rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

The young woman doubled over on the strand, naked as the day she was born, retching and hacking and gagging. Strings of mucus and spit stretched from her lips to the sand, tangling with tendrils of her black hair.

Eärwen watched from her seat on one of Alqualondë’s southern quays, and considered her instinctive appending of “young” to her description. A child was young, or a kitten, or a cygnet, but no Elf full-grown could truly be said to be young or old at sight, unless their minds revealed some freshness, some attachment to the world. She had not reached out to this mind.

“Goodness,” Anairë murmured beside her.

On the beach, the woman’s head and neck twisted and warped into the fierce, slicing curve of an osprey’s beak and plumage. Little downy feathers trickled down her shoulders and outlined the curve of her breasts, shivering in the dawn breeze. Her scream slid up the scale into the screech of the raptor, and then she hacked again, and passed the pellet.

“I understand this is why Aiwendil does not eat if he means to assume an Elven fána,” Eärwen remarked. “Should we go to her?”

The woman turned onto her back, panting and spent, the feathers and scything beak slowly receding into night-black hair and a proud, arched bridge of a nose.

“I think we had better,” Anairë said. “I do not think she has had anyone to teach her.”

The tide played around the horizon, only beginning to consider its daily sweep up the beach to the toes of Alqualondë. Eärwen waved to the far-off breakers and slid down to the wet sand, then turned and lifted Anaïre down. Anaïre pecked her on the cheek in thanks, and they started up the beach to the strand and the woman lying there sobbing for breath.

She did look young, close-up. That is, she looked like an Elf who had just reached full maturity, except where she did not. Around the eyes she bore little crinkles like the seafarers did, on her heaving belly the lightning-marks of pregnancy, and two fascinating rivers of silver ran into the light-gulping blackness of her hair from the temples. And, of course, there were the feathers.

Eärwen knelt beside her and waited. The woman’s breathing gradually slowed, and the blank panic receded from her eyes, which blinked, took in the Princess of the Teleri and the Queen of the Noldor-in-Aman on their knees in the sand, and squeezed tightly shut.

“There you are,” said Eärwen. “It is a strange bird that blows in from the East alone and sheds its feathers on the shore. I have a robe on the quay which you may borrow, and we will see you fed and dressed and housed, should you so desire, and then you may share with us your tale.”

“What she means to say,” Anairë interjected, patiently, “Is that it is plain you need help, child, and we can provide, and gladly. Come now, to your feet.”

The gray eyes blinked open, passing from Eärwen to Anairë and back again. They were familiar, Eärwen thought, clear and deep-set, not unlike her father’s. The woman drew in a rasping breath and nodded. She got to her feet in a lurch, then stood still, not seeking to cover herself, looking them in the eyes. There was something of the raptor still about her gaze.

Anairë reached out, and after a moment’s consideration, the woman took her hand, and allowed herself to be led towards the quay.

Eärwen followed, considering. Had she seen those eyes before? That light-devouring hair? Those feathers even yet shaking off the light-brown arms? Had she perhaps spoken with this woman before, or seen her among Aiwendil’s followers?

“What is your name, bird-child?” she asked.

In a voice like a viol and an accent never yet heard on the shores of Aman, the woman replied, “My name is Elwing, and I am not a child.”

--

The woman with the strange name and the strange voice had almost wept when Eärwen and Anairë showed her the bathing-room in the Queen’s House, indicating the waterfall-shower for rinsing off the sand and the deep tub for soaking. They gave her a wide-toothed comb of driftwood and oil for her hair, then departed, closing the door behind them.

They stood in the little anteroom of robes and towels and slippers and stared at one another.

Eärwen had asked no further questions after the shock of the woman’s -- El…wing’s? -- reply. Presumably, Anairë had had equal trouble pressing words out past the jolt of newness. She overcame it first, however.

“‘Elwing,’” she said. “I have never heard a name like that.”

“At the quarter moon, the fisherfolk told tales of a great light from out of the East coming to rest on the shore south of here, then vanishing into the mountains,” Eärwen replied. Anairë would follow her leaps, as she always did. “Three days later, a child with a strange name and a strange face and strange ways of transformation lands on our beach and almost chokes on a pellet.”

“She said she was not a child,” Anairë countered. “You saw her stomach.”

Eärwen pursed her lips and tilted her head. “A child with a child of her own?”

Anairë curled her lip. “No, you are right; it might make things worse, not better. Also, she almost choked on a pellet; clearly she is no habitual skin-changer.”

The sound of falling water ceased, and they paused in their speculations until the sound of a body slipping into the tub was heard.

“Will you question her?” Anairë asked quietly.

“I must,” Eärwen replied. “I feel no taint in her, but -- she is from the East.”

“She might--” Anairë began, then stopped abruptly, hand flying to her mouth as though she sought to bottle up her own words.

Eärwen reached out and drew her hand away by the wrist. She did not let it go, but kept it, cradling it like a dove. Anairë bit her cheek, then composed herself.

“Perhaps she knows where Nerwen is,” she said.

Eärwen inclined her head, and did not reply. Steam curled in tendrils from under the door. She hummed a little, enjoying the vibrations in her lips and the clarity of the sound, so different from the clarion tone of a swan. The steam swirled briefly in the shape of a cygnet, then dissipated.

A low whistle proceeded from the bathing room, followed by a billow of steam that reared up in the form of a pelican taking off from the water in a frenzy of flapping wings, blown apart by the opening door.

Elwing stood in the doorway wrapped in Eärwen’s robe, her hair unbound and dripping. The bath seemed to have restored some composure to her, for she gazed about the small room and dipped her chin as though taking stock of all it contained, themselves included, and deciding they sufficed.

Eärwen shared a glance with Anairë.

“You look much better,” Anairë said, giving no sign that anything had passed between them. “Come, eat; refresh yourself. Then you may tell us how you came here.”

Elwing made a tiny smile in her direction, but tilted her head -- a remarkably birdlike gesture -- at Eärwen, and waited.

“Yes,” Eärwen said. “This is my home. You are welcome at my table this morning. We will hear your tale and see if you will be welcome there in the afternoon.”

Anairë sent her a pulse of irritation that tingled down her neck, but Elwing’s smile grew. Eärwen had thought she might appreciate the straightforwardness; she was pleased to be correct.

In that bells-and-breakers voice, Elwing said, “I thank you. I have a tale to tell indeed, though it may bring unwelcome ghosts to your table in the telling.”

It was the most she had said so far, and she said it strangely, in a mix of phrases ancient and novel. From somewhere in the belly, Eärwen felt the sparks of hope, long-banked and ashed over with loss and dread and resentment, begin to burn again.

Breakfast in the Queen’s House of Alqualondë was an austere affair, but Elwing fell upon the simple fare as one starving. She had nice manners, Anairë noted, beneath the obvious ravenous hunger, the kind of almost-innate neatness and conformity to etiquette that only came from centuries of practice -- or hard training from an early age. She ate her seaweed soup quickly, but neatly, the spoon skimming the broth in the right direction, and sipped her tea rather than gulping it, and polished the bowl of rice with salmon roe in an elegant trice.

Anairë did not push her to speak before she had filled her belly, and trod on Eärwen’s toes when it seemed she might ask the sort of questions unconducive to smooth digestion.

She took the opportunity to catalog each of Elwing’s features and discard them as proceeding from strangers. Those high cheekbones did not belong on the broad, catlike Vanyarin faces of her children; nor did the loose-curled nullity of her hair, tied back in a green ribbon, share texture with Nolofinwë’s coils. That light-brown skin with its yellow undertones did not come from Anairë, and some features were simply a mystery. What might cause those hairs at her temples to grow silver as Eärwen’s? How had such a young person -- for Anairë was sure she was young -- gained mariner’s creases around her eyes, like the sailors who spent centuries out to sea, until their hröar took on their spirits’ farsighted squints of their own accord?

No, she looked like no member of Anairë’s family. And why should she, after all, when there was an entire world across the sea to swallow them? She might as well wonder if the girl was a relative of long-lost Elwë.

She paused.

She had not seen the maiden Lúthien when she came to Valinor on the quick, light road of the fëa.

And yet.

What news had trickled into Tirion from the slopes of Taniquetil spoke of a woman with short-cropped, curling hair like the night itself, who sang like a nightingale -- sweet and impenetrable -- and scattered winged shadows about her even at high noon. Anairë had had to sort through each and every report, so she could stand before her assembled people of widows and orphans and tell them that their loves would not be released, and their dead would remain so, for such was the lot of the Queen of the Noldor-in-Aman.

Anairë looked again at each feature on the face of the stranger Elwing, and was caught by those gray eyes. Elwing had finished eating and gazed evenly at her.

“For whom do you search in my face?” she asked.

Anairë did not cringe, for queens in the inverse of exile did not flinch when asked for the truth.

“I look for the maid Lúthien, and I look for the family of Elwë Singollo through her,” she replied. “She came with a familiar sorrow and left with a joy still unknown to Aman, and none know whence she departed.”

Eärwen’s fëa pressed against her own like the ocean seeking to overwhelm a seawall. Anairë did not let her in.

Elwing, meanwhile, gave her a look, almost, of approval. Who had last looked at Anairë so?

“‘Long ago they passed away, in the forest singing sorrowless,’” Elwing said, falling into a ballad rhythm, that forest-tide voice stirring the little air currents. Her mouth quirked humorlessly. “She left her sorrows to us.”

“And who comprises ‘us,’ bird-guest, black-haired girl? Her heirs to privilege?” Eärwen’s voice was cold, and Anairë chanced a glance at her face, even knowing it would be still as pearl. “Do not speak in riddles to a queen.”

Anairë slammed her heel down as hard as she could -- but Eärwen had moved her feet. Something in her felt frozen, the same kind of congelation that stilled her heart in court, or when facing yet another cool meeting with Olwë and Ingwë, the sense that she was a chunk of ice in the midst of a whirlpool, being carried by currents she should be able to master, but which she hardly wished to.

Elwing, however, laughed.

“Not my queen,” she said. “I am Elwing Dioriel, daughter of Nimloth, granddaughter of Lúthien, great-granddaughter of Melian and Thingol Greycloak. This lineage grants me no privilege, Lady Eärwen, for who else am I? A refugee dispossessed, a mother reaved of her children, a queen usurped, a bird blown off-course in a storm so that I might beg before the same gods as my grandmother, whose plight and power earned her only her own rightful life on a dying continent. I do not cow easily.”

Anairë wondered what was expected of the least at a table of three rulers — for she could not have -- had not! -- claimed dispossession and power at once with such dignity. And once she had not cowed easily, but that was when she had nothing to repent for.

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, and decided that, if she were so outmatched, she would not pretend to queenliness.

“May I help you?”

She asked as if she spoke to Irissë, her little proud one. A smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, a tone like she wished to be invited into some adventure, not like she was a mother swooping in to fix some small disaster. It hurt -- but there. Elwing darted her a little glance with just her eyes, and visibly — at least to her — decided that she could be trusted more.

Eärwen was palpably peeved — again, at least to her — but she would never stoop so low as to show it to a stranger. Anairë kept her smile on, and slowly, Elwing turned away from Eärwen to face her.

“You have much to tell us,” Anairë said. “I must return to Tirion, for their time of worship will soon be over, and it is known that something came to these shores from Endórë. I would like to be able to tell your story, or such parts of it as you vouchsafe us, well. I would like to be able to help you, for I have at least been a mother. And, if you are Eärwen’s family, you are mine.”

Elwing nodded.

“I need--” she paused, looked, perhaps, embarrassed -- “Shelter. I have no place to stay and many of the plants and animals here are strange to me. My husband goes to speak with the Valar. He will tell our tale to them, but I would tell our tale to the people of Valinor.”

Anairë carefully did not react to the idea of a husband roaming loose in Aman. It was a privilege to take chaos one problem at a time.

“Shelter we have, and plenty. But let us decide together where you shall stay. You may come to Tirion, city of the Noldor, where I rule, or we could seek to rejoin you with your husband. Or,” and she wished Eärwen’s feet were in range, “You may stay here, with Eärwen, among family.”

She snuck a glance at Eärwen, silent and impassive at the head of the table. Mentally, she dared her to protest or contradict Anairë’s claim of kin-right for Elwing. Tirion was no place for someone from over the sea. She would be mobbed instantly, asked to bear each grief, even each blame -- no. Alqualondë would be better by far. She folded her hands beneath the table and waited.

Elwing did not visibly waver or hesitate, and Anairë thought, Irissë would be chewing her lip now. But, of course, Elwing was not a child, and Irissë was not either, anymore.

“I would stay here,” Elwing said. “I sought out this city a-purpose, for an ever I had family, I knew to search for it here — and I do not wish to be far from the sea.” She tried to catch Eärwen’s gaze.

Anairë, for the first time in the conversation, nudged Eärwen’s mind. Please, she thought, and sent a little sense memory of the press of her first descent into Tirion after — everything — the bodies and the clutching at her hem and the fevered hum of questions.

Eärwen did not respond in osanwë, but she pursed her lips slightly enough that Anairë wondered if anyone else could have caught it, and unbent.

“Stay and be welcome, cousin,” she said. “You are no guest in Alqualondë; you are kin. My home and table are yours.”

Anairë caught the sigh of relief before it could escape.

“We must see you settled, then,” she said. “Afterwards, I will take my leave, for it is a long way to Tirion, and I mean to travel faster than the news. First, however, you must tell me: what is it you wish the news to be? What is your story?”

--

Anairë sat on a haybale in her traveling clothes, waiting for the first horse in her relay to be saddled. There were three more horses before Tirion, two more before she would have to dress, one more before she would reclaim her attendants from the wayhouse where she had left them on her journey northeast to Eärwen.

She did have to go, she reminded herself. There were reassurances she must provide, information she must disseminate, fears she must lay to rest. No one needed her here.

She thought of Elwing, who had looked small and birdlike in her white robe, speaking of Men and of Elves, of her children slain, of a transformation three years in the making, of a quest. Eärwen had burned beside her the whole time, something like a ship alight with Ossë’s Candles, cold to the touch and luminescent.

Anairë had not seen the docks of Alqualondë sluiced with blood, nor the swanships burning, anymore than she had seen the wharves of Sirion splintered or the reed-thatched homes torched. Flames seemed to flicker before her eyes all the same. Her own nephews had done that, she thought, and wondered at her own surprise. As they had begun, so had they carried on.

Bitterly, she nudged at the clotted silence where her children’s minds had once nestled against hers, and twisted her mouth in a smile. How dare she be glad for the absence? How dare she grieve, that at least her own children had perished before they could slaughter the children of someone who sat across from her at table?

Nerwen had remained unspoken. Cowardice on her part, perhaps, but also her hard-won sense of politics. Elwing had not said what she wished of the Teleri beyond refuge, but her desperate quest belied a mere interest in family and her own shelter. Eärwen, meanwhile, had hardly spoken a word.

Anairë may have become a flotsam queen, these many years after the destruction of her world, but Eärwen had become like sea ice, a jagged rime over a bitter ocean.

A groom led her horse towards her — a compact chestnut gelding with a dished face — and she stood, brushing straw from her skirts.

Perhaps she was no one’s first choice as ruler, perhaps she was no one’s first choice as a parent, but the world had sung to her, once, and still she could hear its echoes, when she had the time and the will to listen. If she could not shape it as she had once wished, giving of her body and her dancing and her joy, still, she could shape it. She mounted the horse.

There was one final task before she returned to Tirion. The city rejoiced in festival, and their queen, supposedly, paid her respects to the powers that governed their lives. Anairë… had. She had danced on the shore each morning for the foam-cap painters and the sand grinders, and watered the grandmother trees, and sung to the cloud-spinners and the little straw-thatched sprites who helped the horses birth, and given little garnet drops of her blood to the emerald-eyed wolves who approached her in the forest and held her wrists gently in their mouths. Every stone and stream with its own soul had shared a part of her, this last week, as she had shared as a young girl before she had dreamed of kings and princes.

Before the next relay station was the temple where she should have been all this time, and on her saddle were the offerings it was her duty to present. From Alqualondë, it took only a handful of hours to reach on horseback.

Anairë tethered the gelding to a tree, slipping on a halter for extra insurance that headstrong Sungold would not wader. She unfastened the bundle from her saddle and stepped into the circle of monoliths — the star, the bear, the tree, the eagle, the shuttle — and neither sang nor danced nor bled. She walked to the circle’s center. Undoing the ties of the bag, she let fall the hunting horn of chased silver, the telescope of bright copper, the dancing shoes of finest silk, and all the rest. The objects clanged into a shining heap, crushing a spire of lupin — white-hearted, unfertilized. Anairë dropped the bag atop of the pile, and turned to leave. The stones watched in silence. She hesitated. Chewed her lip. Sucked the droplet of blood back into her mouth.

She kicked the pile once, then turned to go back to her husband’s city.

Elwing ran her hands over the silk bedspread, catching her rope-roughened fingers on the satin weave. It was a very vivid blue, clearly dyed in the thread. Idril had often worn a woolen gown of a similar shade, which became a mantle, which became a vest, which became handkerchiefs, which became a set of button coverings, and finally became a memory of when people could spare the time and effort to do things like grow dye instead of grain. Sirion had been an earth-colored, homespun place.

Everything in Alqualondë was green, blue, deep brown, or white, and smooth as nacre. Elwing closed her eyes against the gleaming pearl wall of the chamber Eärwen’s seneschal had given her, and collapsed backwards onto the unrolled mattress. It was strange to lie upon a bed that did not rise up to embrace her as had her hammock aboard Vingilot.

Did she have time to sleep? Her eyes itched. She had wandered for days along the beach, and she was unsure how long she had spent as an osprey, flying through time in portions more discrete yet more endless than her human days. Eärwen had told her in no uncertain terms that she expected to see her at sunset, when her court adjourned. Unsaid but no less clear was her expectation that Elwing stay in her chamber until then, like a naughty child or a restless bird. A protest had risen to her lips, but died upon them, for she had been called upon to be a queen in a way she had not in three years, and her soul felt as weary as her body.

She swung her aching legs onto the mattress, and though her mind was full of swirling thoughts half in Quenya and half in Sindarin, she slept.

The click of her latch threw her into wakefulness. Moonbeams chased each other through the hair of the tall figure in the doorway, and she relaxed.

“Galadriel,” she mumbled. “Is it the boys?”

Her own hair tangled in her mouth, and she reached up to remove it, and froze, staring at the feathers blooming from her palm. At once, the room snapped into relief: pale as the inside of an oyster shell, and empty. In her doorway stood Eärwen.

“I do not understand you,” Eärwen said.

Elwing supposed she had spoken in Sindarin. She forebore to respond, swiped her unfeathered hand across her eyes, and focused on what it felt like to have fingers that could feel silk slubs and dry cheeks.

When she had two hands again, she sat up and looked at Eärwen. The courteous thing would be to apologize for sleeping through her appointed meeting.

“I thought you were your daughter,” she said.

The room was not fully dark, so Elwing could see Eärwen stiffen, though her features were obscured in the gloom.

“So you did know her.”

Elwing nodded, then realized Eärwen might not be able to see her.

“At times, I believed I knew her well. She delivered my babies.”

“My Nerwen? She always scorned such tasks.”

“I did not claim she performed admirably,” Elwing replied, wry. “She was there when my father was born, that was all. She was the only one who knew how a half-Elvish birth might proceed. In the end, she mostly handed me things to bite.”

Eärwen did not exactly laugh, but the air in the room thawed appreciably. Had Elwing known casting aspersions on her daughter’s prowess as midwife would appeal so, she might have begun there.

“Is biting in birth some custom of the Secondborn?”

Eärendil’s absence panged through her -- so had she felt while laboring with him far afield, yet not even the stuffiest ex-nobles of Gondolin-that-was had never seen a human before. Even they would have understood.

“Ah. No. It hurts. It hurts us terribly. I did not want to scream.”

There was a silence. Elwing judged herself a connoisseur of silences, yet could not decipher this one. She breathed in through her nose, slowly, and waited. Eärwen made a sharp, jerky sort of motion with her hands, the first ungraceful gesture Elwing had yet seen her make. She thought perhaps she had moved to hug herself.

“It seems right that it should hurt,” Eärwen said. “I never imagined it so. Yet I think it meet that the bearing should presage the loss.”

“Your daughter yet lives,” Elwing said in haste. No queenly persona outranked the need to reassure a parent of their child’s survival. “As far as I know, she is safe. She traveled east with her husband when -- when I had heirs. The journey is long, but she is its match.”

“I know she lives,” Eärwen said. “The Shadow is not so great that it can break my bonds with her. Not even she could do that.”

“You… feel her? From across the sea?”

The column of shadow in her doorway cocked her head slightly.

“Of course. And I felt her siblings die. I would know, were she returned to Mandos.”

A horrible snarl clotted Elwing’s throat. Many times she had spoken and hated her words, but never yet ones so hateful as the question she had not dared ask even Eärendil. She breathed in the darkness and held it. It was safe in the darkness, like the forests, like the floor of the sea.

“Do you sense your children?”

And darkness was the sweet knife, that permitted wounds that daylight would burn out from the edges, like embers on paper.

“I sense nothing,” Elwing said, and then said what she had not once dared to say, in three years since leaving Sirion, so this haughty stranger with no reason to care would hear them. “They said I would feel it if they died, but they also said I would feel it when I conceived. They must be dead.”

Then, as she had when Elros had finally slipped from her, with home and Eärendil as far away as they ever had been, she began to cry.

She turned her face from Eärwen and bit her cheek savagely, but to no avail. Immediately, her nose stuffed and forced her to open her mouth with an inelegant sniff in order to breathe. As quietly as she could, she inhaled, resisted the urge to hold the air, and exhaled shakily. One forgot how tears did not really taste like the sea, she thought, desperate for distraction. The sea had other notes — it was saltier, for one — and it could do things, while tears did nothing.

She cast about the room for some other distraction, as much as she could with her head tilted as if to hide from Eärwen’s gaze under a wing she did not currently possess. The gleam of the walls in the starlight reminded her of fishes in the river Sirion. How strange that the window did not face the full moon despite being on the proper side of the building for it. Had Eärendil yet reached Tirion?

There came a rustle from the doorway. If Elwing turned her head, surely Eärwen would see her blotchy face in the moonlight, and the undignified dampness of her collar where her tears had run down her throat. Almost soundlessly — or perhaps soundlessly in truth, except that the dark had always whispered to Elwing — Eärwen walked towards her. Elwing clamped her mouth shut and tried in vain to breathe through her nose. It was not necessary, in the end. Eärwen did not venture to catch Elwing’s eye, nor to face her.

Instead, she simply folded downwards with surprising speed and looseness to sit on the floor beside the mattress, her back resting against the wall. Elwing blinked.

Eärwen’s hair sheened in the faint starlight, barely visible from the corner of Elwing’s left eye. Tucked up on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, she seemed very much like Galadriel indeed -- except Galadriel would never have been so undignified before a near-stranger. Indeed, from Elwing’s limited experience, it did not seem much like Eärwen, either.

“Has my shame overcome you?” she asked, with a horrible croak in her voice.

“My own,” Eärwen replied. “How should I resent you for having known my daughter? We suffer the same hurt of spirit.”

She lapsed into silence.

Elwing let it spin out. The unfamiliar stars danced outside her window. Her tears slowed, then stopped.

“Their names were Elros,” she said eventually. “And Elrond.” The darkness held them gently.

“Strange names,” Eärwen replied. “Like yours.”

“They are like mine, of both our kindreds. Elros, Elwing — we are star foam. And Elrond was my vault of stars.”

Eärwen nodded. “What was it you called my daughter?”

Elwing finally looked at her, still curled around her knees like a child.

“Galadriel. She who is crowned in radiant light.”

“She always dreamed of a crown,” Eärwen said, and they shared silence again while the stars shone cold in the distance.

--

Elwing woke again before dawn, the sky through the window an almost featureless square against the pearlescent walls. Neither she nor Eärwen had remembered to close the sliding paper shutters against the light.

The bedchamber was once again empty but for her. Though Eärwen must have left sometime in the night, Elwing had no recollection of it. The whole interlude felt vaguely dreamlike, though when Elwing touched her fingers to her sandy eyes, she felt the froggish bags to which she had always been prone after crying. At least this morning she did indeed have fingers.

“Ugh,” she muttered, and rose to find a way to wash her face.

She retraced her steps to the bathing-room she had used after being rescued from the beach with minimal trouble. It still struck her as the most luxurious living space she had ever seen, with its gleaming tiles and smooth wood, and running water both hot and cold, and stacks of drying cloths simply waiting to be used.

Doriath had boasted similar amenities — she could just remember it — and Sirion had taken the safety of its water and drainage seriously. Even so, memories from the edge of her conscious life and the efficient but plain plumbing of her own beleaguered city simply could not compare to the gloriously hot water already pouring from the tap into the basin.

The soap smelled of violets. She hoped Eärendil had found clean water.

Refreshed, she found her way back to her room, where an attendant had been in to leave a steaming tray of seaweed soup and rice and hang a belted, square-cut robe like Eärwen’s on a stand. She felt relieved that the household had decided she be left alone to dress.

She fingered the collar thoughtfully. The cotton thread was finely spun and the weave excellent, if plain. It had been colored with indigo, squeeze-dyed in the bolt, or perhaps as a finished garment, in a simple, precise pattern. It did not strike her as fit for the court, even in Sirion, where all was scraps and rags of former finery. She shrugged and put it on.

Just as she was tying the sash in one of the simple configurations Galadriel had liked to use when she wore the costume of her mother’s people, someone rapped on the door. Elwing wrapped her braid into a low knot, went into the parlor, and opened the door.

Eärwen stood alone on the threshold, looking none the worse for wear for her late night. Her own dress was simple, though of fine material, and her face was smooth as a pearl. Elwing wondered what she might be thinking.

“Come,” she said, and made as if to walk off down the corridor.

Elwing, who had noticed Anairë treading on Eärwen’s feet beneath the table the morning prior, crossed her arms and leant against the doorway. Evidently, she had kept some awareness of Elwing about her, for when Elwing forbore to follow, she stopped and turned around, raising one eyebrow just slightly.

“May a humble queen and kinswoman beg leave to know where it is we go?” she inquired.

Something that might be a smile tugged at the corners of Eärwen’s mouth.

“Do you frequently awaken with feathers in place of fingers?”

Elwing shrugged. In truth, unplanned pinions seemed all of a piece with the unlooked-for wings that had borne her away from her chosen doom. Non sequitur questions had a similar air about them.

“They come when they choose.”

Eärwen’s expression did not noticeably change, but something in her bearing struck Elwing as surprised, or perhaps angry.

“We go down to the shore,” Eärwen said, sternly, in a tone Elwing recognized in a wave of disorientation as one she had heard often from her daughter. “I can teach you how to choose.”

She turned and walked down the corridor, and this time, she did not pause to see if Elwing followed. Elwing crossed her arms tighter.

After a moment, she followed Eärwen down to the solitary sea.

The dawn reached out and wrapped Eärwen in salt and coolth. The breeze filled her lungs and tingled down her arteries; the mazy streets of Alqualondë drew her feet dancing down to the strand, where the jewels of the past had weathered — almost — to innocence.

The turning alleys offered her glimpses of Elwing following behind, light-footed and focused. Indigo became her, as did the early sun, which chipped shards of blue from the jet of her hair. In the night it had seemed tentacular, tenebrous, as though its curls had twined tendrils around the dark and held it close; now, in the morning gleam of the City of Pearls, her body confined her once more, keen and fine, a wave rather than the sea. In fact, she seemed almost girlish, and Eärwen remembered her initial impression of youth here on this very beach. In the night, she had forgotten it.

A tarrying lamp-douser could be seen leaving the seawall. All the better. Eärwen did not intend to preempt Anairë — or, indeed, herself — in announcing the presence of a visitor out of the East.

The tide was half-in, and a few pelicans fished the breakers. Eärwen jumped the last few feet from the streets and breathed deeply, running the sea air over her tongue. Elwing landed beside her after only two breaths, skirt hiked up around her knees, a smile playing around her mouth.

They started together towards the packed sand where the waves had washed an hour ago. Eärwen kept taking steady, deep breaths, preparing that fierce attentiveness to self that had permitted her to conceive when she wished, and tend to her body after birth and grief, and which let her know where the pieces of her heart wandered, far from here. Where the lacy hem of the tide brushed across the sand, she halted, and Elwing stopped beside her.

“So,” Elwing said, and preempted Eärwen’s half-planned introduction. “You say you can teach me how to change at will. What do you know of skin-changing?”

“What I know I learned from my mother’s friend, Aiwendil,” Eärwen replied. “A Maia of Yavanna. He loves the wild places and he changes his shape more than many, to burrow with the rabbits and run with the hinds. Before I married, I ran with him.”

She paused. “He loved my mother because she loves the animals too, and wished to learn all she could of their behavior, their families. But he loved me because I once half-wished to be an animal. I loved the sea-swans and how they flew and called and battled with their wings and settled down to sleep in a cloud.”

A wave rushed in unexpectedly, nipping at her toes, and Elwing startled.

Eärwen bent down and hiked her robe up, looping the skirts through her sash.

“Did he teach you to fly, then?”

Eärwen shook her head. “No — perhaps he thought he could. He is a strange creature, who perhaps did not understand that the Elvishness of an Elf is nothing to be trifled with, lest…”

“I know,” Elwing interrupted, unexpectedly. “I have seen it.”

Her voice was strange, hard and brittle, and Eärwen turned to look at her in surprise — but her face was impassive, and her hands relaxed. A kind of queen’s mask, Eärwen recognized, and one ever so finely carved.

“What do you mean?”

Elwing shook her head, still all stateliness but for her thin legs and bare feet in the sand.

“The world boasts monsters a-plenty, but none so foul as an Elf whose self is forsworn or forgotten — or stolen.” She sighed. “You are not roaming the beach putting your subjects to the sword or fading for the love of the sea-swans, though. What kept you?”

“Oh,” Eärwen began, noting Elwing’s strange phrase, “Anairë.”

The waves rushed in again, spat a halved scallop shell at her feet.

“Anairë,” she said again. “She traveled, when the world was young. It sang to her like it sings to very few, and she roamed from place to place and listened for a note gone sour, so she could make it sweet again.”

Elwing crouched to pick up the scallop. “I did not think this part of the world permitted such things.”

“Ha.” She watched Elwing rinse the sand from the shell. “We have always made our own trouble, Elves. There I was in the fens trying to learn to be a swan, half faded-away, forgetting how to speak Elvish tongues, wandering between my body and a dream, eating marsh worms. Spending every moment with a Maia who seemed to think everything was quite usual, and couldn’t imagine why Alqualondë was in fits simply because I liked birds more than being a princess.”

Elwing nodded to the shell and looked up from her crouch at Eärwen’s feet. “I was only a princess very briefly, but I did not like it much either. What did the lady Anairë do to call you back?”

“She reminded me that there was more to being an Elf than being a princess, and so more to being Eärwen,” Eärwen replied, and hesitated over all that was left unsaid — she dressed my hair every day, she sang me pictures of the great horse herds of Hyarmentir and her father baking bread, she fed me dried cherries from her own hand, she called me by my name, she stayed…

It all seemed a bit much to say, too dramatic and too prosaic at once, for all that it was the truest act of love she had ever been offered, husband and children and all. She held it in.

But Elwing smiled. A soft smile, an intimate one, quite unlike any expression Eärwen had yet seen her wear. If Elwing had not worn it so calmly, if it had not sat with such certainty on the bow of her lips, Eärwen thought she might have looked away, to give it privacy.

“Yes,” she said, and, leaving her carefully washed shell to the waves, stood. “Yes, there are those people who help one know one’s own self.”

She glanced to the west, and Eärwen remembered with a start that Elwing had a husband at large in Aman, a partner in a quest the full details to which Eärwen was not yet privy. It was unlike her to forget such a political game piece, and it was also unlike her to feel that mean little twist in her gut that she had last nursed when Anairë wed Finwë Ñolofinwë in his pomp. The tide had retreated another few feet, and she followed it, focusing on the give of fine sand under her arches and the purl of the lapping wavelets in her ears.

“So,” Elwing said, all seriousness again. “You want that I should dwell on the beauties of life and the intricacies of my own Elvishness — but I am not an Elf, and my beauties are bittersweet.”

Eärwen found it perturbing how easily Elwing was able to perturb her — to remind her of the lines around her eyes and the wrenching reality of the distant land which seemed so often a mere kind of nightmare-hell, a dreamland that vanished and robbed, but did not encroach on the solidity of the quays at Alqualondë, the quotidian rhythm of her days. She had not been fully understood, however.

“If you will,” she said. “But when I had to make an effort each day to remember that I should eat rice and cooked food and not marsh worms, I tried dwelling on word problems about Alqualondë’s wastewater system, and the intricacies of terraced crop rotations. A thorny legal question on tenancy, on occasion.”

Elwing’s eyebrows, which had been delicately arched, lowered. She frowned, but only for a moment, after which she laughed and said, “Problems for a queen, not problems for a princess. A puzzle; things of interest. Things of responsibility.”

Eärwen nodded. Elwing sighed, though she still smiled.

“Very well,” she said. “I will think on my plans and watch my feathers melt away; is that it?”

She did not wait for any response from Eärwen, but made a quick, sharp flicking motion with her right hand, which of a sudden was not a hand at all, but a broad wing, barred in white and black. Vertigo swung through Eärwen, brief but intense, and she found she could not quite understand what happened at the join of Elwing’s shoulder and her— wing. She allowed her eyes to slide away, as they wanted to do in any case, and looked at Elwing’s face.

Elwing’s eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids, a single line between her brows, though her face was otherwise calm. The feathers quivered, though the breeze was gone for the moment. A bufflehead squealed. The waves hissed. The feathers remained.

Carefully, Eärwen pressed her mind out. She knew her osanwë was blunt and forceful, a wall rather than Anairë’s clear song. Nonetheless, she knew — from council meetings, from parenthood, from experience — how to make it seem as a wind or a passing pressure, something natural. If Elwing dwelled on her plans—

At once, Elwing’s eyes snapped open. The feathers vanished. Her strange, slippery mind remained as hard to grasp as ever.

“Your daughter learned much from Melian in Doriath’s prime,” she said, “but, on occasion, she would use your tricks, too. Apparently.”

It was not in Eärwen’s nature to blush, or to stammer. Even so.

“I… apologize,” she said, with some difficulty. “I meant to help.”

Elwing shrugged one shoulder, the one that had been a wing. The feathers had grown and disappeared with such clean rapidity.

“Why had you eaten as an osprey when we found you?” Eärwen asked. If she could change only an arm; if she could change it back — but then why had she found her in her pinions at night?

“I was thirsty,” Elwing replied. “The bird knows what to do.”

Nothing more was forthcoming, it seemed. Eärwen felt the urge to seek out her mind with her own pressing like the tide at the seawall, but she had learned her lesson.

After a moment of tense silence, Elwing turned back to the sea. “I believe I shall try it all, now,” she said.

Before Eärwen could respond, Elwing was a jolting space in the world where her narrow shoulders and slim hips had been, a robe crumpled on the sand. But there: the sea eagle, emerging from the folds of indigo cloth.

Her eyes were gray and strange set in the bird’s fierce visage over that tearing beak. She freed herself from the robe and ruffled all her feathers, unfolding her wings to their full expanse. Eärwen caught her breath.

She had brought Elwing here to play the teacher, but this was a world apart from her youthful madness. There was an osprey, clear as day, with those impossible eyes muddling the sharp demarcations of black and white upon her breast and wings. Eärwen gathered herself to move, or perhaps to say she knew not what, if Elwing could even hear her — but Elwing stepped, then hopped, then beat her immense wings and heaved herself into the air, aloft in the span of a gasp.

Up she spiraled, catching invisible coils of air above the retreating waves. Against the early sky, her white belly blurred at the edges, until she banked on those secret breezes and her black wings left a cut in the morning.

What else could be done? Eärwen watched her soar.

From the ground, away from those uncanny eyes, she appeared as any other dancing seabird, circling with all the grace of one of young Artaresto’s bridges, dipping from one thermal to the next like a singer spiraling around a note. She had left the earth behind.

Despite all that awaited her in the Queen’s House upon her return, Eärwen lost herself in secondhand buoyancy. She did not know how long she gazed into the sky, following each tip of each brindled feather.

But the bird had stopped her circles. She faced the east. She had hardly to beat her wings and she shot towards the last vestiges of the sunrise. Eärwen’s heart pounded. She sent out her fëa as if it were a net and the bird some precious cargo lost to the waves, and found no purchase.

Just as she thought she might have to abandon secrecy and dignity and scream, or sing out some word of power, the bird dived.

It took Elwing only an instant to streak down to the sea’s wrinkled surface, then struggle upwards once more, her wingbeats suddenly laborious, a fish writhing in her talons.

Eärwen’s breath escaped her in something like a growl. The bird swooped in an efficient arc down to the sand once more, just out of reach of the water. She mantled over her prize, still thrashing in her grasp.

Eärwen had not uttered even the smallest oath in centuries, but she could curse, and did. She ran down to stand in front of the scene, unsettled and galled at herself and Elwing for it.

She stopped her rush before reaching the osprey, for Elwing had raised her head, and her eyes were yellow.

Oh. Perhaps she was needed after all.

But what should she do? Osanwë was useless. The bird was as tall as a toddler, with wicked claws.

Well, she thought to herself. When Nerwen could walk but could not yet speak and found that kitchen knife, I handled that by being firm and swift.

It was a strange flash of memory, one she had not thought of in what felt like an age — though of course it was as sharp as anything else she could call to mind.

She gave a tiny shake of her head, and took a last step into the reach of the osprey’s wings.
Elwing made a clacking sound, gripped the lithesome silver body tighter in her talons, and tore into it with her beak, bloodying her white-feathered throat.

“Ah ah,” Eärwen told her. She crouched on the sand before the osprey and darted her hand out to grab the fish. Elwing opened that scythed beak and screamed at her, and Eärwen wondered if she was enough herself to keep from savaging her with it.

“You will regret it if you do,” she said, and reached, quick as thought, to pinch the hinges of Elwing’s beak.

“Think,” she commanded, with all the force she could muster directed at that strange mind. A moment stretched, then she watched the yellow eyes mist into gray. Something slippery coursed around her fëa, and suddenly the scimitar beak was sharp white teeth, and she gripped Elwing’s narrow jaw in her hand while they both knelt in the sand.

Elwing breathed hard. Eärwen could feel the warm gusts on her wrist. Blood lingered on her face and smeared her neck and chest to where her small brown breasts heaved, shedding downy feathers. Those gray eyes held her own, no less sharp than the raptor’s.

Slowly, Eärwen released her grasp of Elwing’s jaw. With the back of her finger, she rubbed away a smudge of blood by the corner of Elwing’s mouth, and another on the ridge of her cheekbone, and a last on her chin.

“Close,” she said, and tapped gently on the soft space beneath Elwing’s jaw. Elwing made an expression like an Elf at last, a curling smile that Eärwen caught only in a flash, as Elwing lunged forward and snapped her teeth at Eärwen’s finger.

She did not catch it, but Eärwen startled back, and to her utter chagrin, lost her balance on the shifting sand and sat down hard.

She opened her mouth to snap, but Elwing was laughing — a laugh like strings, almost too rich to come from that narrow body with its collarbones like the prow of a ship. Eärwen was not one to grin off guard, but a smile threatened nonetheless.

“It is discourteous to bite one’s host,” she said, and hoped Elwing would see the tiny upturning of her mouth for what it was.

Perhaps she did: Elwing grinned down at her and replied, “It is discourteous to steal a guest’s breakfast.”

Before Eärwen could respond, Elwing rose to her feet, the last tiny feathers drifting down around her. From her undignified seat, Eärwen could see one catch in the fine, fascinating hairs on her calves and quiver there.

“I must wash,” Elwing said, half-turning, and the little bubble of feather and hair broke, and Eärwen could lift her gaze and see Elwing walk to the water and crouch to meet the waves, the bumps of her spine a nautilus where her wings had been.

Strangely mazed, Eärwen stood. She shook the sand from her robe, and gathered Elwing’s up from the tide line. When Elwing returned, free of fish blood, she watched her dress, and they raced the opening shutters back to the Queen’s House, where court and questions and grand pronouncements awaited.

The barbs of the feather wavered in her mind’s eye still, caught in black hair.

The glassblowers were the first to fall into step behind Anairë and Maldanar, who had begun to prance the instant Anairë and her attendants passed through the two great valley oaks that marked the processional avenue into Tirion.

For what possible preferment could they be hoping? Anairë wondered, as she focused on sitting Maldanar’s airy trot with grace and solemnity, rather than simply posting it like a sensible person. Next came the usual first column, Anairë’s own East Gate neighborhood, then the flutemakers’ guild, and the dyers, and the Flats, and all the rest of the guilds and associations and districts of Tirion. Even those from the Repudiator’s Quarter, who nominally recognized Arafinwë as king and rotated between Alqualondë and Tirion with the seasonal reparations work, had their place. With each new addition, Maldanar pricked his brassy ears as though he liked nothing better than leading Tirion in its much-diminished glory back into the city after ceremony.

Perhaps he did, Anairë thought, for his dam and her sire and his sire had carried her in state before the people, back and back through the generations to dear blood-bay Sáhuoron, who had been the last horse to carry her when she rode beside Nolofinwë at the Mingling, and the train of the city wended through the oaklands for a score of miles, rather than a mere handful.

It took half an hour for Anairë to reach the walls at the head of her people. As much as she could, she had kept an eye on the widely spaced oaks and golden grass of summer, and had caught a flicker or two of the little Maiar who lived in the sagebrush, and a glimpse of a doe that glinted in the sun. She had nodded solemnly to each of them, for she would likely not have time to greet the keepers of Tirion’s surrounds for days. Her attendants had come with briefs for her to read on horseback! It was a continual marvel that a city one-fifth its former size could generate so many squabbles and engineering problems and minor explosions.

Anairë huffed a quiet laugh, keeping her face schooled — though Maldanar flicked an ear back at her. She carried the makings of far more than a minor explosion. Even whatever machinations the glassblowers were planning would likely wait after she lit that fuse.

She passed through the gates. After a few days without constant traffic, the diamond dust from the walls frosted the streets with an even layer of sparkling grit. Anairë sighed – the dust was a perpetual nuisance that scratched window glass and caused dangerous glare at midday. She hummed a little mist over Maldanar’s eyes to protect them from the dazzle and turned onto the main avenue that led to the High King’s tower and Finwë’s house.

Her own eyes she protected with a black gauze veil, sighing a little in relief as the particolored blaze diminished. She blinked. Without the glare, a set of depressions suddenly jumped into relief in the dust. Footprints, broad and soft-soled, staggered unevenly down the road. Heart in her throat, Anairë gave Maldanar leg until his hooves fell in line with the traces of who could only be Elwing’s questing mariner. Who else would have broken the city’s holy emptiness? They scattered into drifting motes of light beneath Maldanar’s feet.

Her heart began to pound. Maldanar arched his proud neck and collected his trot even further, as though her racing pulse commanded him to dance. Beneath her veil, she let herself show a little more smile than would have been expected of her. She and Maldanar smothered this spark with every propulsive hoofbeat, but she would strike another one, when she was ready, when it was time. Well might Maldanar perform – she would take her own stage soon.

The white walls of Tirion echoed past, as though she passed through theater wings from one stage to another, as though a dancer weary of a long-running show had found an unexpected trapdoor and begun to run towards the distant strains of a new melody. Anairë, who had danced ten thousand miles when the world was young without repeating a step, and whom circumstance had whirled into one unending, funebrial pavane these six hundred years, felt her feet itch at the prospect of a new performance.

