Fee of Passage by Elleth

Chapter 1

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The sea loves relentlessly; it loves by swallowing what it loves - treasures, people, ships, islands.

Gilmith has known this since her youth, since the first time the dream of the green wave rose above her and took her to its bosom. Her terror drowns her along with her body - until she screams her offer into the roar of waves, until she can breathe underwater, days and days in the sea in its Lady's uncanny, steadying, beloved presence.

All creatures Uinen loves that dwell in the salt streams, but on occasion to love is also to give something up, at least for a time, a promise of future claims.

The water spits her out onto a far stretch of rugged coastline, but the hair before Gilmith's face, clinging wet to her cheeks, is dark, not the elven-silver that she hates because what it promises is unattainable. In time she finds her people, the Faithful ships that sailed before the cataclysm and were cast high into the land. They call her Míriel, not Gilmith.

Míriel scrambles to the highest rock for safety, terrified of death and water.

But over the years, Gilmith comes to welcome the dream, and through many nights and many dreamings standing at the precipice loses its terror. She knows that even if she plunges, death won't get a hold on her.

* * *

Another page of Gilmith's records floats down past the wall and along the cliff's edge to settle on the water. An inquisitive seagull pecks at the sheet of writing, and then, disappointed to find no morsel of food there, it takes wing to wheel among the rest of the screeching colony.

The page - a letter with a hymn to the sea that's written as a song for a lover - sinks as though an invisible hand is pulling it down, soon invisible in the dark water. A shadow glides through it without rippling the surface, and Gilmith holds her breath, almost cries out - but it may have been anything but the Lady. There are whales and dolphins before Dol Amroth, and sharks, and other immense creatures in the sea that even the fishermen have no name for.

She waits in vain for the shadow to return.

The sun is setting by the time Gilmith tears free the last sheet from her ledger. Evening gilds a path into the west out of the shallow bay of empty Edhellond where no more ships come and the buildings are overtaken by the slow growth of olive trees and the swift flowering of honeysuckle.

It's tempting, on evenings like this, to give in to impulse. Uinen loves her, Gilmith knows, and would gladly take her, and the height holds no more terror. It would take only a beckoning hand from the water. But she is not Elwing with some grace on her that would let her live - and the gardens of Dol Amroth lie serene in the evening light when she looks the other way. A window in the keep flashes with light when it is closed, and the scent of herbs hangs in the air, mingling with a salt breeze from the sea. Nothing that merits plunging.

She'll leave the choice to Uinen.

The sun is slipping below the horizon when she's next looking out to sea. The gulls have flown, and some of the pages cling scattered to the rocks far below, but the waves will wash them into the depth before the mussel-gatherers come around with the morning tide, and if anything remains then Gilmith hopes at least the sea will lick the ink from the pages. The ponderings on mortality and on Númenor, and the gracelessness of it all are not for anyone's mind but her own and that of the water. Her brother once found a stack of such philosophizing and teased her in his typical fashion about the angst-ridden ponderings of a woman. But he has it well: easy, kind, complacent. They are twins and she is the firstborn, but he is the one who inherited their father's princely crown and some meaning to his life, while everyone calls Gilmith the shadow of a mother she hardly, and only with hardship and grief, remembers. The only thing she has is a portrait in her father's study that he'd made as a young man while she lay unconscious and recuperating from the wounds of her attack on the way to Edhellond.

If Gilmith could get her hands on it, she would hurl it into the sea with delight. She hates that portrait, that gentle, sweet-faced, sorrowful picture that stares out of every mirror at her in uncanny likeness, but for Gilmith's silver hair where her mother's was dark.

She hates it for the false promise, not for its own sake: She hates her mortality more yet. She hates how it holds her back and tethers her to the earth, and that the plunge she has dreamt of remains a dream. She should hate her father for bequeathing that onto her, but it's her mother who made the choice to bear him children, and then, like a craven, ran when Gilmith and Galador were but babes in arms. If she'd taken them - perhaps things would be different now.

She stretches her legs and rises to return to the keep.

