarious? Were they not still unaccustomed to agriculture in this hot, sunny climate? Were the Valar not still making their presence known in every wild patch of this island of gift, seeding the rock with unknown seeds, filling the waters with unknown fishes? 

 

Losseth watched him, some unreadable expression tucked into the corner of her mouth. 

 

“My grandmother lived at Sirion, you know,” she said. “She died of eating poison and drinking ash for half her life after it fell. But she remembered the Queen of Sirion and what she built there, before the Elf-lords despoiled it. She attempted something other than the kingdoms that wrecked Beleriand. But you wish to be a king. I would fain you did not, but if that is what you will be, you must act like one.” 

 

Elros found himself surprised, somehow, that she had ventured so daringly. “You go too far now.”

 

“Do I? I am your nurse and not your secretary, and this allows me some privileges. You act as a judge and a priest and a mediator and a trader, and those are all good things, but kings do not come to their nurses and ask them to make out a treaty in a fair hand.” 

 

Elros gritted his teeth on a number of possible answers. With an attempt at stately slowness, he turned and stared out at the children. Behind him, he heard Losseth retwist her spindle and drop it again with a clatter against the flagstones. Such avoidance of the question was not kingly, and yet… If Elwing at Sirion had bestowed a voice upon the meanest of her people, what of it? It had failed. Her fate was to fly away, and Sirion crumbled in her wake. 

 

He thought, as he more or less tried not to think, of his Feänorion years. Had Elwing’s experiments saved her or him from his foster-family, from the Doom of the Valar and the crunching culmination of Beleriand’s great stories? No, nor her people. They had been kings to the end, Maedhros and Maglor. They guarded their folk well and held none who wished to leave captive -- no, not even him or Elrond, in the end! Did he not have the advantage of their training and the example of their leadership, which drove their followers to do terrible things in one body -- yes, terrible, but effective? He did not want to be like them, though. Had not Maedhros fallen like Elwing at the last? All this over a question of a secretary! 

 

The spindle whirred. He did not want to compel Losseth. He did not want to compel anyone. 

 

But -- did he not also have the advantage that all his parents had lacked, that he was all his people, Beörian and Hadorian and Haladin? Was he not also in some way their voice, their will? In the garden were Vardamir and Tindómiel, all of that and more -- born to Númenor, of it, their teeth and bones formed from its rock. 

 

From out of the past echoed the great roaring rush of the wave that had swamped Beleriand at last, and the high, clear note of Elrond’s horn, and from out of the din, the voices of his people, stumbling from their ragged ships onto the ragged beach that was once an inland valley. He had guided them to the boats, screamed orders over the crash of the waters, led them to the safety of the new Lindon coast. 

 

That was not compulsion, he thought; that was acclamation. It was the moment he knew how he must Choose. For what act in any eternal life could be truer and more righteous than the choice of these people behind him, riding the wave into an unknown future where they might, at last, be free? 

 

The sound of the wave roared very loud in his ears, and he thought he might hear a cry, a woman screaming -- he jerked his head up and cast about for whoever she was, but -- it was only Tindómiel. 

 

She ran unsteadily around the chickpea patch shrieking like a peacock, and Vardamir chased her with his hands stuck to his sides like flippers. Seal and penguin, Tindómiel’s favorite game of late. Vardamir was kind to play it with her. 

 

The sound of Losseth’s spindle returned, ticking quietly over the floor. The wave receded.

 

He did not want to compel her. He did not want to compel anyone. Loyalty freely given, responsibility shouldered, freedom for those who swore fealty. And, at the last, freedom for him. Could he not, perhaps, do better than any of his parents?

 

He turned around fully and looked at Losseth once more. She stared back at him evenly, never faltering in the rhythm of her hands. Her mouth still twisted, yet here she was. 

 

“Very well,” Elros said. “Is there anyone you recommend?”

 

Losseth tilted her head. “Are you--”

 

Elros held up a hand to stop her. “Whom do you recommend to me as a secretary? I ask you, Losseth.” 

 

There was a long pause. Elros waited, feeling patient at last. His voice, which came from the people, would be sent out abroad by one of his people. Losseth had been right after all. 

 

“Zâinabên’s second son has a fair hand,” Losseth said, slowly. “Adûnabêl. Named for this island, and he chose the name himself.” 

 

“Does his father not need him to work the land? I would not deprive our chief farmer of his son’s strong hand, however fair.” 

 

“He is Hadorian, yet the family, as you know well, feel themselves Númenorean to the bone. He would bring their loyalty and skill, not their resentment. Zâinabên knows who makes the final decisions on allocating land. This is the purpose of a royal household, is it not?”

 

Elros considered. Losseth stared out the doorway at the children, still running between the rows of food. Her hands fed the spindle steadily, but a shadow remained around her face.

 

“I accept your recommendation,” he said. “It would be well to reassure the farmers that they have a voice in my household.” 

 

Losseth stilled her spindle. She turned to face him fully and gave a bow. 

 

“My lord,” she said, and nothing more. 

 

 

--

The new moon brought with it a high tide that surprised even Uinen’s priestesses. The swell painted their skirts wet up to their thighs as they scampered up and down the sunset-gold beach with the sandpipers, drawing their evening prayers in the sand to be eaten up by the waves. Tomorrow would be a good day for sailing, they said, and the Elven ships rode tall and fair in the water. 

 

Elros and Zamîn rose before dawn to see them off. Vardamir had begged and begged to come with them to say goodbye to Aeglosbes, but when Elros crept into the nursery in the wee hours, he was fast asleep, curled around Tindómiel, curled in turn around her soapstone goose. 

 

Instead, Elros walked in torchlit procession with Zamîn and her spinning ladies to the quays of the Second Harbor, then slipped away while she bade a formal farewell to each merchant. 

 

The seven youths Aeglosbes had consented to take with her to trade with the Lossoth stood in a huddle near her great double-clad ice-ship Nais. The bustle of loading and sail-settling eddied around them, and Elros thought they looked rather lost amid the crystal-lit whirl of the fleet. They would all have been small children the last time they set foot on a vessel larger than a fisher’s dinghy. 

 

The night before, Elros and Galor Guildmaster and Aeglosbes had instructed them in their purpose: to learn the tides and currents to the northeast; to study Sindarin and Quenya with the crew; to be educated in the construction and upkeep of a great ship; to act respectfully towards their hosts at sea and on land; to gather their share of whale and seal oil; and to come home and share it all. Elros’ purpose in this halting daybreak, was, however, different. 

 

All seven looked out at the water and up at the ship, talking quietly amongst themselves. Elros caught snatches of the Taliska-flavored Adûnaic common among the youth born in Beleriand but raised on the island. He walked close to them, then cleared his throat and bid them good morning. To his amusement, the whole group spun around with wide eyes and scrambled to bow, or make the Hadorian salute, or even to kneel -- Elros recognized that one as the girl he had healed after she cut herself on a rusty knife and began seizing.

 

“None of that, now,” he said with a smile, deliberately informal. “You are all rendering me a great service, and I wish to thank you.” 

 

There was a general mumble and shuffling of feet, and then a tall youth stepped forward and said, “I am Pharâzindil, daughter of Boron of the Haladin, who came on the Pharâzbalak, Your Majesty. We are proud to be of service.” 

 

“Thank you, Pharâzindil,” said Elros, thinking with amusement that Losseth had done well to place this one of her people on this expedition. “It gladdens me to know that my kin will represent Númenor on our first voyage beyond our waters.” 

 

He smiled again, making sure to look each young person in the eyes. They were a fine crew, he thought, with all three Houses and a fair mix of ships represented. It was no small thing to venture out on new waters yet unmapped and go sailing over the drowned lands where their grandparents had been born — with an Elf, no less. It was no small thing either to be burdened with the expectations of every person on the island, to feed and light and warm them through the winter and to teach them every season thereafter. Galor and Zamîn and Losseth had spent a full day with him deciding who could be spared and who should be spared, and Elros thought they had done well.

 

Îbal there was a fisher’s son the sailors said was beloved of Uinen. The small lad behind him, Zhân, had a Drúedain mother and a head for directions and mapping. That Pharâzindil was quite the young firebrand and had thrice petitioned Elros for, of all things, infrastructure investments -- and had announced to her family that she was, in fact, a young lady by organizing all the spinners on the island into a guild and then spinning herself a dowry. 

 

“You will make us all proud,” Elros said, and nodded to them, not quite a bow. “I would ask of you one more small thing, a favor for myself only.”

 

Everyone crowded in, but Pharâzindil was the one who spoke. “What would you, Your Majesty?” 

 

“You go to learn many useful things from your hosts and the sea,” Elros began, “And I wish only that you seek to learn a little more, perhaps, than is taught to you outright. You will be in the company of our allies, and it is good to learn about their ways, their troubles, their thoughts of home. In Beleriand we lived side-by-side, of course, and fought shoulder-to-shoulder, but these days it is passing difficult to hear of movements and changes from across the sea. We would not wish to cause offense through ignorance, or be caught unawares by some strange news! What if one day we were to awaken to find another island raised beside us?” 

 

He widened his eyes, and a laugh swept through the group in front of him. “We would welcome neighbors, of course, but it is good to be prepared. Would you agree?” 

 

Elros cocked an eyebrow slightly, and thought of how Maglor could make his eyes hard as flint behind a smile. Zhân bit his lip, but the young Hadorian alnerwen beside him boasted a mischievous sort of smile, and Pharâzindil had the look of one presented with a pearl oyster and a knife to open it. He kept smiling, and one by one, everyone nodded. 

 

"Wonderful,” he said. “I will learn so much from you, and I expect that you shall each come home with a tale to last you all your life. Númenor needs such as you.” He clapped his hands, and took a step back, shrinking his shoulders in his tunic. 

 

“Now, where is that second mate of the Murre-Admiral’s who is meant to be seeing you safely stowed with the dried fish and kelp jerky?” 

 

Pharâzindil giggled and pointed over his shoulder. “There, my lord, with the firkin barrel.” 

 

“Very good. Then I suggest you ask them to put you away in the right place, and go with my blessings.” 

 

There was another awkward rush of bowing and salutes, and they gaggled off to, presumably, be stowed or put to work. Elros watched them go, wondering if they would be quite so adolescent when they returned. He did hope so. At that age, he and Elrond had been fighting in orc-skirmishes for years, and their first great journey had been to Gil-Galad’s war camp, alone, unsure of their welcome. These youths might have been born in Beleriand and grown up in the hungry, anxious early years of Númenor, but still, they would have known purpose, sanctuary, and hope. 

 

They would do well, he thought. He looked out into the fray, searching for a sight of Zamîn. 

 

“Do you suborn my crew, Your Majesty?” 

 

The voice drifted out of the dimness above him, and Elros crouched on fighter’s instinct, casting about for its source. 

 

“Here,” it said, and the blue glow of the Fëanorian lamp hanging from the beak of the Nais’ murre figurehead shifted and rose, and there was Aeglosbes, stretched along its back like a great panther. 

 

Asking if she had been here this whole time would not do. Elrond would have heard her lurking there, the damnable Elf. Elros straightened and reached for cool. 