Finwë’s house appeared at the end of the avenue, and Anairë urged Maldanar forward. They burst into the Great Square with its white stucco and its dark balconies of wood, where Fëanáro had made his Oath and turned all the music of her world sour and plodding. This once, her eyes were not drawn to the flagstone where Nolofinwë had stood and watched his brother and done nothing, but backwards, to where the people who loved Tirion flowed into the Square and filled it with the last breaths of the sacred silence.

María the priestess of Vána brought her the ram’s horn. Anairë laid a steadying hand on Maldanar’s neck, brought it to her lips, and blew.

In the open quiet after the great blast, she unwound her veil, squinting a bit against the Sun-light on the white-painted walls. She smiled, and Tirion smiled back.

Perhaps their cheeks ached at the unfamiliarity too.

“Next year in wholeness,” she called, and Tirion called with her.

When the last echoes faded, Anairë held up her hand. The crowd rustled.

“You hunger and thirst and wish to clean the dust from your feet,” she said, projecting her voice till it rang from the walls of the Square. “I have news that will not wait for another dawn, news I must urgently tell each and every one of you, for it concerns us all. It will not wait the night, but it will wait for you to eat and wash. Go light your fires and draw your water, and return at sunset. Change is upon us.”

–

Bathed and re-dressed, Maldanar curried and cooled and put away, and nineteen urgent dispatches reviewed and sent on their way, Anairë sent for a box to stand on in the square. It was, by now, second nature to ensure she did not appear before Tirion flat-footed, in house shoes and dance clothing, but it was still not yet second nature to command others to bring the apposite fittings of royalty. That had been Nolofinwë’s assiduous duty. Her attendants would likely bring a baldachin and a carpet with a pile visible from the city walls, but this they could do without her asking for them.

Arien’s late arrows pierced the dustmotes hanging in the open windows, swirled up by some activity below. Anairë went to see.

The enterprising peddlers had already set up stalls around the square, selling hastily ground madia yuhu and cups of the glorious whitebark raspberries and salal berries and blackberries of midsummer. When Nolofinwë had courted her, she had made him buy her acorn porridge from just such a stall, and laughed at him when he fumbled with the small coins and asked for a spoon with which to eat his portion.

If the costermongers were out, so should she be. Anairë shook her head, and went down from her tower to find her box.

It was still — almost — second nature to emerge from the doors of Finwë’s house, see the audience, and lift up her arms to begin a dance. "Almost" was enough to keep her face and body well schooled, and her step steady as she climbed onto the hastily carpeted and draped platform in the center of the square. Her heart beat its wings like a hummingbird, droning in her chest. She turned to face Tirion, feet sinking unsteadily into the rug, which indeed boasted a pile to get lost in.

Each guild and district had bought its cups of berries and settled into more or less distinct clusters arrayed in a semicircle before her. The press of the square made the whole populace of Tirion diminished stand out in their numbers as the procession in its pomp and disunity had not — the scrim of dark heads like foliage over the varied trunks of a forest in its barks, whispering and creaking and difficult to take in in its entirety. How astonishing that they should be so many, that the city should feel empty to her when the seven or eight children born since the exile had to be boosted on parents’ shoulders, and the experimental ceramics laboratory commune had to stand almost behind her in order to fit into the space. How astonishing, really, that they had all done what they had been doing these many centuries now: listening to a command she issued on the basis of what little information she possessed, and organizing themselves to meet it as best they could.

That familiar feeling of fungibility stole over Anairë again — she could be any one of the crowd; she was a prop whose work could be done by any other — yet, for once, it did not leave her gritting her teeth and steeling her spine. It fizzed. It settled in the folds of her throat and lingered, warm.

She surveyed the crowd, the left-behinds and the stayed-behinds, and the ones like her, who were both and neither. They surveyed her back.

Then, as she had not done since she was a young woman who danced for Nessa and none other, she raised her arms and called out the simplest prayer she knew, that asked for attention from her people before any other; that asked for oneness.

Each spot in the square where the religious orders gathered ruffled their feathers at the change in proceedings, but she was aware of the other patches of person-forest where it seemed some wind swayed them forward, and others where snatches of responding song echoed back to her.

The prayer was short. She sang out the last note, folded her hands, and spoke.

“I bring tidings,” she began, “And I do not invoke the Valar to hear them, for this is a matter for ourselves first, if not ourselves only. This is a matter for widows, a matter for orphans, and a matter for all the world only after we have had our say. We have a decision to make, and I would that we make it for ourselves.”

A buzz darted through the crowd and back. Anairë breathed into her belly.

“A ship has come out of the East and landed in Alqualondë.”

The roar she had expected did not come. A silence held the square and every person in it such that the clicking of the roof tiles settling in the evening’s cool could be heard over her heart, still pounding. She went on.

“On it sailed a queen and her consort, enemies of Morgoth, grandchildren of that Lúthien before whom Mandos bent his will in single exception. They come to plead before the Valar for their children, who are lost, and their land, which is broken. As a token of safe passage, they bear a Silmaril.”

The silence crested into cacophony at last. Anairë could see even the gap-toothed mouths of the few small children who had never seen the light of a Silmaril or known Tirion before its emptying opening in cries of shock. Others, she thought, looking around at the faces cast into high shadow by the setting Sun, were crying out in anger or joy; still others seemed simply to be crying. The noise went on and on, ebbing and swelling and eddying around the square. It was beyond her power to quiet it. She sought out instead some island of steadiness.

Near the front, the head of the glassblowers’ guild seemed to be praying to herself, but, being a follower of Vána Flower-Robed, did not seem as perturbed by the crowd as many. She caught Anairë’s eye, and when Anairë held a finger to her lips for silence, she hummed a clear note, just audible over the din. One by one, her colleagues and journeyfolk took it up, and their neighbors the Repudiators noticed, and, slowly, another silence spread across the crowd, as pockets of leadership took it upon themselves to redirect their consociations.

Anairë watched the quiet crest and run across the crowd, each eddy of authority its own pocket of calm. She fingered the stiff brocade of her skirt, fit for a queen. Tirion quieted itself for her, mastered its passions, marshaled its thoughts, waited to ponder and deliberate together. Almost, she wondered—

It was time to speak again.

“I do not remember the Journey to Aman,” she said, and hoped that the crowd would have patience for her clumsy, borrowed words. “I know, however, that the decision to journey onwards, through loss and peril, was made in plebiscite. I know that I am in the presence of many who do remember those days and those decisions, who scorned to follow the words of a king without demur.”

All at once, the sun slipped behind the city walls, and the houses grew blue and pink with twilight. Anairë shivered once, hard.

“I am not the ruler my husband was,” she said, before all the people she had never once called her own. “I could not decide this question alone an ever I were. Instead, I pose it to you, to the city of Tirion, to the free-thinking people of this land.

“Elwing, queen across the sea, wishes to redeem the guilt of the Valar, and through them, redeem her land and her people from evil. I say the guilt is not solely on their hands, but stains ours as well. I say the Valar cannot act alone. I say the choice is upon us: remain as we are, a half-city, a half-people, in exile in our homeland, while others fight the battle we helped begin, or take up once more our part in this long and wicked working and this time, finish it.”

Her throat itched with dryness. She licked her lips, and drew breath enough to send her voice over the cooling violet air filled again with voices.

“I choose for myself,” she cried. “I cannot choose for you. Tirion, what shall we choose?”

Her question rang out, floated, and after a heartbeat of shocked pause, dissolved in the hubbub of argument. Anairë stiffened her spine against the urge to sag. The evening air rasped at her throat, and she thought longingly of the little-apple juice the costermongers sold in deerskin pouches. She looked out at the tumult of the crowd and steeled herself to shout again, to take back up the reins she had let slacken.

Before she had done more than take a deep breath against her bodice, she noticed the eddies again — riptides in the waves of the square, people parting to let pass the first elder, or the Guild-Head, or the leader of the clan, or the principal investigator of their work-group. These came towards her on her dais as they would, striding or shuffling or running, but all came with a purpose.

First to reach her was the head of the glassblower’s guild. The woman kept her peace while the rest of the elect caught up with her. Anairë watched her greet each, murmur some words to them, tone and meaning lost in the noise. They fell into a loose huddle behind her, the square and the crowd at their backs.

At last, the guild-head stepped forward and stared at her with a directness that shocked through the centuries of deference as the first winter’s rains shocked the washes.

“Intyallë of Tirion, Head of the Guild of Glassblowers,” Anairë acknowledged.

Intyallë bowed, though not deeply. She gestured around herself at the many people Anairë saw so frequently in court, somehow fresh-faced in the dusk.

“You know the leaders of the city,” Intyallë declared. “Queen Anairë, you have done well to call upon us. We will choose together.”

Elwing knew Eärwen meant to make up for her missed presentation at court that evening. She meant to introduce Elwing to her father Olwë, still king in name — Elwing’s own twice-great uncle. If it went well, she might introduce her to a handful of trusted advisors, a scattering of important officials.

Elwing meant to introduce herself.

She meant to do other things beforehand, too, since Eärwen had seen her ensconced in her chamber, fed, and showered with needles and thread and hemp-leaf-bound books to while away the hours until dusk, and promptly left to dress for court. She had left no attendant. Elwing could not remember the last time she had been left to entertain herself in her room. Surely it was before she first bled, when she grew tall enough that her feet no longer swung when she sat upon the rough-hewn throne at the head of Sirion’s council table. Only Galadriel had thought to treat her like a child after that, and then only when it suited her.

Like mother, like daughter, she thought. Well, she had not been a child for many years, and she did not mean to spend another day uselessly in sleep. Her heart cried out across the strange and spellbound land for Eärendil, and found no answer. If he should return, she wished to be ready for him.

The room boasted an alcove behind sliding paper doors, filled with wooden chests of clothes. She riffled through them, searching for anything similar to the clothing she wore at home – had worn at home – to no avail. She folded the last of the rectangle-cut robes back into its chest, and paused at an electrum glint on the raw silk. A long, silver-gold hair had worked its way into the weave. Elwing tugged it out and held it up to the light, where it shimmered.

Sighing, she wrapped it around her finger and left the small coil atop the garments in the chest.

The washroom had a mirror, and she set about making herself seem as foreign as she could before it. She untied her hair and let it fall in coils down her back. She bound the loose, wide-legged trousers she had found at the ankle, so they mimicked those she had worn in Sirion, and tied a short robe over that. She looked a fool, but how would the city people know?

Dressed to draw attention, she hid from it while she stole down to the docks. So early in the morning, the shadows of the twisting streets were thick enough to flit through unnoticed, if one were beloved enough of the darkness.

The great harbor of Alqualondë was not so shadowy. Elwing paused in the crook of a side-street spilling out onto the grand quay, straightened her robe, and stepped into the early sunshine.

The fishers were long gone with the tide, and little wavelets lapped at the broad white paving stones of the promenade and the blue-barnacled legs of the jetties. Only the great ships remained, and the pleasure craft, and a few swift, narrow-keeled messenger ships awaiting their lady’s word. Clinker-built and carvelled, they creaked and chuckled at the gentle swells, their sails furled like banked clouds except where the spire of a lateen scraped at the sky. They shone against the water in bright pinks and yellows and greens reflected back with a sea flavor, a mass of flowers floating against the harbor wall.

Few were about to see her walk openly down the promenade where hawser ropes coiled and seabirds made displays at empty buckets. She nodded at each head that swiveled to look at her in her odd costume, with her curling hair loose down her back, and walked on, feeling their gazes between her shoulder blades. None hailed her, yet.

Instead of calling out herself, she counted boats, pretending she played the old game of guess-the-ship with Eärendil, trying her eye on the draft and capacity of each. That sea-going yacht, some rich Elf’s toy, might hold thirty while it crossed a calm Belegaer. That two-decked galley was a more likely prospect; it might hold a hundred or more and brave rough seas. That full-rigged fluyt had seen storms but might easily be made sound again, and carry many tons of food through all weathers. That dhow, twenty spears. That child’s toy with its painted sail would stay safe in harbor.

Enough portage for an army lay at anchor here, she reckoned.

The many-colored ships and the lap of the waves drew her eyes to the sea again and again, and when the smooth sandstone flags of the quay changed suddenly to unpolished granite, she almost stumbled. Catching herself, she returned her gaze to the promenade before her, and stopped short.

White fingers clawed for the sky. Bleached ribs stabbed the earth. Pale pinions strained towards the sea.

Several moments passed before Elwing could fix the flow of impressions into a coherent image. Before her, spars and beams of some strange, smooth, pale material were fixed into the ground, twisting and reaching into the air like the ghostly club fungus which sprouted in Sirion’s forests after a rain. They were not aligned in a neat grid, but there was a clear order to their placement, though every time Elwing shifted, a new aspect seemed to emerge: feathers, seaspray, flames, each imbued with an uneasy urgency that belied the lambent glow of the white matter. Leaning closer, she noted a swirling grain – wood, then, after all, though she had never seen wood white as new bone, nor yet any so smooth and torqued, as though someone had carved ivory from an oliphaunt the size of a house into shapes like driftwood.

The whole patch of jarring gray granite and white objects was not more than ten paces square, jutting baldly from the promenade with no fence or decoration around it. Elwing narrowed her eyes. It discomposed her. It reminded her of the way the Silmaril’s searching light speared out from between her fingers when gripped in her fist, or perhaps it recalled the storm waves at Sirion crashing against the breakwater. She paced around it, watching the images shift.

The other side was not so bone-white. The spars showed grayer – weathered, it seemed – and were cracked and warped in places. The cracks almost hurt to look upon, crevasses in the uncanny smoothness of the wood. Some spots, she noticed, looking deeper into the thatch, were black. Burned?

It took an unexpected effort to step further into the square. Elwing squared her shoulders and drew a breath, and almost choked on it when a deep, musical voice spoke behind her in a language she could not understand. She resisted the urge to whirl around and turned slowly to see who addressed her.

An Elf no taller than herself, with spun-gold hair in a close-cropped cloud of curls, dressed in fine masculine Noldorin clothing, looked at her quizzically, and repeated his indecipherable question.

She spread her hands and half-smiled in the universal gesture of incomprehension.

The Elf cocked his head and, in a Quenya accent that could etch diamonds, said: “Not Telerin, then. Yet I see you find the memorial affecting.”

Elwing dipped her head, half a greeting and half agreement. “It captivates me,” she agreed. “It is very beautiful, and very sad.”

“You are a stranger here,” he replied. “Do you know what it remembers?”

Elwing breathed deeply, steeled herself, took control of her face. Now that this fellow with his gleaming hair had approached her, the sailors and promenaders were drifting closer.

“I am stranger than you know,” she said. “Yet across the sea the arts of our cousins are still remembered in song and story. The Swanships burned on our own shores, besides, with such loveliness they say the flames appeared as sculpture. I wonder how the pieces that remained came to be here.” She dropped her voice, darkening its tone. “Moreover, we know well the first Kinslaying and its consequences.”

The little crowd stared at her, the salts in their work clothes as well as the gorse-headed lord. Skin prickling under her improvised attire, she wondered which of her breadcrumbs they would pick up first.

“A cousin—!”

“Did you see them?”

“You mean–”

“But how came you here?”

“—first Kinslaying?”

All of them at once, it seemed.

The lord held out his hand, and some quieted, but another, a dark-haired sailor with bare feet and fish scales sticking in shimmering panoply up her arms, sneered at him and stepped forward, mouth working around some unknown quantity of questions.

Oh, a dynamic, Elwing thought to herself in mental imitation of Idril’s dry tones. We do so appreciate a dynamic.

Idril would say such things when Elwing still begged her to sit at her right hand in council meetings. Every bard remaining in Beleriand had sung the Lay to her upon stumbling into Sirion’s ramshackle glory – every bard save one – and woven Lúthien’s journey before the minds’ eyes of the council and their little queen. Greens and blues and browns for her grandparents, and this part in deathly gray, the path to Mandos, the bitter taste of determination and quest, and, depending on the singer, recrimination. By the time she was no longer little, and had made of “queen” something quite different, no one could notice a dynamic as well as she.

The beat of her heart settled into the galloping rhythm of story. She ducked her voice under the first syllables of some further demand from the scaly-armed captain and sang, in the granddaughter of a voice that had moved gods:

“‘Long are the paths of shadow made
Where no foot’s print is ever laid,
Over the hills, across the seas!
Far, far away are the Lands of Ease,
But the Land of the Lost is further yet,
Where the Dead wait, while ye forget!’”

A little of the joy of those evenings in the garden courtyard of the Queen’s House, open to the slapdash market square, slipped into her voice, and a little of the trackless paths of the three-year sea. From some locked drawer, Elwing cast out her ease, her babies in their ship-cradle rocked by Ulmo’s waves, as a fisher casts out a line, and having beguiled her catch, let bite her hook — the screams, the blades, the babies’ faces lit with flame, two small boys lying still in a forest, covered over by the unpitying snow.

She had to work the translation, rather, but when the last notes of "forget" rippled out upon the pier, she thought she had made her point.

A few gulls cried out into the silence before a member of the crowd spoke. The surly captain darted a glance at the lord, and seemed to decide that any words would do, if spoken first.

“Are you the ghost of that allottance-jumper who sang a ditty to Mandos and left without a by-your-leave? It's only that otherwise I can’t see how you have much to say to us about forgetting the dead.”

“Don’t speak foolishness, Nissaratë,” someone hissed from behind her. Elwing’s mouth twitched.

The captain, whose sneer was apparently equal-opportunity, grimaced in the hisser’s general direction. “I think it’s rich that you-–”

“Shut up, Nissaratë,” a different voice snapped. A slight, dark-haired woman stepped out from the captain’s shadow, fists and jaw clenched. “We remember what you think. There are obviously more important things afoot.”

She faced Elwing and tilted her chin up to look at her — she stood shorter even than some Men of Sirion.

“I am Voranna of the Repudiators’ host, though no Kinslayer am I,” she said. Elwing saw her pulse fluttering in her throat. “You are someone, and you have your story, and I expect you will tell us more just as soon as you can. But tell me first — I believe you when you say you are from across the waters – tell me, do you know my son? Do you know my ruddy-haired Urundil, who marched in the train of Nolofinwë? Did you meet him on your strange shore?”

Elwing bit her tongue. Voranna’s eyes, fixed on hers, glinted with desperation under their Treelit sheen. Which was worse, she wondered. Should she say she had known, or known of, a Rustil, a Rusdil, an Urdil, and even a Rusnil, and a full hand more besides of copper-topped Noldor from who knew which host, with names no parent gave them, who stumbled to Sirion and were given a roof if they showed willing? Or would it be better to evade the interrogation, the running-through of every particular of every unlikely candidate? To avoid enumerating the personal qualities of Rustil, Eärendil’s child-healer, who had died in Gondolin by Balrog-flame, or Urdil the fletcher, whom Elwing had seen die by the sword of another Noldo during her flight to the clifftop? To keep back the knowledge that the greater part of the Noldor who survived the journey to Beleriand were dead before she was even born? Which was the kinder decision, and which the more useful?

“I knew none by that name,” Elwing said, as gently as she might. “Your son would have taken a name in the tongue of the Sindar. Some I did meet, or hear tell of, whose names ring alike. I must warn you that of their number, some have died by the sword, and some by Melkor’s malice, and still others passed away before my birth, in the noontide of the Noldor in Beleriand. I knew few well, for when I was young, we were uneasy neighbors, and when I was grown, few remained of any host, and many made themselves my enemies.”

Voranna dropped her gaze. A sea mew screeched from a mizzen yard. Even the belligerent Nissaratë held her tongue.

“I did not think death should dog the footsteps of the Noldor so closely,” Voranna said at last. Her mouth twisted. “Nor that they should find themselves among enemies.”

Someone in the growing crowd snorted, and Voranna visibly stifled a flinch. Elwing searched the cluster of faces, and found more than a few sneers. She began to formulate her next sentence, but was cut off by a loud clap. Startled, the mutter dissipated.

Nissaratë brushed the scales from her hands, not looking at Voranna. “The best use of our time is not asking after every Kinslayer who may have come to Endórë one by one.”

“No,” interjected the golden-haired lord, “I expect not. Why came you here from so far, Lady?”

“And what do you want?” asked Nissaratë, clearly discontented by the theft of her last word.

Elwing smiled at them, the queen’s smile.

“I come with my husband to treat before the Valar, who brought me to this place and season. I did not mean to come so far, but as they have tied my life to their whim, I mean to make them answer for it. My want is for my life, and my request is for the lives of my people. For though I was taken up out of the reach of my enemies, we are yet abandoned, my people and I, to be destroyed. Our deaths stain their hands. They must answer.”

The smile stayed in place, though at least seven pairs of eyes looked askance at her. A few mutters about the relative usefulness of the Valar’s aid and her relative sanity reached her ears.

“I do not seek aid,” she said, still smiling. “I demand redress. And I shall have it, for their own law recognizes the justice of my claim. Shall I tell you more?”

Nissaratë, the lord, and at least three others tried to speak at once. Through, it seemed, the sheer force of lung capacity, Nissaratë won, and stepped closer to Elwing than she liked.

“The help of the Valar comes at a high price,” she said. “Tell me, nameless cousin, why should they care for you, on your distant shore?”

“I think what she means—” broke in the lord, and was himself interrupted by Voranna.

“She said what she meant,” she said, with some asperity. “But I agree.”

Nisasratë aped shock, and Voranna visibly restrained herself from rolling her eyes.

“You should tell us your name, cousin. And I would rather not speak of the Valar, whose curse lies upon my son. But—” her eyes flicked up, to the memorial over Elwing’s shoulder. “Would you tell us about them? About your people, and your homes across the sea?”

“That is what I said,” said Nissaratë, and this time Voranna did roll her eyes.

Elwing took a step closer to Nissaratë. “What in particular may I tell you?”

Nissaratë’s eyes darted to the side, and she shifted her weight back, swallowing. Elwing was about to step back, having made her point, but Nissaratë’s gaze returned, and she stood straighter out of her ironical slouch.

“What did you eat?” she asked. “What sort of things did you cook?”

Elwing’s eyebrows rose involuntarily, and she did not quite manage to catch them. Nissaratë scowled, but held her composure.

“My nephew was a ship’s cook before the Kinslaying, up and down the coast and even to Avallónë,” she said, and paused to clear her throat. “When he comes back he’ll like to hear about some new dishes.”

She stepped back, and paid careful attention to peeling another fish scale off her arm. The stiffness of righteousness seemed to drain from Elwing’s body like the tide out of the estuary at Sirion, one finger at a time. The creaking of the boats bobbing in the harbor returned to her ears, as familiar as the calls of the unusual seabirds were strange.

“My sons loved steamed mussels,” she blurted out, surprised even at herself. “The blue kind with orange flesh. One wanted them the usual way, with onions, and his brother always wanted them without. But the onions go in the pot first, so if we wanted to make both of them happy, we would have to have two pots on the hearth.”

A sharp tingle in her nose made her stop. She bit on her tongue, invisibly, as Idril had taught her to do.

Nissaratë eyed her mistrustfully. “So you lived on the coast, then?”

“In an estuary,” Elwing replied.

“Did the mussels there have nacre too?” asked a new voice, a much younger Elf.

“Yes, they were beautiful inside, and some even grew pearls, blister pearls. Always duller out of the water, though one could varnish them to make the shine last.”

Voranna looked interested at that. “Was that done commonly? Was it for jewelry, or decoration…?”

The lordling cleared his throat. “Perhaps we might continue this conversation with seating,” he suggested, making an elegant gesture towards an unprepossessing stack of crates, quite as though he stood in some grand parlor.

Elwing laughed, and the knot of people before her breathed out a sigh in one body, it seemed, and one or two people chuckled with her.

“Sound advice!” she said. “But first, may I learn your names?”

Nissaratë took the lead and ensured the Teleri were introduced first – fishers and dockworkers, mostly. The Noldor – for that was, clearly, who they were – introduced themselves one at a time, casting anxious glances towards the blond lord. For a moment, it seemed as though he would not introduce himself, but Elwing gave him a prompting glance.

“Ah,” the lordling said. “I am Arafinwë Finwion. I lead the work of those Repudiators who seek redemption through labor. You must have come to know my wife.”

There was a beat of silence. Elwing might have known, in retrospect — that hair, that bearing, that air of command. Many questions crowded her throat, but, Elwing thought, they could, and perhaps should wait. Now was a chance to speak to many of those who controlled portage and Alqualondë’s new fleet – such as it was.

She only replied: “Let us do sit and speak awhile, as you suggest,” and found her arm taken, quite to her surprise, by Nissaratë, who began to walk her towards the boxes.

“You mean to say you usually eat shellfish with onions?” she demanded. “No, wait to answer — what is your name?”

Elwing had almost jerked away when Nissaratë’s brawny arm wrapped around hers, and the little hairs on her arms still stood up. The captain’s voice had been so disbelieving, so offended — she found herself laughing again.

“Always!” she replied. “And my name is Elwing.”

“Well,” Nissaratë said, “Elwing, why would you spoil seafood like that?”

Elwing put a hand to her cheek, where the muscles ached. She parried, lightly, and Voranna asked another question on oysters. Nine Noldor and Teleri sat together around her, listening to her spirited defense of minced onion on oysters, and asking questions about harvest and sustaining the shellfish populations, and what the tides were like, and who sailed, and what birds rested on the masts at harbor. Someone sang a snatch of Telerin sea shanty, and Elwing sang one back in Sindarin, and a shared chorus melody was discovered, and Arafinwë Finwion was overcome with excitement and demanded they sing the full songs.

All afternoon, the words came easier than she would have thought, while the tide rolled back in, rocking the boats that might yet serve her cause.

Eärwen’s hands twitched and coiled with nerves not her own, clenching on the arms of her carved chair — the driftwood-gray one beneath the pearly opulence of her father’s raised, bedraped dais of a throne. Anairë could launch a feeling across the miles as though she were a javelin-thrower second only to Nessa herself: a talent useful in times of danger, soothing in peacetime, and hardly ever as much of an annoyance as now.

The last petitioner, case heard and judged in Eärwen’s wisdom, made her obeisance to it, empty as it was, and began to back out of the hall. Eärwen sat straight-backed and smooth-faced and watched the doors to the King’s House swing closed behind her, digging her fingernails into the armrests.

“Please inform my royal father that I am ready,” she told the attendant who manned the doors. “And fetch the Lady Elwing from her chambers.”

Anairë’s anxiety spiked, a twist deep behind Eärwen’s ribs. She stretched her mind out, tensing against the strain, questing for some clear word or sign from Anairë.

What is it?

Only the same cloud of tight, excited nerves answered her, the familiar contours of Anairë’s mind focused inward and away.

Sighing, she drew back over the oaklands and the low mountains, skimming along the wide southern sweep of Alqualondë’s sound, dragging the fingers of her mind through the thought-fizzing water of the outlying fishing villages readying for the evening tide to turn. The largest boats sparked into and out of focus as they swung their bows homeward. Scattered shrine priests glowing lamp-like in evening meditation serenely ignored her. Minds snapped shut in the ramshackle rookeries of the Returned by the mouth of the trickling Alpasírë, unwilling in rebirth as they were in their first lives.

Alqualondë proper warmed with its second rising as Arien plunged into the sea, the eating-houses clusters of alive! and presence!and the docks almost smarting with excitement.

Eärwen paused. Even for a fine evening and a good catch, that was a great deal of excitement. She gathered the eye of her attention, a storm cell touching down near the promenade.

He was immediately present to her, as open as the day they wed, sunny and candid. Around him was a crowd of some size — impossible to tell precisely at this distance — all in a swirl of emotion, pressing and tugging at her mind.

Distantly, Eärwen felt her fingers seize on the armrest of the chair again.

She pressed at her husband’s mind, an open-handed slap on a doorframe standing ajar, a kick at a threshold she had not passed through these six hundred years.

His surprised pleasure almost sent her running back across the miles to Anairë, preoccupied but safe. Before she could shape a question, he sent an impression to her: delight, even wonder, intrigue, a wild hope, a blackness like two thousand fathoms, shot through with silver.

It clicked together at the same instant that the attendant’s feet on the wooden floors clicked back into earshot.

Eärwen threw herself back into her body with enough force that her ears rang.

“Princess,” the runner said over the high-pitched hum, “I cannot find the Lady Elwing.”

“I misspoke,” Eärwen replied, her own voice distant to her ears. “The Lady Elwing is at the harbor with Prince Arafinwë.”

Guards to separate and retrieve Elwing were out of the question, as was permitting whatever multitude Arafinwë had gathered about himself to come to the King’s House. Whyever had she gone out? How had she found Arafinwë? What did they discuss together in such a crowd?

“Go quickly and bid them come to the Queen’s House together,” she said. She could find her father herself, and the Queen’s House was not open to the eyes of the city.

“What of the king, Princess?” asked the page.

What of him? Eärwen wanted to snap, but long practice kept the words well behind her tongue.

“I will see that he is notified of the change in plans myself,” she responded, and, rising, swept out of the hall while the page was still trapped between bowing to her and making obeisance to Olwë’s empty throne.

–

The main room of the Queen’s House, the room that had been her mother’s delight, was fitted with no Noldorin innovations. As such, Arafinwë and Elwing knelt upon the elegantly embroidered sitting cushions, too absorbed in animated conversation to notice the main door sliding open. Eärwen’s heart panged, and she bit her tongue. The page must have run like the wind for them to arrive and settle before she could corral her father across the way to the Queen’s House. Eärwen folded her hands in her sleeves and waited to be noticed.

“No, you see, that was the issue at hand,” Elwing was explaining to a rapt Arafinwë. “The Gondolindrim had particular needs, language not least, but it was impossible that they should self-govern. There would have been fighting in the streets — and then we all would have starved. Hence the districts: of course each people would cluster together, but it was all cheek-by-jowl, and it was not as though there were enough dwellings to pass up one– going spare.”

Eärwen caught the hitch in Elwing’s voice, but Arafinwë did not seem to notice.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “And each could then select a representative who would compete for the honor, that none might say they were unfairly excluded!” He clasped his hands together before his breast, that delighted gesture Aikanáro had so loved and imitated until it became his own. Eärwen’s hands twitched.

“Yet… all accepted you as final arbiter?” A diplomatic thread of doubt winding through that musical voice.

“I do believe you consider your daughter,” Elwing said wryly. “It will not surprise you to know that she secured herself a position high in my confidence — perhaps it will surprise you that she managed it with sweet words and wise counsel.”

Arafinwë’s face could hold no interest, surely. Eärwen, still trapped in the doorway, did not find herself surprised, though a thread of unease drifted through her thoughts – how young must Elwing have been when Nerwen came to her with sweet words to gain a role as confidant and counsel? Across the low table from Arafinwë, smiling and animated as Eärwen had never yet seen her, she practically radiated youth.

“She hardly could do otherwise,” Elwing continued, “For if she wished to live with her husband, the peoples must perforce be allowed to mingle, and once blended, how might I claim that the law should address neighbors as strangers?”

“Clever,” said Arafinwë, as approving as he had ever been when one of the children had produced some astute answer to a tutor’s question, and though Eärwen had only a moment before dwelt on Elwing’s youth, she felt her hackles rise. “Though surely even my troublesome daughter could not have been the only obstacle?”

Elwing quirked a brow. Flatly, she replied, “Husbands proved useful in that respect as well.”

“Itarillë’s boy, of course! Please excuse my forgetfulness; naturally the Noldor would follow a prince of the house of Nolofinwë.”

Yet more evenly, Elwing said, “My husband is Ardamírë, son and grandson of prophets. He followed me, and his peoples chose for themselves, as was ever the way of Sirion. Had the Gondolindrim wished, they might have crossed the strait to Balar and seen what Círdan Nówë’s child aspirant might do for them. Naturally.”

Arafinwë bowed from the waist, though he remained seated. “I see I have offended, my lady,” he said. “I beg your gracious indulgence.”

The final filament of Eärwen’s patience snapped. She stepped off the threshold into the room.

“Your half-apologies remain unwelcome in this house, my lord. You dance upon my indulgence already, and I suggest that you not tread upon Queen Elwing’s as well.”

Arafinwë started violently to hear her level voice, whipping his head around to stare, while Elwing betrayed no surprise and turned to face her slowly. The last sparks of Treelight gleamed from Arafinwë’s eyes, while Elwing’s shone gray and depthless as the sea. Neither gaze settled easily upon her.

“What trouble did you spawn upon my docks?” she demanded, before either could speak.

“No trouble,” said Elwing in a voice of maddening calm to match her own. “We shared songs and debated our tastes in seafood, and caused no agitation.”

Arafinwë made an unresolved sort of gesture. “It was but a chance gathering of sailors and a group of Repudiators. My first work crew knows what behavior is expected of them— of us. Captain Nissaratë badgered her, but no worse. We spoke of many topics, but not in anger.”

“The carpenter Voranna asked me where her son was,” added Elwing, and let the ripples of her statement spread out into the night air.

Eärwen pressed her lips together. It was no good looming over them as though they were misbehaving children. Ignoring the long-ingrained habit of kneeling by Arafinwë’s side, she walked to the head of the table and knelt, arranging her sleeves about her.

“I am surprised Nissaratë stooped to speak to you,” she said to Arafinwë. When he did not immediately respond, she faced Elwing. “I suppose you learned with whom you spoke. Noldor paying reparations — not Kinslayers, but those who were happy enough to profit from slaughter until the Valar’s threats of consequences turned them back. Perhaps I ought to be surprised that you spoke to them.”

Elwing tipped her head a precise number of degrees to the left and regarded Eärwen. It was unnervingly like the stare of the sea eagle. Eärwen fought the urge to hiss at her like a swan.

“What did you think I meant when I told you of Sirion?”

Flat-footed, irritated with the obliqueness, smooth-faced, Eärwen replied, “I do not grasp your meaning.”

“Who precisely did you think lived in Sirion? Who were the Gondolindhrim? Who were the stray Noldor who came to fish Balar?”

Eärwen kept her counsel. Elwing continued, looking easily between her and Arafinwë, as if they conversed at a dinner party.

“Your daughter lived with us a while; I told you this. She made such a fuss about working with Kinslayers. The whole continent knew she had sworn against them. She did weave for the common stores, and performed healing, and once she fought off a starving bear with a short spear. She and her husband left two days after I delivered my sons, and she took Elves with her, some two-score Sindar. Thus, she was not here, and her followers were not here, when Sirion burned.”

Elwing folded her hands very neatly in her lap, and made a funny sort of shrug, like a bird running its beak through feathers.

“Could they thatch a roof? Could they set a snare, or lay on hands to heal a rotten wound?” She tipped her head back and forth, and Eärwen saw Arafinwë stiffen from the corner of her eye, and consciously relaxed her back and jaw where they had tensed. That had been Nerwen’s gesture.

Elwing’s face remained quite smooth, and for the first time, Eärwen wondered if that was her own face, passed down across the ocean.

Arafinwë broke in.

“I believe you mean that Sirion did not turn away those who swore they meant no harm and were willing to help their neighbors put up a wall — and then I am sure you broke up many fights!”

Elwing unbent, a little, and flashed Arafinwë a small smile all out of keeping with the nasty twist it engendered in Eärwen’s belly.

“Well, not physically.”

“It is just as well,” Eärwen broke in. “I am here to introduce you to my father, as I should have done yesterday. If you have caused no trouble, then we need not speak of this to him.”

Elwing stopped smiling, but she turned the full force of her attention to Eärwen, as she had expected she would — she could feel it, and Arafinwë’s too, hot on her skin as the two-edged summer sun.

“May I speak to him about ships?” Elwing asked, leaning forward, almost rising on her knees.

Eärwen thought before she spoke. Careful to meet Elwing’s intent eyes evenly, she replied, “He is unlikely to take kindly to the question. The destruction of our Swanships was a great blow, as was– well. He will need much convincing to lend aid to Noldor. Indeed, I must yet be convinced there is any worth in your quest.”

“You have ever been difficult to sway, daughter.”

Before Elwing’s eyes could do more than flash, or anyone could startle at the sudden intrusion of another into their tableau, Eärwen rose to her feet and folded into a bow from the waist. From the rustle of clothing, she guessed that Arafinwë had thrown himself into a full obeisance, and Elwing had not. Of course not.

“Enough, daughter, up; do not be silly. You are in your own mother’s home,” Olwë said, entering the room and raising Eärwen up. Though her eyes had been trained on the floor, as her mother had drilled into her after her return with Anairë from Aiwendil and the marshes, she had noted the unsteadiness of his stride — the insecurity of many centuries rather than the lithe sailor’s swagger that had rang the floorboards of the Queen’s House when she was a child waking to another day of bliss, and which, in nights when she woke without Anairë by her side in her childhood bedchamber, she still half-expected to come down the hall to wake her from bad dreams. It was not, then, a good day.

It so rarely was. Eärwen raised her eyes to take in her father’s face, golden-tan and familiar, but somehow not the father’s face she always expected, still, even now. She turned, and saw Elwing — thank the stars — holding a shallow curtsey of antique Noldorin style, though her head was high and her gaze avid, an arrow fletched by those arcing lines at her eyes’ corners.

Arafinwë kept his forehead pressed to the floor. Olwë did not look at him.

“Atar,” said Eärwen, “This is Elwing, Queen of Sirion across the sea, come to treat with the Valar as her grandmother did.”

Elwing dipped slightly lower for a moment, then rose entirely. “My uncle,” she said, in that voice a hundred furlongs deep. “My great-grandfather’s beloved brother. I regret that I meet you without good tidings of him.”

Eärwen watched Olwë’s eyes dart from Elwing’s proud nose to her gray eyes to the lightning-riven profundity of her hair. His sash had been clumsily tied.

“I see some of Elwë in you, child,” he said. “A very little. But it is more than I have seen since long and long ago, before either of us dreamed of children, much less great-grandnieces come a-questing across the ocean with sad news.”

“Shall I tell you regardless?” asked Elwing.

Olwë sighed, and gestured at the table. Eärwen stepped aside so he might sit at the head, and he took his place, the hem of his robe brushing over Arafinwë’s hand where he knelt still on the wooden floor, his breath fogging and vanishing.

“What is one more tale of woe?” he asked, not seeming to expect an answer. He settled on the cushion where Eärwen had sat, giving somehow the impression of an old gull with webs too ragged to perch comfortably on a ship’s rail. Eärwen clenched her teeth.

“I have heard the story in brief, and wish to hear it properly, so we may support — or not — our cousin’s decision informedly,” Eärwen said. Her next words floated out from some unknown place beyond her conscious mind: “Arafinwë will stay and listen as well, for we may hear of our daughter.”

She moved around the table to sit next to Arafinwë, not pausing to look for her father’s reaction. Arafinwë’s own response was merely to rise from his reverence and steal a fleeting look at Eärwen’s face before turning his eyes down to the table.

Her heart thudded hard, once, twice. With Arafinwë at her right, and her father at the head of the table, and, if she only looked at the polished wood of the table, a woman’s indistinct form reflected in its shine, she could almost be a young bride again, or a mother whose children were far away because they explored their home in all its wild safety.

She folded her hands firmly in her lap.

“Can you paint a picture for me while you tell your tale of my brother, child?” asked Olwë, breaking the thick silence.

Any indignation Elwing felt at the condescension stayed behind her eyes, and she only dipped her head in a graceful nod.

“I could, Uncle,” she said, “But I was not yet born when he was slain for the Silmaril, and my pictures would be art, not history. I shall sing you a lay that tells of it in plain speech.”

So she did. Or rather, she chanted, clearly making a rough translation on the wing, where spaces between meaning and speech clattered and echoed. Necklace wire dripped with beads and little gems with unfamiliar names, and swords scraped against a child’s vocabulary. Eärwen closed her eyes to hear Elwing’s low, ripe voice the better, and so when Elwing had finished her gloss, and shifted seamlessly to free-singing of the sort that Eärwen knew well from the docks and warehouses of Alqualondë, the first flicker of silver-gold splashed bright as dream behind her lids.

She was a child, and she looked up, less far than she might, for strong arms cradled her against a warm chest — but still, she looked up, for the vision before her stood taller than anyone she had met before, and was crowned in hair that gleamed like the torchlight gleamed on the steel of her sword. She reached out with a chubby arm, fascinated by a curling tendril, and had to decide whether to cry when the vision’s lips tightened, only for one of the voices that meant brother to chide, “Don’t frown at her! She’s only a baby,”and for the vision to sigh-laugh and reach out her arms and cradle her against her lacquered breastplate. The hair came down in a shining curtain like the waterfall where she had been born glowing at sunset, and she stared through it to her new home.

Somewhere else, someone Eärwen loved made a broken sort of noise.

The veil of gilded silver did not shift, but the surroundings beyond it did — gray-pink water and blasted trees, muddy overhangs in streambanks, running and hiding and running and hiding again. Her father’s star lit the hair curtain and proved she was safe, but it would also bring in the hunters, said Galadriel, so keep it hidden, curl around it so the light cannot get out. She slept in a tight twist so her father’s star pulsed scarlet through her hands, and over her hunched someone who wasn’t her father, or her mother, or either of her brothers, and over that person crouched the orange-stained night.

“Stop!”

Eärwen snapped back to herself, and Elwing’s note hit a funny modulation and then ceased. She hoped to the stars that Anairë, still radiating discomfort across the miles, had not felt any of that. Beside her, Arafinwë breathed unevenly.

Olwë hovered on his knees, palm flat on the table, veins in relief.

“I did not ask for that tale!” he boomed.

“You asked for the tale of your brother, my great-grandfather, and I meant to bring it to the present day,” Elwing replied, golden-eyed. “I expect it is not yet finished.”

“His tale ended when he died,” Olwë said harshly.

“It ends when I die, and all the other remnants of his people.”

Olwë pushed the table away as he rose, sending its legs into Arafinwë’s knees. “What is done is done, and I cannot grant you justice, or him — he is beyond justice, in that cruel land of yours.”

Elwing made as if to stand as well, planting her hands flat on the table surface and pushing up, pins and quills bristling along her hairline — but Eärwen grabbed her wrist and squeezed until she could feel the bones.

“This is not how a supplicant requests a boon from a king,” said Olwë, lips pale.

Elwing opened her mouth, and Eärwen squeezed even tighter and watched as Elwing visibly remembered that she needed help, not victory, and snapped and bent every pinion of rage back under her skin.

She did not apologize, but she did seat herself again, and bowed her head a very little.

“Do not come to me again tomorrow,” Olwë warned, turned on his heel, and swept from the room.

In the silence of his departure, Arafinwë passed a shaking hand over his eyes.

“You– you push too hard.”

Elwing did not respond, only removed Eärwen’s hand one finger at a time from her wrist, where a handprint stood livid against the brown skin. Eärwen stared at the mark rather than offer her own opinion.

She had not just witnessed an exercise of stunning diplomacy, but — well. It had been a long time since she had been pushed, rather than pushing.

“I’m… sorry,” Elwing said, not as insincerely as she might have. Arafinwë did not take umbrage, merely stood, took a moment to smooth out his clothing, and glanced between Elwing and Eärwen, eyes flashing quickly over Eärwen.

“I will take my leave. E– Princess–” his voice wavered slightly– “I apologize for intruding on your home, and this conversation. I did not think. It was not my intent to act like– like–”

Eärwen cut him off before he could say whatever dreadful thing hung on the end of that sentence. Family, or invader, all the same in anguish.

“This I do not hold against you,” she said quickly. She thought to thank him for his work today, but forestalled herself almost immediately. Thank him for reparations? No. Thank him for, almost certainly, stepping in when Elwing might have embroiled herself in some trouble? His presence was half the trouble. She almost reached out to the distant, tense presence that was Anairë — but no.