* * *

"Yours is an awfully long face tonight," her nurse chides softly, and runs the brush through Gilmith's hair a second time. A gnarled hand comes to rest on her shoulder, and Gilmith shudders briefly under the touch. Dol Amroth's erstwhile royal healer has passed a hundred years and even with the high-Númenorean blood in her veins, her age is beginning to show. Gilmith has come to abhor her touch, her voice, even her scent, not for her own sake, but as reminders that this is what awaits her, too, one day.

She shrugs her shoulders lightly as though to drive off a fly.

"I was outside on the walls all day. The sea wind always tires me out."

"Because you won't stop hoping for what won't be," Gimîlhazid says around a cluck of her tongue. "Your mother won't be coming back, and the Lady won't be taking you out on the Straight Road. There was no doom on your mother for her to pass any choice to you, so you'll have to make do here and get your heart out of that far-flung place. Valinor isn't ours. Find a lover here to anchor you. But if even King Eärnur is not good enough for you..."

Gilmith shakes her head and pulls the brush free of her nurse's hand to let it clatter to the table. The King of Gondor, too, is mortal, despite the sea in his name.

It's true that Gilmith wishes for a lover, but she doesn't answer directly, only begins to hum the Lay of Nimrodel that she's brought from her journeys to Lothlórien when she still was desperate to learn all she could about her mother to help find her. And she knows her mother loved Nimrodel more than she ever loved Imrazôr, and still her feet were restless - in that at least she was genuine, the one thing that keeps Gilmith from giving up on her entirely, and that alone is her reason to keep clinging to the song. If Gilmith were to love anybody but the Lady Uinen (for that is beyond compare, to hang her heart to one of the Powers, lesser though she may be), it'd be in her mother's footsteps, too.

And Gilmith can't bring the grief her mother ran from on anyone else, nor wants to suffer it herself. She is half-elven, suspended in the middle, and it's not often she's become so keenly aware of it.

"There is no one for me in the world," she says. "Unless the Lady Uinen takes me."

"Her Name Be Blessed," Gimîlhazid adds hastily. "Oh, child. Don't speak so."

"Her Name Be Blessed," Gilmith repeats without thinking. She has been taught to honour Uinen whenever her name is spoken aloud, from the moment she has been old enough to recall the formulas, but she likes to dare form, hopes that one day the water might simply sweep up and take her like the wave took Míriel. It's said, in a legend her nurse claims was passed down among the women of Dol Amroth in secret from men, that Uinen had a hand in the founding of their line, and that none other than Tar-Míriel was their foremother, rescued from the drowning of Númenor, and cast ashore near the very rock where she had built her house, now the site of keep and town.

Gilmith doesn't doubt it. She's had the dream.

"At least she could grant me the pity that was given Míriel. She should have died, and lived."

"Perhaps, but it's not ours to decide our own fate, and she rendered her island as fee of passage. You have no island to give, not even this town, only your own life, and without grand deeds in it, as Elwing's, or Glorfindel's, that never moved the Powers before." Her nurse's hand strokes her cheek. "If I had any doubt left that all of you is mortal, I no longer do. It's the Elves that settle and envy us our flight, in the end, and us Mortals that envy them their staying. You are indeed the blood of Númenor."

"I am also of elvish blood, and why should I surrender a heritage that I never had choice in? There is more elf in me than mortal, and even a little of the Powers, from Melian and Lúthien, if I'm truly Míriel's descendant. Perhaps I should claim my heritage and sail to Aman, and give no other care."

"Now you speak as Pharazôn did, no doubt," says Gimîlhazid. "Careful. And the Straight Road isn't open to us exiles, no longer."

Gilmith starts as though her nurse slapped her in the face; her voice is that sharp. "How then do we know all we know, if none sailed to Aman and returned? I wouldn't come to conquer, I'd come as a supplicant."

The idea settles like a stone in her chest. She strides from the room. There are farewells she has to say that do not sound like they're farewells. She is her mother's restless daughter after all, and her brother is the mortal, so settled in his ways, so accepting that death will come for him in the end, that he wouldn't even understand.

* * *

Gilmith dreams restlessly.

She rises, and walks barefoot from the keep, down and down the rock-hewn stairs that lead through the harbour, and then out the gate. The guards do not see her. There is a storm along the shore, and the call into the west is loud in a wind from Aman that hums through the air, rises from the waves, and envelops her. Her skin prickles with some lightning charge and she is soaked in flying spray in an instant. The waves whip in ways that make the shoreline disappear, glassy and green in the far moonlight across the sea, shining from a cloudless distance.