 

“I encourage my subjects to educate themselves.” 

 

Aeglosbes let the lamp crystal swing gently, the cool light casting her round face into shadow, then light, like the changing moon, while the figurehead seemed almost to beat its wings. Elros could not read her expression. 

 

“Much knowledge could they have for the asking,” she said, and her voice was oddly gentle. “My work is trade, is it not?” 

 

“The gifts of Valinor come at a high price,” Elros replied. 

 

Aeglosbes sighed. “Think you that I represent Valinor, my lord? These gifts I have ferried across the sea are not those of the Valar, who believe your island gift enough. Other ships from fair Tirion and the Lonely Isle may have dealings with the Great Singers, but under my command we sail where we please and bring with us what we will.” 

 

Tindómiel’s precious soapstone bird fluttered across his mind’s eye. And what divinity would send recipes for beet tops?

 

Elros reached up and stopped the lamp in its arc. The blueness scintillated through the gaps in his fingers, moonlight through clouds, and lit his hand red. Dawn neared, he noted, almost absently. Without the lamp, the sky was more grey than black. 

 

“Why does Elwing send you?” he asked. 

 

There was a little silence. Aeglosbes looked down at him from the prow, cheek to cheek with the great murre. 

 

“Because I let her,” she said. 

 

“That is no answer.” 

 

“It is a true one. What she asks, I would fain grant her, for she is my sworn lady and has my love besides. What is more, I esteem Númenor and find it noble in its aims. And I think Vardamir and Tindómiel and I would miss each other now were I never to return.” 

 

“That is why you come, not why she sends you.”

 

Aeglosbes sighed again. She released the strap of the lamp and slid off the figurehead, landing in a crouch at Elros’ feet. He looked down at her, still holding the lamp aloft. The light was coming quickly now, and he could begin to discern true colors, the coppery brown of her skin, the dark green of her tunic. It discomfited him, having her crouched like this, and he was grateful when she rose and looked him in the eyes once more.

 

“Because she loves you and misses you and wishes for you to be happy,” she said. “Because when she was queen she had none to aid her, and when her children needed her, she had little aid to give.”

 

Elros’ hand clenched on the lamp. His pulse throbbed in his fingers and pounded in his ears. Elrond came to mind -- a small boy, shivering in the sea cave where they had once held dinner parties with the seabirds Elwing sang out of the sky, telling Elros again that Emig had said to wait for Círdan, just wait, and -- Elros felt he might shatter the very crystal of the lamp in his fist. 

 

“Yet she might have given more,” he gritted out. 

 

“Might she?” 

 

“She might have come herself.” 

 

Aeglosbes gave him an assessing look. “Did she not?” 

 

Elros stood silent. The tide lapped at the harbor wall, and he remembered striking at it with his palms while the pelican bobbed before him. He had begun, almost, to think it had been a dream -- or perhaps he had wished it so. How Mannish of him, to seek forgetfulness. Even so, she had been there; he had looked her in the eyes. 

 

“In a seeming, only,” he said. “She did not speak and she did not touch the Isle. I wondered if it was her in truth. Am I to consider that a visit?”

 

A slanting smile played around Aeglosbes’ lips, eschewing her eyes, and she reached up to pat the figurehead. 

 

“Pelicans are silent,” she said. “The young ones scream like monsters, but it is as if the adults forget how to speak. They are not like gulls, who say their own names, or albatrosses, whose cries wake Ulmo’s people in the mornings. They do not cry, or perhaps they cannot.” 

 

She turned to face her ship fully, and Elros was about to offer a retort when she spoke again, as if to the sea, but loudly enough for him to hear. 

 

“She cannot come. Do you not know? ‘They shall not ever walk again among Elves or Men in the Outer Lands.’” 

 

The sea slapped hard against the Nais’ keel, somehow out of rhythm with the other boats. Aeglosbes’ shoulders jerked, whether in laughter or anger Elros could not see. 

 

“Thus spake Súlimo his Doom!” Aeglosbes said in ringing tones, and the water rose up in a column level with her chest, then plummeted with a great splash and was still. This time, Elros was sure she laughed, but she kept her face to the harbor.

 

“You think he would have had enough of that, by now,” she said, once again the collected, soft-spoken diplomat Elros knew. She turned, the front of her green tunic black with seawater. Gesturing to the place where the wave had fallen, she smiled, and it seemed true this time, if sad. 

 

“Yet she is still beloved, you see?” 

 

Words clotted in Elros’ throat. He shook his head. Aeglosbes’ smile grew, and Elros spared a thought to wonder when he would feel old enough to be immune to the glimmering condescension of Elves. 

 

“Changeful Ossë did not raise your island as a gift to the Valar,” she said, “Nor even for you, child of the seashore, grandchild of Tuor! He raised it at the bidding of his master, who raised up your mother, who raised Valinor from its complacency.” 

 

At once she was serious again. “The gifts of Valinor come at a high price indeed,” she said. “Yet I do not think it is you who paid for this Gift.” 

 

If Elros tried to speak, he felt he might simply spit, or choke, or vomit some ball of words rooted in his throat since Círdan had failed to come soon enough and Elwing had failed to come back. A Doom, again. Had his line not suffered enough of Dooms? 

 

He drew a deep breath, to say he knew not what, and then, all at once, it seemed that the world was bathed in gold. As it did every morning, the Sun crested the Meneltarma in a rush, and the ocean glowed, and the sails of the tall ships blushed into wisps of cloud in the bright dawn.

 

“Ah! Bright Arien, who re-enacts each day the work of her creation!” Aeglosbes sang, and Elros smiled despite himself. For that was Losseth’s prayer which she had written herself, years ago, when Vardamir woke her for milk before dawn almost every day, and she said she needed to find something to be grateful for. Tindómiel’s first word had been a mangling of Arien’s name. 

 

He exhaled, pushing down the tangle of unknown words. The proper response, as Vardamir told him every day, was a gratitude that Manwë had returned his fëa within him, pure. And as he did every day, he kept silent, and simply felt the warmth of the new sun on his face. He reached into his robe, drew out his letter, and handed it to Aeglosbes. 

 

“You may tell her it is from Elros,” he said, “And I prefer my letters to have signatories.” 

 

Then he turned and went to find Zamîn, leaving Aeglosbes and the water behind him. 

Chapter 4

Read Chapter 4

Midsummer came in a rush of enoughness. Half the orchards fruited for the first time. The figs swelled and darkened and the cherries burned almost blue. The sardines swam in shallow waters in lightning-shot masses, the goats kidded and gave milk, and the young barley burnished the ridgetop fields in green. None went hungry. 

 

Zamîn insisted they make thanksgiving. Elros never forgot, precisely, that she was devout -- calling Vardamir’s name every day would have reminded him in any case -- but he rarely felt that his spirit sang along with hers. Perhaps having known an Ainu or three in person diminished one’s sense of natural awe, or perhaps a god-touched family did. Watching Tindómiel and Vardamir’s cheeks fill out and the farmers sing as they sowed the second chickpea crop, though --  there was a kind of awe that sprang up from the breast and belly in bubbles like joy. A thanksgiving they must have. 

 

 In the very early days, Elros had sent expeditions to scout the island thoroughly, climbing ridges and fording new-made rivers, before the dwindling supplies on the ships and the miles upon miles of bare rock constrained them all to the East-Haven of Rómenna, where there was fresh water and fish. Elros remembered the scouts’ reports of a flat-topped prominence like a table, charged with a silence that set hearts racing and filled the ears with the hum of one’s own blood. It did not take a priest to know a holy place. It took food and people strong enough to make the climb to honor one, alas; yet the great pillar of the Meneltarma dreamed quietly in the background of all their years of effort, growing greener before their eyes as seabirds, wind, and grace quickened the rock. 

 

Elros, trying to remember he had a secretary now, sent Adûnabêl through the dirt streets of the toddling town to bid come all those who could spare six days and travel over pathless land to the tor. More came than he had dared hope, with net-and-wood carriers for those adults who could not walk the distance, and children on shoulders and in slings. 

 

They walked in a column under the sunshine. Zamîn sent the young people to the rear to keep them from rushing forward out of sight, and Elros picked the more solemn among them to walk the sides and bring water and dried fish to those struck by the heat. Elros walked at the front and, at times, it felt so much like the war that he expected Elrond and Gil-Galad to appear around the next outcropping or sapling; while at other times, he felt like the leader of a great dance, and would fill up his lungs and sing whatever came to mind -- hymns or marching songs or the wordless tunes to folk dances -- and behind him his people sang along. 

 

They passed out of the cultivated lands within the day, yet Elenna was filled with blossom-stars the same. The terrain was rough and stony, but no longer altogether bare, and little vales where soil had been carried by the rain overflowed with foliage. The children ran about the meads and rushed back to the column to ask what was this leaf, or this flower, or this small insect. Parents and siblings laughed and said, oh, that was a mint of Brethil-that-was, or a stem of tamarisk like they had known as children, or that they did not know! Tindómiel brought Elros a great hank of twining groundcover with white flowers, bright crinkled leaves, and a sweet scent that seemed to relax walking-sore muscles. Adûnabêl thought it was a rockfoil, and was cozened into a heated argument with one of Zamîn’s spinning ladies that only succeeded in determining that it was yet another new discovery, brought from who knew where. 

 

The fresh, healthful smell of it tingled all through Elros, and he told Tindómiel it was his favorite flower, though it had not yet told him its name. Tindómiel squealed with excitement and dashed into the brush again, returning with practically a whole bush of it, roots still clinging to soil. Elros chided her a little for disturbing the new topsoil and the plant, but he could not bear to see her cheer diminished today, and called out for the nimblest hands to come and make garlands with it. He walked for a while thereafter in a cloud of teenagers making flower chains, who all at once started shooting him surreptitious glances and giggling. A smile tugged at his mouth as he walked on, feigning obliviousness, and when they all came rushing forward to toss their necklaces and swags of flowers over him, he struck a grand pose like a statue he had seen once in the ruins of Hithlum and let them cover him in greenery. One alnerwen of perhaps sixteen boosted up their little sister to settle a coronet of flowers around his brow, and the plant’s perfume dizzied him deliciously.

 

Zamîn’s argumentative spinning lady asked Adûnabêl what he thought that strange plant in front of them was, and Adûnabêl, not missing a beat, replied that it was clearly kingsfoil. The lady swatted him on the arm, then shouted the joke back to the walkers behind her, until the column groaned with laughter. Adûnabêl swore he would make a record of every new plant they found on the journey, and though kingsfoil would be the first, the thorniest he would name after the cruelest plant-sage of his acquaintance.

 

They slept under the sky and felt only the warmer for it, and the stars gleamed ever-more bright as they climbed the foothills towards the center of the island. 

 

They met the third day at the base of the Meneltarma. A hush came across them as they switchbacked up, and up, and farther up -- a hush of something more than breathlessness. Elros felt it too. The air ought to be thin at this height, but it coated the tongue like wine and seemed to fill the lungs with something more than vapor. 