“I will see you when next we discuss the work of the Repudiators,” she said, after a pause she hoped was not too noticeable. She also offered a very slight bow.

Arafinwë returned it, a series of complicated emotions passing over his face too quickly for Eärwen to read, catching at the part of her that had once read him like an unrolling scroll. He bowed also to Elwing, and then departed without another word.

Eärwen turned to Elwing, who remained seated at the table, her smooth expression held back up to her face like a mask. Tiny pinfeathers still dotted her hairline, however, and a little bead of blood ran into the hair at her temple where one had broken the skin, staining the silver streak there a muddy pink. She said nothing, and Eärwen had the sensation that they were each waiting for the other to speak.

Elwing, she thought, might have the same practical experience of rule as herself, but she had not had the experience of raising adolescents. She knelt back down at the head of the table and waited.

As she had thought, Elwing broke first – though not in the way she had expected.

“My husband is better at pushing the right amount,” she said, and to Eärwen’s surprise, she could detect shame in her voice. “Agitation, you might call it. Angering people enough that they work together for a goal, with you. I have never been nearly so effective.”

“You are too angry,” Eärwen observed.

Elwing visibly bit her cheek to keep back her last response. “I am exactly as angry as I should be,” she said, in a voice more level than the planed floorboards on which she knelt. “It is only that I fail to communicate it as I ought.”

What was there to say to that? What good had Eärwen’s own anger, so richly merited, done her? On Elwing’s temple, the drop of blood had found its way through the forest of hairs and slid slowly down her cheek.

“Your husband is not here,” she said, and reached out to brush it away. Elwing caught her wrist before she could touch her face and hold her still as she had in the morning, which felt as though it had been days ago, months. There they knelt, Elwing’s hand as tight around her wrist as her own had been around Elwing’s just minutes ago.

“He goes to agitate those whose complacency does most harm,” Elwing said, and tightened her grip.

“He is not here,” Eärwen repeated, and twisted her hand so she grasped Elwing’s hand, and drew them together to their feet.

She did not let go.

“Yours is.”

Another long silence, while Eärwen’s pulse pounded in her wrist. If she still held Elwing’s, would she feel her heart racing alongside her own?

Elwing looked up at her. She was small, Eärwen noticed, smaller than she had realized; her presence that of a hunting bird which drew the eye and seemed enormous despite its perch on the falconer’s forearm. Yet, she looked up into Eärwen’s eyes.

“This morning you spoke to me of responsibilities,” Elwing said softly. “That which makes you a person, and not a bird in a flock pecking at the marsh.”

It could not be denied. Yellow no longer lingered about Elwing’s irises, but the gray was fathomless.

Elwing continued. “My responsibilities are not yet discharged. I have decided to be a person. Yet I do not find that I can bring about my responsibilities without help — so what manner of person am I?”

Not one whose like Aman has seen in decades, Eärwen thought. Aloud, she said, “I have not foreclosed the chance of help.”

“Nor have you offered it honestly and freely!” Elwing snapped. “In merely introducing me to the boat captains this afternoon, your Kinslayer husband has done more to aid Beleriand-- to aid the world, for it should not be thought that Morgoth will be content to stop at your children, or mine!”

“Then hie you to Tirion,” replied Eärwen, feeling each word fall from her tongue as though they froze to hail at its tip. “It will take you two days only — the relays are at your disposal.”

She tried to wrench her hand from Elwing’s, but she failed to break her grasp and did not struggle beyond the limits of her dignity. Her heart continued its breakneck pounding.

“You will not keep me?” Elwing asked. She had once again submerged her rage, and her voice was quieter than the brightly lit room seemed able to hold. The room was too bright, but Eärwen had no eyes for it, except as it cast the strange lines of Elwing’s face into high relief, limning each small expression, none of which she had ever learned how to read in any other life.

“Not against your will.”

“You will let me go?”

When had it been Eärwen’s choice when people left?

“If you will it, how may I prevent you?”

“You may offer me what I need.”

Eärwen dropped her hand and stepped back, two strides as long as the tight column of her robe would permit. This time, Elwing let her go easily enough.

“I am not Queen here,” she said. “It is my father whom you must convince, and through your own actions he will not see you tomorrow, and I expect not the next day. There will be a horse waiting for you in the morning. Anairë, I am sure, will show you to the Repudiators’ Quarter.”

Elwing made no response. She only stood there, small and regal, dressed in Nerwen’s castoffs, and followed Eärwen with her eyes as she turned and left the front room.

Eärwen flexed her hand as she walked down the corridor, and while the night-steward took her orders regarding a horse for Lady Elwing, and while she changed out of court dress and into her sleeping clothes. Only when she unrolled and lay down on her empty mattress did she stop feeling out the absent shape of Elwing’s hand – but the incipient bruise around her wrist throbbed in time with her heart until she fell into an uneasy sleep.

From above, the swallows made themselves an inlay over the pale flagstones of the great square, a pretty mosaic of nest-building.

From Anairë’s right hand, Intyallë of the Glassblowers cleared her throat. Guiltily, Anairë turned from the window and drew her eyes back to the great university lecture hall in which some two hundred delegates sat, and bickered, and proposed grand plans, and got absolutely nowhere. This had been the situation for two days now.

On the one hand, this meeting was a marvel. Each guild, each neighborhood, each major House, even each principal laboratory — every organizing unit of Tirion, including the handful of small villages remaining in the hinterland, had sent a representative to the echoing lecture theater to debate the involvement of the Noldor in any strikes against Melkor in Middle-earth. The message went out in the evening, and overnight, the little collectivities that made up Tirion’s society hammered out their positions on the matter and chose the persons best able to represent them before–

Well. That was the other hand, poised to slap. Who, or what, should they present before?

“We have each of us sworn personally to Queen Anairë, and follow where she goes!” barked the representative of the East Gate neighborhood.

“But that is the point, honored Helwarin,” rejoined the head of the Flutemakers’ Guild. “She has decided that we are here to present our own opinions and come to our own, collective decision about where to go!”

Helwarin gestured emphatically at Anairë, as if to drive home the fact that she presided over the proceedings, and had in fact made her own position quite clear. It was undeniable — Anairë sat near the lectern, and the attendants currently attached to the King’s House had even dragged in a baldachin of velvet, dyed crimson with cochineal from the eastern outlying villages.

“I think you will find,” interjected the representative from the university in which they bickered, which had admitted its second class of new students since the Darkening that very year, “That Queen Anairë did not decide that we should decide; that entirely defeats the purpose of deciding ourselves…”

A very young delegate from the Flats interrupted that circuitous tirade, and Anairë, sighing internally, had to step in and remind them all that they were operating under rules of order. The intervention did not make her feel particularly like the lecture hall hosted a symposium for self-determination and free will.

The swallows outside flew because dusk neared, and the summer insects rose with the plumes of warm air breathed out by the stones. This particular debate had been circulating as water circulates a drain since the swallows’ morning flight, with a brief pause to retire from midday’s desultory heat.

Before the break, the Scouts’ representative, a very young person of the sort who thought everything Fëanorian was automatically superior, had accused Anairë of instrumentally sharing knowledge vital for any kind of informed decision — an obvious grab for power. Anairë, hungry and cross and trying desperately not to show it, had agreed to step back and cease adding the facts as she knew them when relevant, only for it to become very clear that she was the only person present who knew anything about present events. The young Scout had then switched to accusing her of strategically withholding information, supported by the delegate from the principal sapphire-synthesizing laboratory, who simply seemed frustrated that there was so little information to be had, regardless of whose fault that was.

After rejoining the session, quite the opposite issue had arisen. The Scout had apparently decided over lunch that, being as the true ruler of Tirion had departed over the seas, the only proper course of action was to do so as well, and damn the naysayers. Anairë had not expected that anyone would be so enthusiastic about a plan to charge into danger that they would try to ride roughshod over the entire Repudiators’ Quarter, much less suggest that that was her will.

Her will being the looming oliphaunt in the lecture hall, the current circular discussion was, perhaps, to be expected. She gripped the lectern tighter and sent a despairing sort of mind-wail across the miles to Eärwen, who would certainly be annoyed by it — and indeed, she received back a cross nudge that stung her nostrils.

Her moment of sniffling inattention let the Flats delegate jump in out-of-order again. Before Anairë could issue another reprimand, however, Intyallë imposed herself.

“Look here,” she said, standing from her seat and turning to make good use of the theater’s acoustics. “The issue at hand is one thing. Queen Anairë is correct: we simply cannot repeat the tragedy of six centuries ago, when our people sundered from one another and left rifts yet-unhealed, projects abandoned, families bitterly separated. It is right that we should meet together and decide as one people what our course will be.”

Anairë watched her look around the room, and noted who nodded along and who scoffed.

Intyallë continued. “Yet we have not approached a solution to this quandary, because it is also the case that, as when apprentices broach their ideas to their guildmasters, one person holds disproportionate sway in this room.”

At last it comes out in the open, Anairë thought to herself. For centuries, she had dreaded the challenge that, it seemed, must inevitably come – that she was a usurper, a pretender, a failure. Now that it was here, however, she felt a sense of lightness, relief, almost wonder, just as she had the evening before in the courtyard, gazing upon her city in its self-directed masses.

“Queen Anairë has led Tirion well these six hundred years,” Intyallë said, with a stern glare around the room that Anairë did appreciate. “We have much to thank her for, including her insistence that we all share in the responsibility of deciding our next steps. However,” she continued, beginning to pace, “It is that thankfulness that poses such a difficulty to us! When she speaks, some are too eager to listen — and some are far, far too eager to disregard anything she says! If she goes, some will feel compelled to follow, and if she stays, some will feel compelled to stay. Her presence disturbs the balance of the workings she herself set in motion.”

Someone had said it! Indeed, Intyallë had said it kindly and well. She clearly meant to go on, but Anairë had once been a dancer, and she knew how to seize her moment. She stood.

“Well then,” she said, and her voice wavered just a tad, but she shaped her hands in a dancing posture, and it steadied. “I believe I must abdicate. I— I do abdicate.”

She reached up to where the baldachin’s gold tasseled trim hung over her head, missed by a handbreadth, and hopped slightly to fist a great hank of velvet and yank as hard as she could. The canopy did not slide from the frame, as she had half-hoped it would; rather, she overbalanced the frame and sent the whole thing crashing down on its side with a velvet-muffled clatter.

The hall resounded with silence for just long enough that a slightly hysterical titter from the upper rows could be heard, then exploded into uproar.

Anairë felt a bit like laughing deliriously herself. No one would hear her over the din of hundreds of Noldor in full cry. She noticed that Intyallë stared at her with her stately mouth hanging slightly open — what in the world had she wanted with that speech, if not this? A giggle worked its way out of her throat, and Anairë had to breathe deeply through her nose to suppress its companions.

Should she try to calm the assembly? The moderator was responsible for keeping order, but, after all, she had just resigned as moderator for all of Tirion! She had quit! It was no longer her job.

A hard pounding began to sound. After initially mistaking it as her own heartbeat thumping in her ears, Anairë noticed movement she traced to the venerable representative from the East Gate, banging her staff of office on the floorboards.

“Enough!” she cried, and slowly, the roar settled to a buzz, and then to a hum, and then to a tense, expectant silence.

“Queen Anairë,” said the representative. “I am Helwarin, Gate-Warden, your vassal. I swore to you before the Moon first rose, when you took up the rulership of Tirion in the Darkness. Do you not remember?”

“I remember,” replied Anairë. She remembered with the clarity of crystal, as all Elves did, and she recalled Helwarin’s pledge with the swooping terror of falling from a horse.

“How can you abdicate?” Helwarin asked her. “We are sworn to you.”

She meant the East Gate neighborhood, Anairë was sure, with its apartments full of priestess-dancers and performers, a stronghold of support these many years, but she was also sure that the plaintive question echoed silently in many more hearts.

“I release you,” she said. “You have been loyal, Helwarin. You and your people helped rebuild the city and hold it fast against our losses. You swore to me when you saw me attempt to take up the reins my family threw aside. But I have never been more than a substitute, a makeshift replacement.”

A murmur of protest rippled about the hall, heartening in its own way, but unwelcome at the moment. Anairë raised her voice over it.

“I do not wish to rule in this matter of a war,” she said. “Guildmaster Intyallë is right. I believe I would repeat the mistakes of my husband and my father-in-law, and yes, my brother-in-law, were I to try to decide who should stay and who should go. There is not enough of Tirion left to disregard the feelings of those of us who remain. I release you from your oath. I abdicate.”

“But how can you?” cried Helwarin. “It has never been done before!”

“Well…” came a hesitant voice from near the middle. It was the Scout, uncharacteristically tentative.

Anairë gestured impatiently at them — she was no longer queen, and so her gestures could be as peremptory as she wanted — and the Scout grimaced, but spoke louder.

“Technically,” they said, in a tone which, Anairë was sure, they did not know was just like Fëanáro’s, much as they might enjoy the knowledge. “Technically, Prince Arafinwë abdicated his claim by marrying Princess Eärwen of the Falmari. He really should be king here, especially considering the Repudiators look to him, but…”

Helwarin made as if to say something angry, but Intyallë forestalled her.

“Come to think of it,” she said, “Did not the Princess Findis also have a claim, as the eldest child still in Aman?”

“Y-yes,” said the Scout, reluctantly.

“She just– left,” offered the representative from the Flats.

“She did,” agreed Intyallë. “She left for Taniquetil with Queen Indis and the lady Amarië and has not returned to the city since. We have all left her alone, essentially. I do not think any here would argue that she still maintains a right to rule us.”

None chose to do so at that moment. Instead, Anairë felt the unnerving sensation of several hundred eyes at once turning to look consideringly upon her.

“Your friendship with Princess Eärwen is well known…” Intyallë said, almost wheedling.

“You want me to follow Finwë’s path?” Anairë asked. “Eärwen may be my meleseldë, but Prince Arafinwë is still very much alive.”

Intyallë, to her scant credit, looked somewhat abashed.

The Scout twisted their mouth. “You could just leave,” they said, and Helwarin actually began to stride down the stairs of the lecture hall, staff gripped meaningfully.

“Teach your tongue respectful speech, Singenáro! You ought not dare to suggest that Queen Anairë be banished from Tirion for six hundred years!” she exclaimed. “Delegate or no, I will see you scrubbing dishes in the East Gate refectory for a month!”

Anairë held out her arms. “Peace!” she called. “Enough! I am no longer Queen Anairë, and I will leave — I would like to leave, for a while! — but I would rather it not be for six hundred years. I was a dancer here once, and I would fain be one again. I grew up in the East Gate before I wed into Finwë’s House and do not wish to be banished.”

Mumbles sprang up and died down across the hall. A few Elves activated the blue-white sconces on the walls, apparently for something to do with their hands while they thought.

If, previously, facing Helwarin, Anairë had thought of the rush of panic that came from falling from the saddle, she felt now the distinct sensation of sitting securely on a bolting horse one could not compel to stop, only, perhaps, steer a little so it did not break its legs in a ditch.

“I propose an option,” suggested a new speaker. Anairë spared a moment to be satisfied that someone at least followed protocol, then called out, “Speak!”

The person stood, revealing himself to be the newly appointed steward of the university students’ union, about the Scout Singenáro’s age, but much quieter.

“I propose two hundred years or as long as the war takes, whichever is sooner,” he said. “That way, you– she– cannot possibly sway our decision. A baby born today will not know her influence until they are grown, if it takes two hundred years. And if the war ends first, then it does not matter.”

He sat back down with a thump, visibly shivering. Anairë waited a moment for any immediate objections.

When none materialized, she said, “That sounds fair?” unable to quite help her questioning tone.

A few heads nodded in the audience, but none spoke again. Anairë waited again. It became clear that no one else was going to suggest another next step.

“I should swear, then,” she said. Pushing down the habitual flinch at the thought of oaths took but a moment; it disappeared beneath the rising tide of excitement lapping at her breastbone.

More nods. Arien sank to the proper level for peering through the clerestory window at the top of the hall, rubbing out faces with golden dust motes. It made Anairë’s next words easier, somehow.

“I abdicate the throne of Tirion,” she began. “I release all vows, promises, and oaths made to me as Queen, and all objects and responsibilities vowed, dedicated, and sworn to me in that role. I abdicate on behalf of myself and of my children. I swear to go first to Princess Eärwen of Alqualondë — I suppose! If that helps! — and to forswear the city for two hundred years or until such time as the war that looms concludes. This I swear in the presence of Tirion, and in the sight of Bright Arien, and in the faith of Nessa.”

Each word dropped from her lips like a little stone, smooth in the hand and rough on the teeth. She felt lighter from the absence — light enough her head spun.

“Your oath is witnessed,” replied Intyallë. The theater echoed her words in jumbled chorus.

Anairë reached up to detach her circlet from her hair. For lack of a better place to put it, she let it rest on the lectern, where it slid precariously before the book-ledge checked it.

She and the lecture hall then proceeded to stare at each other with the startled, wide-eyed expectancy of deer caught in torchlight. Slowly, a practical thought surfaced through the surprised, half-hysterical happiness.

“I have to pack,” she realized. “I need not go immediately, surely?”

“Wait,” someone else cried — Anairë’s secretary, who had been Nolofinwë’s. “What about all the Queen’s Orders?”

A hubbub broke out as more people realized certain pragmatic details thrown into disarray by the loss of another royal.

Anairë looked from one corner of the hall to another – people gesticulated at each other, brandished quills, tried to wave or gesture to her, shouted to be heard and only added to the general din. A few knots of people bent their heads together in keen conversation, and some strode about tapping compatriots on the shoulder, seeking to impose some order on the chaos. Intyallë kept sending her little glances. Two minutes ago, it was her charge to wrench this group back into a semblance of discipline, just as, six hundred years ago, it had been her charge to wrench the ragged remnant of the Noldor into a pale imitation of peace.

She glanced at her crown, crooked on the lectern, its jaspers and red agates yellowed in the late Sun-light. Looking back at the rising benches, she caught one of Intyallë’s looks, and, smiling, flicked her a jaunty salute.

Ten strides took her to the door, five more to the Great Square, the swallows still flitting between the dark wooden eaves.

The costermongers snuck curious peeks, but did not approach her. Anairë sniffed the air and followed her nose to a stall selling butter-slathered, lime-lashed corn grilled over charcoal – a delicacy that made a terrible mess unbefitting a queen’s cheeks and chin. The last time she had eaten one, she thought, was when she played truant with Findekáno when he barely came up to her waist, so many years ago she refused to count them.

It was the same stallholder after all this time, she noticed, Findekáno’s favorite round-cheeked Elótë, by now surely Arda’s greatest master of grilled maize. She stared at Anairë as she approached, but did not cease turning the cobs over on the grill.

Anairë ordered a skewered cob dusted with dry cheese, insisted upon paying with a handful of red po beads, and let the butter grease her lips.

She had just begun to contemplate how she should go about removing her things from the King’s House when hoofbeats clattered on the flagstones, startling the birds into swooping tangles.

Anairë easily recognized the first gray mare to emerge into the square as one of the relay horses between Tirion and Alqualondë, carrying one of the regular post riders, but found the intent obscure. It was not time for the recently renewed daily delivery of messages from the land of the Teleri, and this was no royal entourage either.

A second rider, a palace guard she vaguely knew from visits to Eärwen, emerged on a tall bay, ponying a silver-muzzled old gelding alongside. Its rider clung to the tall horn of a cow-working saddle rather than the more standard arched-pommel style usual in Tirion, clearly unused to riding. Anairë followed the line of the novice’s arms up to a set face, and curling black hair shot through with silver.

Oh, thought Anairë. I thought I might have one evening with no responsibilities.

–

Uncharitable first reactions aside, Anairë overflowed with gratitude at whatever snit of Eärwen’s had banished Elwing to Tirion to speak with the Repudiators and seek word of her husband.

Simply walking out of the lecture hall had not been well-received, as Anairë admitted she had known it would not. Someone had to sign off the large-scale labor rotas that kept corn and beans flowing into the workhouses, and then sign off on the distribution of the same when it had been pounded into masa or fermented into chicha. Someone had to perform the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly rituals that pleased the Maiar and the priestesses and the people — and, potentially, the Valar. Someone had to mediate between feuding laboratories and hold weekly public audiences. Someone had to receive the reports of the outlying towns and manage the strained lines of trade and communication between the Noldor, the Vanyar, and the Teleri. Someone, in fact, had to be the Noldor, as a body, when embassies from Eressëa or Taniquetil or elsewhere arrived.

That someone had been Anairë for six centuries — in fact, the ritual dances had been her purview for far longer, ever since she married Nolofinwë and became a princess of Tirion. Therefore, Anairë had spent a full day in the lecture hall trying to hammer out who should take on those responsibilities, while also trying to prevent a mob of multifarious curious or furious Noldor from eating Elwing alive.

Elwing, as it happened, seemed to thrive on being the center of a great deal of semi-hostile attention. Anairë watched it happen at least three times: a group of like-minded Noldor would approach her, wanting something, and Elwing would wrap a mantle of glamor around herself and seem almost to glow, or draw the eye through some secret magnetism. She would speak in that voice that would sound hoarse or husky in conversation, but when raised to address would ring out deep and piercing, so all her words would hang in the air, only falling slowly into silence. One group had left quite evidently starstruck, one thoughtful, and one seething, according to what they had asked of her.

Each time, once they had gone, Elwing had once more been a quiet assemblage of angles and hair tendrils, rather awkward in her native grace, and, to Anairë’s eye, young. That first day, no one approached her alone, and she approached no one.

Then, the next day, as the talk turned from panicked practicalities to the philosophy of whatever sort of new system they meant to cobble together, she began to suggest solutions for Anairë to propose to the gathered delegates. A high council, a separate set of judges, the importance of formal papers, the vital nature of clerks. This was a voice of significant experience, Anairë discovered — and others, watching her from the corners of their eyes, discovered it too.

All that second day, while Elwing stuck close to her elbow, heads of neighborhoods and clans and laboratories drifted up to them and probed Elwing on her prior experience leading alongside a whole fractious city of other leaders.

These conversations tended to go better than when one of Anairë’s ladies had tried a friendly chat in the bath Elwing’s first night in Tirion, when Elwing’s awkward reserve had made things almost unbearably uncomfortable. Speaking about matters of technical expertise brought out the sharpness in her eyes and some well of hard-tempered competence. At times, there would be a bump — not quite understanding the already labyrinthine bureaucracy it took to keep Tirion in corn, shocking a delegate silent by asking who was prioritized when rationing healing supplies — but Elwing took them in her stride. Her suggestions circulated the room and reared their heads in discussions two degrees removed from the initial interlocutor.

When Anairë was not wholly occupied with her own discussions, she thought of how much this glimpse into the ruthlessly functional political workings of Sirion told her of Elwing herself.

The representatives of Tirion tottered towards a consensus about consensus by the end of that second day: a schedule had been put in place for yet more delegates to be selected to draft the formal documents Elwing had so insisted upon, which would lay out what a kingdom might do without a king.

That was enough for Anairë. Sitting as a delayed exile in the hall where, only a few days ago, she had been queen, trying to help create queenlessness, was worse than the transition from dancing priestess to princess had been, if better than that from princess to ruler. Two days ago, she had abdicated and sworn to leave Tirion, not to set foot again on the white-walled alleyways or buy its buttered ears of corn again until peace or two centuries came to pass. She had done it of her own will, but her heart yearned for a clean break, not this dragging-out of the shroud of power left over from her husband’s family.

She and Elwing stepped out of the university and into the lambent night, where the starfire caught the diamond dust drifting in the cracks between the red tiles of the roofs. They set out towards the King’s House — someone would have to decide what to do with the building! — and Anairë clenched and stretched her fingers as they walked across the Great Square, bounced on her toes.

Elwing glanced at her, but seemed able to tell that her restlessness was benign.

Anairë, compelled to reassure her anyway, just in case, said, “Are you weary? I might like your help in packing away my things tonight, for I wish to be on my way.”

“I am not weary,” Elwing replied. “Though I imagine it will take more than tonight to remove the contents of this building.”

Anairë realized their strides had fallen into synch, one step each per flagstone. “Yes,” she mused. “But I do not think many of the contents of that house are mine. Some, I imagine, properly belong to Tirion itself. I will travel light, as I once did — I look forward to it! And that which is not Tirion’s and not mine… well. It was left behind, and so cannot have been of much value.”

From the corner of Anairë’s eye, Elwing frowned. “Are all things left behind less loved?” she asked, but they reached the door of the King’s House, with its gossip-primed attendants, before Anairë had to answer.

Elwing spent the next three days half in helping Anairë pack up an unspecified number of lives, half in knocking on the doors of Repudiators and having the same three conversations over and over again, and wholly in a cloud of worry over where Eärendil might be and what he might find when and if he returned.

In the mornings, Anairë still visited the nascent council to clear up confusion about property ownership, corn rotas, and the like, or to ask questions herself about what to do with High King Finwë’s second-best scepter of office or how to divide her private records between herself and various branches of Tirion’s bewilderingly complex bureaucracy. By the second day of messengers dashing from the King’s House to the university and back again, the representatives decamped to a large public audience room on the ground floor of the King’s House, so Anairë merely spent her mornings sweeping up and down stairs, rather than trudging across the Great Square to badger and be badgered.

Those mornings, Elwing slipped away from Tirion’s political bustle and walked through the stone-paved streets to the Repudiators’ Quarter. She passed between white-plastered walls and beneath dark, carven balconies in the eggshell chill that pressaged the beating heat to come, carefully hugging the sides where the traffic moved slower. Her first morning out alone, she had walked into a crossroads and almost been knocked over by a trotting horse harnessed to a wagon full of cabbages, then, jumping back into the cross street, stalled a handcart bringing grapes to the city center, which created a knot of snarled motion stretching back down the avenue. Someone had shouted to get the bumpkin off the streets.

She had bristled, then, laughing to herself, conceded the point. Sirion had boasted two horses — they did the heavy plowing until one drank untreated water from the river and died bleeding from the nostrils, and the other refused to drink until it died. Then they had eaten it; and Elwing, six months pregnant, had been given the heart. Likely that did make her a bumpkin, in a city where horses carted around cabbages.

The Repudiators’ Quarter was quieter, though not quiet. The streets wound in concentric rings around a small center plaza with a dance floor dedicated to Nessa, intersected at the cardinal directions by broader thoroughfares for riders and small wheeled vehicles. It made for confusing walking, until she grew accustomed to how houses clustered in the semicircular arcs between curved and straight roads.

When Elwing knocked on their doors, they opened onto narrow, deep rooms with tiled floors and tall, thin windows with shutters just closing against the growing heat. The faces in the doorways were variably curious, avid, and mistrustful.

Eärendil had always been the more skillful in guiding the conversations to draw out concerns and irritations and fears and wrap them into some larger aim. Her tendency was always to try to explain or convince, not to ask the leading questions that led to long exchanges of information, commiseration, solidarity. In Sirion, when Eärendil was home from sea and some task wanted hands and heads, she would send him from door to door to draw out those stores of knowledge and cooperation — finding what homes needed more food, and could lend their hands to purifying water, and who lacked community and would be happy to join the workers on the always-crumbling seawall in exchange for companions for singing old Taliska songs as they mortared. He could always elicit what was needed, and find out what someone was willing to give, and then convince them to give just a bit more. That was his talent. Elwing excelled in oration, education, pulling together the high council with hard logic, explaining why the seawall needed to be repaired, yes, again. She was better than any at putting her own hands to work and leading by example, but confronted with a tired face sick of being asked to give, she would stumble into high-minded speechifying, or let herself be backed out of the half-opened doorway.

It was harder now, too, with no concrete request to make. Should she ask this jumble of Noldor — Eldar! — to, what? Follow her to Alqualondë? To the great council of the Valar where her husband must, must, still be pleading their case before the Powers? To, at the heart of it, care about a continent they had declined to visit at the very beginning, before Elwing had even been born to darken their doorsteps?

She made herself a little script, nonetheless. Hello, she said, over and over again. I am Elwing of Beleriand. What do you know of my home?

That was key — no yes-or-no questions. Even the rudest, bluntest Noldo had trouble shutting the door in someone’s face when a question hung unanswered over the threshold. Ask what they thought was wrong, then ask what they would do to fix it. Ask them how they would implement those solutions, then ask if they would go to observe the representatives squabbling in the great hall of the King’s House, which really would need a new name soon.

Elwing decided on that request on the first morning. There truly was not much else she could ask any individual common-born Tirion-dweller to do but to watch the construction of their new lives and raise their voices up, hopefully in her favor.

Perhaps one person every hour would give her their wholehearted agreement, and those she asked to introduce her to their neighbors, their grown children living at home, the people with whom they served their workhouse rotations.

On the second day of this, a woman brought her into her cool, shadowy front room to put Elwing to work dehusking little grass seeds while she told them her stories. They rubbed the rough little kernels — brome, she was told — against the patterned sides of a wide, shallow basket, while Elwing explained again and again how she came to leave her home and why she thought there was hope for it, as daughters and nieces and friends came trickling in and out. A little boy only as high as Elwing’s hip ran about the room knocking into furniture and people. When the lady of the house saw her gazing after him, she let her give him a little cake of acorn flour full of blackberry jam, after which he ran faster. Every person around the table followed her back to the King’s House that day, and the next day, one of the nieces took her to meet her fellow apprentices at a workshop making percussion instruments. The woman whose house it was had been Arafinwë’s drummer on the march north, and now took personal students and never performed in public.

So she went, and sometimes was shown, up and down all the alleys of the quarter, spreading word that barricades had fallen before justice, and change was come to the world across all its lands and oceans. The doors opened and shut before her.

When the sun beat down in the afternoons, Elwing returned to the King’s House, where Anairë retired to an upstairs balcony to eat soothingly cool dishes she explained were of crunchy raw sanicle dusted in acorn yuhu, strange flavors and textures to Elwing’s tongue. The streets were eerily empty in the midday heat, and the diamond dust that piled in the corners flashed and twinkled in the corners of her eyes. On the third day, Elwing paused at a particularly large pile outside a boarded-up school and dipped her hand into it, withdrawing her fingers traced in coruscation — red, blue, yellow, blinding white. It stuck beneath her fingernails, gritty and sparkling, for days.

“Beware your eyes,” Anairë said, when she saw Elwing’s hand winking at her. “It will scratch your corneas if you rub them.”

Those meals felt real, which was more than Elwing could say for the rest of the sun-hammered, Quenya-filled days in a place where farmers climbed stairs of crystal and blue tile to market. She recognized that she clung to Anairë’s vague familiarity in this sea of strange foods, strange dialects, strange politics in which she played a key role she might already have failed to pull off. She recognized it, but she could not prevent herself from following Anairë about the King’s House like a woebegone gosling, serving her before herself, lifting chests and heavy baskets, lingering in the evenings while Anairë packed, until she shooed her off to sleep in a room furnished, it seemed, entirely in white buckskin.

In certain moments, especially when lit by fire during those late evenings, Elwing caught glimpses of Idril in the lineation of Anairë’s face, or, rarer yet, snatches of Eärendil. Mostly, she looked very different — darker complected, with a high nose and high cheekbones presiding over her smooth oval face, with a crown of hair she wore in an exuberant halo of coils far tighter than Eärendil’s, though the twins had boasted aureoles of hair just that smoky black.

Whenever Elwing found herself picking at ghosts in Anairë’s features, she sternly redirected herself to what might actually be useful, drawing Anairë out on matters of Amanyar politics, on whether she thought Elwing was doing any good. When asked, Anairë would explain guild politics and neighborhood grudges with the weary humor of long experience, or suggest new ways to describe what she wanted to the people of Tirion. This, of course, required that Elwing know what she wanted.

On the third night in Tirion, they came to the heart of it.

–

That night, the two of them supped in the East Gate neighborhood. Representative Helwarin had found a long, narrow-shouldered house on a street lined with low, heart-leafed trees Anairë called redbuds, and had, over some desultory protest, given it outright to Anairë.

“It is quite the least you can do after exiling her for two hundred years,” she had told the assembled representatives acerbically, on the very first day when Anairë asked what she should do with the contents of the King’s House that did not belong to the state and which she could not take with her wandering. The house had been abandoned, Helwarin said, and no one in Tirion would miss it.

The windows — glass windows! they still surprised Elwing every time — were boarded up when they arrived with a handcart of clothing. Though a helpful neighbor offered to pry the wood off, they declined; it was not as though anyone would live there in a week. It made for dark work, but it was not so bad from the outside, for someone had painted the boards with intricate ochre designs that made the house’s face look less forsaken.

They also offered privacy, which Elwing was glad of, for after dinner, she found herself sitting on a curve-legged chair while Anairë rested on a cushion between her knees, leaning back while Elwing plaited her hair into cornrows and blushed furiously.

Anairë had washed and oiled her hair in a basin in the corner while Elwing laid out blankets and padding for a night on the tiled floor. She settled atop her makeshift bed to try to reach out to Eärendil as she had seen Eärwen and Anairë reach out to each other, but as always, the confines of her own skull remained imperceptibly solid.

“I wonder why I can use osanwë in song, but cannot reach my own husband,” she said, turning to look at Anairë parting her hair with a pin-tailed comb.

“It is strange,” Anairë responded. “I cannot imagine not being able to sense across minds, especially those of my dear ones. Are you sure it is inherent, and not a lack of training?”

Elwing sighed. “Galadriel — that is, Nerwen — tried her very hardest, as did Idril when I was young. They taught me much else,” she added absently, watching Anairë shake out her arms.

Anairë made an enquiring noise, raising her arms again to begin braiding.

“Oh, projection, images, control, boundaries,” Elwing said. “How to show only what I wanted to whom I wanted when singing, and no more. The particular styles of one people or another.”

Anairë braided to the end of a row and shook her arms out again, and a nervous presumption rose in Elwing.

“They also taught me to braid,” she said hesitantly. Anairë cast a skeptical look at her hair, loosely tied back in a single long plait.

“For Eärendil’s hair,” Elwing hastened to explain. “And the children’s. I am not as good as they were. But I can braid rows. I thought– perhaps your arms were tiring.”

Anairë crooked a smile. “That they are. I suppose I taught Eärwen to make a passable braid. I would like very simple, tight braids, straight back — they are best for traveling light. Can you do that? I shall sit at your feet.”

The blood rushed instantly to Elwing’s cheeks and neck, but she kept her voice steady as she assented. She found a chair of the right height from the jumble of furniture at the back of the room and moved the lamps closer so that she could see her fingers, keeping her blushing face away from Anairë’s eyes.

So here she was, fingers slick with Anairë’s sweet-smelling hair oil, running a tight plait down the crown of Anairë’s head while the erstwhile queen of Tirion leant against her knees. She reached the nape of her neck and kept braiding another few inches, until the hairs grew too sparse just above the wings of Anairë's shoulder blades, visible where her linen nightshirt was transparent with water.

“How do you want me to fasten the braids?” Elwing asked, abashed at having forgotten.

“Oh!” Anairë jumped up and went to rummage through one of the cases of left-behind lives stacked precariously in a decorative niche. She emerged with a handful of what Elwing almost thought was lightning — but no, it was a twisted bunch of thin gold wire with tiny hooks at one end, glinting in the firelight. Anairë held one up to her single braid, and Elwing put two and two together.

“Oh,” she said, and could not quite decide how to continue.

A look passed between them, an acknowledgement of some familiarity. Anairë handed her the handful of wires, and Elwing took them. She looked to see if any black hair still twined between the gold, but it was as clean as it must have been left in its jewelcase these many centuries ago. Anairë settled back between her legs, and Elwing steeled herself, and began to weave the thin wire into the completed plait, twisting it close about the end.

The next row would be thinner, she decided, so that Anairë could have a simple pattern of alternating thicknesses, at least. She tried to keep her hands as gentle as she would have for Elrond and Elros, who had squirmed and complained at the slightest tug. The repetitive handwork and the fire-reddened gold slipping in and out of Anairë’s dark hair like fishes lulled her.

Her walls down in the warm evening, she found herself asking: “Does Eärwen usually do your hair?”

Anairë shrugged one shoulder. “Only on occasion, when I find myself in Alqualondë for too long between appointments with my usual braider. I taught her when Findaráto was born with his father’s hair.”

Elwing tied off another braid. Another thick row next.

“Will she do it more often now? Since you are to live with her, and she is your–”

The sentence avoided being finished, and Elwing pretended absorption in creating a clean new part with the pin-ended comb.

“She is my meleseldë,” Anairë replied simply.

Elwing ran the comb down the other side of the row, and Anairë shuddered slightly against her knees.

“I do not know what that means,” Elwing said, and was startled at the roughness of her own voice.

Anairë hummed thoughtfully. “A meleseldë is… the friend who keeps with you a friendship that will last all your life and hers. The one to whom you cleave in all weathers and keep safe in a sacred hall of the heart; the one from whom naught but death shall part you.”

Elwing kept her hands very gentle. “A lover, then, or a wife.”

“I have a husband,” Anairë pointed out. “Eärwen and I have not borne one another children, nor lain together. But we swore faith and friendship undying in our youths in the Tree-lit marshes of Alqualondë, and our oath has endured where the oaths of lovers and spouses raveled away. We know each other well, Eärwen and I, and love dearly what we know.”

Elwing’s fingers continued the careful process of adding new hair to the braid strands, while she watched half-unseeing. A friend to last all one’s life — Eärendil was that to her. Yet he had also given her children, and she dearly loved their play of bodies. Had Galadriel been such to her, an intimate friend, a pillar of her small family? Eärendil sought careful, discreet affection elsewhere when he was away at sea, and she had thought, perhaps one day—

But she had not known her so well, in the end, and Galadriel swore no oaths to her, even in her leaving.

“It sounds a fine thing,” she murmured. Another row done. Next, a thin braid. She hooked in the wire and began to braid, thinking still.

“Since you know Eärwen well,” she began, and found she was afraid to go on, until Anairë hummed again, and rested her warm, dry hand against her ankle in a reassuring squeeze.

“If you know her so well,” she continued, “Why does she resist? Why will she not help me rescue whatever souls are left in my home, where her own daughter yet fights against evil?”

An effort kept her fingers gentle. “She knows I am in the right. She knows the Amanyar must send aid if anything at all is to be left of the peoples of Beleriand, for I am not sure the Valar are inclined to save as well as to vanquish. I do not even ask that they fight.”

Anairë sighed. Her grip on Elwing’s ankle tightened comfortingly, and she leaned back until her warmth loosened the muscles of Elwing’s thighs. Elwing found she could still blush, despite the tenor of the conversation.

Again, Anairë sighed. “It is likely that you demanded the ships. Eärwen may know it is right to send aid in the fight against great evil, to rescue, at the least, those who are kin to her own people – but think.” She pulled against Elwing’s hands a little, as though to emphasize her point. “Think of the last time a stranger came to Alqualondë to demand the ships of the Teleri.”

Elwing had to still her hands a moment, while she pressed her eyelids closed and clenched her teeth against the hissed retort that sprang instantly to her lips – no Fëanorian was she!

“I am thinking,” she said instead. “I think that, if she refuses to help, she ensures that more people die. You do not – you cannot know, you cannot know what it is like. Ashes in the sky, poison in the rivers and breezes. The Valar may squash Morgoth like swatting a mosquito – perhaps! – but if they do nothing more, we will simply starve under no shadow, for the land and air and beasts are sick unto death. We are all the Children of Eru. We have so little more that we can lose.”

“Eärwen has had losses too,” Anairë said. “Her mother, her brother… Her brother died in the Kinslaying, run through on a Fëanorion’s sword.”

Elwing bit an angry enumeration of her losses to Fëanorian blades. It was no contest. She braided the full length of Anairë’s scalp again, tied off the row, reached again for the comb to make a clean part. This next braid had to curve to follow Anairë’s hairline above her ear, a sharper point than Eärendil’s, or Elros’, or Elrond’s.

“What happened to her mother?” she asked, when she thought she had full control over her voice once more.

Anairë hesitated, then said, “You ought to ask Eärwen to tell you. Regardless, she is not there to help her. You may also have noticed that her father has almost stopped ruling – Eärwen has managed a great deal with precious little support. Nor much recognition,” she added, darkly. Then, sighing once more: “I imagine she is afraid. Eärwen hates to be afraid. She will avoid it if she can.”

Elwing tied off the final row on the right side of Anairë’s head. Carefully, tentatively, she rested her hands on Anairë’s shoulders. Anairë leaned back into her touch almost imperceptibly.

“I have been afraid all my life,” Elwing said into the fire-red, flickering bubble of space around them. “My fears have never waited for me to be ready to face them.”

Anairë reached up to cover one of Elwing’s hands on her shoulder, slipping just slightly in the remnants of her hair oil clinging to Elwing’s fingers.

“We travel to Alqualondë tomorrow,” she said. “I believe you will find her more ready than you imagine.”

Elwing turned her palm up, and with infinite kindness, Anairë let her grasp her hand for long minutes before she returned to braiding rows into Anairë’s hair.

It was not that Eärwen did not trust Tirion under Anairë’s hand. However, when a messenger slid panting to her knees in the great reception hall, bearing tidings of some kind of political upheaval and Anairë banished, it took all Eärwen’s will to keep from calling the fisherfolk to arms. In the week and few days since she had sent Elwing out from the city, she had wound herself more and more tightly, tying herself in knots like a net twisting in the wind: action or inaction, safety in isolation or risk in war? One incoherent messenger bearing vague news of trouble that touched on Anairë, and she found herself wishing for a sword. What a hypocrite she was.

She rode out to meet them that very day. Sternly, she instructed her father that he must sit in judgment that day, for she had urgent business down the Alpasírë. If he thought that business had to do with the recalcitrant settlement of Avari at the stream’s mouth, it was no great hardship. It would not do to alarm him unduly before she commanded all the facts.

It was not entirely clear to her what she would do if she foundered four horses to reach Tirion, only to find the city — what, burning? Torn apart by mobs? Brought to its knees once more by some unknown slaughter across the sea? She could not imagine what might have happened in the time it took for the messenger to reach her, though she could feel Anairë’s presence in the back of her mind. She reached out again and again, but Anairë’s mind, usually so responsive, was clouded. Surely she would know if anything terrible had happened, but, well. She remembered Tirion’s last great upheaval all too well.

She took ten level-headed citizens who could ride and wield a spear or harpoon and kept their pace at a steady trot. It would not do to be cruel to the animals in the summer heat, and a gallop would not change whatever was afoot in Tirion. It would also not do to bring swords or ranged weapons, or, for that matter, the citizens who had learned to keep them at hand.

In the end, the horses’ flanks were only lightly lathered when Eärwen came across their party at the ford of the Alpasírë. She herself broke out into an unwelcome sweat when she noticed what was toward, however.

There was Anairë, crownless, hair in neat cornrows of alternating thicknesses and woven through with gold wires like Findekáno used to wear -– safe, unhurt, even smiling. Beside her sat Elwing, and beside her sat the orange-haired figure of Lelt.

Very quietly, she swore, and reached out to swat at Anairë’s mind. Anairë lifted her head and stood, and Lelt turned around and stood too, and Elwing hesitated for a long moment before standing — but no one was looking at Elwing, really.

The little settlement of Avari at the marshy mouth of the Alpasírë did have a name — in fact, it had two, in two different languages Eärwen could not understand a word of, one each for two factions whose war against the Deceiver in the lands beyond the Waters of Awakening had seen their spirits removed to Aman in death. Similarly, it had at least two leaders, one of whom was nowhere to be seen, another of whom bestowed her with a serene smile worthy of a Maia.