Gilmith steps closer to the water, mindful of the surge - it's strong enough to wash her away, the very weather that Uinen in her strangeness delights in. It's amid the white froth on the water when they are clinging for dear life that sailors most often see her like an apparition in the water, gigantic as whales and calling them to dance with a voice out of the deep.

"I would give you all I possess!" Gilmith cries, remembering Gimîlhazid's words, only for the storm to cast the words back into her face in shreds, as a rejection and denial. "Only let me cross! The Straight Road is mine to find, why must I languish on this shore?"

She is astonished at the hurt in her own voice. It is not that of a woman denied her birthright, it's that of a lover spurned, for how often has she felt Uinen's touch in her dream, how often has she longed for Uinen's hand?

There are more of her papers in her hand - she does not remember taking them, but dreams are odd and senseless things, and she does not question, instead hurling the sheets into the water where they dance before sinking, and a glow in the water emerges where they touched.

A woman emerges from the waves, trailing hair like water behind her, clad in foam and seaweed, pearls and coral.

"You called for me," she says, towering above Gilmith, fair and terrible. Her dress of foam falls and washes away back over the sand, leaving Uinen glorious in her nakedness with pearls cascading over her breasts, to her hips and to her center. "My child. Daughter of many daughters of one I loved and who feared me so that she would spurn me, climbing to the highest rock to build her house out of fear of my waters, even knowing that I might take her again as I took her from the mountain? She promised me anything I would for her life, and when, if not in the hour of death, can such a promise be most solemnly given? By rights you are mine to claim."

Gilmith's breath catches. Desire stirs in her blood, to give herself over. She should resent Míriel, perhaps, for signing away the life of all her descendants for her own, another woman who bartered with fate, but what Míriel bequeathed her aligns with her every longing.

Uinen studies her from sea-deep, luminescent eyes. "And I know your grief. The books that you gave me, and the pages upon pages of your writing - my maidens gathered them and brought them to me. And you could find your mother at any time if you joined my host, but come to me in waking to make good on this."

"There are ships lying at anchor in the royal harbour," Gilmith hears herself say. "I will take one. I will take one, and sail to find you. Say clearly what fee would you have me render."

"No more than Míriel promised me, for all time, in recompense of the breaking of her troth. I am not cruel, and you would not suffer, by virtue of that which is infinite within you - for even the least drop of infinity remains so. We are of a kind, from before the world. Whom you name Melian the Dear Gift was dear to me also, and it was bliss beyond all that I remember to come and take her realm into my domain when Beleriand broke. I would have you, also, as I had Míriel, and Erendis, and Númenor itself."

"But I would live?" Gilmith asks. She cannot help feeling small and fearful suddenly now that her desire is in her reach, now as she stands before Uinen, whose skin ripples like water, and whose hair is spindrift. She is beautiful, and alien, and Gilmith is afraid.

"You would live, by virtue of that in you which cannot die."

"Then let me seal this pact," Gilmith says, although her voice is shaking, tilting her head up to meet the salt of Uinen's lips, deeply, and as they kiss she is flooded with gratitude and quiet. Around her the storm rises to a pitch, and then abates, leaving only the lapping of waves gently stroking the sand.

"Then it is done," Uinen says, drawing from the kiss after Gilmith begins to grow breathless with need, and holds out her hand. "Come. Come with me, and I will give you a first taste of what you agreed to."

Gilmith takes it, and Uinen shows her, indeed. She rests Gilmith on the sea-floor and truly, and insatiably as the sea, claims her for her own.

* * *

Gilmith wakes before dawn, when the mist of stars is still on the sea. From her window in the keep she sees the shore and the footsteps in the sand, feels the crown of shells that Uinen left her with still tangled in her hair, the pleasant soreness from well-spent passion.

By sunrise she is sailing, and a gentle wind steers her onto the trade routes and far out into the sea, with the glassy green waves playing around her for company, until they rise and rise, and envelop her ship.

The sea loves relentlessly; it loves by swallowing what it loves - islands, ships, treasures, people. And Gilmith has long learned not to fear the plunge.