 

One by one, people began to drop away. They sat in clusters, or alone on boulders, or stood and looked across the land to the encircling sea; the diminishing line of walkers passing them without speech. The mountain stretched ever upwards, and the grass thinned with each step. 

 

All at once, it ended. Elros took a step, and found that the ground almost fell away beneath him. Panting, he raised his head. 

 

He stood alone, all of Númenor sweeping down from his feet. Before him was a shallow, grassy bowl of earth, spangled with more of Tindómiel’s white flowers. The hollow resounded with silence. 

 

A footstep behind him seemed to echo like a snapping sail. Zamîn summited, Vardamir clinging to her hand, Tindómiel riding on her back. Zamîn looked at him, then out to the whitecapped sea, and smiled with such dazzling joy that Elros felt his heart squeeze in his chest. She did not speak, only nodded, and sat at the edge of the dip. Vardamir stood next to her, eyes wide, and even Tindómiel was quiet and still, running her hands through the grass. 

 

Elros stepped towards the center of the flat peak, half expecting resistance. None met him, so he walked through the shushing grass until he stood in the exact middle of the bowl, the sky arching endless above him, pulse beating in his ears. He was small, yet vital, as if the lynchpin of a great wheel, the world turning and turning about him, some minute portion of a great gyre of attention laid gently to rest on his shoulders. He drew in a breath, let it go. 

 

To utter even one word was terrifying, yet he was compelled to speak. He had to shape in some way the emotion bursting forth from his every limb: from every memory of Vardamir hungry and Tindómiel laughing, from the lingering taste of the dried apricots from the first harvest he had eaten that morning... Perhaps this once, he could speak to the listening world without fear his words would Doom him. 

 

“A blessing,” he said, and the hallow absorbed the words as dry ground did the rain.

 

“A blessing,” he said again, “That we are alive, that we are sustained, and that we have arrived to this season.” 

 

A shadow wheeled across the meadow and, looking up, he found three great eagles circling through the upper airs, curving and soaring ever westward. The attentiveness of the world lingered a moment, then Elros felt as though a cloud had passed from before the sun, and he simply stood upon a mountain, beautiful, but alone. 

 

He lingered a moment, gazing out to where little Rómenna smudged the coast; where the ocean sparkled in the sunlight; and to where, beyond his sight, lay the tattered shoreline of his brother’s new-made home. Then he turned, and walked back to Zamîn, and his children, and his people. 

 

--

 

As summer stretched on, Elros took again to sending scouts out into the hinterland. The pilgrimage to the Meneltarma had demonstrated that the land could support a light traveler or two for a few days, even far inland. Adûnabêl fell so in love with the novel plants they brought back -- examining them under a cherished reading stone, illustrating them on precious paper -- that Elros felt cruel insisting on employing him in tallying legume stores and organizing crop rotations. 

 

“You should name him your first loremaster,” Zamîn said from her loom. “Set him to determining which plants are useful, as food or medicine.” 

 

“My commonsense lady, he already is half a loremaster,” Elros replied, waving a lazy hand through the stultifying air. Even on the bedroom terrace, hardly a breeze swept in to ease the close heat. Zamîn wove from their experimental new crop of flax, for she said even looking at dog wool or goat hair caused her to sweat. 

 

“Well, then!” 

 

“Would you believe I have already thought of his replacement?” he inquired. “That Pharâzindil is keen as a spear. She has ambitions, and I would fain she try them within my house. What is more, she still leads all the spinners in Rómenna in their projects, and I know how you yearn to bring them under your wing.” He grinned. “Do you not think Losseth would be proud of me when she hears me politicking so?” 

 

Zamîn snorted. “Proud as a peacock. You do well to think of the fabric stock, too! Think you that young Adûnabêl will survive until Aeglosbes returns, or will he shrivel into a husk like one of his specimens?”

 

“We will endeavor to change his water frequently, and he will do well enough. Aeglosbes will return soon, for winter comes faster in the far north,” Elros said. The air pressed even closer, and he swallowed against a dry throat. “Zamîn…” 

 

The gentle thump of the loom halted. Zamîn looked at him quizzically. “What unease do I hear in your voice?” 

 

He swallowed again. “I thought-- that is, just before Aeglosbes’ last visit--” 

 

Elros pressed his lips together and let out a breath through his nose. 

 

“I think we ought to open relations with the Lady of Adsirion.”

 

Zamîn laid her shuttle down. “Your mother.”  

 

Elros made a sharp gesture of the arms. “Elwing Dioriel, yes. Her aid has been invaluable, these ten years, and I feel --”

 

“Elros.” 

 

That was the tone Zamîn used with Vardamir, sometimes, when he fretted too much to sleep. Elros watched her rise from the loom and walk out onto the terrace, feeling almost clammy despite the heat. 

 

“I know how she has helped,” she said, sitting down across from him. “The first solid food my son ate came from her hand, though at a distance.” 

 

She looked at him, her dark eyes steady, brow furrowed. “Númenor may well have failed without her gifts. I would have sent her the hair from my head in thanks. This question of, of diplomatic relations seemed a trifle. Yet you…” She trailed off, lips twisting. 

 

Meeting her eyes was too much. Zamîn was blunt and clever, and he felt he would be able to read from her face what she would not say aloud. He knew what he wished to say, yet saying it felt impossible in the face of Zamîn’s incisive attention. He spoke to the sea. 

 

“Do you not feel that all of this, the food, the soil, the doctors -- do you not feel that these are merely reparations? Gifts of a guilty conscience?” 

 

It was not what he had meant to say, yet he meant it. He chanced a look at Zamîn. She frowned. 

 

“And if they were? It would have been our duty to accept them all the same, for aid came from no other quarter.” 

 

Elros bit his tongue. His voice wanted to pitch and yaw, as if his throat and mouth were not his own. “Yet why now and not before? Elrond and I --” he faltered, and went on with an effort of will. “We were children in the warcamp of enemies, and then we were soldiers in a crushing war. What was she doing then?” 

 

He turned to look fully at Zamîn again, feeling the scowl thunderous on his brow. She had sat with her head cocked but straightened, eyebrows raised, at his words.

 

“I believe she was redeeming an entire continent — yourselves included — before the Powers, and convincing family she had never met to lend substantial military aid to their ancient murderers, who had also destroyed her own home and family.” 

 

The heat seemed to press in and then flash to ice, and back to heat, like a fever. Did Zamîn not hear him? 

 

“And when she had seen off the fleet of the Valar?” he bit off. “Where then?” 

 

Zamîn huffed impatiently, and Elros flashed hot again, but she was speaking -- “Doomed to never set foot again in Middle Earth, for breaking taboo, as the songs all say!” 

 

“The songs are hearsay,” Elros snarled, feeling his control fray. 

 

“Aeglosbes confirmed when I asked,” Zamîn retorted. 

 

Every sinew in Elros’ body tightened. “How dare you ask her such a thing?” 

 

It was a mistake; he knew as soon as the words were out. Zamîn pressed her lips together so tightly the dark plum color bled out of them. She sucked a breath in through her nostrils and let it out slowly through her mouth.

 

“Simply because,” she said, measured, “this is an unutterable question between us, does not mean I may not ask it of others.”

 

“I would you had not.”

 

“Would you? My people’s lives, my children’s lives, hung on the kindness of a woman you would not even speak about, much less speak with. I am their queen and their mother, and I have led among Men since before you and Gil-Galad swept us up into an army.”

 

Elros kept his voice level with great effort. “I feel it is a question of care.”

 

“Do I not care about you? Of course I do. I am your queen. But a queen thinks of her people first.” 

 

She stood, sharply, and turned to gaze out over the town. In profile, Elros saw her jaw clench and release, as though she was forcing herself to relax muscle by muscle. He made to take his chance to speak, but he was too late; she rode over him. 

 

“Hear me, Elros Tar-Minyatur,” she said, words clipped. “In the face of two Dooms not her own, your mother held the final asylum in all Beleriand against utmost Evil, alone. She sacrificed her husband on a fierce hope, and he let her do it. I do not know her mind. I do not know what she thought when your foster-fathers came to slaughter refugees and the last hope of a continent with them.” 

 

Zamîn slapped the banister with an open palm and whirled to face him. Even as his heart hammered in his throat and the blood rose to his face, Elros saw her as he had at the first, with a sawn-off spear guarding her clan against a whole army of Elves come out of the dying forest.  

 

“I do know,” Zamîn said, voice wavering-firm like a harpstring about to snap, eyes burning, “that if I thought I had hidden Vardamir and Tindómiel safely away, with allies hasting to their aid, and my presence meant the ruin of the last haven of my all my kindreds -- the people to whom I was sworn in rulership -- I would jump too.”

 

Elros leapt to his own feet, heart clogging his throat, unsure if the thought of Zamîn plummeting over the banister -- right there!-- or her defense of Elwing’s choices, or some summer madness stirred him. He towered over Zamîn, who stood like a doe at bay. 

 

Some noise from the town wafted on the hot air, and the obligation to see what was toward restrained whatever terrible, childish retort struggled at the back of his tongue. He took a breath, perhaps to say something merely terrible, but Zamîn’s eyes darted over his shoulder and widened. The clamor increased, and footsteps sounded upon the stairs. 

 

Elros shoved the argument aside and turned, keeping Zamîn behind him, but before he could call out to Losseth, or anyone, a young girl burst through the curtain door. It was only Meril, one of his scouts, sent out westwards -- what could be the matter? A pack of people gaggled behind her, breathless, and when the girl fell to her knees before the two of them, he noted that her dusty face was streaked with tears, her breathing ragged with more than her run. 

 

“What is it?” he asked, glad, almost, for a new target for the angry race of his heart.

 

Meril gulped another breath, then looked up at him and said, “Dragon! A dragon on Armenelos!” 

 

The breath froze in his lungs. What worm of Morgoth had braved his isle? How? And how was he to fight it, without the weapons of his father? 

 

Yet Meril stared up from the floor with hope behind her fear, and his people behind her clutched spears and bows, and from behind him, Zamîn said in a steady voice, “Go.”  

Chapter 5

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Even one horse, even a mule, would be a blessing. Elros remembered Maedhros liked to say a king never runs before his subjects unless he is running down a hart in the hunt, but Númenor’s newborn rocks could no more support a herd than the blasted mud of Beleriand. Meril might have run from the hill of Armenelos all the way to Rómenna, but Elros could not, not and arrive in any shape to fight a dragon. Instead, they rowed to the dragon up the firth from Rómenna, straining against the receding tide. 

 

Meril huddled in the stern of the boat beside Elros, who had one hand on the rudder, another clasping her shoulder comfortingly. As the spear-fighters rushed to the single seaworthy three-rower in the Second Harbor, she had reported that she had wished to climb Armenelos-hill, which she had seen from the Meneltarma at midsummer, and had switchbacked up its eastern face. The slope was gentle, but long, and when she heard water in a depression just out of sight, she went to search for the stream. She never found it, for cresting the lip of the cup valley, she had seen the dragon.  

 

“Just its teeth,” she said. “White and long and awful. I was behind a rock. I couldn’t see more. And I saw movement behind the teeth. They were as long as my arm. Something was moving in the valley.” 