Eärwen dismounted to buy herself time. She decided to nod to Lelt, who had not made any gesture of deference to her. Elwing watched them both in a hawkish manner, and Anairë’s face was unreadable.

Eärwen decided to wait for an explanation rather than test her control over the situation. It had not been her finest moment when three hundred-odd Avari emerged from the Halls of Mandos speaking unfamiliar tongues during the very peak of the rebuilding in Alqualondë, having fallen in battle some centuries ago, before any murdered Lindar had been reborn. It had not been Anairë’s either — she had prevented riots in Tirion, but barely, and another swathe of Noldor had departed the city permanently for Avallónë, just in time to leave the acorn harvest shorthanded. Strangers released from Mandos? It was a wonder Alqualondë had kept as tight a rein on its squirming wound-sickness as it had.

Lelt spoke first, of course. He had learned Quenya, she thought, strictly to get one over on Targadej, the other would-be ruler here, but he spoke it well, in Falmarin accent.

“You are sending boats, then? We will crew them.”

One of the armed fisherfolk behind her knocked something —a spear butt?— against a stirrup.

“We have decided nothing,” Eärwen replied. “We have heard nothing from the Valar, and we have not put the question to the people.”

Elwing made a little movement, which she ignored, just as she ignored Anairë’s hand resting on Elwing’s shoulder. Lelt made a kind of shrug she had seen in the market with other Avari selling river pearls — one shoulder, with a nod of the head to the other side of the body.

“We are only a few of us,” Lelt said. “Had we ships yet, we would use them.”

Eärwen bit back her immediate answer -– you shall not use our ships — and decided immediately that the only thing to do was to leave. It was madness to try to bargain at a ford bridge, with no decision and ten armed Lindar, too many to disregard and too few to-– too many. Too many, only.

“I have come to greet and escort Queen Anairë and Queen Elwing,” she said.

Anairë shook her head almost imperceptibly, but she did not open her mind, so what did she expect Eärwen to do?

“You come in haste,” observed Lelt, eyeing the spear-bearers behind her.

“Great haste,” Eärwen replied.

“I hope to hear word of your decisions in the marketplace very soon, then.”

Elwing’s mouth twitched slightly. Eärwen kept her face smooth as the inside of an oyster. She looked to Anairë, her face similarly expressionless.

“I carry tidings relevant to any commitments,” she said, bland as milk, “and I look forward to discussing them in council with King Olwë and Your Highness the regent.”

The trickling of the stream could almost evoke a seven-and-five verse recited by a skill-mask performer. Eärwen mused on its recitative properties until she could be absolutely sure of the levelness of her voice.

“Please accept my escort with your guest.”

Elwing arched a brow but kept her peace, while Anairë murmured a gracious assent and turned to give an equally gracious farewell to Lelt, who loomed in an amused sort of way. Almost as if it were usual, she boosted Elwing into the saddle, mounted herself, and waited politely for Eärwen to indicate her place in the ring of spear-bearing citizens, whose mounts stamped and danced in an anxiety their riders would not show before Lelt.

Eärwen gestured Anairë into a position beside her, meaning to force Elwing into the triangle of space behind their two mounts and within the circle of Lindar, but the blasted woman clearly had not spent any of her time in Tirion learning to ride better, it seemed. She was ponied alongside Anairë’s Maldanar, unusually accepting of the close presence of another horse. In the end, Elwing and her walking dun mattress took up their position only half a pace behind Eärwen and Anairë. Thus arrayed was Eärwen forced to wheel the group around and set out for Alqualondë, with Lelt’s wryly intent gaze on their backs.

She led them half a mile through the cypresses at a trot that saw Elwing jouncing on the back of her poor mare like a sack of rice before she thought they were out of his hearing, which still left the problem of the Lindar. None of them were the type to gather outside the King’s House or the wharves to rattle harpoons and talk loudly of the inadequacy of the Repudiators’ reparative labors; neither did Eärwen think any were the sort who made tearful toasts of sweet potato liquor to the true but sadly reclusive King and Queen of Alqualondë, may they return soon to the steps before the throne. They would not have been chosen to accompany her on this errand if they had been.

Even so. Her daily audiences, slowly but perceptibly, had swelled in the last week since Elwing made her scene at the docks. Not more petitioners, but silent onlookers before the empty throne and Eärwen’s humble chair, watching her hand down judgements. The streets were less silent, buzzing furtively with rumor she tried to disregard or counter with ever-more stone-faced calm before the people. Further gossip was inevitable, but it was foolhardy to invite it.

Carefully, with an uncertainty she misliked to find within herself, she reached out the Anairë’s mind, so opaque to her these last days, and found it warmly, almost mischievously open. Swallowing past a traitorous lump in her throat, she let Anairë waft impressions and images over her, overlaying the wind-bent cypresses and redwoods with a gauze of Tirion’s golden oaklands, and Tirion’s tiled and stuccoed interiors, full up with round-faced, dark-haired Noldor, turning to look as—

Eärwen’s horse, a gelding trained with Anairë’s own steady Maldanar, shied sideways. Eärwen kept her seat, forcibly loosened her knees, and stared at Anairë. Her traveling braids, her plain garb, Elwing beside her.

What did you do, Anairë? she sent, as forcefully as she could.

It was near-impossible to receive words directly from another’s mind unless through a Palantír, but Eärwen had known Anairë long and long, and understood exactly what the rush of nervous pleasure she received back from Anairë meant. If not for the spear-bearers — if not, perhaps, for Elwing watching them under her heavy-hooded, dark-lashed eyes — she knew just what Anairë would have said.

I did exactly as I wished.

–

They arrived at the Queen’s House through the narrow back streets that hosted carts bringing sheet-weed and fresh vegetables to the royal complex, dim under the overcast sky of the habitual Nárië-gloom. Even so, whispers ran before them and trailed after them, surging out and meeting again in the middle, ripples around a dropped anchor.

She let the guards peel off before they reached the — still open — gates, uneasy at their glances, tracking from one group of murmuring onlookers to another, back to Elwing, then on to her. The staff waiting in the grand courtyard before the reception hall had no need to see it.

“Take the Lady Elwing to the baths in the King’s House,” she ordered them, watching with a vindictive curl of pleasure as Elwing slid clumsily off her horse and tried to suppress the bow-legged stride of one deeply saddlesore. When she had vanished, she commanded, “She is not to enter the city today.”

She set off without waiting for Anairë. Her own bathtub in the Queen’s House steamed gently already, milky with salts. The waterfall-shower served to briskly remove the grime of the road, and by the time she lowered herself into the bath, Anairë was wrapping an oilcloth about her head and stepping into the shower after her.

The steam nosed into the corners of the room and down into the loftways of Eärwen’s lungs, loosening them with gentle impartiality. She forced herself to breathe in deeply against the stinging-hot pressure of the water, then exhale on a low whistle, then inhale again. Before her, the graceful five-storied pagoda of the King’s House coalesced in pearly vapor, the way it appeared to her in dreams: a deep breath in, a whistle out, a new story added to the tower, a deep breath in, a whistle out, another level stretching serene and impossible towards the ceiling.

Anairë drew back the curtain and sent the steam winging away into mist once more. Eärwen looked away, but could not stop her ears from swiveling to listen to Anairë pad across the tiles, nor her skin from tingling when she stepped into the bath and brought the water up to her collarbones. A hand on her knee beneath the water made her turn her head to face Anairë at last.

They looked at one another for long moments. Nothing in Anairë’s dear, familiar face seemed to say she had run mad, or been coerced out of her city, or, in fact, felt anything but contentment, albeit leavened with nerves.

“She was not with you a month before you tossed your crown away,” Eärwen said at last. “If I were credulous, I would cry enchantment. As I am only suspicious, I ask what exactly you think you are doing.”

Anairë shrugged, her shoulders dipping in and out of the water. “I think I was waiting for an excuse. She had less to do with it than you seem to believe.”

She reached out and placed her hand on Eärwen’s knee, cool compared to the water. Eärwen watched the sharp turn her arm made between the air and the water, a disjointed shift in perception. She laid her own hand over Anairë’s.

“What will the city do without you?”

Anairë laughed. “Right now they are having a grand time debating proportional against direct representation, and whether to have a head of state and a head of government, just in case I decide to come back and they need somewhere ceremonial to stick me. I believe a spot of electoral politics was just what Tirion needed.”

Eärwen ran her finger down the tendons in the back of Anairë’s hand. “And you? What did they decide that you left the city crownless, with your girl enchantress braiding your hair for travel?”

“Enchantress,” Anairë scoffed. She half-stood and moved gracefully to sit beside Eärwen, smooth and strong along her side. “I gave up the crown, dear one, and no one forced me to it. You know this. I am not you; I never longed for it, nor grew to like it when I wore it. It was little to me but a reminder of loss and strife and the heads it crowned before.”

She reached over the side of the tub and drew a gooseneck kettle sitting in its enameled basin towards her. “I suppose I am an exile now, too. Tirion-city is forbidden to me for two hundred years or as long as the war takes, whichever is sooner. It does not feel like exile… It feels like freedom, in truth.”

Eärwen watched her fill the kettle from the bath and add a small portion of shampoo, stirring to dilute the mixture. The kettle and basin were Turukáno’s make, decorated with perfect imitations of kelp and sea urchins in cloisonné, the colors fortressed between high walls of gold wire. Anairë had kept it in this bathing chamber since before the Darkening.

“So Tirion is for war,” she said, for that was the point that must be of import to a queen, and she was the closest thing to that in this tub. Even so, she reached out and pressed gently against Anairë’s forehead, leaning her head back against the rim of the bath.

Anairë closed her eyes and hummed. “I left before it was formally decided, but that was the stipulation for my absence: until the war is over. I do not doubt they will choose to join Elwing, should a way be found across the sea. It seems only right.”

“Tch.” Eärwen dripped the diluted shampoo carefully onto the roots of Anairë’s braids, set the kettle aside, and began to carefully massage the lather into the hair. She watched her hands work gently, all the while keeping the confused storm of responses gyring in her throat at bay.

“And that way will be the use of our ships, of course, lest Ulmo lose patience once more and drag another island up from the seabed to ferry us all across. It must gladden my heart, I suppose, that the Noldor are not already at the door with swords and arrows — only an eighth-Maia witch-girl with a gift for stirring up trouble!”

Anairë kept her eyes closed, a line between her brows.

“And you! You come to me with gold in your braids, as did your son when he stormed my docks and turned a battle into a rout.”

Anairë opened her eyes, and her mouth too, indignation rolling off her, but Eärwen held her hands up.

“Peace!” she said. “Peace. That was low of me. I apologize.”

“It was low,” Anairë said. “It might do you good to remember you are not the only one to have suffered — are not the only one to be suffering now. I believe that is the crux of Elwing’s plea.”

“What you must think of me!” replied Eärwen, stung. “Of course others suffer. And yet-– to demand of my people that they lay their suffering aside— to demand they give succor to those who caused it-– is it not an insult to the sufferers?”

The bathroom was silent for a moment, but for the lapping of the tub and the tinkle of water into the basin as Eärwen called up a vine of warm bathwater and rinsed Anairë’s braids. When the water began to run clear, Anairë spoke.

“Would you say that is what I have done? I demanded nothing — I removed my own capacity to demand — and Tirion chose to send aid nonetheless. I chose, independently. Do I offer insult to myself?”

She shook her head against the rim of the bath, sending droplets of water flying.

“I think we are proving we are more than our suffering.”

To that, Eärwen had no reply. She turned to Anairë’s hair cream and began the process again, slowly and carefully, so that the neat gold-woven braids Elwing had made in Anairë’s hair would remain whole and smooth.

Anairë opened her eyes to the pearly light of an Alqualondë morning filtering through the walls and windows of Eärwen’s chamber. Beside her, Eärwen slept soundly, washed with silver.

As every morning, Anairë cast her mind through her responsibilities for the day. For the first time since her marriage, no flood of duties sprang clamoring to mind. She rolled onto her back and pushed her light coverlet off her chest and belly, where sweat already prickled. Through the open window, massed thunderheads threatened a summer storm that would at least break the heat.

If it came, she would not be responsible for ordering flood control measures, assessing damage, or distributing aid. Nor would her actions or inactions be judged by all the city. If it did not storm, still no particular task awaited her. Anairë lifted her right hand and let it flap loosely back onto the mattress, as if to test its idleness.

Eventually, she must renounce the ritual aspects of her queenship — but it would be unwise to travel to the monoliths that served as the closest hallow to all the Valar, if a summer thunderstorm warned. She lifted and let fall her hand, thudding against the bedclothes.

Eärwen stirred beside her, shoving her own blanket all the way down past her hips. Half-asleep in the innermost layers of her court dress, she looked young and small, a princess in truth. Then she blinked her silver eyes open, and was again sharp and sleek and cool, a winter fox in the summer heat.

Anairë gently kissed her mouth and helped fold and stow away the mattresses and coverings for the day. Eärwen’s servants had laid out clothes for both of them: full court attire for Eärwen, with extra layers of linen to protect the fine silk outer robes from sweat, and for Anairë, one of the Tirion-style redwood bark skirt-and-cape sets she kept in Alqualondë. Dressed and coiffed, Eärwen proceeded to the King’s House to meet her own list of innumerable responsibilities without so much as hinting that Anairë find any for herself.

The increasing closeness of Eärwen’s second-story bedchamber drove her downstairs, where the paper walls stood open to allow for cross-breezes and the heat rose out of the high-ceilinged rooms. The bathing chamber emitted a scent of rosewater, and the garden courtyard played host to a flock of spotted towhees raking at the groundcover. An Elf Anairë recognized as a fluid dynamicist on sabbatical from Alqualondë’s university buffed beeswax into the already-gleaming boards of the floor and gave her a quick, shallow bow from her crouch.

“The other lady is in Princess Nerwen’s old rooms,” she said when Anairë hailed her, pointing across the garden, then returning to rubbing vortex streets onto the floor.

Anairë drifted in that direction. The door was half-open, though she could not see Elwing through the gap. She rapped lightly on the frame and entered at the quiet, surprised, “Come in,” from within.

Neatly dressed in what Anairë recognized with a pang as one of Galadriel’s left-behind indigo day robes, Elwing knelt at a low desk with a writing brush and blank book. At Anairë’s entrance, she pressed a piece of fine blotting paper over the words — quite a natural movement, and one that hid her Tengwar from Anairë’s eyes.

“Good morning,” Anairë greeted her, and moved to kneel before her.

“Good morning,” Elwing replied, smiling slightly.

They listened to the towhees whistle and chirp. Elwing did not pick up her brush again.

“I am surprised to find you still here and not attempting a daring escape into the city,” Anairë ventured after a sufficiently awkward pause.

Elwing’s mouth quirked up farther. “I find myself surprised that you have not yet found yourself a piece of business to attend to with great assiduousness.”

Anairë sighed, then laughed despite herself. “Eärwen did not provide any such task, and I find that without a schedule, I am lost. I know I used to fill the hours somehow, before rule and children.”

Elwing hummed. She had dragged one of her sleeves in the ink, Anairë noticed, though the dye was dark enough to mostly hide the spots. The whole robe still smelled very faintly of cedar, from the chest it had rested in these many long years since it was left behind by its owner, perhaps disregarded, perhaps repudiated. Though Elwing knelt, still the hem puddled around her ankles, for she was not so tall as the lady it had been made for.

“Allow me to guess: she left you in your room with some books and some sewing?”

Anairë laughed, startled. “A fellow victim of her idea of peaceful entertainment, I see.” She placed her hands on her knees and pushed to her feet, holding out a hand for Elwing to take. After a moment, she did, and allowed herself to be raised up, tucking her paper away in that ink-splotched sleeve.

“Come out to the city with me,” Anairë said. “I have a better idea. We will get you some proper clothes.”

Elwing’s eyebrows rose, but she followed without demur, sneaking along behind Anairë as she crept through the freshly-waxed corridors stifling giggles, slipping out into the high-walled tangle of service streets behind the royal complex. Anairë led her up Alqualondë’s twisting streets away from the ocean, keeping to the shadows when she could, feeling the body-warm air slipping down her throat as though finding some natural equilibrium. Passerby cast glances at them but did not disturb them, and finally, Anairë found the narrow gate flanked by dusty-berried junipers.

She paused before the knocker of wave-smoothed bone, breathing deeply, composing herself. Beside her, Elwing stood quietly, sharp eyes following the steep street on its dive to the ocean. Anairë knocked, and the door opened of its own accord into the half-wild garden with its white scraps of fabric fluttering from branches and stone lanterns.

She led Elwing down the short stepping-stone path to the low-roofed house that Ninkwitāllë had called her own since the first settlement of the harbor, before the city crept up the foothills towards her. To the right, where the flags flew particularly thick, a hollow clamor rose, its source invisible. Beckoning to Elwing, Anairë stepped carefully among the sorrel until a sharp-edged ring of a trough appeared at her feet, a cairn of stones at the center. In the deep-worn track that encircled it, a boulder rolled of its own accord, rumbling to itself, wearing the chasm imperceptibly deeper before their eyes.

Elwing watched the stone circle and circle, eyes wide. Anairë clapped her hands and bowed, closing her eyes against the low reverberation of the stone carving itself uncaring into the bedrock of the hills. Elwing imitated her.

“You might not bow to it, young one; it’s your cousin,” came a voice from behind her, and Elwing gasped and whirled, almost losing her footing on the edge of the trough.

Anairë turned and bowed, as deeply as she had bowed to the Maia wearing its purpose into the earth.

The woman in front of them smiled a close-lipped smile, deep-set eyes dancing behind their Treelit shine. Swan feathers danced at the end of the white leather thongs tying back her black hair, and her robe was of white linen so fine the deep copper brown of her skin showed through like the sand beneath an unfurled wave, smooth and unblemished even by a navel.

“Ninkwitāllë Unbegotten,” Anairë said, and straightened from her bow. “My young friend needs clothes.” Elwing opened and closed her mouth, struck speechless for the first time in Anairë’s experience of her.

Ninkwitāllë hummed. “Did you think I lacked for entertainment, Anairinkë, and thought to bring me the talk of the town to dress?”

Belatedly, Elwing folded into a bow even deeper than Anairë’s, and Ninkwitāllë laughed and stepped forward to raise her up, hardly rustling the round sorrel leaves around her feet.

“Well met, littlest kinswoman of Gondō the Circler. The town is abuzz with gossip about you -– and I must admit, I have not yet grown immune to tales of great quests, nor yet to making clothes. Come into my workshop.”

So saying, she led the still-silent Elwing into the cool shade of her house, shutting the door on the low grinding. As always, being inside her home was akin to standing inside the churning white spume of a breaker. Lace frothed from worktables, while bleached linen billowed over the flung-open windows, casting spots from its cutwork, and lengths of sugar-pale silk spilled from table edges.

“Sit,” Ninkwitāllë said, and gestured to where a white-robed apprentice, half lost against the white rush of the rest of the room, knelt at work on a length of bobbin lace so intricate the eye grew lost in its twisting paths. Ninkwitāllë made a gesture, and the apprentice rose and left their lace pinned to its pillow, vanishing into the back of the house.

“Tell me how you dressed in your home — my old home. You wear that robe well enough, but I can see it is not what you like, and it could like you better, too. What does little Elwë’s great-grandchild wear when she dresses herself?”

After a false start, Elwing said, “The dress of the Grey-elves at the Sirion-mouth; the clothes my mother wore that were brought out of Doriath for me. Later, I wove the cloth myself from our own flax and wool. I did not dye it, usually; I liked the white.”

Ninkwitāllë twinkled at her. “I do too,” she confided, and Elwing giggled, unexpectedly sweet, surprising even herself, Anairë thought, watching as she brought her hand to her mouth, feeling out the edges of her smile.

“Will you show me?” Ninkwitāllë asked, and Elwing nodded, began to tap a beat on the mats, a breathing rhythm, and when she began to sing it became a loom rhythm, and the fabric spooled out from her lips before Anairë’s eyes, bunching into loose trousers, cuffed at the ankles, a light tunic down to the knees, long sleeves over graceful arms, an embroidered collar over which a silver-haired Elf-woman looked down at them and smiled. Elwing stopped her beat, and the ghost and all her raiment wisped into the white foam of the workshop.

The apprentice reappeared before anyone could ask who the ghost had been, with a pad of thick paper, a charcoal pencil, and three other students trailing behind them on no pretext Anairë could discern. She tucked a smile back away where it belonged.

“So,” Ninkwitāllë said, taking the paper and pencil and beginning to sketch, “Four of the trousers and six of the tunics for everyday and one set for special occasions. Most in dark colors, because you are practical, and some in white, because you like it. Come with me — you can choose the fabric for the finest.”

Elwing rose and allowed herself to be led by one of the apprentices to the accordioned racks of cream and ice and eggshell cloth, while Ninkwitāllë sketched on and Anairë sipped the jasmine-fragrant tea another apprentice brought out to her.

Eventually, Elwing returned with a thick true-white silk damask patterned with seabirds confrontory in foliate rondels, at once formal and free — the work of an Alqualondë weaver almost certainly. Elwing stroked the breast of one of the birds where the weft shone smooth, carefully freeing her fingers when their callouses snagged the silk. Ninkwitāllë nodded in approval, but Elwing clutched the bolt to her almost regretfully, loath to lay it down or keep it close.

“I have no way at all to pay you,” she said. Anairë bit back an offer — Elwing had said it very simply, with neither regret nor shame, only a statement of fact.

“Nonsense,” said Ninkwitāllë. “You will come to my workshop to sing my apprentices every piece of clothing you can remember, so I can make clothes the likes of which have never been seen on this shore. That will be payment enough.”

Elwing twisted her mouth. “I may not dwell long in Alqualondë.”

“Nonsense,” said Ninkwitāllë again. “I lived here before the city came — and you are my good neighbor’s little cousin, if it comes to that, staying in its home. Eärwen cannot object.”

As if to protest, Elwing opened her mouth again, then shut it. Anairë could guess what she had meant: Eärwen was a little fish compared to what Doom the Valar might bring down upon her head, walking uninvited on the shores of Aman. But she kept her counsel, and so did Elwing, and the moment passed. Ninkwitāllë took her pronouncement as fact — as she often did — and the shop suddenly bustled with measuring tapes and shears and bolts of hard-wearing linen held up against pretty woven trims.

Laughing, Elwing held up her arms to allow Ninkwitāllë herself to wind a tape around her waist. Two pieces of paper fluttered down from her sleeves and landed in little tents near Anairë. She picked them up.

A graceful hand with letters rather larger than Anairë was accustomed to announced that the papers were a petition, addressed to the Princess Eärwen and King Olwë, from the people of Alqualondë and residents of its surrounds. These concerned parties called for a hearing for Queen Elwing of Sirion and the people of all Middle Earth, whom she represented, on the matter of aid for the Children who claimed all Elves as siblings. Anairë read the stipulations and explanations with half a smile, impressed despite herself by its — admittedly diplomatic — nerve. Elwing watched her impassively.

“So you were quite prepared to go rabble-rousing, after all,” Anairë concluded upon reaching the blank space below Elwing’s polished signature. The second page was simply another copy, as dignified and free of error as the original.

Elwing replied with her funny birdlike shrug, while Ninkwitāllë left off her measurements and reached out a hand for the papers. She outright grinned as she read, then knelt where she stood to sign her name with a flourish in her grease pencil. Her apprentices fell over themselves to sign below her.

Gumption or not, Anairë felt compelled to caution Elwing. “You must understand that half the city will throw this back in your face, and, moreover, that it will not obligate the Swan Throne in any meaningful way.”

Elwing gave her a close-lipped smile that progressed to a grin as she spoke. “Then I will rely on the other half and be content in the knowledge that they will, at the least, annoy the Swan Throne very much.”

Ninkwitāllë burst out laughing, and Anairë had to chuckle too.

“Very well!” she said, and signed her naked name neatly below the apprentices.

–

She knew how Elwing did it, but it had still felt surprising to agree to return to Ninkwitāllë’s workshop in three days’ time to collect the copy of the petition, which the apprentices had promised to offer to clients and neighbors. Doing it was easy, the simplest thing in the world, as was spending those days traveling by Elwing’s side through Alqualondë’s mazy streets knocking on doors and asking others to pass petitions along. Sometimes shipbuilders or cooks or sailcloth weavers did indeed throw the petition back in her face, or begin to scream at her as soon as they registered her gold-woven braids, but many times they did not, and opened their doors slowly wider and wider as Elwing spoke of home and hope and repair.

In between the knocking, she showed Elwing the many small jewels of the city: fish markets glowing coral-pink with salmon, the greenways preserving the grand redwood groves of the land before the city came in a network like veins, small shrines to Uinen with shingled roofs that mimicked the swell and fall of waves, tidepools full of giant green anemones and deep purple urchins.

With Elwing, she could efface herself, be only the more-experienced tourist, the respectable organizer, the older friend like an aunt or elder sister, seeing the city through eyes both new and knowledgeable.

Then, at night, she might come home to soothe Eärwen’s grumbles — Eärwen, who had been so particularly attentive, as though she were a patient half-healed but still deserving of concern. They would bathe together, dress each other’s hair, lie down to sleep together touching at the palm and knee and ankle, to be close in the equally close heat. She would be Anairë, and only that.

Today, however, she found herself without Elwing and without Eärwen, and could not lose herself in the play of roles to which, she learned with dismay, she had become so accustomed that she could hardly conceive of a self uncovered by a well-fitting mask.

Only Maldanar seemed familiar, cropping lazily at the tall pasture around the temple boundary where Anairë had left him. They had set out early and ridden easily down the road from Alqualondë, but the days were still warm, and his saddle blanket had left a square of sweet-smelling sweat on his back. Anairë rubbed him down with a handful of grass, checked his hooves for stones, and finally stood chest-to-chest with him, Maldanar straining his neck down to catch a few more mouthfuls over her inconvenient embrace.

At last, she could delay no longer. She patted Maldanar’s neck a final time and waded through the seeding grass towards the monoliths, where it suddenly became as well-behaved as if it had been mown by Tirion’s most dedicated gardeners.

The blossoms of a few scant weeks ago no longer peeked above the short grass — only seed pods and drying flower spires waved in the hot breeze. Anairë’s front teeth ached, the crystals in them responding on some particulate level to the sigil-graven stones that formed the circle. The jumbled pile of offerings she had so rudely left behind was gone, with no sign of its passage.

She breathed in deeply, feeling as though she had to push her ribs out against some great fist.

“Well,” she said, in the absence of a better beginning. “Here I am. I do not expect I shall return quickly, if at all.”

Her nose began to run, responding to the twinging in her teeth. She sniffed angrily. As priestess-consort to Nolofinwë, the temple had been as the parlor of a friend, full of lively interest and slightly formal familiarity. Nor had Nolofinwë mentioned such animus in his visits to the temple where the rulers of Tirion made good the bonds between city and Powers. Then again, he had been invested formally, if surreptitiously and hastily, upon the departure of his father for Formenos, leaving the city behind adrift, cut loose from its marriage with fate and dance and weather and more. Anairë never had, only moved from priestess to queen with the gradual addition of papers to her desk and no ritual to gild them. Moreover, she had been remarkably impolite the last time she had set foot here.

She forged on. “I renounced the crown of Tirion,” she announced to the listening air. “I have renounced it for myself and my line, and if any should quibble with my right to do so, they must be released from the Halls of Mandos or returned from across the sundering sea first.”

Another deep breath, pressing her tongue against her two front teeth. “Tirion remains in good relation with the land and its Powers. Tirion rules itself and will decide for itself how to honor its relations and its kin-ties with the forests and fields. I am no longer Tirion, if I ever was.”

So saying, she sat down hard on the prickly meadow-cover, startled by a sudden release of tension. Even Arien’s glare seemed brighter, somehow, embellishing the grasses’ seed heads with afternoon bronze.

“Was that all?” she asked, a little dazed, as she might have asked a secretary unexpectedly relieved of all petitions before the evening bells began to toll.

Only Maldanar’s contented munching answered her. Then, looking about the circle, she spotted a little bird, a red-winged blackbird, alight on the mossless menhir engraved with a floating feather. It cocked its head at her, examining her with one beady eye. Having completed its inspection, it let loose a torrent of song, that liquid descant of its kind so familiar to the marshes of Alqualondë and the little lakes of Tirion’s oaklands both. It echoed — strange reverberations in the flat, wide-open meadow.

Anairë rose to her knees, then to her feet. Slowly, she approached Manwë’s monolith, hands out in front of her as though she feared to fall in the dark. The blackbird watched her, periodically ducking its head to groom the yellow edging of its noble red badge.

Before the stone, she stopped. From outside herself, she watched herself perform the first steps of the first dance-prayer she had ever learned, arms liquid like the wings of a wild goose or swan. Then she stopped and brought her hands together, breaking the step.

The blackbird took wing, but only to the next stone in the circle, graven with Varda’s radiating star-cradle. She danced a few steps of her favorite of Elentári’s dances, the sickled bends of the Calacirya’s orison, then brought her hands apart.

The next stone was Ulmo’s, shining as though wet in the dry heat. She lapped at the edges of her body, broke the dance. After that, the blackbird led her to Yavanna, then to Aulë, then to the rest, one by one, in a silent procession around the circle. By the time Anairë reached Nessa’s stone with its incised spear-tipped antlers, she was panting, as though she had run a race or performed a full act on Tiron’s stages, though she had only begun a few of the simplest dances she knew.

She paused before Nessa. Heaving breaths, she reached out as though to touch the stone, although the blackbird chirped sharply before she made contact with the rough surface, its edges rippling in a heat-illusion dance. Before she had ever dreamed of a crown, or a husband, or even of a silver-haired princess of the Teleri, she had dreamed of the dancing-grounds and the fleet-footed, doe-headed Power who seemed to move in her marrow, her nails and neck.

“Melesta, Helinyetillë, Nessa Arrow-Fleet, Dancer to the Great Theme, Guider of the Thrown Javelins,” she whispered, and felt a shivering laugh in the mineral of her wrists and knees.

“I renounce no vow I made all wittingly to you,” Anairë said. “Today I only relinquish those promises made under the exaction of duty, not those made in joy and full will.”

The blackbird puffed his red epaulets and screed his approval as Anairë danced the flitting, leaping dance of the deer before the stone, careful of her feet despite her weariness. He lifted his dashing wings to fly away when she flicked her last sharp gesture, but she called after him, panting, “No! Stay!”

Hands on her knees, she felt shocked at herself between gasps, albeit the blackbird was likely only a messenger. He curbed his flight at her call, in any case.

Effortfully, she rose to her full height to face him, and made a more proper curtsey, as a dancer would give after a performance.

“I beg a boon,” she said, and all of a sudden felt the humming, tooth-clenching pressure of attention resume. She buckled slightly, then bore up under it.

“Thank you,” she managed, in the hopes of giving some sort of positive impression. The blackbird fixed her once more with his beady eye, hopping in place above Nessa’s stone.

“My young friend Elwing fears for her husband,” she said, and carefully did not say, I myself am wildly curious. Greatly daring, she continued in the vein of Ninkwitāllë: “She is your niece, of a kind!”

The blackbird cocked his head at her almost at a right angle.

“I ask on her behalf,” Anairë finished, feeling herself rushing a little, “Where is Eärendil, son of Itarillë and Tuor, and when may she see him return home to her side?”

Silence from the meadow. The blackbird fluffed his wings once, then again, and warbled his call.

Anairë let her shoulders slump, sighing, and turned to tear Maldanar away from his midday meal. At the very edges of her hearing, the blackbird’s cry echoed again, still strange, only this time it did not fade away like waves from a dropped stone. Rather, each repetition grew in magnitude until it was no longer recognizably a bird’s call at all, but the sort of sound that passed audible comprehension and became a tide of the body. Against the roaring tug at her sinews, Anairë found the presence of mind to recognize Oromë’s horn at use as a herald’s instrument. Her ears had been allowed to hear the announcement of some judgment at the Máhanaxar, as had not been heard since the Doom, though she could not guess its content.

As the last earthquake tremors of the Valaróma dissipated and made room once more for elucidative thought, Anairë found she’d been given the answer — as well as a gushing nosebleed. Eärendil must have completed his mission indeed and come before the Valar enthroned to plead for his peoples, stirring the Powers to some rapid judgment.

The blackbird chirped gaily and flew away, only a cheery meadow bird, while Maldanar’s ears stood pricked interestedly forward, but showed no sign of fear. The horn blast of Oromë must not have been nearly so loud outside the temple stones. Unsteadily, Anairë made her way back towards Maldanar, dashing the blood from her upper lip with the blade of her palm. Only when she had left the circle and stood checking Maldanar’s girths by rote did she recall the second part of her question.

“But wait!” she cried, half turning to look back at the temple. “When will he come back?”

Maldanar craned his head around, and, with clear asperity, said, “Look for him in Alqualondë in four days’ time.”

Anairë jumped half a foot in the air, and Maldanar imitated her with significantly higher elevation, the whites suddenly showing all around his eyes and his hair and tail standing up as though he had been put out to pasture at midwinter.

Biting back an imprecation which, while no more than usually blasphemous, was likely a worse idea than usual at the moment, Anairë held out her hands and tried to soothe him while he pranced sideways and tossed his head. Eventually, she managed to catch the halter she was glad she had put on him that morning for the mere pleasure of seeing the turquoise tassels against his smooth golden cheeks, and whispered into his flat-pinned ears, stroking the silky skin of his jaw between the bones. Gradually, he stopped dancing in place and let his ears come forward to half mast, though he trembled and blew air through red-tinged nostrils as though he had run a race.

Anairë stayed on the ground and walked him slowly to the road, still murmuring soothingly and holding his head down so he did not leap again. She mounted up, though he made it difficult for her, and gave him his head so they pelted down the road back to Alqualondë only just carefully enough to avoid coming to grief. For, if the Valar had seen fit to terrify her horse to deliver their message, she might at least let him run the fear out, that it might be delivered faster.

Elwing was a handsbreadth away from knocking firmly but politely on another door in the shipbuilding part of Alqualondë, when Anairë, travelworn and a little wild about the eyes, forestalled her.

“Four days,” she heard, and little else of Anairë’s explanations and descriptions, though it explained the noise like a distant bell that had come ringing through the mountains near noon. Her heartbeat in her ears drowned the rest out.

In the same state of suspended, distant calm in which she had conducted so much of her business as queen, she reassured Anairë that her news was welcome, that all was well, that Anairë ought to go bathe and rest from her pell-mell rush back to Alqualondë, that Elwing preferred to try a few more doors before returning. It served well enough, as it always had, and Anairë turned to walk the distance back to the Queen’s House, though not without casting a concerned look over her shoulder as she went.

Indeed, Elwing did try another door, as though by rote, and had an entirely disastrous conversation with a shipwright who resented being told that the construction of new ships would likely help her livelihood.

Not the point, lady songbird, Eärendil murmured in her mind as she left the shipwright’s courtyard and wandered back towards the seawall that girded the Belegaer before this part of the city.

Eärendil! Ardamírë! She swung her leg over the top of the seawall, absently grateful for the freedom of her first set of Doriathrin trousers, delivered that morning along with another full sheet of signatures by one of Ninkwitāllë’s apprentices. Four days until he arrived, who knew how, and brought judgment with him.

The tide was in, knocking moonstones against diamonds against chunks of basalt battered from the rock pools and slapping against the riprap below the wall. Elwing stared down at the jeweled foam and thought of what would meet him.

Would an eagle bring him like the body of a High King, to see from above the minor cutters and fishing boats that were all that sufficed to bring any host across the rough ocean? Would he come with good news at all; that, though they were forsaken themselves as trespassers in this land of magic, their plea had been heard? Perhaps he would arrive as a prisoner, or a patient, to be handed over to Eärwen’s limited tolerance, another piece of grit in an oyster, not consequential enough even for a seed pearl?

A pinfeather burst from beside her brow, stinging sharply. Elwing flinched, plucked it out, flicked the drop of blood that clung to the quill into the waves. Where the little ruby struck the water, it flattened, smoothing into a mirror in a frame of froth. Her face, water-tinted and wide-eyed and nervous, gazed back at her.

Eärendil would arrive — a joy! A hope unlooked-for! — and find her with some support in this city, some curious or fervent or staunchly reciprocity-oriented Falmari willing to, at least, hear her out, sign her little petitions, agree to come to meetings and bring others. He would certainly be glad to hear that the city of his mother’s folk, which people spoke of as a sad shadow of its former glory, yet which had overawed her nearly to speechlessness when she rode through its lacework gates and gazed upon its ranks upon ranks of roofs, prepared willingly for war. Those ready when she left to remedy old wrongdoings, or at least miscalculations, of parents and siblings and friends, already numbered more than all the Elves in Sirion, however much they complained of their echoing-empty streets — and who knew but that the eager organizers she left behind had swayed even more to the cause of Morgoth’s defeat since she left them to their own devices?

It was, after all, something. Yes, she decided, she had done what she could with what she had. Whatever verdict Eärendil brought down to her must contend with her work. Whatever end now rushed towards them, here at the end of their quest, must pause and wait upon the instant they first saw each other, as when Vingilot came sailing home in the days before sorrow and the world held its breath for them.

The mirror in the sea-top returned to the gemmed ruffles of high tide. The water worked the clear crystals and black basalt alike to velvet-skinned spherules, then at last to glimmering jewel-sand. Four days of worrying in the waves might do little to a diamond born in the convulsions of the beginning of the world, but it might release just one small star for the marvel of the beach. There was more yet she could do, before Eärendil came home to her, perhaps for the last time.

–

As she had for the last several nights, Eärwen had dined privately with Anairë, then returned to the main room of the Queen’s House to work into the night. It was not that Elwing was disinvited from attending these dinners, only that she did not think they could end well, considering her last audience with Eärwen. Surely Anairë was keeping her appraised of all Elwing did — all that she herself did, for that matter — in the city.

It was not, again, that Elwing thought Eärwen approved of their movements throughout the shipwrights’ neighborhood and the converted dormitories of the Repudiators and the wharves when the sailors came home to dock. It was only that she did not stop them, and leveled charged looks at Elwing when they met in the corridors, some intensity breaking through her coolly serene countenance to drip over Elwing’s shoulders and follow her through the doors into Alqualondë’s swiftly breaking summer.

It was those exchanges of mutual consideration that led Elwing to the corridor outside that comfortably appointed main room by the courtyard, where Eärwen’s tall, straight silhouette knelt at a low desk, brush in hand.

A grand robe of Galadriel’s, hastily tacked up at the hem, nonetheless rustled with her footsteps, a magnificent court costume left folded in a trunk in a paper wrapper that itself would have been precious enough to buy a whole day’s catch in Sirion. The attendant who had helped her find and alter it, then to drape the layers upon layers of under-robes, each finer than the last, over her shoulders, had also taught her the full obeisance due a queen with a blank-faced professionalism that Elwing sensed held back a burning curiosity.

She rapped on the doorframe, then waited.

The door slid open of its own accord, and Elwing looked up to catch Eärwen’s level gaze just closing over some ripple of disturbance. She entered, made her bows, moved gracefully around the long sleeves, and pressed her forehead to the mats before her.

“Rise,” Eärwen said, her voice betraying nothing. Elwing did not rise.

“Rise,” Eärwen commanded again, just a touch faster than was strictly dignified. In the dim safety of her folded arms around her bowed head, Elwing closed her eyes.

“I am not queen here and did not ask for your reverences. Rise, Elwing!” Cloth rustled as she stood from her desk, and Elwing pressed her brow tighter to the mats.

Raising her voice to be heard through the layers of muffling silk and flesh, Elwing said to the ground and to Eärwen, “I do not offer reverence save if it moves your heart. I do not bow to grant honor; I fall to my knees to beg.”

Eärwen stood before her, Elwing could sense it, a column of heat against the nape of her neck where it bent.

“This is not the act of a proud woman,” she said flatly.

Elwing clenched her eyes shut. “I was proud when I had aught to lose. Now I have naught, save my life and the love of my husband, yet there is nothing, nothing I would not give if it moved any power towards the aid of my home. My pride is the least of it. I beg you.”

Silk susurrated again, and suddenly, a hard grip found its way into the carefully pinned loops of Elwing’s hair, fisting at the back of her skull. Elwing followed it upwards, a journey not quite of yanking but forceful nonetheless, and startling, her eyes squinting in the light of the room after the shelter of her arms. She shook her head against the pressure, still on her knees, leaning on her flat palms. Eärwen was very close, and if Elwing craned her neck, she could see small expressions chasing one another across the calm lake of her face, currents disrupting the surface. Their eyes met, and Eärwen released her immediately, making as though to step back.

Elwing reached out and grasped her hand as it retreated, falling forward as the silk pinned beneath her knees forced her shoulders down. She caught herself on her other hand and pressed her mouth to the back of Eärwen’s palm, soft and cool and scented with agarwood, its skin catching a little on the insides of her lips when Eärwen moved to jerk it away. Eärwen forestalled the movement, however, unusually ungraceful, and Elwing dragged her lips away to press Eärwen’s hand with both of hers to her forehead, tendrils of hair coming down around her field of vision.

“Please, lady,” she said. “For the sake of my people, and the sake of the land, and the sake of your people once Morgoth has sucked the marrow of Middle-earth and crunched the husk between his teeth and looks for more to feast upon. Even for my sake! Please, help me to send forth the doom of Bauglir.”

Eärwen’s hand twitched, but did not withdraw, though Elwing thought she could feel her pulse hammer on the edge of perception, fluttering against her brow.

Bitterly, Eärwen said, “It does not seem to me that my help is required. Nay, for all must love you and follow in your wake — if you do not have your army today, surely you will have it tomorrow, when turned-over Tirion comes to find you.”

Yet she did not take her hand away.

Elwing’s thighs began to complain of their awkward position. She let herself slide lower again, so that her head pressed above Eärwen’s knees through the smooth, fine fabric warming slowly between them.

“It is not for love of me that Tirion musters arms and makes speeches of redress and remedy,” she said, thinking preposterously of the angry shipwright she had so incensed in the afternoon. “They see that they have waited almost too long, to the brink of possibility; they see that doing nothing is another wrong to add to their tally.” She fought against the prickle behind her eyes.

“And it is certainly not only for love of me that some of your own city wish to aid me,” she added, and went on despite a sharp movement from Eärwen. “You must ask yourself why they do it! But know that if every shipwright in Alqualondë began shaping keels tomorrow, yet it would be too late; for it is too late for me, and my city, and my children, and every day of delay is another day of eating cinders with poor bread and drinking the same bane that poisons the rain that falls unseasonable and stunts the crops.

“Your aid wipes away those days, for every day sooner is one more child or tree or mountain saved.”

Elwing found herself panting, the light, precious scent of Eärwen’s skin and the incense over which she aired her robes coating the back of her throat. Suddenly, so quickly Elwing jumped, Eärwen knelt before her.

Eärwen brought her hand up to her breastbone, where her graceful neck rose above the folded collars of her robes, and Elwing’s hand followed with it. Elwing lifted her gaze from where her hand nestled against the hollow at the base of Eärwen’s throat to meet Eärwen’s eyes, blinking rapidly against the tears gathered in her own.

“A child, you say,” Eärwen murmured. “Middle-earth. Do you mean it? Truly?”

“I do not understand your implication,” Elwing replied. Eärwen tisked.

“Mean you every last soul on the continent? Strangers you do not know, ones who have done you harm? Mean you everyone, Elwing, or do you mean to make a pawn of my people’s hurts and say your tears flow selfless as Nienna’s?”