 

Elros had hushed her then and praised her bravery, and insisted she drink and sit beside him at the rudder of the three-rower. Beneath his hand, she was stiff as a board, but silent. 

 

Also silent was the burnt Umbar-painted figure of Elwing-Who-Called on the prow. Her hands were raised to hold a lantern, her mouth carved to cry out to the waves as feathers burst from her arms and hair. Elros thought of Ancalagon, run through on the prow of Vingilot -- had the Valar carved a figurehead Elwing there too?  He kept his eyes on the far shore of the firth and did not watch her shadow run over the water. 

 

They disembarked while the low sun washed the stones and scrubby volunteer shrubs in gold. Armenelos rose gently before them, half black in the shade of the Meneltarma. The clusters of house-sized boulders that had leant the hill its name glowed orange. 

 

Should they wait here until morning? Elros wondered. The rowers would be fresher for a night’s rest -- but who would sleep, when a battle with a dragon hung on daybreak? Now, if they kept the setting sun at their backs, the dragon would be at a disadvantage. And, perhaps, just perhaps, the star of high hope rising out of the gloaming would remind the worm of its vanquished sibling. 

 

They started for the hill, Meril leading, Elros at her shoulder. 

 

The little cup valley was just as Meril had described -- water tinkling against shale just out of sight from the girl’s use-path, a gentle slope interrupted by a sudden, deep scoop just at the rise’s elbow. Elros motioned for Meril and the spear-bearers to hold back and stalked to the lip of the depression. On his belly, he slunk to the very edge, taking care not to rattle the slightest pebble. 

 

He had no blesséd boat, nor a Silmaril, but his second cousin Túrin had needed no such armaments to slay a dragon. When he and Elrond had been young, Maglor had, with varying degrees of sympathy and malice depending on how they fared, sung them tales of Turambar, slayer of Glaurung, outlaw, cursed and Doomed. One evening, soaked with rain and pestered by orcs, Maglor had told them with particular relish of Niënor’s death, and Elrond had looked up at him with that limpid poise he possessed even then and said that, for all the tragedy of their deaths, he was glad his cousins, at least, had managed to do some good despite their Dooms. 

 

Elrond was not with him now, but neither was any Doom. So had Elros chosen. His acts were his own, and his dragons, too.

 

A deep breath, and he pulled his torso over the lip of the valley. 

 

The teeth froze him in his tracks. White as bone, white as death, they were as long as a goat’s horn and hooked, great sickled spears set in a mouth large enough, it seemed, to swallow the world. 

 

Elros’ breath rasped in his throat and he thought again, desperately, of Niënor frozen under Glaurung’s eye, and of Zamîn saying she would jump if she had to. Another breath. No poison fouled his lungs, no voice wormed through his brain. 

 

He blinked. The teeth were still there, an arm’s breadth from him. 

 

Yet they did not move, and the great, hollow eye socket was black with shadow, not malign intelligence. He beheld a vast skull.  

 

It seemed all teeth and eyes, with a long snout and round cranium behind, like a hunting hound. Behind it curved an immense spine, with ribs fit to engulf a longboat, bloody with sunset. Each bone in the great back could have served Tindómiel as a table. He saw why Meril had been spooked by motion -- tattered banners of rotted skin draped over the beast’s sides, swaying and fluttering in the slight evening breeze.

 

Elros’ whole body shook once, a wracking shudder, and afterwards his breath came easier. The skeleton had no true limbs, he registered, only hand-like members at the top of the spine. Following the arc of a rib to the shadowed floor of the dell, he saw that the creature had not died alone. Fish bones schooled around it in spirals and spiked knots. Mussel and clam shells clustered on rocks, open to the sky, meat long since dried to powder. Strange husks, like the carapaces of cicadas, but strangely jointed and flattened, seemed almost to skitter in the waning light. Looking closer, some of the stones were not stones at all, but bleached and desiccated billows and fronds of coral, a dead reef drowned in the air and faded by the unabating sun. At the far edge, a spring bubbled up and ran towards the Meneltarma, singing water songs. 

 

For a moment, Elros’ body insisted it lay on the edge of some tidepool or shallow, despite the wind ruffling his hair, the rocks digging into his belly. He swam among the remnants of the sea, swept out by a great undertow, as if a thousand thousand years had passed him by, and Númenor had been worn down to the seafloor from whence Ossë wrenched it. 

 

Another shiver, and Elros knew again the firm ground beneath him, his perspective on the cup valley where no dragon had ever lain. He rose to his feet, and held up a hand to beckon. 

 

--

 

“We are safe,” Elros called. “There is no dragon here.” 

 

The spear-bearers approached warily, fanning out around the edge of the dale. A few muffled oaths floated on the breeze as they looked upon the remains of the sea beast, and a few more gasps of wonder. 

 

“As you see,” he said, pitching his voice to carry, “there is no danger, only, perhaps, a memory.” 

 

A spearman removed his rusted helm, revealing himself to be Galor, wide-eyed and intent on the scene in the valley. 

 

“That was an ambergrease whale,” he said. “As large as I have ever seen. They are jealous of Great Uin, so make their perfume to delight the Lady of the Seas with sweetness instead of might.”

 

“How came it here?” Meril had crept up to hover behind Elros’ shoulder, her helmetless head chest-high to the old sailors and ex-soldiers. Galor looked down at her, scowling. 

 

“Not on the wing, certainly,” he said. “Dragons indeed! Any of the fisherfolk might have told you what this was and not sent all Númenor into dread, and taken workers away from the fields.” 

 

“Peace,” Elros said mildly, putting his hand on Meril’s shoulder. “I do recall, Galor Guildmaster of the Fishers, that a whole school of fisherfolk followed Meril to the King’s House and were quite caught up. None mentioned a whale.” He glanced lazily at Galor’s spear, more recently used for stabbing grouper than dragons. 

 

Galor’s skin was light enough to show a flush spreading from his neck in blotches. Elros watched a moment, then let Meril go, nodding slightly to him. It would not do to wound his pride overmuch. 

 

“Guildmaster, I beg your expertise. If we set out now for Rómenna, could we reach harbor before it became too dark for the rowers?” 

 

Galor cleared his throat. “I fear not, my lord king,” he said. “Look, the sun falls behind the holy mountain already. The firth is full of reefs and sandbars that hide in the dark; we would surely run aground.” 

 

A spearwoman of Galor’s guild spoke. “They will all think us devoured or slain by dragonfire if we do not return tonight. My king, will you not send Meril to tell of what we have found?” 

 

Meril nodded rapidly, but Elros forestalled her, shaking his head. “No, no. Meril has run that distance once today, and to fall on this rough ground in the dark is as likely to result in death as an encounter with a true dragon.” 

 

The woman’s face fell, and she twisted her hands on her spear, a troth-ring glinting on her finger. 

 

“Our people remember waiting,” Elros told her gently. “One night of unease will do no lasting harm. We will leave at dawn in the morning, rested, and row as fast as falcons back to Rómenna.” 

 

She bowed and stepped back into line. 

 

“So be it,” he said. “We make field camp here. Do not light fires; should the flames be visible from Rómenna, they will be afeared for us indeed. All may sleep; there is no need for a watch on the Isle of Gift. Be ready at your oars when the sun rises.” 

Chapter 6

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As a child in Sirion and the Feänorion warcamp, the fires of Thangorodrim had faded all but the brightest stars, turning the night sky a sickly pink. As a young adult, just years or months before his Choice, the fierce storms and strange flames wielded by the Ainur against Morgoth had blotted out even those, leaving only Eärendil and the flensing light of the Silmaril. It was only as Tar-Minyatur that Elros had known the sable velvet of a black night and the coruscating scatter of Varda’s jewels at rest upon it. Vardamir would never know aught but his name, but Elros remembered the stars anew any chance he could. 

 

So by moon- and starlight, he left the hasty camp to its dreaming and stole to the steep lip of the cup valley. 

 

Tilion was kind. While by day the white glare of the boneyard might terrorize a child into running miles to home crying of her ancestors’ nightmares, by night the Moon drenched it in blues and grays and silvers. The fish swam again under the wash of luminous starfire, and the skeleton of the whale leapt and dove once more. 

 

Elros slipped over the edge into the dell, and found his lungs straining to hold his last breath, as if he slipped in truth from a boat into the sea. He exhaled, deliberately, and inhaled the silvery air. His feet met the ground with a crunch. Surprised, he glanced down. Sea biscuits, the skeletons of brittle stars, and the glorious jewelbox cases of urchins carpeted the ground beneath his feet in such profusion that there existed no place to step without crushing some reminder of the deeps, except treading on the rare bare patches where, shielded from the wind, the shadows of ribboned sea plants remained pressed into the sand. 

 

It was as though one of Vairë Ever-Weaving’s tapestries had come to rest on his island to tell the story of its former inhabitants. Elros imagined Vairë weaving himself, at this very moment, into her images of history, mirroring the living tapestry at his feet, reflecting it back and forth through time. 

 

Time flowed strangely around him for a moment, and the sea plants rose up again from where they had been laid low, turquoise and sapphire shadows in the starlight. Then, someone sniffled very loudly from inside the moon-rinsed ribcage of the whale. 

 

Elros startled, and peered through a gap in the bones to find, huddled in a patch of shadow behind the whale’s immense skull, Meril. She looked thoroughly miserable, a hunched assemblage of pointy pre-pubescent discomfort, gazing right at him in dismay. 

 

“Meril,” he called, as softly as he might. “Why do you sit at the heart of a whale while all our party sleeps?” 

 

Meril mumbled something wet and inaudible, and tipped her long locs forward to hide her face. Elros sighed. 

 

He took a crunching step forward, wincing at the smashed imprint of his foot. Another step, and he disrupted the long-preserved stamp of a kelp frond. Another stride, and he wiped away the remains of a pugnacious crab, fierce claws shattered under his heel. On the third step, he stopped flinching at the obliteration he left behind him and made his way steadily to the great skeleton, ducked under the ribs, and knelt before Meril. 

 

“How now, child?” he asked. “Are you hurt?” 

 

Meril made an attempt at a bow, but -- being already on the ground, squeezed beneath a giant spine -- succeeded mostly in wrapping herself more tightly into her disconsolate ball. 

 

“No, my lord,” she said thickly. 

 

“Something is clearly wrong,” Elros replied. “Else you would be asleep in camp, preparing to return home on the morrow.” 

 

Meril’s shoulders heaved, and she buried her face in her arms. She mumbled something mostly unintelligible, but Elros caught, “think I am an idiot,” towards the end. 

 

Elros felt the urge to reach out and comfort her as he would Tindómiel, this daughter of his Númenor, but he had no desire to distress her further. He was not her father, after all. 

 

“Ah,” he said instead, keeping his voice even and gentle. “I do not think everyone will think you foolish. Even Galor Guildmaster followed you, did he not? We Men have had much to do with dragons, of late. Who, moreover, could fault you for finding such a wonder as this?” 