Elwing blinked harder. Eärwen’s eyes were bright, brighter than their usual Treelit glow, but it was with anger, not with tears. The place in Elwing’s belly where she had pressed down her passions all these years of wandering heated: she grew angry too.

“Yes,” she bit out. “Yes, or it is not a sacrifice, and I have made of myself a sacrifice. I have been made a sacrifice, and I shall fill that shape to the uttermost edge if I must. I said my pride was as nothing before the chance of your help — think you I lied? If my innermost heart must be pure as Nienna, then I must fail, but never will I argue for half a redemption!”

Her fist clenched involuntarily, her nails lengthening and sharpening into talons that dug into her palms. She curled them yet tighter to avoid pricking Eärwen, though she found she could not move away.

Eärwen’s voice rang as hard as her grasp. “You would stand on Alqualondë’s quays and ask, ‘Will you come with me? Will you support my cause — to save the ones who raped your ships and killed your lovers and children and friends?’”

“Yes,” Elwing said again, finding the words as she spoke them. “How am I to say, this person and not that person, this place and not that place! I am not Eru, to choose who lives and who dies, by sword or fire or grief. If I pick and choose my mercies, I will be as them!”

Eärwen’s face was once again opaque to Elwing’s eyes, but she hardly saw it; her vision blurred. Onwards she ran, leaning forward into Eärwen’s chest, noticing at the fringe of her awareness that Eärwen leaned into her in turn, bracing her.

“From the beginning they decided they would have no mercy, that they would offer neither forgiveness nor pity, that they would throw grace back in the face of the granter and return no ruth at all. Yes!” she cried, “I ask pity for all Middle-earth, Fëanorions and all, if that is how you mean to goad me; for although my heart is bitter, it beats still only because of mercies offered to me all-undeserved. I refuse to be like them once more.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, and she squeezed her eyes shut, tilting her head away from Eärwen’s face so the tears ran back into their channels and she could not see her expression.

“My principle,” Elwing said, “Is mercy. I will hold to it. For I have learned from cruel masters what it is to allow pride, or vengeance, or stubbornness to be one’s principle, and it is death. I live on grace and all I have to offer in return is grace, though it burns my hands to hold.”

That was all. What well of eloquence she had tapped ran dry, and at last a tear escaped the corner of her eye and ran down into the hairs at her temple where the white streak shot through the black.

She sought to shake away Eärwen’s hand where it still gripped hers, but the movement overbalanced her, her borrowed silks slipping beneath her knees.

Before she could fall, Eärwen let her hand go and moved her grasp to Elwing’s waist, where she held her still and centered. When Elwing dared look, her mien was calm as ever, though her eyes were wide, and her fingers clenched and released, clenched and released, tight over Elwing’s hips.

There they knelt for a timeless moment. Elwing opened her mouth, then closed it again, dry of words.

Eärwen’s eyes moved to her lips when they parted, then slowly back to her eyes. She made a false start at speech, then another, and Elwing felt a dizzy shock at her lack of composure.

At last, she licked her lips and spoke in a low voice, but without faltering.

“If you can convince my father, I will help you convince my people.”

Elwing’s knees gave out entirely. Eärwen caught her and brought her to rest against her breast, where her scent of precious wood stood around her as an aura.

“Do you promise?” Elwing asked, and heard her own voice small and high, as though she were one of her own boys seeking reassurance.

“I swear it,” Eärwen replied, and placed her hand once more in Elwing’s hair to guide her head and place a kiss upon her lips.

Perhaps it would have been a kiss as a liege grants a vassal in surety of an oath, but that Elwing gasped in surprise, and Eärwen slipped into the space she made. When she parted from her at last, she did not move her face away.

Eärwen opened her hand so it cupped the back of Elwing’s head, no longer grasping or seeking to lead her, but not retreating.

Is it like this? Elwing inquired of herself, feeling her body flush and fluoresce with every movement like Ulmo’s Fire on the waves at Sirion — victory, relief, surprise, desire. I wondered if it might be like this.

She did not move away. She did not move closer. She thought of Eärendil, and the lovers they carefully chose between them to go with him to sea, and of the woman whose clothes she wore, the daughter of the woman who had just kissed her, for whose sake she had never done the same. Eärendil, who even now made his way to her carrying Doom, and who had wanted her to stay on the ship, safe from reprisal for standing on this sacred shore.

If you can convince my father, I will help you convince my people, echoed Eärwen in her mind, and on their heels, her own words: I live on grace. Grace, and borrowed time.

Elwing closed her eyes and leaned forward to kiss Eärwen again.

Like the last time they had passed the night together, neither Eärwen nor Elwing had remembered to close the room against dawn’s exploratory fingers. The morning breeze stirred Eärwen first, blinking in disorientation — here she was in Nerwen’s room, a smaller body drowsing beneath the blue silk coverlet beside her, but what was this light? This smell of feathers?

The bird-scent brought her back to herself, and to Elwing, for although Eärwen had passed the night wandering in memories of the room washed silver by Telperion, holding baby Nerwen in her arms of recollection, Elwing slept true-sleep beside her, arms flung above her head.

Eärwen turned on her side and propped herself on her elbow, reaching out with her other hand to brush a black-and-white streak of Elwing’s hair from around her neck, where it trickled down between her breasts to finish its curl over the wings of her narrow ribcage. In the night, it had wrapped around Eärwen’s fingers like the lapping waves around pier-legs, or the vines that wound the great redwoods of the hills, something half-alive.

At her touch, Elwing’s gray eyes blinked open and focused upon hers with hardly a moment of confusion. Though mourning dove-soft, Eärwen could not plumb them. They stared at one another in mutual remoteness, until Eärwen closed her eyes and leant forward to kiss her again — for it was dawn; for she had spoken in the mind to Anairë in the night and said not to expect her until breakfast; for in this, at least, Elwing acceded to her; for it had been long and long since she had used her body for pleasure of this kind.

When Elwing made to hold her in return, Eärwen moved over her and held her arms in their winged abandon above her head by the wrists and her hips with her own hips. When Elwing opened her mouth to speak, Eärwen kissed her. When at last Elwing relaxed into her grip and the press of her lips, Eärwen squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed and let her free hand snake down the edge of Elwing’s body. Elwing stiffened when her fingers played with the crepe-crinkled remnants of stretch marks on the low moon of her stomach, relaxed when Eärwen’s hand reached lower to where black hair curled in fascinating abundance around the lips of her cunt. Eärwen held her down and pressed her voice back into her and let the deep throb of pleasure drown out thought, until Elwing’s teeth snapped together and she shook loose-limbed into the morning.

When she blinked her eyes open once more, clear and sparkling in sunlight turned honeyed with the turn of the day, they surprised Eärwen with their happiness, and something, at last, uncoiled within her so she let go Elwing’s wrists, sat up astride her hips, and let Elwing bowl her gently back, curtaining the light with her hair.

“You would have me overmastered?” Elwing asked. She lay a hand beneath the curve of Eärwen’s breast, and, breaking into a smile, jiggled it, watching in evident delight as the soft flesh rippled. “When all last night I knelt before you and kissed your hand?”

“You arise blithe and merry,” Eärwen observed, asperity mellowed slightly by breathlessness.

“I find I have carried my burden to its resting place, and so I run about like a horse untacked — ai, or I run like a horse sensing an earthquake, yet glad to be swift. I am giddy, not blithe. And you are comely.”

So saying, she leant down to lip at Eärwen’s breast, then the other, and then her curtain of curls dragged shivers down Eärwen’s body until it settled in a silky drape over her hips. Though Eärwen thought her words strange, they were muffled by pleasure, and Eärwen arched and shuddered out of her desperate mood and into calmer waters.

Elwing settled her pointy little jaw — shining-wet — above Eärwen’s pubic bone and watched her blink and swallow and reassemble an approximation of her intentions for the day.

“I expect you will go out and make more trouble,” she remarked when her mind had fallen back into place, raking her fingers through the milky white streak in Elwing’s night-black hair and pulling her once more to lie stickily beside her.

Elwing hummed. “Have I your blessing, then?”

Eärwen cast about for a cloth, then briskly wiped the shine off Elwing’s chin and mouth. “You were convincing,” was all she replied.

Something wry flickered across Elwing’s expression, but she held her peace. It was too hot, really, for closeness, the morning fog already rolling back out of the bay, and Elwing moved away from her, leaving only her hand resting gently on Eärwen’s thigh.

“The Gondolindrim I knew were all such prudes,” Elwing mused, running her hand down to Eärwen’s knee and back up. “I might have been as convincing as I liked and they would have turned their noses up at such barbarity. I never even thought to try.”

Eärwen snorted, rather than think of Elwing kissing her hand to be… convincing. “I did not consider the knock-on effects of Fëanáro’s rabble on the relative chastity of Valariandë.”

At Elwing’s cocked eyebrow, she elaborated. “All the real partisans were, shall we say, reactionaries. If they had to hate Indis, then consistency demanded they reject other such unusual combinations. Though I find it hard to believe my own children did not cut swathes across Valariandë as they did Valinor.”

She had expected a certain amused reaction from Elwing, but her face was perfectly unreadable.

“There were always rumors about Galadriel — Nerwen — and my grandmother,” she said evenly. “Yet she and her husband Celeborn are as constant as the stars.”

Eärwen closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Elwing was sitting up and turned slightly away from her, combing a hand through her curls where they spiraled in all directions like pea shoots.

“Will you allow me?” she asked, eyes fishing for the flickers of fawn-colored skin between the black waves.

Elwing shook her head. “I go to make trouble. You go to gentle my effects.”

Was it so? Yesterday, Eärwen would have said that she went to forestall her effects entirely. She was not immune to logic, however, nor charity — nor yet pretty girls on their knees before her, though it chafed her pride. And who had taught Elwing to make such bargains?

Elwing reached for one of Nerwen’s old court robes from where it lay crumpled beside the mattress, back still turned.

“I go to meet my husband, in fact,” Eärwen said, and winced internally, though she made sure her face did not shift. Elwing paused, blue silk rippling in her hand.

“Should I take offense?”

“I will not say you should thank me. I go to ask: will the Repudiators here and in their quarter in Tirion join with Anairë’s rebels?”

Elwing began to dress again. “I have been more effective than I dared hope. Though they are not rebels.”

There was something in her tone that Eärwen could not read, a state of affairs that always discomfited her. Elwing’s movements were efficient and practiced, though the robe she had chosen was too large and she swam in it slightly.

Eärwen reached across the mattress and tugged again at Elwing’s night-black curls. Startled, Elwing’s head tipped back, not quite far enough for her eyes to meet Eärwen’s. She held still in her grasp like a rabbit scruffed from above. Eärwen placed her other hand on the sweet, enchantingly furred hollow of her lower back and dipped her, admiring the curve of her spine.

“You have been other things than effective,” she murmured, and kissed Elwing, her nose bumping against her chin.

Elwing gave into gravity and fell back almost into Eärwen’s lap, crumpling Nerwen’s robe yet further. She blinked up into Eärwen’s eyes, and Eärwen felt her mouth curl into her smallest and truest smile. Elwing smiled back, eyes shimmering clear until the light failed at the last opaqueness of her bones.

–

It was not Eärwen’s custom to take a guard to venture into her own city, only attendants to provide a kind of buffer against onlookers and petitioners. The exception was the stretch of repurposed shipyard where Repudiators drifted in and out to offer what redress they could under Arafinwë’s eye. There, attendants were simply more potential arguments or snubs embodied, while a guard was both the image of political distance and bound by a degree more professionalism. It was never Eärwen’s custom to take only Anairë and none other.

This, Eärwen told herself, was surely the reason for the mutters that followed her and Anairë down the cobbled streets to the dry-docks. The morning was warm, though it did not threaten the heat or stickiness of recent days, and all Alqualondë seemed to be on its stoops, tending its gardens, playing in its parks. Beside her, Anairë kept her eyes fixed firmly but calmly forward, looking neither left nor right, gaze on the manes of Ulmo’s horses as they galloped to shore.

They spoke mind-to-mind, where none might hear them, except that even in the wordless non-space of the fëa, which throbbed in Eärwen’s stomach and soughed in her lungs, which expanded and contracted just out of rhythm with Anairë’s own, Eärwen found she had nothing to say. Or, at least, nothing to say that she could make coherent. Anairë, who had smelled Elwing on her in the morning, veiled her innermost thoughts, and the outermost, though kind, were oblique.

Passing by the point where the streets ceased to be cobbled with local stone and began to be flagged in inland granite, to stand up to the great traffic of carts and lumber and shipbuilders and fishers, Anairë stopped pressing in her gentle way at the seawalls of Eärwen’s mind, where no helpful spray topped the stones. Instead, she reached out and took her hand.

She might have slid Eärwen’s arm through hers, as friends would. Instead, Eärwen walked down towards the sea hand-in-hand with the erstwhile Queen of the Noldor in Aman, focusing all her will on keeping her fingers relaxed. Talk drifted behind them like foam in the wake of a ship.

It ran ahead of them, too, for Arafinwë stood empty-handed at the bronze-bossed gate of the old compound and watched them in their impromptu procession, still dressed in work clothes. Which would be worse, Eärwen wondered: to keep hold of Anairë’s hand or to let go? In the end, she allowed her hand to stay in Anairë’s, which was warm, and soft, and held her to her purpose like an anchor.

Arafinwë bowed. A coil of his golden hair fell forward over his face as he did so, and Eärwen noticed without conscious volition that even his work clothes boasted little embroideries on the collar and cuffs. Bubbles, cleverly done in satin stitch for shine. Her fingers itched.

He straightened without speaking, caught, surely, in the same awkwardness that always filled Eärwen when they met at unawares, outside the tightly scheduled public meetings where he reported on the work of his people in Alqualondë, and Eärwen spoke ritual words of repair and redress from behind a porcelain face. Anairë spoke with him more frequently, Eärwen knew — or had, as most of their conversations and correspondence dealt with the governance of the Repudiators’ Quarter of Tirion — but she forebore to help in this instance.

Instead, she squeezed Eärwen’s hand, then drifted to the shrine to the wave sprites embedded in the wall, running her fingertips over the rippling gold-and-blue mosaic. It was a relic of the compound’s former use. The Noldor had no use for a little sanctum dedicated to the foam-flecked Maiar of the breakers, minor by anyone’s standard — yet Eärwen noticed that someone had left a dusty purple plum in the niche for offerings.

She had been silent too long. Arafinwë opened his mouth.

“Ingoldo!”

Arafinwë closed his mouth. Almost, Eärwen put her own fingers to her lips, which had spoken his beloved amilessë — the name he preferred, for it came from the mother who had never done aught but adore him in the most uncomplicated way — the one Eärwen had not spoken since Arafinwë had led his host back to Alqualondë, the image of a prince. It was the very name she had given their son, their firstborn, because it was a name of love, golden and untarnished.

So, she had preempted him. She had preempted herself. Some hopeful flame kindled in Arafinwë’s eyes.

“Would you like to come in?” he asked. The stilted formality demanded an answer, and Eärwen found herself replying automatically, “You are too kind.”

She mulled that one over while Arafinwë pulled the gate open in courtly fashion and let them into the Repudiators’ courtyard.

There were no ships, because no ship could replace the Swanships. Instead, there were piles of nets woven through with delicate steel chains to stymie the teeth of the harbor seals. There was a drafting table littered with drawings of bilge systems, intricate enough for a headache at thirty paces. On all sides, Noldor made things: pulleys, ropes, sailcloth, planking. The little stuffs of life, weregild tossed into a hole with no bottom.

Arafinwë led them through the space, nimbly avoiding the runners — filled in now with the dirt of decades — where a ship would have trundled from its dry-dock to the embrace of the harbor. Eyes followed them, though some Noldor at least had learned subtlety.

The small offices along the walls of the courtyard, old haunts of accountants and engineers who needed tables or books of reference, were now bedrooms, or rather dormitories. Their glass windows – of course the Noldor had glassed them in – showed two or three beds to a room, some bunked, some in neat rows, some with portraits or loose socks or hot water bottles scattered around them. It all had an air of the camps in the high foothills of the Pelóri where they had sent the children to swim and bow-hunt and learn candle-making while they enjoyed the empty house, until the emptiness grew too large.

Arafinwë paused before one of the rooms, tucked into the corner. He put his hand on the knob, said, “Be welcome in my home,” and held it courteously open for Eärwen and Anairë to tramp through in some parody of a social call.

Someone had knocked out the wall between this corner office and the next, so the room made a sharp right-angled turn. There was one Noldorin-style bed with legs and a feather mattress, a pretty black-figured clay ewer and basin, a sturdy desk with a roster that took up half its surface. The windows to the street had been boarded up, but light shone generously in from the courtyard, picking out spangles from the beaded hangings on the wall.

Eärwen took it in. Here he had passed half his time since he had returned to Alqualondë under threat of Doom, which threat he had listened to when the cries of Eärwen’s kin, the inhabitants of his own home, had not unbent his neck. Would it be better if he slept on a cot, or a pile of rags? If he wore sackcloth and sheared his golden hair to stubble? If all the windows were boarded and he sat sorrowing forever in the murk?

He offered tea, chairs. Anairë drifted off into the other wing of the room, studying the tapestries on the wall, which were unfamiliar, for Eärwen had permitted him nothing from the chambers they had shared, which stood shuttered in the dark-windowed Princess’ House, visited only by cleaners.

At last the thin breeze of propriety blew out and left them becalmed, seated across from one another at the desk. Upside-down, Eärwen read the roster which organized the rotations of Repudiators from Tirion and its hinterlands to Alqualondë and back. Arafinwë’s eyes burned on her brow.

It was not a queenly thing to avoid them. Eärwen raised her head and said, “I will not ask my people to fight. I do not think it is right.”

Arafinwë sat back in his chair. She had not startled him, she saw, perhaps because the shock of seeing her at the dry-docks was too much for anything lesser. His brows — the left just slightly longer than the right, as it had ever been — remained level. He spoke.

“Many of my people wish to go. In fact, almost all of them. Anairë sent me messages from Tirion, then Intyallë did the same, and even Ingwë Ingwion down from the slopes of Taniquetil with unforeseen tidings of a Secondborn messenger at the Ring of Doom. So: I am to lead an army.”

“Again.”

He nodded. “Again. May I prove a truer leader this time.”

The corners of his mouth twitched rapidly. Eärwen, who knew every expression of his face, had once loved that one — the face of Arafinwë making a mistake in conversation and preparing to fix it. Once, it had filled her with affection, even a sort of pride, that her son of Finwë knew when he had done wrong and strove to make amends. It was a lifetime since she had felt so.

Yet Arafinwë, perhaps, had not changed in that particular, not so much as he might have, for he put his shoulders back and said: “I mean that I was true until the moment it did not serve me, until I had to make a choice. I was true to you until I chose to be true to my brothers instead, and then I cast aside all I knew of you to follow them. Why should I stay, or make amends — for Alqualondë is unforgivable. So I thought.”

His lips twitched again. “Hark at me! I say ‘Alqualondë’ as though I am not here, in Alqualondë, where I have pledged to be true again, to heal and earn forgiveness. But then my troth to my brothers lasted only as long as it took for Mandos Námo to echo his judgment against the mountains, and back I came.”

Every expression that crossed his face, Eärwen knew. She could predict them, almost. How different it was to sit across from Arafinwë, whose soul had mingled with hers, and discuss blood on swords, than it was to look down at Elwing’s bent head, a shimmering sheet of black-and-white enigma. So she had taken her to bed, had listened — surely she had not felt more deeply then than now, with her own husband explaining to her that he was to go to Middle-earth, and fight the evil that had seen both his brothers, who had never thought they had made a mistake at all, dead.

Arafinwë’s voice was level, his eyes bright but dry. His speech had the sense of words long-practiced. Surely Eärwen had another speech to give him, even many, polished in the dark nights with Anairë far away, in the echoing Queen’s House surrounded by her mother’s things. She could offer the one that began, “I must never have known you at all,” or the one that ended, “I respect your efforts at repair and, though they will never suffice, your time of repentance is through; go back to Tirion and we will live our lives apart.”

But Elwing had knelt before her and spoken all-unthinking, and from her lips had fallen mercy. And she knew the expressions Arafinwë would make, if she made any of those speeches to him.

Eärwen closed her eyes and wiped the centuries of careful words from the slate of her mind.

“I do not forgive you,” she said, from she knew not what source within her. “But— I have not forgotten you.”

She opened her mind towards Arafinwë just the smallest bit. There he was: summer wheat, clover honey, topaz, rich spring butter.

“I–” Arafinwë began, and Eärwen thrust a hand out.

“No,” she said, and knew Arafinwë would know that, in another, it would have been an exclamation. “You say, ‘unforgivable.’ Perhaps! I never knew what forgiveness meant, until you walked away with the spoils of your brothers’ murders and did not turn back until threatened by Fate. So I find I am unforgiving; still, I do not forget you.”

She opened her eyes. Perhaps she did not know all Arafinwë’s expressions yet.

“I have not forgotten that you did come back, against all good sense. Back to an empty house, where your wife bars the door against you. And you have labored long in a city that despises you — I see it! If I have not encouraged it, neither have I discouraged it! — to be worthy of forgiveness. Can I do less than you?”

She found that her shoulders heaved with harsh breaths. Arafinwë, yellow and warm in the space next to her spirit that had never yet sealed its gates, looked as though he wanted to spring across the table.

“I have received a lesson recently on the value of grace as principle,” Eärwen said. “I cannot do less than you. How much the more so, if I cannot forgive?”

Behind her, Anairë came up and put her hand on her shoulder. Arafinwë’s eyes never wavered from her face.

“What I mean is: I do not know how to forgive. But perhaps I must cease to behave as though forgiveness must come before any other action. Last night I gave Elwing leave to convince my father to lend the aid of the Falmari, and promised I would not stand in her way. Do you promise —” her voice cracked. “Do you promise your people will be true, this time?”

The chair clattered. Arafinwë leapt to his feet, hesitated, made an abortive attempt to sit back down, and in the end paced behind the desk, as though it was a chasm without a bridge. It was something like looking at Arien in her new glory, if Arien paced. Eärwen leaned hard into Anairë’s supporting hand.

Arafinwë stopped, balanced on the balls of his toes. Eärwen thought she knew the expression, from a memory that might have belonged to another Elf: Arafinwë with a ring of his own crafting, muddy to the waist in the marshes of the Alpasírë.

“I swear I shall be true,” he said, hand to his heart. “I will be true, and my people only truer.”

She noticed a brightness in his eyes that was not the last relic of the Trees.

Arafinwë paused, then burst out: “And when I return, will you look upon my face as you did when we were young and watched the children from our balcony? Whether from the shores of Endórë or the Halls of Mandos, when I return, will we three ride through the oaklands to Tirion and back to Alqualondë as we did when the Trees shone on our meetings?”

Eärwen had not cried since she had felt Findaráto’s death across the miles of empty ocean. Yet she fought to push her words out over the swelling in her throat. “I do not know. But, Ingoldo! I want you to return.”

She forced a steady breath. “Anairë can decide for herself whether she wishes to ride with you.”

Anairë squeezed her shoulder, and Arafinwë passed a hand over his eyes, dashing away the gathered wetness.

“It is about time that someone remembered I make my own decisions,” Anairë remarked, not without a touch of asperity.

Arafinwë paused with his hand still half-covering his face. Even so, Eärwen knew — those eyes went with one of his charming, crooked smiles.

“I will have to return, then, in order to hear what you decide,” he said.

Anairë led the way out of the dry dock, nodding perfunctorily to the Repudiators who made confused half-bows to her. Behind her, Eärwen trailed distractedly behind her, mind a muddle of emotions behind her smooth countenance.

It is her just deserts, Anairë thought. She had thought she was done with bitterness, now that she was done with the crown and the great diamond burden of Tirion. But it would take a Maia of Nienna to find celestial calm and pleasure in passing a night alone without warning in the home of one’s meleseldë, followed directly by a highly emotional visit to one’s semi-estranged combination colleague, husband-in-law, and brother-in-law where one’s own feelings as colleague, wife-in-law, and sister-in-law were more or less disregarded.

She towed Eärwen up the greenway, where the foliage provided more privacy than the streets with their pavements of curious onlookers. A bower of browning azaleas hanging languidly over a bench off the path provided yet more seclusion, and Eärwen mounted no resistance to being guided there. Anairë pressed her into the seat, then stood back and scanned the waxy leaves until she found the blossom-eyed face with its anthers and pistils all crowded with honeybees. Bending down to its height, she blew gently and felt the leaf-face rustle as it took in her breath. Then the little Maia vanished, leaving only a confused cluster of bees as witnesses.

Anairë sat beside Eärwen.

“Well,” she said. “Begin from the beginning, because I am at sea and have been exceptionally patient with you today.”

Eärwen blinked. Then she shook her head, a slight gesture that sent the ornaments in her hair to trembling. Anairë was gratified to see her look round and focus her whole attention on her.

Anairë amended her statement. “In fact, I would prefer that you start by explaining why you took Elwing — who is married — who is very young! — to bed, how she convinced you to lend some kind of unspecified aid to her cause, and what that has to do with you marching into the city to have it all out with Arafinwë.”

“Dear one,” Eärwen murmured, turning to face Anairë on the bench. “I am sorry. I have kept you in the dark, have I not?”

Anairë raised her eyebrows.

Eärwen made one of her tiny rueful expressions with her lower lip and the corner of one eye. Then, to her credit, she did explain. For what good it did: though Eärwen spoke with her accustomed poise, not all the parts of her story seemed to add up. Why not draw Elwing to her feet and hammer out a plan over the table? So she always wondered in such matters — but why send Elwing to win over proud Olwë?

“It does not seem at all right,” Anairë began slowly, “that you should send Elwing to treat with your father, whom she does not know at all, and who may be angry with her, and give yourself the people of Alqualondë, upon whom Elwing has worked so assiduously.”

It struck her as she spoke that she was angry, not merely irritated. Had she made her great leap into the unknown only to come and watch Eärwen haunt her mother’s house and miss her one opportunity to strike a blow against that which had made her bitter?

She slapped her palms against her thighs, and though Eärwen would never do something like jump, she flicked her eyes towards Anairë in surprise. Anairë huffed.

“No, it is not right! You promised Elwing aid — you gave her to understand she had somehow won it, or bought it — and yet I have not yet seen you do much. So, you visited Arafinwë: he is not doing anything now that he was not doing before.”

Eärwen’s jaw tightened as Anairë rose, but she kept her face blank and her mind tightly closed.

“Call your father to us,” Anairë ordered, just as she would have ordered a recalcitrant Findekáno long ago. “It is time and past you spoke with him on this matter.”

The heady rush of righteousness filled her as it had filled her before assembled Tirion, and she leaned on Eärwen’s mind the way Eärwen always did to others. Though she found little purchase, Eärwen pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. Anairë could almost imagine the great, cold flood of her thought making its way through the green tunnel of the parkway, the bees still buzzing about it.

Olwë did not take long to reach them. A map of Alqualondë unfurled in Anairë’s mind’s eye: the swift, uncrowded paths she had been wont to take since the Darkening and everything after. Eärwen sat stiffly beside her, but as Olwë’s swaggering sailor’s footsteps came into earshot, she stood and put her hands before her to bow a welcome.

Olwë tutted and lifted her up, shaking his head. He laid a gentle hand against her cheek, looking quizzically about the niche in the greenery.

He waved vaguely to Anairë, eyes sliding over to his daughter in preference to his awkward houseguest, or his awkward not-quite daughter-in-law, but beckoned them both to sit beside him. Anairë graciously declined the implied invitation with a wave of her own hand, but lingered by one of the great redwoods the greenway stood to preserve, leaning her head against its bark.

Eärwen sat beside him, and though nothing she did was ever ungraceful, her motion was rather more like a plop than even Anairë usually saw. Olwë helpfully moved his sleeves aside and somehow sidled closer so that his shoulders just brushed Eärwen’s. There they sat in companionable silence, looking out at the grove. A woodpecker tapped unseen behind them.

Almost in time with its pecking, Eärwen knocked at Anairë’s mind, then withdrew just as swiftly. She had only wanted reassurance, Anairë conjectured, watching her square her shoulders and turn to address her father.

Olwë forestalled her. “I did not think I would come to see the day when you would call me to you urgently, and I would wish you only summoned me to scold me for the lateness of my reviews of the fishing reports, daughter of mine. I imagine you are here with Anairë to discuss your other houseguest.”

From behind, with the fall of her hair and her intricately tied sash in the way, any shifts in Eärwen’s posture were invisible to Anairë, but she could guess at the surprised stiffness of her shoulders.

“Atar…”

“Now, it is unlike you to not have a whole speech prepared,” Olwë teased, though his eyes were sad.

Eärwen shrugged. “Atar, do you remember when I was a swan?”

His eyebrows shot up, but he only nodded slowly in return.

“I thought I was the saddest girl in Aman,” Eärwen said. “I had responsibilities. I shirked them. I was, after all, very sad.”

Olwë passed a hand over his face.

“So is it about the reports after all? Eärwen, it was only…”

Eärwen reached out a hand and touched his robe gently. Just the sleeve, Anairë noted, but she let her hand linger on the fine fabric.

“I felt so sad, and I went away and let others take up my burdens, and when I found I preferred being a human to being a swan again, I came back. And you did not chide me, and Amil–” her voice trembled almost imperceptibly “–she did everything she could to share the burdens that remained.”

Olwë, who cried over the cradles of the strangers’ babies he was called upon to bless, kept his hand over his eyes.

“Anairë has given up Tirion,” Eärwen said, and Anairë startled to hear her own name. “I was angry at first. I still— But she is happier, Atar, already. And I have not nagged her about her reports.”

She might have told me that, Anairë sniffed to herself, but Eärwen went on, almost too quietly for even Anairë’s ears.

“I have taken up Alqualondë, these many long years. But perhaps the two of us have felt that shared burden weigh the heavier for being shared, because we are not meant to pull together the way you pulled together with Amil.”

Olwë’s breath rasped wetly, and Anairë slipped into the trees as quietly as she might. This was not the conversation she had expected; nor was it hers to hear.

In the dim, fragrant coolness of the grove, she thought furiously of where Elwing might be, if she had mentioned where she would go today…

Yes. Light-footed and swift, Anairë Nessa’s daughter ran straight through the trees, careful not to bend a single stem of delicate redwood sorrel, praying that Elwing might be where she said she would be, out on another dogged canvass near the docks. Loath though she was to interrupt the first serious conversation — to her knowledge — Eärwen had broached with Olwë about their nominally joint rule of Alqualondë since Queen Banilómë had gone away with Aiwendil, she had an idea of Eärwen’s angle. It was not merely a touching scene of reconciliation between father and daughter.

What a meddler I have become in these few short weeks, she thought. Even so, her heart raced, her breath came short. All this dashing about felt vital, exciting, useful.

By some miracle, Elwing was on the very first street she checked, making careful annotations in her scrapped-together notebook of neighborhood leaders and guild organizers. Beside her was an enthusiastic young fisherwoman who had become something of a fellow organizer, a silver-haired key to otherwise reluctant doors. Both she and Elwing looked up at Anairë’s precipitous entrance, eyes wide. They were not the only ones to stare: Alqualondim peered out their windows and eyed her from the sidewalks, surely wondering to themselves why she had promenaded down the streets to the docks with Eärwen and then come tearing back up them alone.

“Come at once!” Anairë exclaimed. “Eärwen speaks to Olwë on your behalf. Now is your chance.”

Elwing snapped her book closed so quickly she almost trapped her fingers in it, and shoved it towards her companion.

“Please fill in all the new names of people willing to talk to their neighbors,” she blurted out, looking between Anairë and the fisherwoman. “And make sure you take down their addresses. And tell the person in this neighborhood who passed the petition along to keep checking up with–” but Anairë stepped in and grasped her hand.

“I am sure you know what to do,” she said, and the fisherwoman nodded rapidly.

“Then make haste!”

So saying, she towed Elwing down the street, heedless of the stares.

Elwing, who had spent three years aboard a fairly small ship, began to pant after the first quarter mile, but she kept up admirably until they reached the vine-twined opening to the greenway.

Just out of earshot and sight of the bench, Anairë grasped her hand again to halt her. Holding a finger to her lips, Anairë cast her mind out towards Eärwen.

She was firmly closed and focused on Olwë, whom Anairë could hardly detect, save for a melancholic sort of haze. Anairë felt Eärwen recognize her, followed by a pulse of restrained welcome. She nodded to Elwing, and they made their way sedately towards the bench.

Tears flowed freely down Olwë’s cheeks. Eärwen kept her head down and turned from view, but her shoulders rose and fell evenly with her calm breaths. It was Olwë who spoke first, nonetheless.

“My daughter has given me some very interesting papers,” he said, deep voice loud despite its dampness. “It did not used to be that someone could go through my city stirring up discontent without my hearing of it.”

He held out a familiar set of documents, signatures swirling beneath Elwing’s neat, large hand. Elwing made one of her antique bows, not quite fully recovered from her dash.

“It is not discontent I spoke of with the signatories of those petitions,” she said, only panting slightly. “It was hope, mainly. And grief.”

Anairë went to stand behind Eärwen, who leaned into her, though anyone looking would see only that she rested against the curved back of the bench. Under the cover of Eärwen’s sleek hair, Anairë pressed her hand against her shoulder. She had broken a sweat, running in the heat, and the illusory chill of Eärwen’s mind was soothing.

“We have only spoken once, yet it seemed to me we differed in our griefs,” Olwë mused, wiping his face quite matter-of-factly with a handkerchief pulled from his sleeves.

Elwing’s mouth twisted. She stood before the bench, looking rather alone. “I was not diplomatic when we met.”

“Hardly, Elwë’s child.” Olwë almost smiled. “My daughter has made a case for listening to you again, however. She has not tried to be so persuasive in many a year. I will lend you my ear.”

Perhaps it was the lingering excitement from the exercise, or perhaps the little Maia she had shared breath with was grateful enough to send her a small flash of inspiration. The words bubbled up in Anairë from a place of inspiration: “I believe Lady Elwing has a question for you, not a speech.”

Elwing’s eyes darted to hers so quickly it was barely perceptible as a glance, eyes yellower than they should be. Anairë held her breath.

“Yes,” Elwing said slowly. “I cannot say my position has changed. So what use a speech? I mean to listen, today.” She smiled wryly, suddenly looking very young. “It does not always come naturally. All the more reason that I must try. Please, Your Majesty: will you tell me of the Swanships?”

Anairë’s breath gusted out of her. Beneath her hand, Eärwen stiffened almost imperceptibly. Olwë, who had been folding his handkerchief, looked up, eyes suddenly piercing, the gaze of the king who had denied Fëanáro.

“Will I tell you of the Swanships?” he repeated.

Elwing stood straight and slight before him. “Yes. Will you take me, as a kindness, to the shrine on the docks, and tell me of these great works of your people’s hearts?”

A long pause, broken only by a cheery goldfinch, stretched between their strange foursome. The delight of being so perfectly understood rushed through Anairë, tempered by anxiety. At last, Olwë rose from the bench, movements jerky. Without a word, he set off down the path.

Elwing shot a nervy glance at Anairë, who nodded: it was the way to the sea. Eärwen rose, shaking free of Anairë’s hand, and, also saying nothing, followed her father. Anairë and Elwing trailed in their wake.

It had been Anairë’s idea, but the sight of Olwë standing tall and silvery before the blackened bones of the Swanships in their ghostly, shifting panoply chilled her excitement. She had not expected him to react with such stoic silence, and could not imagine what he might say. Elwing pushed forward, hand brushing against Anairë’s in her passage.

There they stood, the three of them, and Olwë facing them like a wave-tossed spar himself. A gull screamed in the distance.

Olwë put out his hand and touched the smooth, twisting curve of a beam. Out of the corner of Anairë’s eye, she could see Eärwen flinch.

“This was one of Alpuso’s fingers,” he said. “A piece of his rigging. He was one of the fastest, so he was in the dock when the hosts of the Noldor came to pillage and murder. Had he been slower, he would not have arrived hours early from Avallónë and been sunk when Fëanáro’s fools smashed him into a rock before they even left the harbor.”

He lifted his hand and reached for one of the tall, jagged timbers that showed black against the listening sky. “This is what is left of Alpaphilë. She taught Findaráto how to sail. He left with his cousins after they stole her, murdered her children on her decks, and burned her thereafter. This, her keel, floated back with the waves, turned to charcoal. Some kindness of Ossë, perhaps. A child found it on the strand, ten years after the rising of the Moon.”

Again, he lifted his hand. This time, he knelt, and touched a jagged piece of wood that stood only a foot high. “This we found in the back of Alpanelë’s own captain. She was pushed from the mast and fell onto the railing, which splintered. Alpanelë was gentle — I wonder if she welcomed the burning, after that.”

He remained kneeling for a moment, while the wind blew off the sea and the gulls cried. The knot in Anairë’s gut that twisted whenever the ships were mentioned wrung itself tight. She kept silent, watching Elwing’s hair blow in the breeze. Elwing’s eyes were fixed on Olwë. She did not yet quite understand, Anairë saw.

“I loved Alpanelë best of them all,” Olwë said. “I knew her on the Journey. She and my mother were great friends. Sisters, almost, doing everything together. My earliest memory is of her and my mother, singing to me as they fed me mashed berries, the starlight in their hair. If the Unbegotten chose siblings as well as partners, they would have chosen each other. When my mother died on the Journey, she and Elwë took turns carrying me until I was old enough to walk. And when I chose to go on without my brother, she came with me, sorrowing.”

Anairë bit her lip. Very slowly, Elwing cocked her head to one side, then the other, studying Olwë on his knees beside the ragged remnant of the ship.

“I do not understand,” she confessed.

“Do you not?” replied Olwë. His eyes remained on the monument, in its ever-shifting patterns of white and black. “I thought you were familiar with such arts, Elwing, Silmaril-Bearer.”

Olwë’s eyes traced the strained curve of a spar. “All the names I have shared, and all their kin torn from their anchors, were the oldest of the old, those who came with star-fire in their hearts to find it doused in the Tree-lit nights of Aman. The Unbegotten in the Undying Lands are not all cheerful dressmakers. None regretted that they had come, I do not think. Yet they found they could not stay.”

He rose, dusting his hands together, a few flakes of black falling to the granite pavement of the quay.

“Do your songs not wonder what use we had for ocean-going ships in our safe harbor in Valinor? Do they not puzzle over the riddle of a sea-loving swan? Aman was not for all those who awoke, unborn, under the starlight. It was too bright — too crowded, too close, too far from the sound of water and the forests of their home. But to Cuiviénen there is no returning.

“So they built ships instead, to be close to the sound of water that they had heard from the very first, and to travel out to where the stars still shone brightly upon the waves. And they poured themselves into them, aye, even as Fëanáro poured himself into his jewels. The difference is only that they faded as they drove home the last nail, sanded the last rail. They were wise enough to know they should not live on with their hearts outside their bodies.”

The white fingers of the ship-bones looked like feathers, the detritus on the ground after a hawk struck a bird out of the sky.

“Their families said they could still hear them speak, when they were out on the deep waters beyond the reach of Treelight,” Olwë continued. “They danced to their own music on the swells. They kept their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children, safe on the sea. They were with us, always.”

A white feather shivered into being among Elwing’s masses of dark hair, as though the bird in her sensed the tableau the ships made.

“Why–” Elwing’s voice broke off, small against the wave-sounds. She breathed deeply, her shoulders rising, and tried again. “Why did they not burn the thieves, as the Silmarils burned Morgoth? They are surely as holy, if they have souls. If they are souls.”

Olwë pressed his lips together, clearly struggling to speak the answer. Eärwen relieved him. Softly, evenly, she said, “Varda never laid her blessing upon them.”

Elwing turned to look at her, then back over her shoulder to the proud, eerie epitaph, so stark against the gentle blues and greens of sea and sky.

“Why?”

At last, tears began to sparkle in Olwë’s eyes. He drew a steadying breath in through his nose, but before he could speak, Eärwen cut in.

“The Valar did not hallow the Silmarils: Varda Elentári did, for they shone with heavenly light, which pleased her. The work of our people did not flatter anyone’s vanity so.”

Anairë laid a hand on her shoulder. Gently, she said, “Who likes to look at evidence of their own mistakes?”

Olwë shrugged. He had mastered himself, but his eyes were bright. He did not offer an explanation.

Elwing examined each of them closely, gray eyes sweeping across their faces. Anairë wondered what she hoped to find.

Perhaps she did not find it, for, after a lingering look at the memorial, she faced Olwë squarely, but with only curiosity on her face.

“Do you think the Valar made a mistake in bringing Elves to the Blessed Lands?”

Olwë’s mouth twisted. He tipped one hand from side to side. “Yes and no. No and yes. You cannot say it was a mistake for some when it was a glorious gift for others. It was not a mistake for me — I do not even think Alpanelë thought it was a mistake for herself. But do I think they have made mistakes…” His voice dissolved into the lapping waves.

Gaze intent, face fixed in an expression of gentle curiosity, Elwing prodded him. “Do you think it is better to ignore a mistake, or to address it despite the grief it unearths?”

Despite it all, Olwë had been King of the Teleri in Aman before Elwing’s grandparents were born. He did not quite smile at Elwing, but beneath the sadness, Anairë could sense the amusement that had made him the favorite grandparent for all Eärwen’s children.

“In your reckoning, who made a mistake, Lady Elwing?”

Elwing bowed her head briefly and returned a question for a question. “Do you think the Valar made the same mistake in leaving behind Middle-earth as they did when they left those outward-looking souls of your people unhallowed?”

Olwë cracked a bitter laugh. Anairë, who felt she no longer had to portray dignity as Eärwen did, looked back and forth between the two as though she were at a spring-ball match.

“Is it the role of the victim to repair the perpetrator’s mistake?”

“Is it the role of the victim to stand by while others suffer from the same mistake?” Elwing reached back and plucked the feather from her hair. It drifted softly to the ground, skimming over the flags beneath its uncanny wooden siblings. All eyes followed its path.

“My question has never been whether you would solve it all yourselves,” Elwing said softly. “I do not even know how the Valar will answer my plea for help for my — for our — family, and the lands our ancestors loved. It is only this: for the sake of mercy, will you help repair the world so wounded by that mistake, in whatever small way you can?”

There was a beat into which a seagull wailed.

“It is not so small for us,” Olwë said with finality, then turned to look out into the eastern sea, where the distant masts of the returning fishing ships showed clear against the summer sky.

To Anairë’s eyes, Elwing seemed all at once very small, with her eyes downcast before the tall, protean shapes of the ship-bones. Eärwen stood quite still beside her, silent.

Then, Elwing lifted her head, eyes blazing yellow. Before she could say anything rash, Anairë took two short, decisive steps toward her and drew her into an awkward embrace at her side.

Eärwen did not move, but Anairë felt her osanwë like winter breakers against the seawalls. Wait, it said. Patience. 

While the raptor-yellow bled slowly from Elwing’s irises, Olwë studied the horizon, back turned — though Anairë thought he was aware of what went on behind him.

After what seemed an age, he turned slowly back to their small tableau, eyes passing over Elwing in Anairë’s embrace to the memorial. He knelt again and gently touched the spar that was all that remained of Alpanelë.

Quietly enough that the waves drowned him out, Olwë murmured to the wood.

He touched his hand to his lips briefly, then rose. Eyes still fixed on the monument, he said, “I hear you. I will not gainsay you. I will not encourage my people, but I will not stop you.”

Elwing sagged against Anairë’s side, though she could not tell if it was an act of relief or dismay. Her own response was a strange sense of disappointment: was that all? Had they not already taken that much into their own hands?