 

“But it is not a dragon, my lord,” Meril said, with that air of a child telling an adult something so disgustingly obvious they could not believe it was necessary to say aloud. Elros had thought it unique to Vardamir, but perhaps it was inborn in all children around that age. “I made all this trouble for nothing, and took hands away from the fields, and everyone will be terribly angry.” She sighed as though the world were ending again before her eyes. “And my friends will laugh at me, too,” she concluded, dolefully. 

 

Elros smiled, glad that Meril was still speaking to her feet and that the dark hid his face. 

 

“I promise they will not,” he said. “Your friends will be relieved that you have returned safely to them with a story to tell until you are all old and gray. As for the rest, how will they be angry when I tell them how Meril, first rose of Númenor, found the site of our great city to come?” 

 

Meril looked up from her arms. Though tear tracks streaked her face, her eyes rounded in confusion. 

 

“What do you mean, my lord?” 

 

“It has been my thought all night,” he replied. “Would it not behove us to live farther from the sea, not clinging to the edge of this isle as though always looking back at the homes we lost? What is more, all felt the holiness of the Meneltarma, and it is well to honor what is holy with our closeness. And look what you have found! A sweet spring, a defensible hill -- in the shadow of the holy mountain but not trespassing on its slopes -- in sight of the sea but near the center of our new home. I tell you first, Meril, for you led me to this idea -- and the whale, if it has a ghost that can hear us. If not, it is yet a sign that much else lived joyfully here before us.” 

 

Meril seemed to be pondering this. She cast about the valley, eyes shining in the dark, then looked him in the eye again. 

 

“But, my lord…” Her voice trailed off. Elros nodded encouragingly. “But really,” she said in a rush, “How did the whale get here?”

 

Elros pursed his lips, then gestured at the steep walls of the valley. “I imagine it came up when Númenor was lifted from the seabed. Do you see the form of the land here? A high hill, and this deep depression. I would venture that the whale and these other creatures were swimming in this well, surrounded by the relatively shallow water, when the island was raised. They were carried up together and were trapped.”

 

Meril’s eyebrows knit together. She looked up at the whale’s body arcing over her, the shadows of the ribs shifting down her face. 

 

“But the Valar lifted Númenor up,” she said. “It was a present for us.” She seemed close to tears again, her voice thickening, lip wobbling. 

 

“Did they mean to make the whale die?” she demanded. “Or did they only forget, and the whale died because they forgot?”

 

Something uncomfortable shifted in Elros’ belly. Meril looked at him as though he would have the answer for the Dooms and fates of the Valar, rather than only his own old wounds and questions. 

 

“The Valar do not forget, except a-purpose,” he responded slowly. “Things had to be moved aside, for us to walk and live on our gifted land.”

 

“But why did the whale have to die?” Meril repeated. “I thought the land was supposed to be empty.” She really was crying again now, a few tears glinting in the moonlight. Elros put his hand to his heart. 

 

“I do not know, rose of Númenor,” he said. “The gifts of Valinor come at a high price.” 

 

At last, he let himself reach out to the girl, holding out his hand in the air, purposely doing away with the command in it. Meril hesitated, then took it. 

 

“Think of Armenelos-to-be,” he said. “If you have children, they might run to the city fountain and tell stories of when it was a mysterious spring like the ocean on dry land. Think how beautiful we might make this place.” 

 

Meril continued to gaze at him for a moment, then slowly let go of his hand. “I suppose it will have to be paved over, to be a fountain.”

 

“I suppose so.” 

 

All was quiet. Between the ribs of the whale, the stars had shifted in their nightly dance, peeking through different bones. Meril did not speak for long minutes, and Elros watched the constellations shimmer, waiting. 

 

“I think I would rather live in Rómenna all my life,” she said, eventually. Elros looked down at her, but Tilion’s progress had left her face in shadow, and he could not make out her expression. “I would be sad to hear people forget the whale had been here.” 

 

“But you and I will remember, will we not? The day Meril discovered a dragon.” 

 

Meril did not reply, only made a motion of the head that might have been a nod. Elros waited for her to say more, but she kept her counsel.

 

“All this is for the future,” he said, when the silence had stretched. “For now, we should sleep. We must leave early to reassure Rómenna and your friends. You of all of us should not be awake so late at night.”

 

He stood, noticing again the crunch of bones and shells underfoot. After a moment, Meril stood too, scrubbing her eyes on her sleeve. He smiled, and hoped she could see it in the wavering starlight. 

 

“Come, we will have to jump for it to make the edge.” Something like a smile flickered on Meril’s face, perhaps at the thought of her king scrambling up the valley wall like a child after gull eggs. 

 

“On my mark,” Elros said, deciding to play the role to the hilt. “Go!”

 

They ran, and leapt, and clambered out onto the slopes of Armenelos, Meril giggling stuffily. Behind them, a broad path of crushed shells and smeared imprints led to the heart of the whale. Cloven so, the dell seemed less a pocket of ocean remembered, and more a curiosity, a pile of bleached bones wearing away in the unfamiliar air.

 

Elros saw Meril settled in the center of camp, then spread his own cloak on the edge of the ring of sleepers, in earshot of the valley spring. He slept, and if he heard mournful whalesongs in his dreams, he had chosen mortality, and mortal memories fade. 

Chapter 7

Please note that this chapter is particularly heavy on the discussions of suicide. 

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It seemed every person on Númenor stood on the edge of the Second Harbor to watch them return in the last wisps of sunrise, crying out gladly to see them rowing in unhurt and hale. Zamîn stood amongst her spinning ladies on solid ground, carrying bandages and ointments, and, more happily, water and food. 

 

Elros disembarked first, and stood on the seawall to describe the distinct lack of dragons. He made an effort to emphasize the size and strangeness of the whale, for Meril’s sake, and the brilliance of the discovery of the spring. His plans for Armenelos were hinted at enough, he hoped, to spark interest and perhaps a rumor or two. There was not yet enough soil inland for the kind of farming so recently possible at Rómenna, but whither interest, thither effort. Perhaps the Drúedain might be convinced to share their goats a while, to build up the fertile land. 

 

When it seemed his speech had stirred a heart or two, and no negative attention seemed to fall on Meril, he ended with a rousing call for a round song and dance to give thanks for their safety. He sang the first note at an easy pitch, then motioned to Galor to take up the tune, hoping he would let his description of events lie and be happy with the honor. 

 

Galor picked it up gladly and the fisherfolk joined him, and the young people rushed forward to make the inner circle of the dance. Elros made his way to Zamîn, nodding and clasping hands as he went. 

 

Zamîn stood still in the midst of the bustle, her face quite smooth. She lifted a cup to his lips, sweet water sloshing inside. 

 

“Welcome, my king,” she said, and Elros replied, “Thank you, my queen,” and drank from her hands. 

 

When he had done, Zamîn lowered the cup and stood still, a quiet spot in the hubbub. Most were dancing, but Elros felt eyes upon them, the constant surveillance of a people on their rulers in their midst. 

 

“It was not a dragon,” he said, though of course Zamîn had heard his explanation as well as any. “Though it was passing strange.” 

 

“I am glad it was not a dragon,” Zamîn said, and nothing more. 

 

Elros studied her face. It was not so expressionless as he had thought, at first. There was a little furrow between her dark brows; there, a tightness at her cheek, as though she bit it from the inside; there, perhaps, a rim of red around her eyes that bespoke a sleepless night, or tears. 

 

As quietly as he could while still being heard over the tumult of voices, he said, “I think Vardamir and Tindómiel would have missed me, had it been a dragon. I had not a Silmaril, nor a ship of mithril, nor even a cursed sword.” 

 

Zamîn’s lips tightened more, but she said nothing. Elros continued. 

 

“Yet had it been a dragon in truth, I would have still gone, for Númenor’s sake.” 

 

At last, her face eased, and she let out a shuddering breath, lost to the singing. She dropped the cup to the ground, uncaring of where it rolled, and drew him into the dance. 

 

--

 

The summer drew to an end with no more dragon sightings. Only the accustomed small miracles and tragedies of life visited the Isle of Gift, of particular interest to those beyond their subjects only because some were the first seen on Númenor. 

 

Adûnabêl wrote out the first book of Númenor by hand, which he presented to his cruel plant-sage as a courting gift. Númenor’s first justice was named to the (hastily constructed) bench after an incident involving a chicken who had laid an egg on a property line. Elros had found that the number and silliness of incidents requiring adjudication would expand to fill all the time he could spare for them and was glad for the excuse to formalize a more balanced system. 

 

The next new moon also greeted Númenor’s first set of twins. Elros saw them three days after they were born, for their mother had been struck with childbed fever and none could ease her. He crushed kingsfoil beneath her nose to refresh her and shared what strength he could, and when she was out of danger and sleeping peacefully, he braved the cradle where the other parent sat, drawn and tense. The babes were not identical, he saw, and, with a strange ache, made a blessing over them and departed before she woke.

 

Númenor also saw the first return of ships that had carried away its dear ones. As the first pale harriers and landrails of autumn blew, exhausted and hungry, onto Elenna’s shores on their way to winter in Valinor, Elros posted a rotating watch of sailors with a precious spyglass of Feänorian make to look out for Aeglosbes’ sails. 

 

They spotted them on the first morning of Númenor’s first barley harvest, white and proud and swift. Few hands could be spared from the fields, least of all Zamîn, determining which seeds should be kept back for next year’s planting, but Elros sent Zâinabên to alert the families of his seven learners and the priestesses of Uinen. The sails grew and grew and, by high noon, the ship glided elegantly into harbor as though a migratory bird itself. The priestesses sang welcome and thanks, throwing flowers woven of barley straw into the waters, and laughed and cheered when the half-Drúedain boy, Zhân, leapt from the prow to be the first to touch the land again, Aeglosbes smiling indulgently behind him. 

 

Elros proclaimed his gladness at their homecoming and accepted their bows with good humor, before sending them off to greet their impatient families. The night would be theirs to boast and sleep and tell stories. In the morning, Elros would have them tell their tales again before him, Zamîn, Galor, and Adûnabêl, and then again before him alone. 

 

As the last of the seven made their bow and received their blessing -- the young Hadorian alnerwen, at least an inch taller than at their departure just months ago -- Aeglosbes approached. Unlike her temporary apprentices, the months at sea did not show on her ageless face -- yet Elros detected something different all the same. A vitality, perhaps, a contentment that brightened her eyes and lightened her step. She drew up before him, bouncing slightly on her toes, and made her customary shallow bow. The small worry nibbling at Elros’ chest, that she would have carried his insult across the ocean and back, dissipated. 

 

“Welcome,” he said, warmly. “You are most welcome, and it is with a glad heart that I receive you back with all the children of Númenor in your care.” 

 

Aeglosbes grinned. “Tar-Minyatur, my thanks. Your children learned quickly and worked willingly, and I must flatter myself that they are now passable ships’ mates. Moreover, my family found them agreeable guests and commend their courtesy.”  

 

“I am gratified to hear it,” Elros said. “You have sailed in on a harvest day, and I regret that we cannot receive you with much circumstance, but I would hear all the tales you have to tell me now. Tonight, you and your crew must dine ashore, and the parents of your students will honor you.”

 

“We are honored indeed,” said Aeglosbes. “I have much to recount.” 