But perhaps Olwë was finished making grand decisions over the fate of his people, and perhaps Eärwen—

Before Anairë could finish her thought, Eärwen lifted up her voice. “I will encourage my people. And I believe they are my people, now.”

Without looking, Olwë nodded. Anairë’s heart thudded. Gulls mewed. The waves stroked the walls of the promenade, and the fishing boats drew ever nearer. Elwing drew away from Anairë, but made no speech or other move, seemingly unsure.

Again, Anairë thought, Is this all?

Apparently so.

“Thank you,” said Elwing.

At last, Olwë turned around. “I do not wish for your thanks, child.”

Looking to Eärwen, he beckoned. “Let us go home, for we should discuss our plans further before my great-niece’s husband arrives in two days’ time.”

Eärwen nodded and took his arm, and, with a backwards glance at Anairë, she led Olwë back up the quay in the direction of the King’s House.

Elwing looked between their retreating figures and Anairë, visibly unsure what to do.

“Go finish your rounds,” Anairë told her, suddenly immensely weary and unable to muster the desire to comfort her, or plot with her, or do anything, really. “Tell them that something momentous will happen the day after tomorrow. I imagine people will come to gawk, if nothing else.”

Elwing made a small bow to her, then turned to follow Eärwen. She hesitated once, looking at the memorial, then at Anairë, but did not demur.

Alone at last, Anairë let her posture sag.

–

The harbor coruscated in the beam of sunset flowing through the Calacirya. Flame orange where the light hit the water, deep teal where the Pelóri blocked out the glory of Arien’s descent. Anairë watched, letting her eyes be dazzled, blinking at the salmon and buttercup and turquoise splotches that decorated the sails of homeward-bound fishing boats when she looked away from the water-light to observe their approach. Snatches of work songs drifted by as the boats passed her, the sound swelling and narrowing with the distance.

She sat at the end of the seawall, where some helpful Falmarin carpenter had left a bench of planed and varnished driftwood looking out into the eastering ocean. Earlier in the afternoon, some of the little wave-sprites had frisked about in the spray, launched one after the other into the air by the foaming slap of the waves against the stone, and she had danced a very simple dance of hands for them, but now she was alone.

Weariness beat at her. She could not quite understand it — she had done very little today, all told. How capricious she was, to gleefully remove herself from the board and then resent her place on the sidelines.

If she went home — well, she could not go home, for her house was now debatably the public property of Tirion, and she had not so much as removed the boards from the windows of her gift-house in Tirion, and would not for centuries. If she went to the Queen’s House — which, even after all this time, was still not as familiar and kind as the halls of the Princess’ House where her children and their cousins left sticky handprints on the walls — what might she find? More people to minister to: Eärwen to debate or reassure, Elwing to let agitate. Or perhaps they would be wrapped up in each other, in whatever odd dynamic of competition and surrogacy they had found between them, and Anairë would be left to weave a desultory basket or pick up a smooth-spined book.

How tired I am of being the stage crew to the dramas of other people, Anairë thought. The indignity of being a bit character! She had given up the crown of Tirion, which she had never sought, because she wanted rid of it all: the limelight, the attention of an unsympathetic audience. Perhaps after all, the constant intrusion of others’ business into her own had had its benefits.

Hard on the heels of this consideration came the sound of footsteps on the seawall. Anairë closed her eyes and sighed.

Evidently it was audible over the water-sounds, for behind her, Arafinwë said, “I did not think to find you here sighing — indeed, I did not think to find you here at all. Is all your plotting done now that Alqualondë buzzes with rumors of an extraordinary proclamation?”

Without turning to look at him, Anairë shrugged.

“I am moping over the predictable consequences of my own actions. I would have thought you sympathetic, Arafinwë.”

He huffed softly. “Here I am, after all.”

They looked out at the darkening sea together. A final trio of boats slipped past the seawall and into the calm of the harbor. Anairë tried to calculate how many people each could hold for how long a voyage, and could not. How much fresh water would need to be stored below? Perhaps it was fitted with a distilling apparatus.

Behind her, Arafinwë shifted his feet. Anairë sighed and moved aside on the bench.

“Sit, if you mean to stay and have your say. If I must have another fraught conversation today, I will not do it when I cannot even see you.”

Time was that Arafinwë would have teased her for her petulant sharpness. They shared a certain sense of humor that was all Tirion, though Arafinwë had been born in a palace, and Anairë in the quarters. And, of course, they shared Eärwen and Nolofinwë, who both hated to be teased, leaving a surplus of fun to poke at one another. At times, Anairë had tried to revive their jesting exchanges — but each time, as now, her words emerged barbed from her tongue.

Arafinwë sat nonetheless, pressed against the far arm of the bench. “I did not look for you here. Since the opportunity presents itself, however, I will ask you: what other fraught conversations have you endured since you left me?”

“Eärwen and Olwë,” Anairë responded, and Arafinwë nodded knowledgeably. The context was known to anyone who dealt with the Swan Throne in an official capacity; how much the more so Arafinwë.

“And the victor?”

Anairë sighed through her nose. “I was not there for all their fraught conversation. Even so: Eärwen. Though, I believe, in the end they will come to see they both emerged having gained much. Eärwen’s prize was yet another parley between Elwing and Olwë.”

“The victor?” Arafinwë asked again.

Who was to say? Anairë hummed and watched the sun-patch on the waves shrink. “Elwing, I think. I suspect she won days ago, however, when she convinced Eärwen. This was only a concession speech.”

Shaking his head, Arafinwë glanced at her, though Anairë did not return the look. The lapping waves and the strengthening wind of evening filled the space between them.

“Will you go, then?” Arafinwë inquired after a while. “As a sailor, a nurse? To fight, even? I can tell you that by far the majority of the Noldor are going.”

To her own surprise as much as Arafinwë’s, Anairë barked out a laugh.

“Nessa’s hand stay the javelin! I remained once and will again. I do not brood on that choice.”

Arafinwë turned fully to look at her, his curls catching the very last of the light, glowing almost apricot.

“I suppose it is sheer redundancy to tell you that most mean to go. You bestirred us yourself. We —as a people, I mean, not necessarily as individuals— fought wrongly once. We want to fight for the right thing.”

Arien sank beneath the high lip of the Calacirya, and the sea turned at once to blue steel, its depths covered over in the evendim.

“Valinor is not so perfect a land that the Song cannot fall into discord here, as well we know,” Anairë said.

“Perhaps I place too much of myself in my guesses. Perhaps it is rather that there are so precious few of us who have not felt some beloved estrangement, dear in its distance, ripped away at the last. Who would not want vengeance?”

Sometimes he was so much his brothers’ brother.

“You are right, I do not think that is your reason,” Anairë contended, not troubling to keep the bitterness from her voice. “I do not want vengeance, myself: it will be cold comfort. I do not think I was such a villain that I must now make myself a hero.” She scuffed her foot on the flags of the seawall, relishing the dissonant scrape of the grit. “There is nothing I love on that far shore any longer.”

To this, Arafinwë had no response. They looked at the horizon instead, where the first stars winked. Somewhere beyond that hazy line, the heavens danced in unfamiliar patterns, but perhaps Anairë’s children had mapped those skies. Perhaps a shooting star might run from one coast to the next, catching Artanis’ eye.

“Once again, I stay; you say you will, once again, come back.” The gloaming was made for softer words, Anairë thought. “But when you cross the sea with the Powers behind you, your daughter will meet you there.”

Arafinwë bowed his head. “I heard the Lady Elwing knew her,” he said, the longing naked in his voice.

It was not the time to speculate on what Elwing and Nerwen had meant to each other, though Anairë watched Elwing and Eärwen dance around gaps of similar radiant emptiness. It was not the person, either.

Placing those thoughts to the side, she asked, “What, then, will bring you back? The rule of Tirion, its regime still unsteady on its feet?”

Arafinwë scoffed outright. “You say these things to wound me only, Anairë. When have I ever wanted Tirion? It was too large for me. When, for that matter, has Artanis ever wanted Tirion? It was too small for her.”

Tirion made its choice; it would not have you any longer in any case, Anairë thought spitefully, but caught the words and stifled them.

“It is just as well,” she answered instead. “The time of kings in Aman has seen its little glory.”

“I am sure watching Eärwen chafe did not help Artanis’ ambitions. But what could we have done?”

What a question! Anairë opened her mouth, but, again, she caught the self-righteous words before they could escape. What she had done in Tirion, she could not have done in the Treelight. She shook her head.

“No, do not ask me. Rather, tell me truly: what will bring you back, if the last of your children will not come with you?”

A strange half-laugh escaped Arafinwë, almost gull-like. For the first time since his approach, Anairë turned to look at him, startled. His broad-cheeked face, so like the faces of Anairë’s children, was drawn, the skin tight over the bones.

“Did I not say so today, in the first of your fraught conversations?”

A tear escaped his eye, the easy weeping that always flustered Eärwen. Turukáno had been just the same.

He spoke through it, as he always did. “You know why. She is our reason, though our choices were different — are different. I should instead ask you something I have never had the courage to ask. What if Nolofinwë still ruled alive and well in Endórë? With Artanis and Ingoldo at his left hand, and Findekáno at his right? I have dreamed of it. What if?"

The image stung familiarly. Anairë let herself gasp, a small rough sip of the cooling air. The salt rose in the darkness, or perhaps it was her own tears, which she had never been able to give as easily.

Of course she had imagined it. In anger, in longing, in bitterness, in desperation, in grief, in moments of forgetfulness upon waking in the night when Eärwen put orange oil in her hair. That was the afterimage of love, a hall of ghostly portraits iterated into infinity. Arafinwë could not understand, for he had walked farther down that hall, and that, she felt, must erase the remembrance of being left.

Slowly, she breathed out. She could not look at Arafinwë, so she looked again to the stars, which shone above the sea haze and the rising mist in her eyes.

“You are asking me if I love your brother enough. Or, in truth, you are asking how much one must love someone in order to stay with them, or go with them.”

Arafinwë did not perceptibly react. The stars went on shining. Anairë went on musing.

“I think, after all this time, that I understand how it all went so wrong. The idea was always that one is meant to feel love in the right ways, and that will lead to right action. Was it not?”

It was not a real question, and Arafinwë did not seek to answer. Anairë’s thoughts wandered to Nolofinwë with Fëanáro’s sword on his breast, Nolofinwë staring icily at her across the bed in which their children had been born in the flame-tinged Darkness, the twin portraits of Indis and Míriel forever staring at one another in the King’s House of Tirion.

She continued. “I thought about it constantly, you know. Tirion went in quite the opposite direction, after the Exile. It was equally instructive. That one went: one should stop loving when the object of that love stops being lovable.”

The tightness in her throat forced her to pause, but she was practiced in speaking through tears. “But who ever stops being lovable, once loved?”

The pamphlets and rageful ballads made it sound as simple as dousing a candle. Anairë had not found it so, and thought the authors had not either.

“I love my husband, your brother; and I love my children, your niece and nephews; and they have been unlovable. They have done terrible things, unlovable things, and I still love them. I love Eärwen your wife, too. When love stands upon both sides of a sea with ropes around your heart, are its tugs a guide to right action?”

She dashed a hand across her face. “It is simply the wrong question, Arafinwë.”

Sniffing, she glared out into the newly settled night. Very slowly, Arafinwë reached out a hand and laid it flat on the bench beside her. He did not seek to touch her, for which she felt only gladness. When they had been great friends, they had held hands often. Anairë placed her hand beside his, palm down.

“At this moment,” she said, “I suppose I am trying to love them enough to live beyond them.”

They watched the sky together. Anairë traced shapes in the blackness between the milky washes of stars. An oak tree, an acorn, a figure in profile.

Eventually, Arafinwë murmured one of the phrases petitioners offered in thanks to the dancers of Nessa.

Anairë’ twisted her mouth, but she did not say anything she might have said. Instead, she stood and turned back towards Alqualondë, where the yellow lamps glowed through the walls and windows.

Looking back at Arafinwë, still seated on the bench, draped in night, she said, “Only— please hold your daughter when you find her, Arafinwë. That can only be right.”

The steps were written in Elwing’s bones, tapped into her growth plates by Idril, then Galadriel, as she grew. Knock on a door. Ask agitating questions. Educate. Win over. That person now leads to the next door, and this time they ask the questions, provide the answers. That person knocks on more doors, and eventually a whole street or family or neighborhood can pass a message quickly, attend a meeting as one, pool resources to sink a new well, stand up against a bully in council.

Idril taught her the way of it alongside Eärendil, to convince the Men of Sirion to come to council, to wiggle around the protective-powerful counselors from Doriath, to win over the stiff-necked remnants of Gondolin. Galadriel showed her the tricks, the cozening, the spinning so the argument caught the light, and then how to recoup the power after it all went slightly wrong.

Somehow, it had never seemed to grow any easier, the available problems awaiting organized action always expanding to fill Elwing’s available time and skill. Not to mention the doors that did not open.

In Sirion, the hard work had not bothered her. The successes shone out from the many faces of Siriondrim around the battered council table, old divisions of kindred and kind left beyond the reed-beds. It rested in the full cheeks of the children, Elwing’s own and the children of her Sirion, thanks to the richness of the new beds raised out of the march by the collective strength of the city brought together.

In Alqualondë, it did weigh on her. It was not only the lack of the structure built up over time in Sirion, making everything slower and more difficult. It was the endlessness, the scale of the goal, the parlousness of Elwing’s own future.

At least the work distracted her from the last of those.

In between the fits of urgency that came upon her and drove her to canvass Alqualondë’s streets and sparkle at meetings, there were lulls, small spaces in which to wonder and explore. Aman was—

It could not be described in a way that satisfied her. Yet, she tried, because Eärendil neared, and however long they would have together, she would use that time to describe what she had seen.

Every corner had a shop or a cart selling food, and it was always different kinds of food. On one street, the vendor offered piping-hot spheres of fried dough with chewy-tender octopus to children running home from school, while on the next, a gracefully roofed teahouse might offer many-colored sweets with fragrant tisanes for bureaucrats scribbling reports. There were shops that sold food from Tirion, and food from Valmar, and food from Avallónë. Elwing had seen a building with no windows in the back garden of an inn, then watched a server carry out a great block of ice to chill some delicacy in the kitchen. Ice! In the midst of summer!

Wood abounded, in all guises. People carved it into houses and benches and children’s toys and even shoes. Trees grew in the streets and in moist, dim copses between neighborhoods. Loggers in the north sent whole trees down the Alpasírë, and fantastically twisted driftwood washed onto the jeweled beaches, where people collected it and to make hanging confections of glass and gems to hang sparkling from their eaves.

There were Elvish children everywhere. Babies blinked from blankets on parents’ backs. Packs of adolescents roamed the streets looking for sunny lawns for lounging. Hip-high hobbledehoys tugged at strangers’ sleeves and asked for directions and attention and sweets.

Elwing drifted through all the enormity of the green-veiled, good-smelling, sun-drenched, star-kissed, tile-roofed, flag-paved, ocean-going city as it spilled from the hills down to the embracing sea. Once an hour, perhaps, she drew in the clean air and felt it rush to her head like sparkling wine; once an hour, she blinked and found that everything seemed almost too bright and too real to be believed.

She wove it into stories and songs as she walked. Eärendil would want to hear about the flocks of liquid-songed blackbirds flashing scarlet patches on their wings, and the red-breasted bluebirds, and the violently yellow goldfinches chattering in the silk-tassel trees. He would want to know that she had eaten raw fish like a slice of sea-suffused butter on a bed of samphire. If he could, he would like to come with her to see the grove of majestic redwoods whose trunks could not be circled by seven people holding hands.

Greedily, she gathered the memories to herself by the armful, and tried not to think of how long she would have to look back over them like a little girl picking through the sand for wave-smoothed glass from ruined Vinyamar.

The pink dawn of Eärendil’s arrival hovered beyond the horizon of Olwë’s ultimatum.

“What did I say to make you listen?” Elwing asked, the night before her great test, daring to sneak a hand up Eärwen’s calf where her robe split apart to show her soft skin beneath the white and blue silks of her underrobes. From the corner, Anairë watched sidelong over her basket-making.

Eärwen caught her hand and held it by the wrist. “You wore me down.”

“What was it I said?”

Like a silent storm swell far out from the breakwater, regal and cool over a well of deep, slow force, Eärwen pressed her down into the floor of her bedroom. Elwing let herself be pressed, thrilling to pretend that she was tossed about and tumbled by a breaker, too disoriented to think of tomorrows.

“You ought to sleep,” Anairë said from her watchful perch, something curious thrumming beneath her words. They did, eventually.

But morning came the quicker for her distraction, and Elwing bolted awake to the unsullied dawn of the West before even Anairë, heart thundering.

Time was her enemy! Aboard Vingilot, the years had dragged their feet; now, Arien mounted her golden chariot with unseemly haste, splashing sunrise carelessly about her. All too soon, she would slip once more beneath Elwing’s own horizon.

There was more to do -– more doors to knock upon, new acquaintances to instruct. Yet, hastily dressed, shivering pinfeathers, Elwing did not do it. Surely the friendly helpers and fierce new organizers she had met knew their business well enough, and like as not she would do more harm than good in this mood.

Before the last straggling fishing boat had passed beyond the harbor mouth, Elwing found herself crouched on the tip of the seawall, fighting back the feathers with every spell of trembling. The bird-mind was quiet, simple. It wanted fish, water, sunlight. It knew fear, of a sort, but it was clean fear, without guilt. Elwing’s jaw ached with the desire to curve and hook.

Eventually, she found her way to her feet, woman-shaped, and ran up Alqualondë’s twisting streets, still half-shuttered. The lanes of trees grew thicker as the ground rose and the houses thinned — past Ninkwitāllë’s house with its small power wearing itself to the core of Arda, past the last paved streets. When her breath knifed her throat too sharply to be ignored, she stopped running. Alqualondë fell away beneath her, nestled into its tilted bowl and spilling into the embracing sea. To the north, a thin peninsula speared the shining waves, connected to the mainland by a thread of rocky ground. Away south, the land curved out of sight. Behind her, the wall of the Pelóri rose, implacable.

Elwing tilted forward, then back, on her toes. The drop to the sea and the city yawned beneath her. If she leant back, the great fence erected to keep out any living thing from the place of her birth would hold her away. If she pushed, no door in the mountain would open. If she passed through the shining cleft to paradise, she might die sooner, and all her people after her. Yet it was this great palisade she must open tonight.

She sat on the rustling grass beneath her, looking out towards Beleriand. Under her breath, she began to practice. What had they wanted to hear in white Tirion? What had they demanded of her in pearly Alqualondë? What had convinced Eärwen? What had moved Anairë to pity? What had Lúthien done, before an unbending audience?

Her lips moved; her body rocked. Arien sped through the cloudless sky. Her stomach rumbled; she ignored it. Her song gathered shape and density, the brocaded face of a figured tapestry.

Only when the west painted itself rose did she stir, springing to her feet with a cry. She would be late!

Dizzy and stiff-legged with her sudden rising, Elwing staggered, slid a toe over the edge of the cirque, and lost the last battle against the osprey. She cried out again, the descant screech of the bird, and flew down the slopes towards the water, where, far away, early lanterns gathered.

–

The bird wanted to fly forever. In its mind, the glinting waves meant fish rising to the surface for their rich evening meal. The darkening east meant home, while the hubbub of groundlings on the land’s edge meant only nuisance.

Somewhere in the recesses of the sea hawk, Elwing remembered her task. Only, how much easier it was to care only for wave-treasure and the stiff wind combing her pinions. She circled above the quay.

A bare forest of snags caught the bird’s eye — good for nesting and drying damp feathers, it thought. Behind its eyes, Elwing recognized the ship-bones.

Ah, she thought. Not there. 

But beside the ghostly remains was a head of silver hair dressed with pearls, which the hawk could pick out one by one, gleaming golden in the twilight. The bird that was Elwing cheeped and stooped into a dive, remembering to land lightly, as on a nest, and not with talons outstretched as fear insisted.

The bird and Elwing recognized her mistake the moment they alighted on the ground before the head of silver hair, which was after all Eärwen, surrounded by her people. She cheeped again, dazzled by the lanterns and the crush. Elwing thought: All of them waiting for a performance. If she flew away now, she could find her mate and—

Eärwen crouched, reaching out a hand. The bird thought about snapping, but remembered a firm grip at the hinges of its jaw and only whistled, mantling. Elwing thought she might prefer the blood tang regardless.

But Eärwen did not touch her, only pressed the cold implacable wash of her mind against Elwing’s, even small and sheltered as she was behind the osprey’s exact, austere thoughts.

“Do your duty,” Eärwen said beneath the crowd’s agitation. Elwing did bite her then — Elwing herself, though it was the hawk’s sharp beak that drew a single bead of blood from the web between her thumb and forefinger, where Eärwen had stretched out a hand after all. She withdrew it sharply, then unbelted her outermost robe and dropped it over Elwing’s head.

True darkness descended. At once, the bird was calm, and Elwing was furious. Eärwen’s advice weeks ago had been to think on queenly things, and queenliness was a performance Elwing had rehearsed every day of her life since she was a child in arms.

She shook free of her feathers and stood, clutching Eärwen’s robe around her — it had been something of a kindness after all — and listened to the cries and murmurs of shock around her.

Out of her human eyes, the crowd was more than a schooling mass, and less. It was only a crowd waiting for her to speak and convince them, a familiar beast.

She recognized Anairë standing beside Olwë behind Eärwen. Her particular organizers peppered the throng, and ships’ captains dotted the rigging of the tall ships for a better view. Nissaratë, from her very first attempt at a conversation here, leant against the wall of the quay, looking determinedly unimpressed. Others bore stronger expressions: delight, shock, fury. Elwing knew perfectly well how to manage a crowd like this; if she had not been born for it, she had been raised to it.

Eärwen’s hand descended on her shoulder, straightening the too-long robe so it sat evenly. Perhaps it was meant to comfort — perhaps also it was meant to reinforce Eärwen’s own power here, to garb Elwing the distressing, the disturbing, the unlooked-for and agitating, in her own raiments.

Tense quiet rippled outwards through Elwing’s audience. She turned to look at its source.

Olwë stood, hands folded in his sleeves. He bore a great scepter of narwhal tooth and nacre in the crook of his elbow, but made no gestures with it. He had only to rise, and the city quieted for him.

“Hail and hark, Lindar,” he said, and though he seemed to speak quietly, his voice found the cracks between Elwing’s teeth and whispered back from the waves. For the first time, Elwing felt the truth of the relation between him and her great-grandfather, the silver tower of her earliest memories.

Olwë continued, “A daughter of my lost brother’s house, Elwing, comes to us from out of the East, from the shores we left behind us. She asks a boon of us —” Not quite, thought Elwing, and kept her face smooth — “that we hear her plea for aid. For action, I should say, for the sake of her home and family. The lady comes to us honorably, with respect for our ways. She demands nothing, she says. She only asks.”

Into the silence that followed his pronouncement, Elwing stepped forward. What need had she for this silk robe? She was the daughter of Dior the Beautiful, granddaughter of Lúthien Tinúviel. Dispossessed, still she had once been a queen. She breathed deep of the fresh sea air.

She sang of home.

Even Arien tarried on her way to hear her describe Sirion as she had loved it, to let her dark torrent of osanwë show it: its whitewashed wattle homes with seashells hanging in chains from the gutters; its striated cliffs of sandstone gently eroding into the wave-burnished beach; its floating fields, each anchored by its sentinel tree, where Mannish children and Elvish farmers perched side-by-side like sparrows in the branches to escape the noontime sun, then would dive into the reed-beds with great shrieking splashes to send the marsh-hens clucking skyward.

In Alqualondë, stars winked into view one by one. Sirion’s stars were different, its constellations a jumble of favorites with names in Quenya, Taliska, Sindarin, Hadorian. Elwing sang of the Men who had told her star-stories when she sat alongside their own children, spellbound to hear of the rabbit in the moon next to the adventures of her own grandfather. Those children then played games of marbles with the many-sided cones of the salt-loving cypresses that marched down to the sea’s edge in dancing shapes, and shrieked and waved on the beach when their parents came home from their wave-riding, their search for safety beyond the western horizon.

For Sirion was not safe, and Elwing sang also of the children who thought the colors of the sky were blue and yellow, and poison in the waters, and the taste of ash in the north wind.

The song itself carried her, it seemed. Even as she sang, the greatness of the work thrummed in her fingerbones and pelvis.

Another sea of rapt faces gazed at her, or beyond her, watching two little boys play with the soft, dun-colored marsh mice, who could be tempted into eating from one’s hand, but only if one could bear the thought of going a little hungry at suppertime.

Elwing’s breath burnt in her throat, but she sang on. The boys looked up and over their shoulders, where the clouded sky began to burn red.

The crowd stirred. Their clothes rustled audibly, for the noise of the waves had vanished. Elwing looked out to the ocean and saw that the surface was once again a smooth mirror, dark and opaque except where it reflected back Alqualondë’s lights and the early stars.

So she had the ear of some Power. Let them hear.

Even much later, after her Choice, when her recollection cut through time as a sharp knife through butter, she never could remember precisely the words or images she had sung into being on the bloodied promenade of Alqualondë. Her memory was of coppery blood in her throat and the eerie silence of the sea. The very gulls had ceased their wailing when she screamed flame.

When she had done, she panted into the silence, swallowing hard and painfully through her raw throat.

The silence stretched.

It was broken by a most unexpected person. From the sidelines against the promenade wall, Voranna, mother of unknown Urundil, who had never agreed to help Elwing in her quest, cried out, “May their blood be avenged!”

The crowd descended at once into a maelstrom of shouts and outrage. Neighbors shook fists in one another’s faces and declared their stances in an indecipherable vociferation. Unregarded, she sank to her knees.

Her eyes were heavy and smarting, as though with smoke or tears; she closed them. So she felt surprise when warm, cedar-scented arms wrapped around her.

Anairë held her, rocking gently, saying nothing; indeed, Elwing would not have been able to hear her had she tried. She only rested her head against Anairë’s warm shoulder, shuddering in each breath.

After an unheeded time, the clamor took on a kind of order. From shouts, it became claps, in an ordered pattern. Elwing raised her head and looked over Anairë’s shoulder.

Olwë stood on the promenade wall, banging the butt of his staff in rhythms the crowd echoed after him.

“Peace!” he shouted, and when some pockets of argument persisted, he put power into it: “Peace!”

One last clap, and quiet fell, though the waves had returned to hush behind Olwë’s voice.

“Do not think to bring havoc and strife to this harbor-shore once more,” he admonished. “You have heard the fate of our sundered kin. My niece has told her tale, but she has not yet finished, I perceive, and you will hear her out in fairness, for I promised her this much: that she might tell all, then request aid.”

He turned to Elwing, still gazing at him over Anairë’s shoulder.

“Elwiyeldë,” he said. “Make your appeal.”

Elwing gathered herself to stand. Another unexpected arm interpolated itself into her awareness — soft, preciously scented. Together, Anairë and Eärwen lifted her up, then fell back when Elwing stepped forward on her own.

Her voice rasped in her throat, more hawk than nightingale, but it carried.

“My appeal is only for my life, the lives of my people, and even your lives, little though you may think it.” Many eyes glinted at her in the torchlight, without her images to distract them. Elwing continued.

“The great Enemy lies in Angband and sends His venom through our rivers and into the veins of the earth. He also makes his home in every moment of inaction, in every stiff neck that turns only to the sorrows of one’s own self. He is in the despair that is almost pride. I know this!”

The space on her neck where the Silmaril had rested tingled, and Elwing pressed a hand to it, feeling her voice vibrate beneath her fist.

“I know this,” she repeated. “It almost destroyed me, my pride in my despair. Do not imagine that you of Elvenhome so-called will be saved by your inaction when Bauglir has cracked the bones of my home and sucked the marrow! If you keep your ships chained in the harbor and say it is vengeance, or restitution, or only what we deserve, then you will be destroyed before ever the shadow of Morgoth’s hand falls over you, for that is only a physical destruction at the last. The true ruination is that which befalls all who value heirlooms over heirs and spite over hope.”

Somehow, the silence persisted, though the expressions on the faces close enough to read were a riptide, calm above and a mystery below.

“I know this,” she repeated. “Once I jumped, I thought, to my death. I was saved by mercy unasked-for and undeserved. I cannot repay this except by begging you, on my knees if I must, for more. Please. Have mercy.”

The words ran out. Unseeingly, she turned from the crowd, and was caught up once more in Anairë’s arms. The crowd behind her was eerily still.

Eärwen shifted as though she meant to speak, and Anairë hushed her.

Elwing had not thought ahead to this moment. Referenda were no way to run a city; still less were they the wise politician’s choice of tool. What would happen now?

Olwë would stand forth again, it seemed. Speechifying, as Eärwen called it.

“Fëanáro’s followers showed us no mercy,” Olwë said. Elwing’s heart sank. Around her, Anairë’s embrace tightened.

“None were spared — not those who begged, or the young, or even, at the end, his own son. Why should we show mercy in return?”

The high, sheer wall of Alqualondë’s cirque called, but Elwing fought back the feathers. Perhaps she could find Eärendil after all…

But Olwë went on. “Yet I find that I require mercy myself. Lady Elwing would have it that we have abandoned the world — perhaps we have. I have abandoned you, my city, my people. I have turned my face from you; I have failed you as you king and as your brother in grief.”

The people stirred restively. Beside Elwing, Eärwen stiffened, then strode forward to stand by her father. He did not turn to look at her, but reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I mean to abdicate,” he said, and the crowd roared in surprise. He waited them out for long minutes of noise and questions. “Yes,” he said at last. “There has been much of that going around lately. I abdicate–” he raised his voice again to be heard “--in favor of my daughter Eärwen, who has ruled you so well during the long years of my mourning. My last act is not a command. It is only a request of my own. I do not make it as your king; I am no king any longer, and have not been, I see, in some time.

“I ask you for only this: do what the House of Fëanáro did not do. If a ship is yours, choose mercy. Do not fight if you do not wish; merely allow others to do so in the freedom of their choosing. If you desire to lend aid to our kin beyond the sea, the choice is in your hands.”

Olwë turned to face Eärwen, who stared at him, the closest thing to stricken Elwing had yet seen. He smiled and stroked her cheek. Eärwen’s hand flew up to catch his, and he drew their linked palms down to the narwhal scepter. When he withdrew, it rested easily in Eärwen’s grasp.

“Hail to Queen Eärwen,” he said in ringing tones, and bent his knee.

In a great rush like a wave cresting and falling, Alqualondë followed him, though Elwing could see many upturned faces looking on in a variety of expressions: confusion, displeasure, delight, and many combinations thereof.

Eärwen slowly faced them, her face blank once again, though Elwing thought she could still detect the traces of shock.

“Alqualondë,” she said, and then nothing more for a long moment. “Alqualondë. Will you make your choices now?”

“Good girl,” Anairë murmured quietly, and Elwing jumped. Anairë looked down at her from where she had been gazing at Eärwen, smiling slightly. She gave her a small push, and Elwing almost stumbled, but straightened. She and the crowd stared at one another, equally caught.

Jostling at the water-front caught her eye. Someone shoved through the mass of people, though Elwing’s torch-dazzled eyes could not make out who it was. Only when the last row of spectators moved — or were knocked — aside did Elwing recognize brawny Nissaratë.

She stomped to Elwing, then stopped, looking her up and down with her arms akimbo.

“Well then,” she said, pitching her voice to carry. “I am Nissaratë, and my boat is not mine but my nephew’s, the trusty Lintaluntë. He would like it if she had had an adventure while he was with the True Judge.”

So saying, she tapped her fist against her breast and bowed to Eärwen, then to Elwing, and strode away through the crowd.

By force of long habit, Elwing did not stare, stupefied, after her as she shoved through the watching crowd. Following the ruffles of Nissaratë’s passage back to the front, she caught the eyes of one of her young supporters from the shipbuilding quarter.

The young man trembled visibly as he stepped forward out of the safety of his knot of friends, whom Elwing had met and taken tea with, speaking graciously all the while of the pity of Alqualondë’s empty dry docks and the grandeur of her own voyage across Belegaer.

He said, quavering but audible: “I am Telpelamma, and I have no ship, but I have a shipbuilder’s tools, and it would be well to use them in the aid of my grandparents’ kin in Beleriandë.” He saluted as Nissaratë had done, and half-fled back to the cluster of his friends. Though Elwing thought he had turned from her too quickly to see, she bowed towards him in honor of his courage, and to hide the sudden mist before her eyes.

A few people scoffed as she straightened. With alarm, Elwing saw some members of the crowd turn on their heels and storm away — but others were making their way to the front, forming a long snaking queue between other, undecided clusters of observers. One by one, people upon whose doors Elwing had knocked, or who had signed her petition when handed it by Ninkwitāllë, or had been collared by cousins or guildmates or friends, came forward. Elwing watched, heart in her throat.

Four or five spat at her feet, or declaimed wrathful speeches. She stood impassively through them. Most, however, made a pledge following the same formulary, as though they had known it beforehand. Perhaps some steadfast new friend had taken care to write it and share it without her knowing. Perhaps it was her own vanity to assume that it had to be for her and was not some memory of the Falmari from ages before her ken.

Each gave their name, then the name of their ship if they had it. Almost all appended some few words of explanation to the bones of their introductions. For the King’s plea. For my grandparents. For the adventure. For I lost my children too. For you spoke to me in my home. For the songs. For the sake of those suffering as I suffered. For the marsh mice.

Elwing bowed and clasped hands and stood very straight while the strange stars wheeled above her, telling unknown hours. Her spine and the backs of her calves began to ache, but she did not feel tired. This was her fleet. It would sail, with her or without her.

The last person came forward. Elwing noticed with numb surprise that it was orange-haired Lelt of the Avari, smiling his close-tucked smile. He broke the script. Loud enough for all the lingering city to hear, he said in his lilting accent, “I am Lelt. I speak by mandate for my people of Genelt beyond the inland sea. We will go with your fleet. We shall not return with your fleet.”

He did not bow, only made an unfamiliar sort of jaunty salute, and, despite herself, Elwing smiled.

From the space behind Elwing’s shoulder where she had waited through all the timeless night, Anairë threw a mantle around her and drew her close.

Under the weight of her arms and the warmth of the thick wool, Elwing found she was tired after all. Unsteadily, she allowed Anairë to pull her back from the dimming quay, past Olwë still standing irresolutely by Eärwen, through the empty nacred streets of Alqualondë, and at last to her guest room with its window still open to the sea.

Her heart caught up with her all of a sudden, pounding and skipping, and Elwing fell out of Anairë’s embrace onto her knees. She did not register the crack as they met the shining wooden floors, only the sobs that began in her gut and poured out into the room as the Sirion had poured out to the sea.

She had her fleet. They would sail, with her or without her.

The corridors of the Queen’s House were dark, the staff lingering at the harbor or discussing the night’s events in packed teahouses. Eärwen hurried through the dimness, though her mother had said queens should not hurry, or rather, should not be seen to hurry. Queen! It did not yet seem real, perhaps because it had been real already for so many bitter years.

Anairë knocked persistently at her mind, urging her to come quickly to Nerwen’s bedchamber. Her mother was not here to chastise her, so she hurried.

Sliding the door open, Eärwen found a familiar scene. Anairë sat on the floor, cradling a weeping young girl, while Eärwen stood flat-footed and uncertain of what to do or say. That too gnawed familiarly at her. The only difference was that the head of hair spilling over Anairë’s knees was dark and lightning-shot, not the electrum glimmer of abalone under Treelight.

Anairë caught her eye and jerked her head towards the floor, hands unceasing in their steady stroke of those midnight curls, which tangled around her fingers like the tentacles of the tidepool anemones.

It took only a few steps to reach them, but Eärwen found it too difficult to kneel beside them and add her touch to Anairë’s comfort, somehow. She shook out Elwing’s mattress instead, thinking of what she might say. For all the eventfulness of the night, she had said very little — a bitter sort of realization. The sobbing girl on the floor had made her grand speech; her father, still trailing behind her into the King’s House — would he still live in the King’s House? Was she a king, and not a queen? — had made his. Anairë had woven in and out of the crowd on the harbor promenade, touching shoulders, speaking in low tones to people who straightened beneath her attentions, before Elwing dove screeching out of the sky in osprey-form and stolen all the breath and attention of the city. As for herself, she had mutely accepted her father’s scepter, which she had teethed upon before the coming of the Darkness. Silently, she had watched her own city swear something that looked very much like fealty to the little stranger Anairë cradled in her arms. What was there to say to that?

Elwing did not cry like a child. At least, not like one of Eärwen’s children. Rather, she gasped quietly, if raggedly, then held her breath for as long as she could, shoulders shaking, before letting it out slowly and wetly through her mouth. Somewhere, she had learned to weep almost silently.

From the depths of Eärwen’s shadowed memories of the Darkening rang the Doommaker: Not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains.

These muffled, voiceless cries could not have passed over a hillock. Eärwen knelt beside Anairë, who nodded approvingly.

“Why do you weep so on this night of your great victory?” Eärwen asked, modulating her voice as much as she might. Nerwen always asked for her father when she woke in the night.

Elwing took and held another gasping breath. Softly, Eärwen placed her hand in her dark hair, which seemed almost to draw tighter against Elwing’s face. The slippery, entangling curl of it was familiar, though Eärwen thought she had never touched it so gently before, only held it fast.

Anairë murmured, “You said you had forgotten something.”

Elwing exhaled shakily and made as though to speak, but could not manage a full word before her breath caught again on a click. Anairë flicked Eärwen a glance. Tentatively — how she hated to be put on the wrong foot like this — Eärwen hummed, putting just a touch of power into it. Elwing’s body relaxed a touch, though she turned her face further into the mass of her hair.

Gently, Anairë shook her shoulder. “Speak when you can,” she said. “We cannot help you without knowing what ails you.”

In a raw voice, Elwing said, “I did not say that Elros was the explorer and led his brother into things. There was no time.”

Eärwen shared a bemused look with Anairë over Elwing’s head.

“Should you have?” Anairë asked, then winced. Elwing did not appear to notice, though it could not be said with certainty without her face visible.

“No one will remember them,” she rasped. “I should have said more — but I had to show them the rest.”

While she was distracted, Elwing’s hair had wrapped itself securely around Eärwen’s hand. She paused, disconcerted, but then decided to burrow deeper, to see if she could find Elwing beneath it. When she did, she found her face hot and damp, and Elwing made a wounded noise and caught her hand with her own.

Eärwen pulled, and, reluctantly, Elwing followed her up to a sitting position, head still bowed to hide her face.

“I do not understand you,” Eärwen said. “You did just as you had to do. We did see your children at play upon the strand.”

Elwing took another shaky breath, sniffling damply. “Just a picture, a shadow for an audience. When I am gone, no one will remember– I did not say they both snored like their father!”

Eärwen could not make it out. What did it matter if Alqualondë remembered the small particulars of her life before? If Elwing meant to leave the city, she could always return. She could write, if she pleased; her memoirs would be a sensation.

In a gentler tone than Eärwen would have managed, Anairë asked more or less the same thing. Eärwen let the words wash over her without fully registering them, leaning her mind on Anairë’s to feel her intentions instead.

The look on Elwing’s blotched, tear-stained face when she finally raised her head left a far deeper impression.

In a ravaged voice, she spoke, holding Anairë’s gaze with fixed intensity. “I will never return from the Halls to tell of what I have known. When I am punished for setting foot upon this fair land, I will follow my foremother and pass beyond the ken of this world. Lúthien left her sorrows to us; I shall take mine with me. They do not deserve to be forgotten. They barely began to be known.”

Eärwen put her hand down to steady herself. A glance at Anairë showed her eyes white-rimmed.

“What can you mean?” Eärwen demanded. “Who are they and where are they who dare to importune you on Aman’s shores?”

Grimly, Anairë added, “We have kept our cities from bloodshed for lifetimes of your people; none who seek to harm you will succeed while we draw breath.”

To Eärwen’s shock, Elwing laughed. She could not even call it scornful; it seemed Elwing had genuinely found them amusing. She turned her face to Eärwen, resolute, though tears still spilled silently from the corners of her eyes.

“The Valar dare, Amanier. It was my choice to take upon myself their wrath, that my husband would not walk alone into peril, a mortal man in undying lands. We will not be sundered, but it may be that our path leads us into darkness, and all the memory of our lands and love with us.”

Eärwen shook her head. “This is rashness. You have done nothing to merit punishment.”

She looked to Anairë for support, but Anairë pressed her lips together, shadows on her brow. Eärwen reached out a strand of osanwë, but before Anairë could do more than turn her troubled face towards her, Elwing laughed again, a congested sound halfway to a retch.

“What had my fine, brave sailors of Sirion done to merit their punishment? Lost at sea, driven onto the rocks of madding isles, swallowed by fishes: all for the crime of seeking aid and safety!” She gulped and dashed angrily at her eyes. “My husband’s own mother and father, who were as a mother and a father to me, perished so, for the fault of being their parents’ children. Idril was a babe in arms when her kin took her to Beleriand from Valinor; did she merit the fate of Kinslayers? Did Tuor the prophet, favored by Ulmo? The favor of the Valar weighs heavy, and their penalties also.”

Anairë looked down. When Elwing told her of Itarillë’s fate, she had reached across the miles to Eärwen and keened. Little Itarillë, Eärwen thought. Anairë’s precious first grandchild had indeed been too young to walk when Turukáno swept her off across the Helcaraxë.

“Perhaps–” she began, then stumbled into silence. Queens should not misspeak so. But then, queens should not cry openly before others.

Elwing shook her head, a teardrop flying to splash, already cold, on Eärwen’s hand.

“It does not matter if you believe me or not,” she said. She turned to Eärwen. “If I tell you, will you remember? You are an Elf; you keep all the world’s memory. It cannot hurt to remember my children, can it?”

Eärwen closed her eyes. Aikanáro’s bright hair flickered behind her lids, teased up by Findaráto’s playful hands. But when she opened her eyes again, Elwing’s own youthful face, as tearful as Artaresto’s ever was, struck her in its skinned openness.

“It cannot hurt,” she replied.

“It will be worth it,” Anairë said.

Without a battle to fight, it seemed Elwing could no longer stem her tears. She sat straight and inhaled deeply as though to sing, then caught her breath on another sob and crumpled.

Eärwen fought the urge to send a pleading tendril of osanwë to Anairë, whose shoulders still slumped and whose lips pressed together tightly. She thought she would find memories of Itarillë as a curly-haired imp. Instead, Eärwen squared her own shoulders and held out a hand to Elwing, trying once again to make it unqueenly, simple. Only a gesture, not a command.

“You need not show us,” she said. “Only tell me — I will remember — what was it like when they were born?”

Her heart beat sideways when Elwing looked at her with cracks in her eyes.

Elwing sniffed once, then pressed the heels of her hands to her brow. “They arrived at the beginning of autumn,” she began. “Elros came first and did not cry.”

—

By the time Elwing lost her voice completely, the stars spoke of midnight. Eärwen did not sleep and did not feel sleep’s lack. She had laid her hand across the column of Elwing’s sound-wrecked throat and pressed her back into Anairë’s lap, then pressed her lips to hers, still moving soundlessly. Anairë had eased out from beneath her, then forbore to say anything when Eärwen tucked her into her bedding. The two of them went away together to Eärwen’s chambers, where, without speech, they wound Eärwen’s hair into the winged style of Banilómë, then dressed her in her finest robes.

When false dawn set the paper windows glowing, Anairë took Eärwen by the hand. They crossed the garden courtyard to the King’s House while the dawn chorus trilled awake. Just at the bench placed to give a view of the towering Pelóri beside the grand pagoda, Eärwen thought she saw the glint of her father’s hair — but when she turned, only the just-turning maples met her.

Anairë kept pulling her down the winding path, and then they stood at the threshold of the secret door that let onto the Swan Throne. Eärwen’s heart beat wildly, so much so that she put a hand to her chest, half thinking to press it into quiescence through her layers of silk. When had her heart last drummed so? Perhaps only when she had first seen Anairë properly, mud-robed, holding out a hand to a feral princess and chattering about crop rotations.

“Come in with me,” she told Anairë, surprised at her own voice. Anairë only shook her head and dropped her hand.

Then she was to be alone. She nodded to Anairë and slid open the door, kept greased and silent for just such secret entrances. She slid it closed behind her.

Within, all was familiar. There loomed the great main doors that opened to let the public in, tight shut; there stood her chair of driftwood below the steps of the throne. It would have to be removed, she realized, unless she were to give it to her father.

As the light grew, the rich hues of the wood and the lustrous glimmer of the pearls and shells glowed. Dawn in Alqualondë, the daily miracle.

Awkwardly, for this had been her father’s duty, unshirked even on the day of her mother’s disappearance, she knelt on the top step of the throne and looked to the east.

She clapped; she bowed; she whispered the words sacred to the light. When she rose, she had greeted the day on behalf of her people, her first true act as queen.

Settling herself on the throne, she ran her hand down her thighs, as though the flesh and bone might tell her what she felt. She only felt empty, and the shock of static from touching silk rubbed together. The prickle brought to mind Elwing’s hair, a little flash of hot eyes and midnight that filled the echoes of her mind for a moment.

The hall was empty too, not yet filled with petitioners, advisors, onlookers, and scribes. It waited. Her emptiness, too, waited. It was not the hollow she had once sought to fill with swan feathers, nor yet was it the space between her lungs where the golden-silver threads of her children’s spirits should rest. Casting her eyes about the hall, her gaze fell upon one of the sculptural vases filling the niches along the room’s sides — the work of Nerdanel of an earlier age.

Perhaps her emptiness was thus: a vessel. A ruler ought to be a vessel, she thought. If she had once sought self-abnegation in feathers, she had been mistaken in the emptiness she sought. The queens of Alqualondë had made that mistake too often.

Elwing came to mind once more, her fierce gray eyes flaring golden and her black hair sprouting white feathers where the lightning marks ran back from her temples. A trickle of heat flowed from her belly between her legs, and Eärwen closed her eyes. Behind them, Elwing’s other face waited, tear-stained, starlit, cracked open across Eärwen’s own faultlines. When Nerwen had been very young, but old enough to be trusted to be quiet for a few minutes, Eärwen would bring her to sit on the top step of the Swan Throne to hear her grandfather make pronouncements and hand down justice. She had held onto Nerwen’s wrist, padded with that special softness of children’s flesh. In the night, Elwing had spoken of doing the same, sitting on her own throne with her son’s hands in hers so they would not stray into ruling. Eärwen would remember that until the world’s ending — Elwing held between her and Anairë, speaking in her ruined, lovely voice of her children —- and never remember the soft give of Elwing’s child’s wrist in her hand.

Eärwen exhaled. Footsteps sounded in the courtyard. A page came in to open the windows and arrange plates of water and fruit. Yesterday, Eärwen would have entered herself. Today, she caught the page’s furtive glances at the new occupant of the throne. She held herself serene and straight-backed, as her mother had taught her to do.

This day, the first day of her queenship, was the fourth day of Elwing’s husband’s journey from Taniquetil. Would she see any petitioners or make any address to inquisitive city-dwellers burning with curiosity after last night’s dramatics, or would this other messenger from afar arrive and steal the city’s interest before Arien reached her zenith?

She willed herself to breathe evenly, focusing on the angle of her fingers as they rested on her lap. Regardless, it fell to her now to organize for shipbuilding.

Arafinwë’s room in the converted dry-dock swam before her mind’s eye. Shipbuilding! There had not been a great campaign of shipbuilding since Aikanáro had been too young to speak. The streets of that quarter stood quiet; its children came not infrequently to the King’s House to attend to the joinings of the roof and furniture, for the demand for skilled carpentry was not as it once had been, when Alqualondë sent its great ships as far as Hyarmentir and Araman, when all the demesnes of Aman had been as the rooms in one family’s house.

After all, it might be a great thing to see the ribcages of boats once again rising beside the shore and new sails amongst the fishing fleet.

The small bustles in the courtyard grew louder. Eärwen found herself clasping her hands together tightly enough that the color had bled out of her nails and forced herself to relax. Yesterday she had answered the same petitions from the same cast of characters. The only change was in her seat.

But the commotion outside did not draw nearer, nor resolve into the familiar hum of policy arguments, confused questions, and smooth courtierish courtesies. It only swelled, and when Eärwen cast her mind’s nets over the palace compound, it beat in a racing pulse.

Before another page came careening into the hall, skidding on the polished floors, Eärwen stood, wiping her face smooth of all expression.

“The Man is here! He is here with bright Eönwë!”

The page’s exultant, bewildered face set something twinging in Eärwen’s chest — half warning and half yearning. Would Elwing, crying over her boys’ preference for stories over lullabies, have struck such wonder into a young Falmari child?

In order to seem at least half as magnificent as whatever vision of the Secondborn Elwing had seen fit to take as the father of her children, Eärwen swept to her full height and glided, just as her mother had taught her, and just as she had taught Nerwen, through the hall. The page fell in behind her, and Eärwen felt a prick of pride to see the wide-eyed deference she could produce, even in the face of a visitor from another world.

So she swept through the hall — her hall — and paused before the doors for the page to open them. As the leaves slid gracefully in their tracks, Eärwen closed her eyes to prepare for the brilliance that always accompanied the banner-bearer of Manwë.

Opening them, there he stood, softly aglow in borrowed luster.

He was short, Eärwen noticed first, surprised. His head with its crown of short golden locs would reach her shoulder, perhaps — Elwing likely overtopped him by a handspan. Short, and firm like a tall mast that had seen storms, and grubby beneath the radiant garb Eönwë had surely bestowed upon him, threads of pearl shot through sapphire silk sleeves falling over his broken-nailed, weather-beaten hands. Maiar were like that.

She supposed her eyes and mind seized upon these trivialities to avoid the whole: she almost could not comprehend this rough-edged noon to Elwing’s sleek midnight. Against his strangeness, even Eönwë, to whom one never quite grew accustomed, faded into the background.

But he turned to face her, wariness in the set of his shoulders, and Eärwen stiffened, for he was smiling, and though he was lighter-complected by far, and his nose had clearly been broken and set awry, when he smiled, he was a picture of Anairë.

Behind her, two someones gasped. Eärwen turned, grateful for the stateliness drilled into her, to see Anairë and Elwing standing in the doorway of the throne-hall. Anairë stared at Eärendil Ardamírë as though receiving a vision, while Elwing — puffy-eyed, hair in a pitch-black tangle — took one step forward, then another, then broke into a run.

Eärwen let her go, conscious that, despite the overwhelming presence of the Man and the chief of the Maiar, there was a crowd present to watch this meeting. She took care to smile indulgently, as though she thought anyone might be watching. It was more difficult than it might have been, even had she been used to smiling much these last five hundred years.

Elwing and Eärendil came together as two swans in their reed-biers, or two trees grown together so their branches waved as one. Eärendil’s godly collar crumpled in Elwing’s fist, clenched at the nape of his neck. She was indeed taller than him, Eärwen noticed distantly, watching as Eärendil turned his head to bury his face in Elwing’s neck.

“Where did all Turukáno's height go?” Anairë whispered. Eärwen turned away from the vision of these two child-heroes embracing as though nothing in the world could part them and looked into Anairë’s stricken face.

Without responding, and with only an edge of her mind at work upon the problem of the great crowd filling up the courtyard with romantical sighs and dazzlement, she reached out to take Anairë’s hand.

Anairë squeezed it hard. Stepping forward, she stood beside Eärwen and gazed out at the courtyard, where Eärendil, face still hidden, had pulled back just enough to tug at a fine chain and draw out the very crux of light.

It was an almost physical blow. Eärwen rocked ever so slightly on her heels, and Anairë gasped again.

Without letting go, Elwing wrapped her hand around Eärendil’s fist so the Silmaril shone out between the red-lit living flesh of their fingers in coruscating rays that put even bright Eönwë’s gleaming wings to shame, hallowing their embrace.

In the face of it, Eärwen only kept hold of Anairë’s hand, warm and smooth in hers, just as she used to when she was a wayward swan-girl and Anairë only a dancer, and this same inconceivable light had shone on their own caresses.

Even the most glorious tableau could not endure forever. Anairë was glad when, slowly and reluctantly, Eärendil had peeled himself away from Elwing and turned to Eärwen, whose grasp on Anairë’s hand belied her mask of serene benevolence.

Her eyes thirsted for his face, where Turukáno's smile hovered around his lips and her husband’s brow crowned unfamiliar eyes.

Yet how strange he was! Elwing was not an Elf — any who saw her knew that — but she was clearly enough some other creature, with her skin-changing and her witching eyes. Her husband was something else again. He was princely, to be sure, even beneath the soil of his adventures, and almost despite the finery with which Eönwë had arrayed him, but he seemed a lord of some other realm, where the Sun shone fiercer and the inhabitants burned brighter and faster to meet it.

Next to Eönwë, he looked wrenchingly out of place, though entirely at his ease. Elwing, who had been so aloof and skittish, except when playing her games with Eärwen, clung to his arm.

He opened his mouth to speak, and Anairë flinched in anticipation of what, or who, she might hear.

Smoothly as a gliding swan, Eärwen cut him off.

“You are welcome in Alqualondë, Eärendil Ardamírë of the House of Finwë,” she proclaimed. Elwing’s eyes flashed, and Anairë let go of Eärwen's hand. She had her reasons, surely — Anairë wanted none of them.

“Hail also, bright Eönwë Splendent-Winged, and our humble thanks for the safe delivery of one dear to my meleseldë, the most holy Anairë, priestess of Nessa Who Protects the Fawns.”

Anairë hastily made the appropriate bow, raising an internal eyebrow at the various hierarchies of relation implied in that expression of thanks. If Eönwë was at all discomfited by any of the sly ruses Eärwen had slipped into her sentence, his shining face did not show it. In fact, it was so lit with joy that Anairë, well-accustomed to the most powerful orders of Maiar, still found it difficult to look upon.

“Hail!” Eönwë responded, in his aviary of a voice, triumphant hawks and peacocks shrieking behind something not unlike an Elf’s speech. “Hail, Eärwen Swan-Maiden, new-acclaimed Queen of Alqualondë, and tidings from the Ring of Doom!”

The other main characteristic of Eönwë’s speech, thought Anairë, ears ringing slightly, was its overabundance of exclamations.

Eärwen made a respectful, if shallow, acknowledgement, and Eönwë, gesturing emphatically towards Eärendil — who, if Anairë could read his face at all, wore an expression of slight long-suffering — went on.

“Eärendil the Mariner pled his case before the Powers, splendor in his supplication! For mercy and justice he applied, prince of two kindreds, clement and wise!”

“And what did they say?” Elwing interjected.

Anairë was impressed at her gumption. Eönwë, too, seemed delighted, and turned his radiant exultation upon Elwing, whose eyes were very wide, but whose stance was firm and unbending.

“Hail Elwing, of heralds the queenliest, of queens the most bold! O sea-eagle of Men and Elves, O kindly one, my cousin. I knew your father’s mother’s mother. For her sake above all I wished to say: your suit is heard. The Valar march to war.”

What Anairë felt, she could not say; only that it burned in her eyes and roared in her ears such that she could not see how Elwing reacted, nor hear how Eärwen replied. She only felt Eärwen reaching back once again to take her hand, before the eyes of Eönwë and Alqualondë, and Elwing too, if she cared to look.

– –

Glory and urgent proclamations and Eärwen’s games all, eventually, came down to this: Eärendil was filthy with travel, and Eärwen’s house had a bath.

Anairë, who was entirely aware that the muffled turnings-over of her brain would eventually spit out some emotion or understanding that would bring her down to her knees, set about drawing one for him.

Outside, Eärwen dealt with the whole spectacle of divine messengers, terrene messengers, and curious audiences besotted with them both. Abdicated from such duties, Anairë trailed from linen cupboard to tub, setting out her own hair oils and soaps, so her great-grandson could care for his golden locs.

She sat down hard on the edge of the tub. Itarillë, Itarillinkë, who had been too small to walk, and so had been carried across the deathly ice-span to Endórë: her son stood full-grown before Anairë and was a stranger.

For perhaps an hour, she turned Eärendil over in her head, counting the peculiarities of his being. When the Man himself entered the room, his incongruity struck her anew, as though it would surprise her every time to feel parts of herself within this offcomer, whose meteoric life she could feel only from his presence in the room: bounded and swift.

Elwing pressed close to his brawny arm, stirring surprise in Anairë’s belly. With Eärwen, and even with herself, Elwing was positively catlike, darting in to enjoy a caress, almost greedy for touch, then stiffening and circling away. With Eärendil, she seemed to cleave to him as though they would never be parted.

To Anairë’s surprise, though she did not let go of Eärendil, Elwing reached out a tentative hand and gently brushed Anairë’s knee.

“Thank you for the bath,” she said. “It helped me too.”

In, of all things, a Tirion accent, Eärendil spoke his first words to her: “I thank you as well. A star shines on the hour of our meeting. Elwing has told me who you are.”

“Use the waterfall-shower before you enter the bath, so you do not have to sit in your travel dust,” Anairë blurted, then closed her eyes in horror.

“You are very like your grandfather,” she tried again, and then, feeling as though she might fly entirely to pieces, she stood, bowed, and fled to Eärwen’s bedroom.

Miracle of miracles, Eärwen was there, pacing and intent upon her thoughts, but she turned and held out her arms as Anairë entered.

Anairë clung to her. The cool, heavy wave of Eärwen’s mind poured down around her, and she threw herself upon its swell. Eärwen pulled her down to sit upon the sweet-smelling mats and draped one of her gorgeous, excessive sleeves over her, the silk warming quickly to blood-temperature.

For a while, Anairë only breathed roughly into Eärwen’s shoulder, assembling herself once again.

“It is good to know that people still love one another that way,” she said eventually, sliding onto her back so her head rested in Eärwen’s crossed legs. Embroidered trumpeter swans took flight across each of her thighs, winging away from the edges of Anairë’s vision.

Eärwen made one of her characteristic little hums. This one, Anairë interpreted as rueful acknowledgement.

“We were once so in love, the two of us,” she replied.

“We still are,” rejoined Anairë, reaching up and twining her arms around Eärwen’s neck so she had to lean down, her nose almost touching Anairë’s.

“It is another thing to be young and in love. So: the princess and the kindhearted dancer.”

Sighing, Anairë let her arms drop. “Then, the two queens — the swan queen and the emergency reserve.”

Eärwen frowned at her, but Anairë knew her compliments of old and shook her head, wrinkling the silken swans. “Well, you are the queen in truth now, while I am not a queen any longer, of any kind. In fact, perhaps I have been influenced by your little queen and her councils and city officials chosen by lot; I now believe the monarchy is a boil on the nose of society. Would you still follow me out of a marsh?”

From below, Eärwen’s consternated expression pulled together to a point, her eyes oddly upside-down. Anairë sighed and closed her eyes, only for them to fly open once more when Eärwen bent double and kissed her, awkward, her top lip catching her chin.

Pulling back far enough that her own jaw no longer imperiled Anairë’s nose, she said. “When you were queen, you did more than your duty. You did the duty your husband and your children and the whole woeful lot of Exiles left behind. You were all that was constant and true.”

One of Eärwen’s ornaments, shaken loose from her hair, fell heavily to the floor. Anairë cast about for it, but Eärwen tapped her shoulder smartly.

“Attend! I do not say these things as often as I ought; it is your part to listen when I do.” She picked up the ornament, an abalone comb, and set it out of Anairë’s sight. “When you were Tirion’s beloved priestess-consort, you gave aid to all those who sought it, regardless of kindred or station. You raised your children kindly and with strength, and you treated mine with respect and affection.”

Anairë squeezed her eyes closed again. A single tear in her right eye threatened the silk of Eärwen’s robe. Cool, soft fingers wiped it away.

“Before then, you found me eating marsh-worms raw because I did not like dressing up and going to parties for Alqualondë’s sake, and still thought I was worth all you had to give, which was little enough to be everything.”

Anairë sniffed inelegantly, eyes still closed. If she opened them, she would see Eärwen’s even, solemn face, dear as pearls.

“If you are queen of one thing still, it is myself. Perhaps I should be concerned — a boil on society.”

Anairë sniffed again. Such a speech from Eärwen might come once a century, if that; a hidden question of that sort arrived even less frequently. She rolled onto her side and propped herself up on her elbow.

Eärwen’s face was indeed smooth and sober, but the angle of her ears was oblique and the corners of her eyes held the faintest tension. Anairë reached out and smoothed her fingers over Eärwen’s cheekbones, wiping away the strain.

“If I was at all constant or true, your example sustained me,” she murmured. “All your politicking — you had, and have, your reasons. I have loved the princess, and the princess-regent, long and well. How should I forget the queen?”

Eärwen caught her hand and pressed it to her face. With a hitch in her voice that would have been outright tears in another, she said: “My experience suggests that those seeking queenship leave others behind.”

A pang passed through Anairë, echoing in her nails. And so, she thought. Eärwen had wrapped Elwing in one of Artanis’ short jackets in the small hours, and so garbed had she stood beside her husband come home.

“You did your flying away long ago,” she said, brushing her fingers across the swans laid across Eärwen’s lap.

Eärwen’s eyes followed her hand.

“I told you once,” Anairë continued. “You are only a girl. A woman, now. You have your lofty aims and your grounded duties. If I see you getting feathery — if I think you are at all at risk of marsh worms — I will tell you again.”

Eärwen raised her eyes to Anairë’s, and all at once she sighed gustily. Leaning forward, she drew Anairë once more to her lap.

“Hark at you comforting me,” she said chidingly. “You are but a woman too — and perhaps for the first time, for we were young when we first loved. If you feel the lack of lofty goals and solemn responsibility, think to your own desires, for they are not lowly.”

Softly, she stroked Anairë’s cheek and neck. Anairë closed her eyes once again, nuzzling into Eärwen’s belly. She did not reply.

She did, however, stay there, wrinkling Eärwen’s robes of state, drifting between memory and brief flashes of what she might do, once Elwing had flown, and Eärwen had landed at last in her city, to which she held so tightly.

With the windows shaded, Elwing’s room — Galadriel’s room — glowed like the lambent chamber of a mussel, a cool dimness that cast its own light. The Silmaril was tucked away, and without its dazzle, all Eärendil’s beloved crow’s feet wandered away from the blue of his eyes.

Elwing laid her fingers there on the deltas of his smile, then trailed down to the single crescent wrinkle beside his wide, mobile mouth, faintly quirked as he watched her. His wet hair left a faint web of moisture over the skin of his face, already a shade lighter from a few weeks away from the ocean’s endless glare.

Time passed strangely in this strange land. At the quarter moon, she had leapt from Vingilot’s prow to Eärendil’s side, then sent him off into the forbidding barricade of mountains raised against them. Now, Tilion rose early in pursuit of Arien’s chariot in the lingering summer sky, and Eärendil lay across from her on the unrolled mattress, running his hand from the wing of her shoulder to the crest of her hip, warm and solid and alive.

They had not yet spoken much. Normally, they chattered incorrigibly, unbecomingly. Idril had always chided them to play with the other children; then, later, it was necessary for Elwing to speak to everyone, all the time — to convince Siriondrim to come to council, to forestall Galadriel’s schemes, to gather support and information. It was an exhausting effort, but speaking with Eärendil surpassed silence with any other friend. To be silent with him was as good as a conversation.

This time, Elwing did not know what her eyes could be saying. There was too much, too crowded in. She would let Eärendil speak first. For now, she let him keep stroking her under Galadriel’s cast-off jacket, finer than any dress she had ever owned. His eyes roamed across her face.

After an endless while, during which the mother-of-pearl walls began to gleam with sunset, Eärendil gathered her in so their foreheads touched. In a rough whisper, he marveled, “You found us a fleet.”

Elwing closed her eyes and slid her nose beside his.

Softly, she said, “You changed the minds of the Powers.”

Eärendil’s breath gusted out of him, and he gripped her tighter. They both smelled of Eärwen’s violet soap.

“You were always so good at that,” she went on. She could admit to herseful, guiltily, that it was good that Eärendil followed her lead in most things, and feel sneakingly grateful for how it helped her hold together Sirion in his long absences. It was balanced out by her overwhelming gratitude for his particular gift, not of oratory, but of the face-to-face conversation that yoked people to his own aims, which were hers as well, without his interlocutors being any the wiser. Indeed, eight times out of ten, Eärendil’s partners would leave feeling they had spoken with a dear friend, while she was best at a remove, facilitating a council table or presenting a rousing speech.

Eärendil shushed her. Who needed osanwë like Anairë and Eärwen, when her husband could read her mind so well without it? She knew just what he meant, too. There was no sense in feeling shame for what they had to do; it was done, and done well. She nestled closer to him, throwing a leg over his hip.

Eärendil’s lips began to worry shiveringly at her ear, then the skin of her neck. A glow ran up and down Elwing’s nerves and she clutched at him, pulling him close until she thought they might seem only one person, if Tilion were to peer through the windows and see them.

Under the violets, Eärendil smelled only of himself, rich and clean. She breathed him in open-mouthed, pushing aside Galadriel’s jacket and the too-short robe they had scrounged for Eärendil, clutching at his flanks. She lost herself in the rocking clutch, until the broad blunt head of Eärendil’s cock nudged between her legs. Her breath hissed out between her teeth and she jerked back.

Eärendil’s eyes opened, hazy but concerned.

“Not the right time,” Elwing gasped. Eärendil nodded, but froze halfway through the gesture, arrested by the same thought, surely, that gripped Elwing. What did it matter, if Eärendil pushed inside her and came? If there were a baby, they surely would never know.

During the years of sea-voyaging, at such junctures before a looming cliff, one of them would argue — how could they be punished, messengers, light-bearers, perfect victims? They traded off hope and skepticism. Today, neither spoke.

“Just rub,” she said eventually, and Eärendil buried his face in the crook of her neck and slid against her like the tide.

In the afterwards dusk, he ran his thumb back and forth along her belly, where her stretch marks still lingered. They fascinated Eärwen too, Elwing recalled, though differently.

Muzzily, she murmured, “Do you know that here, the High Elves cannot fathom accidental conception?”

From the general vicinity of her breasts, Eärendil muttered, “We knew that. My mother– my nurse– Galadriel–”

He nosed at her sternum, then nipped. “How did that come up?”

The amusement in his voice was clear. Elwing pushed at his shoulder. “Yes, yes. I took ‘shore leave’ with her. It should be nothing new to you.”

Eärendil hummed. “It is new to you,” he told her collarbones. Pressing a kiss to the notch of her throat, he went on: “Are you well? Did it gladden you? Only you have never done so before.”

Safely out of his sight, Elwing bit her lip. It was not for his sake alone that she had never done the same, not wholly for the delicate balance of power that held Sirion together, nor even for their sons. The electrum-haired ghost haunting this room could say so.

“It helped our cause,” she said, heavy-hearted. “It helped me be… convincing.” She pushed herself up on her elbows, dislodging Eärendil. “But they helped me before, too,” she insisted. “They helped me when they did not have to.” A last faint shiver ran through her, Eärwen’s saltwater eyes flashing through her mind.

“And–” halting “--I was very alone. And the queen of Alqualondë is very beautiful and shrewd. And the queen of Tirion is wise and warm-hearted.”

Eärendil pulled her back down with a thump to rest on his chest. His voice rumbled through her, amused.

“You would require your bedmates to be shrewd.”

Elwing dug her chin into the dip of his shoulder until he yelped and shrugged her off with a thump.

“I go to bed with you, do I not?”

Eärendil tugged gently at her hair, which promptly wrapped itself up his wrist. As he untangled himself, Elwing felt his eyes on her, assessing.

“Was she kind to you?” he asked eventually.

Elwing hesitated. How did the scales tilt, between tearful midnight confessions and tearful midnight calculations; between kisses of passion and kisses of transaction? The sense of being sized up as a pawn was familiar enough — did it matter that Eärwen had also confessed her own episode of feathered madness and taught Elwing to manage hers? And she had fed her from her own table, clothed her in her daughter’s clothing, housed her in her own house, bedded her in her own bed, with her own dear-heart looking on.

Rather than determine what of that was kindness, Elwing replied, “I told them about the boys.”

Eärendil’s hand paused in its stroking of her hair, then resumed.

“They will remember.”

“Yes,” Eärendil agreed, the word dragging out of him. Elwing wondered if his hesitation stemmed from mistrust or an unwillingness to admit the need for remembrance.

She laid her head upon his chest, where the sweat from their lovemaking had dried. The scent of him beneath the violets swelled stronger.

After a spell, Eärendil said, with his deep voice rumbling through the bones of her jaw, just where Eärwen had grasped her that first morning on the beach, “We are summoned back to the Valar’s judgment. Eönwë gave me leave to share the news with you.”

Elwing’s fist clenched of its own accord. Her voice was steady, however.

“When?”

“That was my only instruction.”

Her whole body had seized up. Beneath her skin, feathers itched, to no avail.

“We may as well leave at once,” she said. “There is no sense in waiting. In delaying.”

Eärendil’s arms tightened around her, and he buried his nose in her hair, his warm breath puffing against her ear. Despite it all, Elwing shivered again.

“Not at once,” he rumbled. “Let it wait for tonight. We may go in the morning, but let it wait for tonight.”

Elwing sighed, but made no protest. She drew Eärendil closer in his turn.

Outside, the sunset flared and settled to a blue dusk, the summer day finally exhausted.

When she thought the first star must have risen, and Eärendil fallen asleep, still exhausted from his journey, she was startled out of her own half-drowse by his voice.

“Did you tell the queens about the time the boys tried pushing their cradle out to sea as a rowboat, and became stuck beneath the main pier?”

A snort rose unexpectedly in Elwing’s throat, followed by a stinging. “No. I forgot.”

Eärendil hummed. “We can remember.”

Elwing did not respond, only nuzzled closer to Eärendil’s chest, and felt his ribs push out, and in, and out, and in.

–

They both slept more soundly than Elwing thought right. Opening her eyes in the pearl-gray dawn, she disentangled herself from Eärendil and slipped through the shadows to the back of the Queen’s House, where someone already steamed rice and chopped vegetables.

She and Eärendil ate from a tray in her borrowed, haunted bedroom. It was plain that Eönwë, who, despite being a magnificent spirit of wind and light, clearly had a head for logistics, had told the household of their summons. Barely a moment after they had finished their morning ablutions, Anairë stood once again in the doorway, dressed in the fashion of Tirion.

Eärendil, face still wet, bowed hastily. Anairë shook her head and strode forward to lift him up.

“There is no need for family to do such things,” she said. “I am sorry for my abruptness yesterday. I wish you could stay longer — but the Valar, when they are given to speed, do not wait.”

She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a small package wrapped in the five-fingered leaves from the buckeye chestnuts around Tirion. A sweet, nutty scent permeated the air, somehow refreshing — and familiar.

“The last of my recipe,” Anairë said. “Coimas of Yavanna, for weary travelers. You would do me honor if you took it on your way.”

Eyes shining, Eärendil took the parcel, wrapping his hands around Anairë’s. She stood there for a moment, then gently tugged free and came to stand before Elwing.

“Do not lose heart, friend of mine,” she said quietly, eyes intent. “You flew in on the tail of a storm and brought with you clear skies, such as I had not hoped to see again. Do not think your wings will be clipped in recompense. Had I a home, its doors would always be open to you, for my own sake as much as yours.”

Elwing opened her mouth, but Anairë forestalled her, placing two warm fingertips on her lips, then bending in quickly and pressing her mouth to Elwing’s brow.

Straightening, she was suddenly brisk.

“Come now,” she said, and led them out of the room and down to the great flagged courtyard between the royal Houses, where Eärwen stood, gracefully robed, with two elegantly caparisoned horses behind her in the hands of a groom, both bridled.

Elwing met her impassive gaze, looking for the telltale tidal swell beneath. Eärwen made a courtly formal farewell, then took the reins herself and led the two horses forward. She handed Eärendil the reins of the tall, stocky bay with a shallow nod, then turned to Elwing.

“This is Ulofánë, in the dam line from Queen Banilómë’s long-ago mare out of Nahar. My mother’s.” She gave Elwing a significant look. “I expect her to return. I expect you to return her, in a reasonable span.”

She handed over the reins to the dish-faced, slender mare, who stamped one white foot and twitched her black velvet ears towards Elwing. Elwing took the reins, but shook her head, opening her mouth to protest.

Eärwen raised one eyebrow a minute degree, then, with a steady glance at Eärendil, took Elwing’s face in her hand and kissed her full upon the mouth. Elwing, holding the black mare, could not jerk back in surprise, and only kept her eyes open, her vision silver with Eärwen’s abalone hair.

After a prolonged moment, Eärwen let Elwing’s lower lip go and stepped back to a more suitable distance.

“I will hope to see you again, and discuss certain matters that concern your next steps,” Eärwen said, almost too quietly for Elwing to hear over the blood pounding in her ears. Then, in her dignified way, she turned and took up her queenly pose beside Anairë.

“Farewell and good speed to the Ring of Doom,” she declared, loudly enough for a crowd, though it was only the four of them and the groom.

What more was there to be said? That Ulofánë had not startled when Elwing did boded well for the ride, though Elwing dreaded the jouncing almost more than the destination. Eärendil helped Elwing into the saddle, then mounted himself, much more gracefully — the old muscle memory of riding Gondolin’s rocky mountain paths on his pony.

They rode out of the courtyard, through the awakening streets of Alqualondë where the shutters banged companionably open, and at last into the foothills of the Pelóri, where oaks and redwoods and bay trees caught the morning fog in their hair.

“Well,” Eärendil said, after a spell in which Elwing sorted unprofitably through a variety of emotions and worried at her lower lip. “That struck me as a fairly direct statement of intent.”

Elwing looked down at Ulofánë’s ears, where the mare had clearly realized Elwing was only good for the occasional twitch on the rains and let her forequarters fall entirely out of frame.

“She ought not to have done it before you,” she mumbled.

Eärendil muttered something inaudible, then snorted. “I wager she did it at least half to distract you on the way — and then another fraction to tell me what was what. I have no complaints, though she and I must talk, the two of us, when you and I— well.” He fell silent again. Elwing dared to remove a hand from Ulofánë’s mane and press it to her cheek, which was flushed hot.

They rode on. Great firs began to speckle the forest around the path. From the corners of her eyes, Elwing caught flickers of iridescence. When she turned her head to catch them, careful to stay balanced on Ulofánë’s patient back, they vanished into the canopy, or settled into knots and burls on the trunks of the trees.

When Anairë led her from Tirion to Alqualondë, the same had happened, only Anairë had flicked her fingers to them in complicated configurations, and the little Maiar of the chaparral had sometimes paused to twinkle back. They had been more sparse then; now, they glinted thickly along both sides of the road. Sometimes, a feeling like walking through a cobweb would come over Elwing, and Ulofánë would twitch her dark coat.

Eärendil looked curiously about him, calm interest on his face, his hands relaxed on the reins.

“Do you know, we are already almost halfway through the Calacirya,” he remarked, and Elwing twisted unsteadily in her saddle to look over her shoulder. Indeed, the morning fog already covered the steep valley of Alqualondë entirely, though Elwing could not quite remember breaking free of it.

She shook her head, then peered ahead. The dizzying slopes of the Pelóri loomed as high as ever, while the switchbacking path seemed to stretch on just as long as it had a moment ago — but when she twisted back again, they seemed to have climbed another several hundred feet, though the horses only ambled. In the thinning trees, wisps of opaline vapor shimmered, and Elwing had the impression of warm laughter.

The day wore on similarly, the horses striding easily over the well-kept path, moving just faster than they really ought to have. Just before noon, they passed to the far side of the great gap through the mountain-fence. They reined in the horses and stood at the lip where the path turned to descend.

The great sward of Valinor fell away beneath them. Arien had not yet summited the Valar’s guard-wall, and her light dripped from the Calacirya down the inner slope of the Pelóri like a broken yolk spilling down the eggshell, lighting the rocks at Ulofánë’s feet gold, then fading through apricot and flax and, finally, where the white towers of Tirion rose proud and ghostly, the blue of dreaming. A single flicker cried in a twisted pine tree. All else was silent.

Without speech, Elwing and Eärendil locked gazes. Elwing bit the inside of her cheek, and Eärendil’s strong jaw was set, a muscle twitching below his ear.

Elwing broke the silence, urging Ulofánë forward. Eärendil followed her, as he always did, and they went down together into the walled garden of the Valar, heads high, unashamed.

–

They reached Valimar midmorning on the second day, though the post-road to Tirion took days, and Eärendil said he had been weeks wandering through the countryside, even by Eönwë’s side. Elwing shook her head and forebore to speculate, though anger roiled in her gut and made her footfalls heavy and punitive, as if to punish the land itself for bending to her will now, when she least needed it.

Her head of temper was difficult to sustain in the face of Valimar itself. The city gleamed in the morning light in all the warm shades of metal — gold in the roofs, bronze in the doors, copper and brass in the streets. The Elves who came to their doorsteps to watch them ride through the ringing roads were much the same, golden-haired and ruddy-complected, draped in simple garments pinned at the shoulders with brooches of more precious metals. They were few, however, compared to the other beings populating the streets: great butterflies the size of ravens flashing blue in the sunlight, people with the heads of cattle and cats, half-translucent figures draped in gray, a wild alloy of shapes and bearings. This was the city of the Powers, and the Powers watched them enter.

It was small, for all its glory. Elwing thought it would be hard to bear it for long. The great lines of Maiar and Elves who watched them pass in glowing quiet led them through the center of the city, with its grand fountains tossing spangles in the air, and back out again into a meadow of tall, lush grass strewn with flowers of all seasons, perfuming the air with a heady mix of the year entire. In the center of the lea, a hill rose, dreadful amidst the glory of the grass that rose to Ulofánë’s hocks. It was brown, close-mown, and mournful. A gray citadel topped it, its heavy stone gates guarded by gray sentinels who knelt like penitents before the shadowed portal.

“The Ezellohar,” a doubled and tripled voice said, the mournful cooing of a dove behind a man’s grief-wracked lament. Eönwë stood between their horses, a winged vision of luster who had been nowhere to be seen a moment before. Eärendil and Elwing both startled badly, though the horses, who had not so much as nipped at the grass, stayed still.

“There lie the remnants of the days of glory!” Eönwë continued. “Our sorrow does not decrease with the years; the world does not cease its mourning: there lie the Trees, light of all the world!”

Elwing, heart pounding, vision narrowed to a pinprick, found it within herself to think, Not all the world.

“Our path does not lead us there, who never knew their light,” Eärendil said firmly. Elwing glanced at him and saw his knuckles pale with tension, and the uneasy shifting of his gelding beneath him. For a moment, she longed for the power of thought Anairë and Eärwen used so easily. Then, she merely reached out a hand and touched his arm, not caring that Eönwë, his hawk-beaked face startled, had to lean out of her way. What did it matter if she offended the Herald of the Valar? Any moment, they would exact whatever punishment they desired, for all her offenses. If she was a weak mortal woman on undying lands, she would offer what she could to her husband while she had it.

Eärendil clasped her hand to his arm for just a moment, then let her go. Swinging down from his horse, he strode past Eönwë, still standing in dazzling befuddlement, he helped Elwing down, steadying her when she staggered from soreness. It was terrible to pull away from him to stand on her own, so she did not. She would not deny herself this comfort — perhaps this last comfort.

Eönwë, having at last recollected himself, shook his glorious head, which gave both the impression of a splendid mane of hair settling into place, and the ruffling of grand feathers.

“No, your path goes straight!” he cried. “I will announce you before the Powers of the world, O splendors of the Children of the Earth, lights in the darkness, messengers of hope beyond hope!”

Elwing held tight to Eärendil’s hand and followed the messenger of Manwë into the meadow.

In the end, Máhanaxar was very small. A mown circle of shorter grass, where the flowers took advantage of the fuller sun to grow in even greater profusion, a great tapestry of color that dizzied the eye. Elwing focused on each delicate petal, counting I live, I do not live, I live, for if she looked up and saw the great Presences that watched her, she would fall to her knees and never rise again.

Beside her, Eärendil breathed in short pants, though he had not buckled as Elwing had — he had been here before. He had come back. Leaning against him, Elwing forced strength into her legs and poured iron into her spine. Eärendil had stood before this assembly of might and pled their case; her grandmother had dared to dance before it.

She jerked her head up, holding it high and proud, and had she but known it, she looked the very image of all the queens she had ever known before.

A kind of sigh rippled around the Ring — the tree that brushed the stars, the patch of infinite night in the shape of a woman, the giant with wings for eyes and feathers for fingers, the Dwarf-stocky man around whom the air rippled and glowed like forge-ether, the wave-bearded grandfather who looked at her with two seaweed-wrapped hands pressed to his mighty chest, where Elwing supposed he had a kind of heart.

“Little niece,” the Lord of the Waters said, somehow, for his words were the burbling of streams and the roar of the flood tide. He stretched out a dripping hand, and Elwing felt a bone-deep pang, the feathers beneath her skin shivering to attention. She reached out a shaking hand in return and placed it on his cool, wet palm, beneath which all the waters of the world rushed and tugged at the blood in her veins. Gradually, her heartbeat slowed, holding the hand of the sea and the waterfalls, which, after all, she had known from the moment of her birth.

“Elwing,” breathed the wind. Ulu withdrew his hand, leaving Elwing wet to the elbow. She turned to face Thû, Aran Einior, the king of the air in Elwing’s lungs, which even still came short and harsh.

She looked him in the eye, or tried to. Where eyes would be, bouquets of blue wings sprouted, feathers trembling in an unfelt breeze. The feathers of bluebirds and buntings and others Elwing could not name all shone in sky colors, yet Elwing was beheld. She felt it all around her, wherever the air pressed against her skin.

“For the sake of your people, and the sake of your husband, and the sake of all living creatures across the sea, you came to us on my wind, ocean-daughter, forest-daughter. For the sake of love, you braved the shores of the Undying Lands, though they are forbidden you for the span of your mortal life. Yet I knew your grandmother, and her mother, before you.”

The Elder King lifted an arm, where great feathers trailed from his palm to the ground, and from the sleeve of his sapphire robe flew a commonplace brown nightingale, which flew around Elwing’s head and sang a short, piercing song. Elwing raised a hand, but the plain little bird was gone.

Thû spoke again. “Eloquently and bravely your husband spoke for you, Eärendil the Mariner, star of Men. But I would hear you speak for yourself, Elwing of Sirion. Do you plead for mercy, aye, even for those to whom you owe nothing?”

As his voice faded, Elwing found the racing of her heart transmuting. It was not the rabbit-beat of prey or awe, but the hard thud of anger. They called her here because they doubted Eärendil? They summoned her, as though they had decided to make up for time lost ignoring her ships, her drowned sailors, the cries of parents and orphans and all innocents? They asked her if she meant her mercy, when it was all she clung to in the face of her lost world, when they had offered it to her open-handed? Did they think her only a child, a little niece of greater foremothers, to be taken up and transformed and only held to the mildest of expectations?

“We cannot all owe people nothing!” she cried, aware as she did so that her voice roiled and bounced around the hallowed confines of the holy circle, where no Edain had ever stood, let alone yelled. She stamped her foot — she could not be more ridiculous in the sight of the ineffable forces of the world, and she meant it. The reverberations traveled up her legs and into her pelvis and spine, and with a snap of the shoulders, she shook her arms into wings. Let the King of the Air enjoy her feathers!

“I thought you saw all that went on in all corners of the earth, Aran Einior,” she said, and beside her, heard Eärendil huff in shocked laughter. “Have your eyes ever been turned from me? I told the Queen of Alqualondë that my principle is mercy: I believe I know it better than some, or at least, I hope to practice it better.” She flushed. This hectoring was the worst part of her as a mother, she knew, but oh, who would not rail and rant if it was certain a god would hear?

“If you called me here to cross-examine me before you lay on your punishment for sullying your cloister, then make haste. I am mortal, after all.”

Abruptly, her words dried up, her throat closing behind them. She went to place her hands on her hips, which had, after all, always worked with the boys, then found that she still had wings, and no queenly thoughts to banish them. This was, after all, as far as she had ever hoped to get, and she could see no farther.

“You are very like your grandmother,” said a gavel, dryly. Elwing’s whole body shivered as though struck by the reverberations of a great gong. To her right, Justice sat beside Dream, a dizzying combination. Though the stown-hewn figure’s eyes were covered in equally stony cloth carved in harsh folds, she thought she detected an element of mordacity in Bannos’ voice.

“Will you treat with me like her?” asked Elwing shakily. Eärendil sidled closer to her, standing solid and warm behind her right shoulder.

“Manwë,” said Bannos, and turned his carven head to look at Thû.

“We set you a choice, as we set Lúthien,” said the Bird King. “You entered into peril for the sake of your safety, for love of the kindreds of Beleriand. We do not seek to punish you, though mortal lands are forbidden you.”

Do they expect me to be surprised? Elwing thought sourly. The Halls are no place.

“Not the Halls,” said Thû, and Elwing’s heart leapt into her throat. “We offer you a choice. To you is given the freedom to choose your fate: to live the span of your days in comfort in Valinor, then to take up the Gift of Men and pass beyond the circles of the world. Or, you may choose the fate of your mothers, to live on while Arda endures, tied to its destiny, until the end of all things.”

He folded his feathered hands upon his lap. Elwing watched the barbs flutter in the unseen breeze, deafened by the roaring in her ears. Beside and behind her, Eärendil stood stiff as an oak tree caught by frost.

“Go, sit a while, and decide. I will hear you.” As the King of the Powers spoke, the weighty sense of presence vanished, and the Ring of Doom was only a mown patch of meadow, with bees buzzing among the flowers. The only difference was a small spring by Elwing’s feet, which burbled and began to run down towards Valimar as she watched.

Withdrawn from divinity, she sat down hard, as though the strings holding her up had been cut. The tip of her wing touched the water and melted back into her hands, trembling. Eärendil remained standing a moment longer, then slid down beside her into a crouch, his face hidden between his knees.

Elwing watched the dear curve of his ear: not so pointed as his mother’s, not so rounded as his father’s. She lifted her hand to her own ear, different yet than his. The gray strands that had grown in after the twins were born were straighter and finer than the rest of her hair, smooth against her fingers. Her hands moved to her temples, where the beginnings of crows feet showed. Then she let out her breath in a sob and threw herself over Eärendil.

They hunched in the meadow together for a long time. Elwing’s thoughts buzzed around her skull like the bees, never settling, always lifting off and flying away again. What choice was this? Was this, itself, a punishment? If she did not choose, what would happen? Would she be the same as she had ever been, regardless of what she chose?

She held tightly to Eärendil, sure that the same thoughts must be circling through his mind. His shoulders were taut, and he kept his face hidden from her. He mumbled something Elwing did not catch.

“Speak again, beloved,” she said, pressing her head closer to his.

He spoke again, and this time, Elwing recognized the high, archaic speech of his childhood, which he had so carefully trained away in Sirion.