 

They smiled, and Elros led her to the King’s House to hear her accounts. 

 

Vardamir was spending the day with Zamîn, learning the mathematics of harvest, but Tindómiel was at home and beside herself with joy to see Aeglosbes. In the way of Elves, Aeglosbes received her almost as a child herself, and they bent their dark heads together -- Tindómiel’s hair pulled into puffs, Aeglosbes’ sleek and short -- to speak of all the momentous happenings of her little world. Elros was anxious to hear of the expedition, but the sight of the two of them chattering excitedly was too dear to chivvy away, and he stood next to Losseth, watching indulgently. 

 

Eventually, Aeglosbes cast about for a lifeline, and somehow it was arranged that Tindómiel would practice her fingerloop braiding using Aeglosbes’ ankle as a sturdy pull-point, and otherwise would stay quiet, please, as best she could. 

 

So arrayed, Aeglosbes’ left leg occasionally jerking when Tindómiel pulled her nascent lace tight, they discussed the expedition. The economics of the matter came first. What of Aeglosbes’ stores was available for trade on Númenor before she departed, not to return until the next spring? 

 

Would she bargain for seal oil, as well as whale oil? She would not. Surely in Aman the exotic conveniences of “Feänorian lamps” and “trees” meant Númenor’s need for oil was greater? Perhaps, but its ability to pay was far lesser and she did have a crew to keep; besides, seal oil could not be burned to heat a house of the Númenorean style, and so was only useful for illumination, and Númenor was hardly a reading country yet. True enough, yet Númenor did have one book, written just that summer, and it would be a fine thing to be able to offer this rare and unprecedented bounty of knowledge to the voracious Tiron markets. Now, that was attractive, but what good would only one copy do her, when she was duty-bound to add such knowledge to the scholars’ library of the north?

 

By the time Tindómiel had braided an arm’s length of lacing and was beginning to grouse with hunger, they had hammered out that lending Adûnabêl’s book to Aeglosbes for the season to make fair copies -- the proceeds of which would be split between her, the scribes, and Adûnabêl -- would buy them Aeglosbes’ promise to bargain individually with interested households that came to trade crafts for seal oil. They had not yet touched upon salted cod, smoked salmon, dried meats, arrow-fletching feathers, carving-quality antler and walrus ivory, or furs. 

 

Zamîn was better-suited to those tasks, Elros decided, and adjourned to lunch on the last of the fresh cherries and a cold roast of unfortunate migrating teal.  

 

While they ate, he asked Aeglosbes to describe the training her guest-apprentices had received. It was more comprehensive than he had thought to hope for, he realized, as Aeglosbes recounted her course of study. 

 

“They spoke Sindarin only, except to a handful of crew who tormented them with Quenya. It was difficult at first, but in the early weeks we did nothing where a misunderstanding would have been dangerous and, after all, most of them already spoke it enough for bare comprehension,” Aeglosbes explained. “Knots, ropework, and the marlin spike at first, ship’s manners and safety while they spliced. Next came hullwork and the rudiments of ship carpentry, some sailmaking. Two of them had a real facility for this sort of bosun’s work, Îbal and the young Hadorian, Mían. Once they were comfortable aboard, I sent them to the second mate to learn rigging. They had the responsibility of furling and steering my dear ship one day each on the return, and I did not feel much fear in their hands.” 

 

Aeglosbes took a sip of water and smiled. “There is only so much to be learned in a single summer, but I would gladly take those two on again, perhaps on an older square-rigged ship, as I understand that is what your Great Ships are.” 

 

“As for the rest?” Elros inquired. “I hope they were not laggards by comparison.” 

 

Aeglosbes laughed. “Not at all! The rest found their niches too. That young firebrand of yours, Pharâzindil, wanted to get into everything; I attached her to one of my younger midshipelves to do logistics after the first weeks. I do not think she will make a sailor, but she would make a fine quartermaster.” 

 

Nodding, Elros said, “I had thought to make her my secretary upon her return; I am pleased to hear she performed capably at a similar task.” 

 

“Certainly, yes,” Aeglsobes said. “The rest, I flatter myself, are good generalists. Zhân, though,” she said, a speculative look in her eye, “He is something else again.” 

 

Elros cocked his head, and said nothing. He knew the half-Drúedain boy very little, but his mother held a position in the body of elders who guided the Drúedain’s decisions on Númenor. They had but little to do with the Édain on the island, to Elros’ disappointment, preferring to remain inland, and a distrustful distance remained between the two peoples. He had hoped that perhaps including Zhân might do something to bring the two communities closer in counsel. 

 

“Yes,” Aeglosbes said musingly, and hummed. “He loved the sea. He wanted to know every current, every star map, the name of every fish and the song of every storm. I do not say he was a natural, mind,” she added, “for no one truly is natural to the sea, lest they be a Maia of Ulmo, but he wished to know it and tread lightly upon it. And when we came at last to my family, he of all of them sought to respect the land and those who belonged to it.” 

 

Alarmed, Elros asked, “Were the others unmannerly?”

 

“No, they were entirely well mannered,” Aeglosbes assured him. “But there is a difference between the courtesy shown to a host, whose land is a source of some good to be extracted and brought back home, some place temporary, and the respect of one who knows the people and the land must be honored together, and will be there when one has gone.”

 

She sighed, and looked out again at the waves. “They are my family, and that was my land,” she said, voice low. “I know that it remains while I am gone, for when I return it has changed like the ice in spring. I wish the others might have learned from that child’s example, but I do not know if such an attitude is something that can be taught, only lived towards.” 

 

Aeglosbes gazed out over the ocean, eyes focused on something Elros could not fathom. Then Tindómiel tangled her fingers in her lace and laughed her child’s belly laugh, and Aeglosbes threw back her head to laugh with her.

 

--

 

The evening’s celebration was a fine one indeed. Almost everyone gathered in the just-harvested fields, with a sweet-smelling bonfire made of the barley straw for roasting spitted dormice flushed by the scythes. The parents served Aeglosbes and her crew from their own plates and gave them drink from their own cups, while younger siblings clung inseparably to legs; and the seven were called on again and again to demonstrate what they had learned and tell of what they had seen. 

 

Elros and Zamîn stayed somewhat separate, as was necessary, but ceded their place at the head of the bonfire to the reunited families. To watch from the dark, for once not the center of a constant, low-grade attention, was a pleasure all its own. Harvest and summer and smoke tinged the air as the sky darkened. The Evenstar rose in the distance, and the younger children were taken off to bed. As was inevitable, in Elros’ experience, someone eventually produced a spirit to put hair on an Elf’s chest, and by the time the last dormouse was devoured, the telling of tall tales had begun. 

 

The fisherfolk boasted of enormous fish netted, the old farmers of obscenely shaped vegetables. A reborn Nandorin sailor described in gruesome detail how orcs had lanced him from his charging battle-moose at Oropher’s side in the War of Wrath, and Elros took the cover of laughter and disgusted exclamations to whisper to Zamîn.  

 

“Will you speak with Îbal, Mían, Linglas, and Tôdaphêl?” he asked. “Ask them what they may have learned that they were not taught.”

 

Zamîn glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, the firelight flickering over her lips, her proud nose casting a long shadow down her cheek. “My untrusting husband. Yes. You will do the same with the others?” 

 

Elros made a wry face. “As I am sure you know, Aeglosbes knows, and I know she knows, and on into eternity. Still, I believe many stories make sure knowledge.” He pulled her close by the hips, burying his nose in her coiled hair, enjoying the scent of bonfire in it, the unusual freedom of darkness and irrelevance. “I expect nothing harmful. I merely wish to gather their impressions of Adsirion, as well as they can have gleaned any while sailing in its working fleet.” 

 

Zamîn reached up and ran her fingers through his hair. She leaned in close, and Elros felt a shock of excitement like a youth -- then she nipped his nose. Ignoring his sputter, she murmured, “You think like a king these days.” 

 

Elros watched her stand and melt into the small groups laughing around the fire, singling out Mían and, skillfully as a sheepdog, cutting the somewhat overawed -- and possibly somewhat tipsy -- alnerwen into a conversational posture that foreclosed interruption. 

 

Warm to his bones, he went to do the same. 

 

The fire tossed sparks into the air to blend with the stars, bursts of song and pockets of companionable quiet bubbling through the liquid night. Pharâzindil was easy to find. The center of a gaggle of other young women, half a head again as tall as them and wearing seashells in her hair, she held court in a serious debate about the practicality of canerows for long sea voyages. Elros saw no reason to remove her, and instead encouraged her to show off her knowledge to her friends, asking serious questions as he would of an advisor. 

 

Yes, she said, her impression was that Adsirion was a wonderful place, and Númenor could learn a thing or two -- my king -- and did he, did they all know that it was ruled by election, like some of the Drúedain? Loftily, she opined that the reason was the too-many kings of the Sindar, and Elros wondered ruefully if a spot of electoral politics among the Noldor would have saved Beleriand trouble, or merely accelerated the strife. No, it seemed stable, stable as anything! You could tell -- my king -- because of the sentiments of the laboring class on the ships… 

 

As the talk turned to Pharâzindil’s spinners’ union, Elros drifted away, and sought out the boy Anwion, youngest of the seven, the finest diver on the island. He found him roaring drunk, perhaps for the first time, and of the giddy opinion that Aeglosbes was secretly in love with Elwing-Who-Called, and also that it was terribly unfair that the Nandor and the Sindar and the Avari and all the rest had to go to this strange place they did not know, and maybe they should all get an island too. Also, he wished he could talk to birds like an Elf. Elros found this all rather useful, in fact, but did not hesitate in tracking down the poor youth’s parents for the pleasure of wrestling him home. 

 

Zhân found him. He had been feeding the fire the last time Elros had seen him, and he appeared before him with a nugget of charcoal and a thin stone on which he had sketched a diving pelican. Without probing, he said simply that he hoped the rest of Valinor left them well enough alone, as they should have done from the beginning. Elros had little to say in response to that. 

 

They would speak again in the days to come, but these unfiltered impressions were strong stock to build on, and it was late. 

 

The moon had peaked and dimmed with the bonfire, and the gathering began the slow dissolution into yawning and kissing and sneaking off native to all such parties. Elros looked around for Zamîn, with whom he might sneak off himself. 

 

She had not returned to the fire, nor was she with any of the remaining seven. Had she gone home? No, there she was, at the poppy-strewn border of the field, sitting on a boulder. And the dark head with her -- Aeglosbes. 

 

He approached, careful on the trodden, stubbled furrows. 

 

“--truth, I felt the world a cage,” Aeglosbes was saying, and Zamîn held her hand like a sister. “Can you be anywhere by choice if you cannot leave! Doomed, I felt, with many Dooms, none of them earned. To lose a wife, a daughter, the lands I had walked on since before the birth of the Sun, and to be Doomed to never follow them…Then to try anyway and be trapped all the more, because of kings to whom I pledged no troth and events of which I knew naught. Yes, I hated kings and gods alike, then.” 

 

Her ears twitched, and she and Zamîn turned about on the boulder and watched his approach. She smiled, Elros saw, though her words had wrenched him. 

 

“I came upon your wife on this stone as I came upon your mother on the clifftop below her tower years ago,” she said. “Perhaps the one person in Valinor more trapped than an Elf of the Lossoth reborn and banned from her land, which was melted into the sea besides.” 

 

Elros did not know what to say to this. Something tugged at his breast to see Zamîn and Aeglosbes in each others’ confidence so -- and about his mother. But what was this? It did not seem his to hear, and yet they did not send him away. He sat instead, just at the foot of the boulder, looking up at the two women against the stars. 

 

“She was angry,” Zamîn said, a storm on her brow. 

 

“She was angry, and I was angry alongside her,” Aeglosbes said. “You have been angry too.” 

 

Zamîn laughed, and leant down to tousle Elros’ hair. “Until I was queen, for a queen cannot be angry except in extremity, or cannot admit it.” 

 

Elros frowned, thought of a jest, but her hand was so gentle in his hair, and after all, was he not angry too? 

 

“Well, perhaps this is why she does not call herself queen of Adsirion,” Aeglosbes said dryly. Zamîn laughed, that girlish sound Elros had heard at cradles and the drowning of a continent both.  He could not laugh, and he was not sure what was amusing. 

 

“But she leads there, does she not?” he asked, feeling once more as though his words did not speak his meaning. 

 

Aeglosbes looked down at him now, quite aware, he thought, that an admiral should not look down at a king, and doing so anyway. 

 

“When chosen. Other times, not. She has different aims than power alone.” 

 

Something in it made him bridle. “Power is no evil, treated wisely.” 

 

Zamîn stroked his head again, then slid down the rock to sit on the dirt beside him. She reached out another hand to Aeglosbes, and so remained. “I think the general idea is that power is freedom,” she remarked. “The problem is when people believe that.” 

 

“A lover of knowledge as could teach the Vanyar,” Aeglosbes laughed. 

 

“I do not believe you,” Elros told Zamîn. He spoke to her, yet knew Aeglosbes listened. It felt hot in his belly, but not the kind of heat that burned. Perhaps it was an old heat, too tired to blister any more. “Why should she act as though she has no power and it grants her no freedom?” 

 

Above him, Aeglosbes sighed. It cut through the last pops of the bonfire and the wind off the sea, and Elros looked up to find her as merry and sad as Elrond, perhaps, standing on the chewed coast of Lindon watching him sail away. 

 

“Your freedom is assured without the barest scrap of power, King of Númenor,” she said. “You see, Elwing and I both had meant to die, and could not.”

 

Speech was impossible. It died in his throat. Zamîn held his hand tightly, and he wished she would release him, yet never let him go. He remembered his Choice, how Elrond had begun to look at him with sad eyes behind the mirth of victory. In the harbor below him were ships with his mother’s face painted on them in the burnt Umbar Galor had spent his last metal money on instead of Eressëan food, because he and Elrond and everyone else thought his mother had meant to fly. 

 

“All the Elves left in Beleriand were in a frenzy when Maedhros Self-Slain cast himself into the chasm,” Zamîn said, even-voiced. “Yet none spoke except in tales when Niënor Morweniel did the same, nor when Tuor set sail to seek a deathly mercy; and no one spoke for my love’s father or his mother, when they sought a rescue they thought would destroy them.” 

 

Aeglosbes did not reply, merely sat silhouetted against the stars, and Zamîn did not speak again, but kept hold of their hands and tipped her head back against the rock. A strange tableau they made, like something out of an Elf-gallery in Doriath-that-was; but what Elf would think to include two Men, or the dry earth of harvest, or the bit of dormouse he had just noticed clinging to Aeglosbes’ cheek?

 

From somewhere deep, Elros dredged up a chuckle, which caught the air like a sail in fine wind and billowed to a guffaw. Back he threw his head and laughed out into the night. Zamîn swung his hand in hers, and the soft movement of her thumb tickled him so he laughed harder, ‘til his ribs ached fit to sprout. Above him, Aeglosbes looked on and seemed bemused --  oh, the condescending bemusement of Elves! 

 

“Spare me the torments Elves visit upon themselves!” he exclaimed. “I have decided this very moment; you two are witness to it. Hear me! All your bitter joy and your sweet sufferings are beside the point to me. I declare that henceforth I shall take the practical road and none other! I am going to sleep, right here,” he pointed emphatically at the rutted field, “and in the morning we shall talk of fishing rights and apprenticeships and treaties that somehow do not rely on fealty.”

 

“You mean to say,” Zamîn cut in, “I am finally encouraged to draft up a proper, standard list of offers and requests for a trading relation with Adsirion?”

 

“Yes!” he replied, jubilant. “I hope it is proper and standard enough to bore a bard to barbery. I hope it involves mulch.” 

 

“Mulch?” echoed Aeglosbes. 

 

“Mulch,” he said firmly. “So prepare yourself for the morrow, Admiral Elf, and good night.” 

 

So saying, he drew his cloak over his head, pillowed himself on his arms, and closed his eyes. A piece of straw poked him in the cheek, but he would not stir until his victory was complete. 

 

“Is he…” 

 

Zamîn snorted. “He is the image of his son, is what he is,” she said, and Elros heard the rustle of her skirt as she stood up. “Come down off your promontory, far-sailor, and sleep in your own hammock tonight. You will not wrest the last word from him by winch or lever.”

 

A series of scrapes and bumps marked Aeglosbes’ descent, then he sensed the two women standing over him. 

 

“The Men of my family were not like him,” she said eventually, sounding perplexed. 

 

“You see why we need an island to ourselves,” Zamîn replied, and pointedly wished her good dreams, if she slept. 

 

Her departing footsteps were too soft to hear, but after some moments, Zamîn exhaled on a chuckle. Her warm hand landed on his shoulder, and she shook him back and forth gently. 

 

“You are a nonsense man,” she said. “I am going to sleep in my own bed, and in the morning I am going to draw up an agreement before you can even think about the future implications of Adsirion softwood imports.” 

 

Elros feigned a sleepy murmur, and rolled over onto her feet. 

 

“Oaf,” she said, prodding him with her toe. “Sleep the sleep of the practical. I shall tell everyone this is your manner of giving thanks to Yavanna, and you will be required to do the same every harvest from now on.”

 

Elros pressed a kiss to her shin, eyes closed, and heard her laugh again as she left him to his field. He did sleep not so uncomfortably, in the end, and woke to the first petals of dawn.

Chapter 8

I can't believe we're done!

Read Chapter 8

Zamîn’s exceedingly standard and proper proposal took up only a single sheet of tissue-thin bird paper when all was said and done, not much different in its particulars to the agreements they had drawn up years ago with Tirion and Avallónë. To their mutual chagrin, Elros set Adûnabêl -- still resentful of sending his book overseas for a whole season -- and Pharâzindil -- quickly awakening to the unglamorousness of governance -- to make the fair copy, as a training exercise for Pharâzindil. He signed it Tar-Minyatur, set the seal of Barahir upon it, and brought it down to the quay where Aeglosbes made ready to return to Adsirion. 

 

The air blew brisk, the winds making their yearly turn to the west. The cliffs and breakers were alive with mergansers, shearwaters, grebes, gulls, and great cormorants making their way to Aman to winter, perhaps thrilled with this new land to rest over at, perhaps confused still at the loss of Beleriand. Aeglosbes perched on a massive coil of hawser rope, tossing chum fish from a pail at an apricot-legged black stork that raised its head to stare at him as he approached. 

 

Aeglosbes looked him over too, smiling slightly, though Elros thought he could detect a degree of lingering bafflement. 

 

“Is your noble companion strong enough to carry this?” Elros inquired when he had drawn near enough for speech over the cacophony of birds. 

 

Aeglosbes reached out and took the paper in its travelling canister and weighed it in her hand. 

 

“The document is entirely feasible, but I will instead wrap it in oilcloth and tie it with the usual jewelers’ chains. He is strong and willing, but I would not hinder him overmuch, for it is a hard journey even with no burden whatever. So equipped, he will precede us by a week, perhaps.”

 

“Might I expect an answer before your return next summer?” 

 

With a shrug and a tilt of the head, Aeglosbes indicated her uncertainty. “It might be -- that depends on my lady’s ability to find a seabird willing to fly in autumn or winter, when they ought to be fattening themselves and doing as birds do. It depends also on if she and the people find the treaty to their liking; if they require many changes, their response will be delayed. Certainly you can expect an acceptance or counteroffer by the time I return. That may be most likely.” 

 

Elros nodded his acknowledgement, and gestured to her rope throne. “Would I disturb our messenger if I joined you?” 

 

“Not if you pay the toll, my lord,” Aeglosbes replied, holding out an anchovy. Elros took it, gingerly, regretting the slick of fish oil on his fingers. The stork’s neck seemed to lengthen by half again as much, the spiked beak opening wide, and Elros quickly released the fish, which vanished with a snap. With some fascination, he watched a lump in the bird’s narrow, serpentine throat slowly descend, then vanish. Glancing at Aeglosbes, he found her smirking. 

 

“My toll is paid, Admiral.” 

 

“Sit, then, and be welcome.” 

 

Elros sidled behind the stork to settle beside Aeglosbes, and contemplated the shading of its feathers from stark black to white at the breast. 

 

“A handsome livery for a herald,” he said. “Did he take my earlier letter as well?” 

 

He caught Aeglosbes’ shake of the head from the corner of his eye. 

 

“The ocean birds are my lady’s friends, and one should not ask friends for too many favors too soon,” she said. “I sent your letter, which was small, with a skua who came to us on the wing.” 

 

Elros nodded, and they sat quietly for a while while the stork pecked through the pail for fishy remains.

 

“It gladdens me that you stop here on your own migration,” he told her after a spell. “I know it is a gift in its own sake. I will look to your coming next summer with joy.” 

 

“So will I, my lord,” Aeglosbes replied. “Come, let us set this bird on his way, and then I must catch the tide, which does not wait even for Ulmo.” 

 

They settled the message in its wrappings on a mithril chain along the stork’s back -- like an odd, precious avian satchel -- and watched as it beat its way into the upper air and away across the waves. When it was nothing more than a speck, Elros clapped Aeglosbes on the shoulder, and went to gather his family for a more formal goodbye. 

--

 

Autumn shrouded the island in cool morning mists that burned off into mellow afternoons, midday once again friendly to workers turning over the cleared fields and fisherfolk caulking their boats before the angry rains of winter. 

 

Zamîn saw the Angorodin goats shorn before the fall breeding season and was beside herself with the sheen of the staples, and the ease with which they took dye. No longer consumed with finding food during the floods, she plotted out loom construction and who might be spared from the making of sailcloth to experiment. 