“Choose thou,” he said, his voice thick. “Choose thou, for now I am weary of the world.”

The words were a knife. Elwing bit back a gasp, demands for proof of his safety, a small, forlorn, Why me?

“What if I should choose what you would not?” she asked instead. So it had always been, since they were little children. Eärendil the adventurous one charging ahead, Elwing the little queen telling him where to go. Or Elwing, walking into a room full of grown-ups, and Eärendil following in her wake, proud and fierce at her shoulder. But she knew — this whole listening vale knew — that she did not always choose aright.

Eärendil sighed shakily. “The choice I would make is not a choice of hope. I do not know my own mind. Yet, I would not be parted from you. I told you to stay aboard ship; I was a fool. I will not leap ashore without you again. Where you go, I will go.” He lifted his face, twisted with tears, and buried it in her neck.

Elwing’s own eyes prickled. She lay her head upon Eärendil’s shoulder and stared across the meadow, unseeing.

Slowly, her eyes focused upon the Ezellohar, the tomb of the Trees whose light none of her kin but Elu had ever seen. They had brought light and safety to a few happy souls and left the rest in the dark. When sent out into the world, their radiance had brought with it madness — how well she knew it. Yet, here they were, mourned eternally. The figures kneeling in penitence and grief before the tomb looked as though they had grown out of the stone for the task and would endure into the world’s ending, a sign and symbol of remembrance.

Had her grandmother even paused to spare a glance for the progenitors of her bride-price, when she had come here? Elwing thought she must not have. If she had been old enough to ask, perhaps she would have begged Lúthien to tell her story over and over, the way the twins always wanted Elwing’s stories of travel from Doriath to Sirion and Eärendil’s tale of being towed behind a gray whale through the stormy sea. But she had not been old enough, and Lúthien had vanished into Dor Firn-i-Guinar and left none to tell Elwing how she had chosen, and why.

How had the old song run? “Long ago they passed away, in the forest singing sorrowless.”

And what had she said to Eärwen? “They left their sorrows to us.”

She pressed her cheek harder against Eärendil. She could go back to Eärwen and Anairë as she was, and grow old with Eärendil, and perhaps she would find Lúthien beyond the circles of the world. Might her father and her brothers be there? Might her sons? But if any such thing as a self endured beyond the reaches of the living earth, Elwing had not heard tell of it. And what sorrows would she leave behind, and to whom? And what stories would people tell of her and Eärendil, if they were not there to be asked? Would they remember two more little Sindar boys put to the sword, or would all the young princes of her line be muddled and multiplied and merged into a gallery of like faces, with no one to tell who had preferred their mussels without onions, and who had liked tree-climbing most, and who could play the flute with their nose, and who had died with a gap instead of front teeth, the adult replacements not yet grown in? She had not told Anairë of Eluréd’s teeth. It would pass beyond living ken with her, if she left.

Shakily, she exhaled. Was she weary of the world? She was: stranger, refugee, dispossessed, queen of no people, mother of no living children, failure, craven, suicide. The raw places within her where her family had been ripped away one by one, kelps torn from their holdfasts, ached undiminished.

Yet, Eärendil was warm beneath her cheek. All she had built in Sirion, family and community alike, was ashes. Yet, the capacity remained within her; Anairë had urged her to do it — had even thanked her for it. Every day of her life, perhaps, had been a little death, ever since she was cast out of her home carrying Siron’s salvation and its bane, walking innocently into Dooms laid in motion before she was ever dreamt of. Yet Eärwen touched her body and woke her to more life.

That had been, after all, what Lúthien had demanded. More life: time to live beyond what had been stolen from her. She had been happy; everyone said so. Dimly, Elwing remembered it — her laugh, her smile. But then again, she had passed away; she had left her sorrows to her son, and he had passed away, and left his sorrows to Elwing. And now, Elwing had none to advise her, none to remember how it had been, and what ought to be done. But she had had more life. Years on Vingilot with Eärendil, turning the tiller together. Vibrant weeks with Anairë and Eärwen, braiding and eating and flying and kissing. She would leave sorrows behind her.

She had been crying, she realized. Eärendil’s shirt was wet halfway down his back. Wetly, she laughed a little, and made a last leap.

“I want to live,” she said. “I want to live.”

Then Eärendil rose, dislodging her, and clasped her tightly about the waist. He wept also, dry hiccoughing sobs, and Elwing cried harder, ugly as a baby, fisting her hands in his clothing.

The scent of rain came down around them, a feeling of attention, the sound of many wings beating. Elwing did not raise her head from Eärendil, and Eärendil only held her tighter.

You heard me, Elwing thought fiercely. I want more life.

Somewhere within her — perhaps everywhere within her — something snapped. Eärendil gasped and choked on his breath. Elwing’s knees buckled, but held. The whole world tilted slightly, then was still.

She sucked in one breath, then another. Breathing stuffily through her mouth, she pushed back on Eärendil’s shoulders, holding him at arm’s length and studying his dear, unchanged face with its deep lines across the forehead and its soft, broad mouth, twisted with tears. Her heart went out to him, as it always did, and this time, some other force moved within her too.

Eärendil’s eyes widened. Then, she felt a push back against her own mind, gentle salt breeze and wonder and grief.

“Eärendil,” she whispered, and his warm response made no noise in the clearing, where the attentive presence had been all but forgotten.

Elwing threw her arms around him once again and sent her mind out as far as she could reach, flying without feathers over the land. There was Anairë, there Eärwen. Here with her in the center of all things was Eärendil, flying with her. Offshore, their three companions waited on Vingilot, worried but patient. And oh— oh!

Far, far away, on a distant shore, two minds, two familiar spirits she would know anywhere, though she had never felt them before, shone bright as stars through clear water.

The first hint of autumn veiled Alqualondë’s pearlescent gleam the day Elwing returned to Eärwen, turning the walls of the houses just slightly insubstantial, like a city in a dream.

She rode into the city heralded by birds and children, a jubilant fanfare rising around the hooves of her mare — whom she still sat like a sack of seaweed — and just about drowning out the hisses and protests.

Elwing wore the Silmaril on her breast, brilliant in its light, almost floating in the rippling glory. Eärwen admired the calculation.

To Eärwen’s keen eye, she looked no different, beneath the wash of Treelight preserved. Her hair, with its lightning bolts at the temples, writhed darkly in its bun. Her clear gray eyes looked about her alertly in their setting of filigreed wrinkles. Something of the hawk followed her movements, sharp and graceful, as she waved and nodded to the gawkers.

Yet, she was different. Standing beside Anairë at the gates of the palace, Olwë seated visibly but not obtrusively behind her, Eärwen narrowed her eyes. She had expected Elwing to come back. Lying awake with Anairë drowsing in her arms, sharing pictures back and forth — Elwing naked on the beach, shedding feathers; Elwing robed in silk before the whole city; Elwing staring at the breakfast table in wondering disbelief — she could not imagine any dark fate befalling her. Even so, the clean tide of relief swept her from head to toe, and she opened the floodgates of her mind to share it with Anairë.

Elwing’s head snapped up. Across the teeming street, her eyes met Eärwen’s. Then, a clumsy, inexpert feather of thought alighted on the surface of Eärwen’s mind.

Untutored, Eärwen thought bemusedly, then watched as Elwing’s face split into a radiant grin.

New, came the response, and then she and Eärendil were upon them, travel-stained and almost the same as when they had left, except that they brought mellow autumn on their heels.

For a moment, before Elwing half-fell off her horse into Eärendil’s arms, Eärwen thought she might have known how Elwing’s people had seen her, a young queen with a star around her neck and laughter in her eyes, tempered by a mouth that had known pain.

In Alqualondë, however, Eärwen ruled. Of late, she had run after Elwing, reacted to her coming — her days had been so much standing dignifiedly waiting for Elwing.

You were indeed waiting for Elwing, I think, chimed in Anairë, amusement sweet in her thought.

Eärwen cast her a sideways glance. Be that as it may! It was high time she began, properly, to act.

It was not precisely easy to corral an excited horde of Falmari into the courtyard, and maneuver Elwing and Eärendil into the position of supplicants, graciously given cushions to report back to Eärwen, but she managed.

Elwing’s story, told with great flair and feeling as well as her powerful osanwë of images, as skilled as her mind-speech was rough, stirred all who heard it. Wavelets of feeling undulated through the crowd as she told of her plea, her Choice, the discovery of her sons alive on that far shore!

Standing calmly, holding a mask of proud indulgence before her face, Eärwen watched the light in Elwing’s eyes flare. If she was not transformed, still she was not the hollow-cheeked vagrant bird blown onto Alqualondë’s shores by the winds of fate. Ensuring that one would not die, neither today nor tomorrow, must be strong wine, Eärwen thought, to one who had never possessed that certainty.

Then, with a solemn ceremony in her gestures, Elwing drew out the Silmaril from around her neck. Even Anairë beside her sighed softly and swayed forward into the embrace of the light, the very same that had been the first thing to strike her babies’ eyes as they opened into the noontide of Valinor. Her father made a small noise, hastily stifled. With resplendence in her hands, Elwing sketched out a new plan hatched between herself, Eärendil, and the Valar: the last of the light of the Trees, shared at last with all the world, far away from any who would hoard it away.

“A new star,” Elwing concluded, her voice rolling over the crowd like the wind over the waves or swaying forest, answering the glory in her hands with light from within.

It was effective, Eärwen had to admit. Moreover, she knew it was a natural end to Elwing’s discourse. She stepped forward, Anairë staying behind, watching her, she knew, with a rueful twist to her mouth.

“A star of high hope shall shine upon all meetings henceforth,” she said, a finger at her throat to make her own voice carry out into Alqualondë’s streets. “You are much to be commended, Cousin Elwing, Eärendil, scion of my love. May it be that its light will hallow the next step we Falmari take towards wholeness, as we build the fleet that will carry your mission to the shores of Endórë.”

The assembly shifted on its feet. Only perhaps a third of the sailors and shipbuilders of Alqualondë had pledged themselves to Elwing’s cause a scant few nights ago — not unexpected, from Eärwen’s point of view. The rest should not have to go; how well she herself understood it! Yet, a queen had other points of view as well.

“Children have been born since the massacre. We have done all we could do to survive and to heal,” she said, and made a gesture of her hands learned from Anairë, a mourning gesture. Some in the crowd echoed it back at her, and she allowed her gaze to rest upon them, so they looked up at her and felt understood.

Elwing, any suspicion carefully kept from her face, slowly tucked the Silmaril back into her collar. Eärwen noted this and went on.

“We will never make or know the like of our Swanships, dearest and departed. And yet! We are the Singers, the wave-runners, the people of the shore and sea. The forests of mast-trees stand untended and unharvested, robbing the sorrel of sunlight. Children of ropemakers run messages in the markets, while sailors quarrel over the privilege of crewing the herring run to Eressëa.”

A few heads nodded; others scowled or stayed impassive. It was only true, however, that however wide-eyed Elwing perceived the city, it was not what it had been before the docks were sluiced with blood. For want of journeys, shipyards stood empty; for want of ships, sailors went about as porters; for want of sailors, canvasmakers and ships’ cooks and petty merchants left altogether, or restively moved from one occupation to another. They were all ripe for a renaissance; so too were they ripe for agitation by a beautiful, mysterious princess with a cause and finely honed organizing experience.

“Those who pledged their hands and tools to Lady Elwing will have use of the Hyalmanendë Shipyard and the Marillandon Shipyard,” Eärwen announced, naming the two largest dry-docks, where the great ocean-going Swanships had been so carefully crafted. “These will be fully staffed, and those staff will be paid for by the Swan Throne, until the fleet departs. So too will those who choose to return to ship-forestry, canvas-weaving, and rope-singing.”

Eärwen turned to her right, where Anairë flashed a subtle smile at her, and beckoned. From out of the throne room emerged Arafinwë, with silk-worked daisies on his collar, composed and princely as he walked past Olwë, bowing his head briefly to him, then more deeply to Eärwen. The onlookers stirred, but no hisses or jeers emerged, only a waiting tension. Eärendil, Eärwen saw, had eyes as wide as the full Moon as he looked upon his uncle — who, Eärwen mused, looked rather like his own warped reflection. Elwing slipped her hand into his.

“For centuries of the Sun and Moon, Noldor who name themselves Repudiators have worked to heal the grievous wrong and injury they did us, by raising swords against us or standing aside when others did so, meaning to profit from their bloodshed.”

To forestall any complaints, Eärwen held up her hand. “The deaths of our people and the loss of our Swanships cannot be remedied by any amount of labor. This does not mean, however, that we must demand the same form of restitution forever. While the fleet is built, the Noldor shall no longer work separately from you, but side-by-side with you, otherwise under the same terms, and still under the supervision of Prince Arafinwë, who has led wisely and responsibly.”

Arafinwë leveled a steady look at her, which Eärwen, steeling herself, returned, with the barest brush of her mind against his. His surprised pleasure set him smiling, and he turned at once with a prince’s instinct to beam out at the people, who, after all, had known him when he was their beloved prince, humble and charming.

Eärwen gestured again to Arafinwë, who stepped forward to stand beside her, in the position at her left shoulder that Anairë had once filled, when they three had stood together before High King Ingwë or in the circles of the Powers.

She said, “Upon the fleet’s completion, they will sail with the Vanyar to war. Where once they meant to leave as thieves in the night, this time, they will leave to redeem our family of long ago, on ships built together for the purpose of healing. Then they will depart Alqualondë, and any wounds that linger must be dealt with each to each, not as a matter of rulers and cities.”

Looking out a final time across the gathered people of Alqualondë, Eärwen’s heart beat steadily in her breast. She risked much, yet she felt calm as the glassy dawn waves in the harbor. Standing before her people, with Anairë and even Arafinwë beside her, and her father absent yet present all around her, she could almost remember how it had once been, in those days before darkness struck Valinor. Then her gaze reached the far left of the courtyard, where Elwing stood with her gray eyes alight with interest and understanding. In those distant days, Eärwen could not have imagined her. Perhaps once, she had dreamed of something of the kind for Nerwen, a bright young power capable and sure in herself — but she had never imagined anything like Elwing.

She drew in a deep breath, and concluded. “We are singers and seafarers, and long have our songs been silent and the waves of our home neglected. You may support this cause; you may think it folly, or insult. But to build ships and travel far is to be Lindar: we must not set aside this part of ourselves forever. To all of us, I say: build strong and lovely.”

Dropping the bit of power that made her voice reverberate across the courtyard and even into the streets of the city, Eärwen turned, making sure her robes flared grandly about her, and went into the King’s House, Anairë and Arafinwë at her back, Olwë bringing up the rear. To her intense satisfaction, Elwing’s clumsy, untutored osanwë nudged at her mind, and Eärwen felt her hurrying after — a united front, in the eyes of a simple dweller of the town. Her city was in her hands.

– –

Grand pronouncements required equally massive, but far less glamorous, mountains of work. The newly reopened shipyards required renovation; lodgings and wages had to be settled for the workers; Arafinwë required consultation almost hourly. The sense of efficient pleasure Eärwen took in setting the tides of her people running smoothly came back to her in waves. Perhaps it had not felt like this all the time, in the great before. She and Nerwen had fought bitterly; Arafinwë’s family caused no end of strain; she had chafed at her own restrictions as the daughter of two gloriously competent and popular rulers. Even so, she could not remember such a sense of wellbeing in many long years.

Even so, she made the time the very day after her grand speech to pull Elwing into the courtyard of the Queen’s House, where the hand-leafed maples only just tipped into their spectacular transformation to crimson and gold.

Elwing, garbed in her strange trousers and tunic — a copy of which Eärwen had seen, modified to wrap and be tied closed with a sash, on a petitioner only that morning — walked calmly in her wake. Every so often, Eärwen would catch a flash of wayward thought, Elwing’s newborn osanwë all in pinfeathers.

A small bench of weathered oak sat in a hollow in the azalea shrubbery, looking out to where jagged basalt boulders from the shoreline imitated Taniquetil and Túna in a sward of fine pebbles. As a girl, Eärwen had often found her mother and father here in the early mornings, half-hidden from view, heads together in conversation before the duties of the day called them away. She understood better now the value of such privacy.

She settled onto it, and, after a moment, Elwing followed. Eärwen studied her. She sat very upright, hands folded in her lap. The same repressed energy, that sense of the mantling hawk, still hung about her, but Eärwen guessed its direction had changed. In the stray moments of privacy, where neither Anairë nor Arafinwë nor any petitioner or courtier demanded her attention, Eärwen’s thoughts strayed to her own children, unreachable in Mandos’ impervious halls. Her own energy eddied and spiraled, reaching out to them, then drawing back.

Elwing cocked her head, birdlike.

“Have you brought me here to gently release me from your amorous clutches?” she asked.

Eärwen inhaled a speck of her own saliva and coughed inelegantly. Elwing sailed onwards.

“Or is it that you wish to make me a daughter of your house and keep me in Alqualondë all my days under your watchful eye?”

It did no good to wonder who had taught her these attacks. It was never Nerwen’s way to brightly toss out truthful nonsense. Eärwen looked hard at Elwing, looking, as she had preferred not to look, at her elegant patchwork, the traces of people in her Eärwen had never known.

Elwing opened her mouth to ask another sunny dagger of a question. Eärwen forestalled her.

“Elwing,” she said, “Are you not tired?”

Mouth open, still showing her small, white teeth, Elwing paused. She slowly closed her jaw, her teeth clicking together just audibly. Her hands twisted in her lap, and Eärwen saw the shadows of feathers chasing each other beneath the light brown skin, like mackerel clouds reflected in water.

Eärwen looked back out upon the garden, Valinor in miniature. A jaunty kinglet perched on Taniquetil’s summit, where only the Powers dared tread, raising and lowering its ruby crest. Beside her, Elwing remastered herself.

“That is a question a friend might ask,” she said, a note of apprehension half-hidden in her voice.

Eärwen bowed her head. “I have not been a friend to you, as such.”

Elwing breathed out a small laugh. “You have been other things than a friend.”

Eärwen’s lips quirked. Perhaps, instead of friends, they had been rivals and lovers and the shadows of other people, but she thought Elwing would be able to see her small expressions, as few others did.

“Perhaps I could be those things still,” Eärwen mused. “Yet, I would also fain be your friend. Tell me: are you tired?”

“Yes,” replied Elwing simply, after only a moment’s pause. “To have come so far– To have made such grand choices– and still, Eärendil prepares to sail away from me. Still, the rhythms of my days are yoked to the Silmaril. My children grace the world, but still, I cannot reach them.” She looked out across the garden. “I am very tired.”

Slowly, as she would reach out to stroke a skittish songbird, Eärwen placed her hand beneath Elwing’s. Slowly, she raised it to her lips. She dropped gentle kisses upon each knuckle, then simply pressed Elwing’s hand to her forehead. Those stray drifting thought-feathers darted around her; she felt Elwing recognize her gentle reference.

She held the pose for a long moment. The kinglet gave its double-noted call, a latecomer as excited as if it were high summer. Elwing sighed, and her hand relaxed.

“I do not mean to keep you here with your wings clipped for my pleasure,” Eärwen told her levelly. She straightened, lowering their linked hands to the bench. “In fact,” she went on, more dryly, “if I did — and the idea has certain merits — the city would be yours in a decade. As you have seen to some extent, mine is not a family that shares the throne well.”

“Am I to go wandering with Anairë then, in this plot of yours?” Elwing enquired — but her hand was soft and relaxed beneath Eärwen’s, and her dark, incongruous voice held a throb of laughter.

“If you wish,” replied Eärwen. “It would make it far easier to keep track of you both. But no, my plot is different.” A sudden pang of unwonted anxiety sent her ears twitching minutely. Elwing caught the movement unerringly, very like the hawk.

Eärwen only drew a steady breath, gazing upon the just-turning foliage, and forged ahead. In this case, as in so few things in her recent life, the worst outcome was only personal.

“All your life, it seems to me, you have had a grand and all-consuming purpose. Queen of Sirion, prophet, champion of your lands and your people. Now, that purpose is fulfilled. You achieved beyond the dreams of the Children, and the Powers too — you did,” she added, feeling Elwing’s hand tense. “That your victory was incomplete is the nature of victories. I believe you know well, perhaps better than I, that the thing to do with an unfinished task is to move on to the next step.”

With her eyes fixed on a mossy lantern beyond the Valinorean scene in stone, Elwing replied, “You make a virtue of necessity.”

“Yet it is virtuous.”

The kinglet called a final time and flew away, leaving Taniquetil somehow diminished by its outsized absence.

“I have a task I would entrust to only a very few people,” Eärwen said, and turned at last to face Elwing. She looked very grave.

“I told you of my time as a runaway marsh-princess—” the self-deprecation might ease the request — “and of how Anairë reawakened my spirit. Alqualondë was a different city, then; Aman was a different land. We were all very different people, to be sure. Anairë now deserves more time away from courts and the business of rulers. It pains me that she seeks to leave — but it is her wish to wander, to learn to dance the Music straight again without the trappings of priestesshood or queenship or regency.”

Elwing listened to her closely, her solemn, winsome face closed. Eärwen went on.

“She will come back to me.” This was a truth as deep in her bones as her children’s fëar had been. “To us, if that is your wish,” she added, “Though that is not quite the point I am making at this moment. Rather, in the meantime, I am needed here– I wish to be here, regardless of what Anairë thinks. I have sent my husband, who is, despite it all, still my husband, across the water to where the last of our children yet survives, because we have lost enough, and it is time to set aside the pain of the loss and reach towards what joy can be found in what remains. There is someone else who could use a similar reminder.”

She took a deep breath. “You have seen signs of my mother here. In her house, in my father. Perhaps, though you may not have recognized it, in me. In my daughter. But she is not here. There is no Queen Banilómë in Alqualondë.”

Elwing shook her head slowly. A cloud scudded over Arien’s face, and Eärwen fought back a shiver.

“Do you remember Alpaphilë? You have met her many times now — what is left of her on the promenade.”

“She taught King Finrod how to sail,” murmured Elwing after a moment. A small line stood between her brows, as though confused by the change in topic.

Eärwen would explain. “She was my mother’s mother. She faded — I was not yet born. She did not do so out of any lack of love for my mother, or this place. She only longed to be elsewhere. When she transformed her spirit, she did so in such a way that she might always be together with her daughter and her grandchildren, no matter how different she might appear. She taught my son to sail — she taught all my children; only Ingoldo was the best at it. My mother spent the summer nights on her deck; I was born there, beneath the mast.”

She breathed in. “She burned. She was burned. My brother died, trying to save her.” Another breath. Elwing’s eyes were liquid with sorrow. “You know- you know how it is, to lose a mother, and a child. To lose them all at once, for a woman born in paradise… She would not remain.”

Elwing laid her other hand over Eärwen’s but did not seek to interrupt. Eärwen went on.

“I was a bad example, recovered though I was. My mother went off with Aiwendil, to a little island in the north, where only the seabirds lived. None have seen her since. Mandos declares she is not in his Halls. Aiwendil professes confusion when I ask him of her — she is there, he says, and cannot understand why I find no satisfaction in his answer.”

“And I know something of what it is to fly away,” said Elwing.

Eärwen nodded once. “So I come, long-winded, to my point. The Isle of Seabirds is quiet. It is a day’s sailing from Alqualondë; a two-day ride upon horseback. Far enough for uncontested settlement, yet close enough for frequent visiting. It is far to the north; it is also far east, leaning into the Sundering Sea.”

This was the sticking point, the fulcrum of uncertainty. Elwing watched her carefully, some mask over her vision, only the downy fuzz of her untrained thoughts to hint at her feelings.

“A tower might be built there,” said Eärwen. “It would satisfy the sticklers to have something to build that has nothing to do with war or the Noldor. A mooring for Vingilótë! A jewel in the north. A gift freely given to long-lost kin. And perhaps– if you found a bird among the many–”

“I could do something,” Elwing finished for her, in a voice so unimpeachably neutral that Eärwen could find no purchase on it.

“Perhaps,” allowed Eärwen.

“I would not be a subject?” Elwing asked.

“No.”

Elwing’s mouth quirked. The familiarity of it smote Eärwen’s heart. “Moreover, I would be just far enough away to make any nonsense I might get up to in Alqualondë terribly inconvenient for me.”

A small smile fought its way onto Eärwen’s lips. The cloud cleared from before the sun.

“You would be perfectly convenient for frequent visits when your husband is away.”

Elwing turned her hand over so Eärwen’s was cradled in hers. “Or, perhaps, even when he is here,” she suggested, the quirk of her mouth intensifying.

She has dimples, Eärwen thought. I never noticed.

“Perhaps,” she said again. Elwing’s hand was insinuating itself below the sleeve of her robe, the heat of her palm diffusing through the layers of silk below.

“Should not the lady queen of Alqualondë fear pernicious influence by my populist ways during those frequent visits, when her husband and her meleseldë are away?”

Eärwen took a quick sip of breath, watching Elwing’s eyes darken, a faint golden sheen running over them. “Family friends, and those doing great boons for the queen and her family, ought to be exempt from such gossip,” she said.

“Well, then,” concluded Elwing, her grasp tight around Eärwen’s arm, tugging her closer. “I must discuss with my husband before he sails away, but, on a provisional basis: yes. I will help you. And I will let you help me in this way.”

Hidden in a maple, the kinglet burst into song. Some last bastion of ice hidden in Eärwen did not quite melt, but cracked. It was autumn, but the birds sang as though it were summer still.

Hands on her hips, Anairë surveyed the single pack sitting on the mats of Eärwen’s chambers. Eärwen herself lounged elegantly and disapprovingly across the room from it, icy disdain on her lips and nose.

“You are a nuisance,” Anairë told her, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Outside the paper windows, the rich light of autumn’s first days tugged at her, some new wonder she had disregarded as second, lesser, poor substitute. It made her want to dance.

“You should at least take Maldanar,” Eärwen replied haughtily.

“Did I have Maldanar when I found you in a coastal swamp with mud in your ears?”

Eärwen only sniffed. “You were not a queen then.”

Anairë knelt down to tighten a strap where the pack bulged disobediently outward on the right.

“Nor am I now,” she said, bringing the pack back into true. “I rather like the thought of finding out how much of that person yet remains.”

She hefted the bag, pleased to find it, if not light, then manageable. Most of the weight was food — raisins and salted steelhead, acorn meal and dried seaweed, a single precious packet of coimas from Eärwen’s hand. Otherwise, it held plain capes and skirts, a sewing kit, a voluminous cloak spelled for warmth and dryness. Paper and ink nestled at the small of her back, wrapped in oilcloth. A single pair of white doeskin dancing slippers sat at the very top, Ninkwitāllë’s parting gift, in thanks for a remarkable upsurge in custom.

She hoisted the pack to her knee, then swung it onto her back. It settled comfortably over her shoulders, and she beckoned to Eärwen to fasten the broad hip-belt. Eärwen, who would never do something so undignified as pout, nonetheless managed to look remarkably petulant. Anairë rolled her eyes at her. Eärwen sighed, stood, and walked over. She put her hands on Anairë’s hips, but rather than reaching for the belt straps, only looked at her.

Restlessness itched in Anairë’s feet. All of Aman awaited her, as it had when she was but a tanner’s daughter sworn to Nessa, off to set the Music right where it rang sour. Even so, she stilled the dance curling in her legs, and let Eärwen look at her.

“Tell me again where you mean to go,” Eärwen said at last.

“West,” Anairë replied, envisioning the captivating path as she repeated her plan. “Through Valimar far to the north of Tirion, stopping at the goat-hamlets of the Vanyar: there will be dances enough needed where soldiers have gone to war. Eventually, I will come to Ekkaia, where the dark waters lap at the uttermost shore. Perhaps I will look upon the Walls of Night, should they reveal themselves. In the south, the sacred herds roam the Plains of Yavanna, Nessa at their head. It has been too long since I paid my respects.”

The desire to already be dancing beside the great heartsease-eyed doe rocked her. In recent days she had thought of hardly anything else. Elwing’s safe return had torn away the last remnants of lingering, clinging duty — now she only had responsibility, and that she would fulfill.

She lifted her hands to Eärwen’s shoulders, where her own hand had worked the images of antlered swans that swept across her robes.

“In between, of course,” she said, “I will come to Alqualondë.”

She broke into a grin, and, wonderingly, Eärwen smiled back at her, teeth and crinkling eyes and all. Had they smiled so since the rising of the Sun and Moon? Anairë did not think so. Perhaps they had not even done so since Fëanáro drew his blade on Nolofinwë, in the years before the darkness.

“Two centuries is a moment,” Eärwen murmured, shifting her hands from Anairë’s hips to the small of her back, beneath her pack. Anairë sighed and removed her hands from Eärwen’s shoulders, letting the bag thud gently to the floor once more. At once, Eärwen drew her closer, pressing Anairë's head — neatly braided once more by Elwing, threaded with gold — into the crook of her neck. As always, Eärwen's cool skin smelled faintly of agarwood and the incense with which her robes were stored.

Anairë hummed. Two centuries as Tirion’s ruler had felt like an Age. Two centuries surrounded by her children, deeply in love with her husband, visiting Alqualondë in the summers to see the Swan Princess, had passed like blinks of the eye.

“Go with all my blessings.” Eärwen’s breath tickled Anairë’s ear as she spoke. “Whenever the road carries you back to me, I will be here.”

Anairë pressed a kiss to the side of Eärwen’s neck, then stepped back, careful not to tread on her pack. Picking it up again, she smiled to feel the muscles in her cheeks pull.

“Before you know it, I will be back,” she promised. “Perhaps one day I will even return and find you not here, but at a white tower in the north — or here, but deposed by a similar bloodless coup of your own making and living once more with Arafinwë.”

Eärwen quirked an eyebrow at her teasing.

“Perish the thought,” she said dryly, though her heart panged to think of once more receiving Anairë with Arafinwë by her side, as if they could recapture those golden summers of the Tree Years when all was sweet.

It was not the time for such dreams, however — not this very moment, in any case. She shooed Anairë out of her room and down to the side door where, only weeks ago, they had snuck into the Queen’s House, ponying Elwing alongside Maldanar.

On the threshold, Anairë reached back and caught Eärwen’s hand again.

“I am being silly,” she said. “I am only roaming around until Tirion sees fit to allow me back — I can return to you whenever I wish! And yet…”

Eärwen’s grip tightened comfortingly. “Go on,” she said. “Be not daunted! Go dance and explore and leave all your responsibilities in the dust. When you come back, all will be different.”

“Some things will be the same,” Anairë replied, and, swiftly, kissed Eärwen once on the brow and once upon the lips. Then, hefting her pack once more onto her back, she made a priestess’ gesture of farewell and set out through the narrow back alleys of Alqualondue towards the uttermost west. There, perhaps, she might see not only the Walls of Night, but the sheer gray walls of the Halls of Mandos, where her children and her husband existed in whatever form remained to them. Then, perhaps, she could cease searching with a goal in mind, and only remember to return home when she had exercised her wings. Eärwen, regardless of any changes of heart regarding just how desirable it was to be queen, would be here, in the home of her heart.

–

Passing by Ninkwitāllë’s house, a familiar nicker arrested her stride. The deep rumble of Gondō the Circler growled in her ears, louder than its usual wont. Startled, she looked about her.

In Ninkwitāllë’s doorway stood a dark-haired woman dressed in white — but the lightning-streaked temples and gray eyes gave Elwing away. In the garden courtyard, Eärendil was just visible, vainly trying to keep Maldanar’s muzzle out of his pockets.

“Did you think you would leave without saying goodbye to this gentleman?” asked Elwing. “Leaving him in the stables as a gift with Ulofánë is not the way I would have bid farewell.”

Anairë laughed and shook her head. “He is young still! He needs someone to put him through his paces — as do you, if you ever wish to ride like an Elf and not like a sack of cattail tubers.”

Elwing snorted and straightened from her insouciant pose against the doorframe.

“I have Ulofánë to teach me that; moreover, I am given to understand that the Isle of Seabirds is no place for an exuberant young charger. You would not leave him behind, would you? He would miss you terribly, alone in a strange place.”

Anairë studied Elwing’s face, neither as solemn nor as thin as when she had first met her upon the strand and sensed the imminent, longed-for capsize of her cobbled-together life-raft.

As Eärwen with her blankness, so Elwing with her amusement, she thought.

“Maldanar will hardly have time to miss me, I will return so often,” she said. “And he is only a horse, with a horse’s lifespan. To an Elf-child, my absence will be but a slub in the basket-weave.”

“I am not a child,” Elwing said, and let the mask drop just enough for Anairë to see the anxiety in her eyes. She turned quickly, however, and beckoned Eärendil forward with Maldanar, stepping out of the way as the gelding delicately picked his way over the stones of the threshold.

“You had really better take him,” Elwing said. “One gift horse from an Elf-queen is already almost too much for the sole lonely citizen of a sea-isle.”

Anairë snorted, the wisp of worry for Elwing slipping away. Already, certain troublemakers or hero-worshippers declared their intent to go with Elwing to her isle, though they knew nothing of her quest from Eärwen: she would not be alone. Maldanar pricked his ears at Anairë, and Eärendil gave him a companionable slap on the shoulder, then shoved his hands in his pockets and grinned sheepishly at her. A pang went through her: he was the very image of Írissë with that guilty grin. Already, however, Maldanar sniffed at herpockets, whuffling through her skirt, and Elwing laughed her low, sonorous laugh to watch Anairë shove his head away.

“Very well,” Anairë said. “When we come riding back to your island, thin as rails from lack of fodder, I expect you to treat us as we treated you.”

All at once, Elwing’s face crumpled, and she flew forward, throwing her arms around Anairë. She and Maldanar both startled. Then she relaxed and embraced Elwing, who, after all, was still nearly a stranger to these shores. For all her protests, for all her skill and drive, she was very young. But she was not a child, and she would do well. It would be good for her and Eärwen to needle one another, and for her to have an anchor, in the beautiful northern waters surrounded by the seabirds.

Anairë gave her a last squeeze and withdrew, and Elwing, dashing at her eyes, pulled herself up into a queenly posture, clearly embarrassed.

“Travel safely, and may a star shine on our next meeting,” she said gravely, and Anairë echoed the words back, imbuing them with as much warmth as she could.

At last, she whistled Maldanar to her side, and turned her face again up the steep slope of the city, towards the whole of Aman, where the Music already hummed in her bones, waiting to move her. The first few fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet as she and Maldanar walked up and out of Alqualondë. She slung an arm over his tall withers, already planning the steps she would dance when she reached the lip of the valley and the road spread out wide before her.

The Isle of Seabirds was aptly named. As Elwing stepped from Vingilot’s gangplank onto the striated shore of the island, which was small enough that the far shore was easily visible, clouds of cormorants and grebes and terns took flight, the air whistling and clapping beneath their wings. A haughty white pelican nearly as tall as Elwing’s shoulder merely untucked its great beak from its wing, looked her over, then tucked it back under the other. An array of gulls stared at her in a way that itched at her mind, as though almost– almost–

Elwing filed the sensation away for later. They had not much time for experimenting with speaking in the mind to over-familiar birds.

Beneath her feet, the guano had made for a luxuriant carpet of grasses and flowers, even as autumn approached with its red fingers. Elwing prodded at the turf with her toe, feeling out her land legs. Behind her, Eärendil trotted down the gangplank, then stumbled upon reaching dry land. Without having to look, Elwing slipped her shoulder under his and steadied him, still thrilling at the sense of him that pervaded all of her, beyond the rise of her hair when he was near and his scent.

He wrapped an arm around her and they stood gazing about the island. Already, the Falmari had been busy: a white shoot of a tower like a young sapling reared from the center of the island, a white well beside it. A faint air of incompleteness hung about its rough lintels and scaffolded sides, but it had a roof, and a door, and, Elwing was assured, hot and cold running water from a spring specially added by a particularly grateful and excited Maia of Aulë.

“We had better hurry and settle you in,” Eärendil said. Elwing nodded. Turning her back on the gallery of seabirds, she walked back up the gangplank to gather her small bag of possessions. The stocking of the pantry, the pots and pans, the brooms and prosaic sundries of a home all followed after them with the scouts and crew. The inside of Vingilot, at least, was as it ever was. The hull, hallowed and silver, mithril-clad and shining gently with its own light, felt like a gift of guilt, if gift it was. Eärendil had worked hard on smoothing the shiplap siding of the hull, cut from Sirion’s scant trees. In the light of the Silmaril, hanging securely from the foremast on the circlet Aulë himself had forged for the purpose, the mithril-skin wavered and rippled like the skin of a living thing.

She and Eärendil bustled about the spacious, comfortable first floor of the tower. Elwing laid her precious sets of trousers and tunics in the green-painted cedar chest by the foot of the large bed — big enough for two, and more, she noticed. Over the feather mattress, she smoothed the blue silk blanket that had slept with her in her room — what had become her room — in Alqualondë, the same blue as Idril’s dress. A few skillets and lids knocked about the stone-flagged kitchen, likely the masons’ and roofers’.

Elwing hiked up her trousers and went wading in the tide pools that garlanded the island. With a short knife, she pried at the sea-blue mussels and popped a single red abalone the size of both her hands spread out together out of a deep crevice. Eärendil smiled at the bounty as she came in, barefooted and still dripping, and held out a knob of butter in a twist of wax paper, laughing when she kissed him for it.

They ate a quick meal together of ship’s biscuit and steamed shellfish, just like a thousand other meals they had shared before, though they had never eaten together in such a sturdy house all their own.

They had hardly mopped up the last of the butter — so rich! Elwing still marveled at it — when a deep horn sounded from outside. Eärendil sighed, and Elwing reached out to touch his hand.

Their voyage from the newly teeming harbor of Alqualondë to the Isle had been a quiet one, quieter than their wont. There was little more to say that had not already been said. They quietly gathered up the plates and placed them in the deep basin by the pump, then walked back outside.

Near Vingilot, which was not so much moored as tethered, floating above the waves as spindrift floats above the crests, a more commonplace ship laid anchor, if any ship built by the combined genius of the Teleri and the Noldor could be said to be commonplace. Its sunset-colored sails furled, and a happy cry went up as the pilot spotted them standing near the mooring-spot.

In what seemed like only minutes, the island, previously haunted only by birds and, perhaps, a single persistent ghost, bustled with Falmari, some thirty Avari from the mouth of the Alpasírë, and even a Repudiator or two. Scouts, all of them, who leapt at the chance to crew the first ship to sail to the borders of Beleriand, sending back word to the great fleet that would follow behind them. A few individuals — none of the Falmari — wore swords or long knives flashing at their hips. Elwing swallowed and turned away to help Voranna, who bore only a wrench at her belt, heave a crate of dried persimmons into the kitchen.

Eärendil strode among them, clapping shoulders and trading jests: he was all that was golden and princely, and Elwing watched heads turn to follow him as he went, warmth swelling in her chest alongside the melancholy.

Voranna brought in a final box of fine white sea salt, then wiped her hands on her trouser legs and faced Elwing. She went to seek her copper-haired son, and Elwing had put a word in for her with Eärendil to allow her to crew Vingilot. She was not yet much of a sailor, but she was a fine ship’s engineer, and a dab hand with the strange new parts barnacled onto the hull by the Valar, meant to protect the ship from the Outer Airs and what strange beings Eärendil might encounter there.

Elwing nodded her permission to speak — for those who meant to stay with her, she would have to break them of this habit, but for now ,there was no time.

Voranna nodded back, then said, “It is time. Eönwë decrees that it is the hour for the new star to rise and bring hope to the far shore.”

It was only the message Elwing had expected, yet her heart clenched all the same.

Steadily, with all her training, she said, “Please send him in to me, that we may say our goodbyes.”

Voranna assented, and Elwing called out as she turned to go: “I wish you and your son all good fortune and safety.”

Voranna turned back, bowed deeply, then went out the door for Eärendil. Until he came, banging the door open uncarefully, Elwing leaned against the handsome, broad kitchen table and stared at a knot in the wood grain, heart in her throat, feeling the pulse of wings behind her shoulders.

The sight of Eärendil only made it worse. He saw her face, then took three great strides into the kitchen and gathered her up in his arms.

They clung together in body and mind, rocking slowly back and forth. In a way, it was no different from any of the dozens of departures before. In others, it was worse. Hot tears gathered and ran down her nose, soaking his shirt. All the sailors would be able to see, when Eärendil reemerged.

“You must come back to me,” she insisted, pushing her face harder into the rough linen of his seafarer’s shirt. Eärendil ran his hand down her head, smoothing down the feathers where they burst out of her curls.

“If I do not, I know you will find me, and no ocean or chain or bond of love will stay you,” he murmured in reply.

“I will,” Elwing said, and raised her head to kiss him, salt mingling on their lips. Outside, the horn sounded again.

They broke apart, breathing shakily. Eärendil rested his brow against Elwing’s, eyes tightly shut. Into the space between them, Elwing whispered, “If you find the boys, you must do whatever you must to see them safe.”

He nodded against her head. “Yes. You must do whatever you must to keep yourself safe, while I am gone.”

“Yes,” Elwing replied. Sniffing, she kissed him again, a clumsy press of lips and noses, then stepped back, laughing wetly at herself. She dashed at her eyes, then wiped tenderly at the tears on Eärendil’s dear face.

“Eärwen will be here with the new moon,” she said, hoping it might bring Eärendil some comfort. “Then it is only two weeks until your first berth. That is not enough time for me to get into much trouble.”

Eärendil smiled ruefully and placed a hand on his heart. “Far be it from me, lady, to guess at how much trouble you can cause in four weeks’ time.”

Elwing tilted her chin proudly, ignoring the last cooling tear that ran down her cheek to her chin. “You will just have to look down and see if you are right,” she said, with her nose in the air, and then they both laughed.

Together, they walked out of the kitchen. Eärendil waved and shouted to his crew, and Elwing smiled and heaped all the glimmering charm and thanks upon them that she could, that they would take care of her husband on his strange journeys.

They walked up the gangplank to Vingilot, then drew it up behind themselves, and, at last, Vingilot spread its silver sails to their fullest span and lifted, quite like a bird, from the water and into the sky, the Silmaril’s radiance casting a penumbra of dancing light all about itself.

“Your star shines on our parting!” Elwing cried, and from the rudder, Eärendil stretched a last hand out to her in farewell.

Then, the ship turned and rose swiftly through the air until it was only a beautiful silver speck in the noontime sky. Elwing’s bones ached with the desire to hollow themselves into wings and fly after it.

But around her, murmurs of awe and snatches of prayer still wove through the sounds of the island, the seabirds and the lapping waves and rushing wind. She had, after all, stood and watched Eärendil disappear past the horizon many times before. Then, as now, a milling crowd of mixed-up people awaited some direction.

Elwing put an unfeathered hand to her breast and looked one last time at the beautiful spark of Vingilot far above her. Then, she turned back to her duties. There was a ghost to be found and revived, a party of restless young Falmari to dissuade from declaring their fealty, and a tower to complete. Later, there would be Eärwen to receive into her own home, and perhaps Anairë all unexpected on her doorstep, to welcome as she had welcomed Elwing. In four weeks’ time, Eärendil would dock again from his far adventures: bringing hope and scouting out where the force he and Elwing had won might do the most to rescue whatever was left of the lands of their birth. When they arrived, separately or together, they would want for food and loving company and good lodging. The island wanted caretaking and relief from its haunting. The birds, perhaps, would be friends.

If it was not her home yet — if it would never harbor her children — still, it was hers. Still, there were those who would look to her for shelter.

Elwing clapped her hands, looked across the island and its set of fractious new inhabitants, and set to work. Perhaps in the evening, she would go flying.

.