 

For his part, Elros decided Vardamir was ready to follow him about his days for an hour or two. This way he might see judgements made, survey the storage of next year’s seed, help plan the first road and the selection of the next sites for creating new soil, even discuss plans for Armenelos. He was willing enough, but always pleased to run off at the end of the day to study with Adûnabêl -- but he was a child, and such was to be expected. He was much more attentive when it came time to help Tindómiel learn to read, a difficult task with no books appropriate for beginning readers available. With a patience Elros had not thought he possessed for things outside his own reading, he copied children’s songs down in chalk on slates, and helped Tindómiel sound out the letters, both Círth and Tengwar. Her favorite exercise was a song Losseth often sang to amuse her, because it was full of birds -- a silly patter tune that argued with itself about the many seabirds Elwing-Who-Called might have transformed into, and how they might each have carried a Silmaril. It echoed through the King’s House at all hours now, whenever Tindómiel was at lessons. 

 

The weeks slipped calmly by, as though all Númenor had realized that winter would not this year be a season of fear and gnawing hunger, only a time to rest and be washed clean by the rains. In the shortening evenings, Elros would walk along the beaches with Zamín and Vardamir and Tindómiel, sometimes greeted by the people, sometimes left to gather their mussels and seaweed in peace. 

 

Despite Aeglosbes’ caution, he had hoped to hear from Adsirion before the winter storms. As the seabirds departed, leaving the rocks bare and the strand quiet, he took to eating on the terrace of his bedroom, where he could see the grey ocean stretch to the far western horizon, and hear the town below him sing its caulking, baking, spinning songs. 

 

The first great storm of winter blew in a few weeks after the equinox, lashing the island with days of rain and striking the Meneltarma with great bursts of lightning. He gave up his watch. No bird would come eastering across the sea at risk of a gale now.

 

It pleased him to keep watch over Rómenna, however, and more and more he took to working at the balcony, glancing up from figures occasionally to see what was toward in the muddy streets. During one such rest from his tasks, he happened to look up past the Second Harbor towards the pale blue horizon. 

 

A bird winged its way towards land, and a passing great one it must be to be visible at this distance, he thought. An albatross, perhaps, blown off course in the storm. 

 

Yet -- something niggled in his chest, in his gut. Something called to him, half-familiar. He leapt to his feet. Could it be? Breath short, he watched the bird approach, coalescing into white wings, a keen beak, a black pouch. 

 

Soon they were close enough to look each other in the eye, and yes, he knew those eyes. He saw them in his children every day, and he had gazed into them set in this same pelican’s skull in the spring. 

 

The bird made as if to dive, pulling up short just when Elros thought she would crash into the room, or onto the terrace. She struggled upwards again, circling, awkward without the winds of the sea beneath her wings.

 

What was she doing? It seemed that she must fall, if she would not land.

 

They shall not ever walk again among Elves or Men in the Outer Lands, came Aeglosbes’ voice out of his memory, and he grasped the situation. In truth she could not come to rest on Númenor’s shores. He hesitated a moment, then ran inside and dragged out Zamîn’s worktable. Did the Valar scruple so? Would two layers of insulation from the soil hide her from their attention? 

 

It was enough, it seemed. She landed clumsily on her webbed feet and stood for a moment, arranging her broad wings until they vanished sleekly into her sides. Only then, without the distraction of her dark pinions, did he see the message case around her neck. 

 

“Oh,” he murmured. “You brought it yourself.” 

 

He did not want to touch her. As dispassionately as he could, he lifted the case from around her neck, those gray eyes watching him all the time. 

 

It was indeed the treaty, sent back with, at a glance, only a few amendments to fishing rights, a clarification about the succession of Adsirion leaders, and a suggestion about future intellectual work. The language spooled across the page neutral as milk, just as the document he had sent on the stork the day of Aeglosbes’ departure had aimed for. A certain satisfaction struggled to sprout within him, but -- 

 

“I suppose it is no use asking why you delivered this yourself, Lady,” he said, glancing at the pelican, then away. Which eye should he look at? Should he delay her, while she was on this journey that was surely forbidden? 

 

“I meant for this to be a simple document, an accord like any other, containing only practicalities and nothing of the two of us. Did you dislike that?” 

 

The pelican was silent. She could not make a noise, he now knew, even if she wanted to puzzle out some code of head nods. Doomed to letters in more ways than one, he thought. 

 

Had she sent anything to Elrond? He had received but two letters from him these ten years, on the scruffy ships Gil-Galad could cobble together and spare on an expedition with no promise of restocking at the end. Neither had mentioned any communication, certainly not an avian visit.

 

The bird cocked her head. Graceful in the air and on the water, she loomed ungainly and huge on Zamîn’s table, out of place. She was out of place. She had always been out of place, a drifting refugee. Elros had a home, now, a home he would leave his children behind to defend, nigh-weaponless, from a dragon. She could not live in it. 

 

Still, she had come. Still, she had sent what she could when she had it. 

 

Haltingly, Elros spoke, hoping she could understand. His voice emerged reedy from his throat. 

 

“I asked Elrond once if he was angry with you. He said, ‘Well, they were right.’ And that was the end of it! He has always been thus, cutting right to the quick of things. The bluntest bolt, I would call him, when he would talk merrily of disaster or solemnly of good hope. Imagine, being told that you were correct, and you saved the world, and that being enough…”

 

There was no reply, of course. A pelican had no face that he could read, either, nor a body whose language he could interpret. Hesitating, he held out a hand, unsure if a touch would be welcome. The pelican stretched out her neck and tapped her huge beak, very gently, on the center of his palm. His eyes stung.

 

“You did, after all, save the world.” 

 

She tilted her head so her beak slid across his hand and wrist, and he snatched his arm away, shivering. 

 

“I think you should not have come, Lady,” he said, scratchy and strained. “Doomed you are to remain in Aman, and Doom will find you soon or late.”

 

Silently, the pelican unfolded her wings, dark and tall and edged. 

 

“I want you to write,” Elros said. Something wretched contorted in his chest, watching the pelican begin to shuffle on webbed feet towards the table edge. “Please write. I will write back. I promise.” 

 

The pelican leapt, beating hard at the air so it thundered. She cleared the railing, just, and began to ascend into the West, the land on which she was bound to live, the living to which she was bound, too. 

 

Elros’ heart rabbited through his whole body, watching her fly away. His heart was all that was quick, and it sounded off his lungs turned to steel and his tongue turned to lead, his thoughts tied to a body whose reactions he did not understand. 

 

He felt he might die, and why? 

 

The thought came to him: For I might; for I am not bound. 

 

The words rose from some unknown place in the body he had chosen, dragging the others that had been hidden these many months with them, and at once the crashing of his heart changed to a bell, ringing, and he called out after her, choking on it. 

 

“Emig!” 

 

He found he could not let her leave without this knowledge, and he screamed again, “Emig!” 

 

The great bird banked, suddenly awkward in the air, and flew in a swooping circle above the terrace. Elros felt the rush of wind of her wings across his cheeks, and his eyes watered. 

 

“They will not have me,” Elros cried. 

 

He stretched out his arms, leaning hard against the balustrade. Elwing made another dizzying, twisting turn, and Elros held himself fast against flinching. At last, she spread her wings across the whole length of the terrace, it seemed, and slammed into his chest with her neck held rigid and her great weapon of a beak pointed to the sky. For all her power and wingspan, she weighed almost nothing -- perhaps as heavy as a cat, or a newborn. Elros held her to his breast, fingers greased with the oil of her feathers, but smelling only salt and, somehow, flax.

 

He felt he must know how bright Eönwë felt, with his mother’s wings swept over his shoulders. He laid his head beside hers, and spoke as if to Tindómiel in the night, though he did not in fact know where her ears were. 

 

“My choice was that of freedom,” he murmured into his mother’s feathers. The words flowed out of him, a creek undammed. “My life and my death are a mystery, for there have been none like me before. I do not know when I shall die, only that death awaits me as the mists upon the harbor’s mouth. I will not know when my children die, or what they will think of me, or what deeds they will do fair or fell, and it is a madding pain. Yet it is my gift to them that they should live in a world where their lives are not already spoken for even beyond their deaths, where their Dooms have a threshold at which all destiny must cease, where they must not be forced to play at making the choices already made for them, or at least, that they will have forever an escape the Valar themselves cannot close. And it is my gift to myself that indeed those mists will roll one day to shore and when they depart, I too shall have freedom unimaginable.”

 

Elros closed his eyes and breathed the sea and linen smell of his childhood. 

 

“Emig,” he said, “One day I will set myself free.” 

 

They stood there on the balcony for long minutes. The wind off the sea ruffled Elwing’s feathers and teased strands of Elros’ hair out of his circlet, grey and black and white together. The gulls and children and markets of the town made their music below.  

 

Behind them, Tindómiel laughed, and the familiar sound of her clumsy feet and ricocheting ascent up the stairs followed.

 

In his arms, Elwing twisted her head down, and plucked out with her hooked beak a clump of the soft, hidden feathers from her breast, a little droplet of blood falling after it to the marble. Her neck in its uncanny flexibility wound back until she could look him in the eye. She dropped them, and they watched together as the feathers glided smoothly to the floor, skimming across it on a cushion of air for a long way. 

 

“Attû,” Tindómiel said from behind them, voice as hushed as a five-year-old child could manage. “You have wings.” 

 

“No, izrê,” Elros replied, turning just enough to catch a glimpse of Tindómiel in her play-clothes standing in the doorway. “Our lady here has wings.” 

 

He stepped once more towards the balustrade, and felt Elwing’s muscles bunching beneath his hands, her vast wings spreading wide and feet pounding near his stomach as if beating the sea foam. 

 

He came to the railing and looked out across the falling-away land and the waves breaking against the shore, and far, far away, the faintest shadow of what might be Eressëa, ultramarine. 

 

“Fare thee well, Emig,” he said, quietly.Then, in the great voice that had called ships to follow him on the day of his Choice, he cried again, “Farewell!” and so saying launched the bird with all his force into the air. 

 

She plummeted, wings outstretched, and Tindómiel gasped and ran to the railings, and then she caught a secret spiral of the air and rose -- circling, weightless -- until she was a bright speck against the bright sky. 

 

When Elros could no longer see her, he turned to Tindómiel and knelt down to her. She still gazed into the sky where Elwing had flown beyond their sight, and she held her grandmother’s feathers cupped in her small hands, so white they glowed. 

 

“Who was that, Attû?” she asked. “Why were you holding a bird?”  

 

“For the same reason I hold you,” Elros said, and reached his arms out for Tindómiel to run into. In his embrace she was soft and solid and smelled of seaweed soup and mischief. 

 

He grunted with effort as he lifted them both up. “You are growing so fast!” he teased. “One day I will not be able to carry you like this!” 

 

“But Attû!” Tindómiel said, refusing to be distracted. “Attû, who was the bird?” 

 

Elros hesitated. Tindómiel looked at him, grey-eyed. 

 

“The bird was a gift from your grandmother,” he said. “The one who lives across the sea.” 

 

Tindómiel nodded solemnly. “She flew so high,” she said, and Elros wondered if she meant the pelican or the woman in the songs. In any case, it was true. She had bought the sky dear with mercy. 

 

“Yes,” he replied. “That was part of the gift.” 

 

Tindómiel wiggled to come down, but stayed pressed by his legs, holding his hand. From the terrace, they looked out over the cloud-reflecting ocean dotted with its fishing boats and watched the waves roll in, ceaseless. After a while, Tindómiel began to sing.