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When the sea calmed, Elwing walked nude out of her tower and into the water. The waves lapped gently at her thighs, but aside from a seagull shrieking overhead, all was quiet. “Uinen, dear,” Elwing called, honey-sweet to conceal her nerves. “Don’t be a tease.”
More quiet. Elwing waded forward, careful where she placed her feet on the sandy, rocky floor of the sea. The water soaked the dark curling hair between her legs; it hugged her around the waist, knocked her about. She singsonged, “Uinen, Uinen, where are you? Your poor earthbound—”
The water rippled. Elwing grinned with heady relief.
“I am not,” Uinen said mind to mind, “a tease.”
Another relief: her body emerging out of the water, shaping itself as it rose so that Elwing wondered, not for the first time, if it were truly made of her thought alone, if it were not also made of the sea. Elwing knew from experience that Uinen’s lips, forming now into pinched displeasure, tasted of salt. Her face sparkled in the sun. Her hair, the auburn of seaweed, enveloped her, hiding the shape of her from sight.
“Are you sure?” Elwing said. “I’ve been waiting.”
The ends of Uinen’s hair danced under the surface. They brushed against Elwing’s hips in invitation. As soon as Elwing stepped close enough to touch, Uinen’s hand lifted to brush flyaways from her face.
Pressure. The tang of sea water on Elwing’s tongue. Dark fathomless eyes staring into hers. The poor souls who’d never known a god’s touch—Eärendil’s poor soul, much as he had communed with higher gods than Uinen, than even Ulmo—didn’t understand what it did to you. To be touched by a god was to down strong wine, except instead of pulling the world out from under you, it grounded you, anchored you so that when you looked into the god’s eyes, you knew you were looking into the very eyes of the sea. Uinen never touched Elwing without transporting her back to the shallows beyond the Sirion, the Jewel clutched in her hand, the sea floor ablaze with its holy light. Uinen’s face had been etched there, in the sand. She’d breathed in, and for a single moment the water had stilled. Then Ulmo had tossed Elwing into the sky.
Elwing caught her breath. She touched Uinen’s collarbone with two fingers, drew a line down her breastbone and curved it under her breast. Uinen’s lips parted. She leaned in. Elwing never tired of this: her mortal touch commanding the attention of the sea.
“Kiss me,” she ordered, and was obeyed.
They sat in the surf late in the afternoon, white foam tickling their knees, and Elwing watched clouds gather on the horizon. She leaned against Uinen’s back, buried her nose in Uinen’s salted hair, and breathed in. “When I was a child,” she said, then fell silent.
“When you were a child,” Uinen echoed. The words were a little flat, what lilt they had not curious but helpful, as if Uinen thought Elwing had simply forgotten to continue and needed to be reminded. She was always like that after they laid together. Distant. It made Elwing think of a calm sea on a warm sunny day. The water stretched to the horizon, stunning, a beauty, and when you stepped into it, you felt its caresses, its care for you. But you were never all it cared for. It had far greater concerns than the small creature you were could even comprehend.
“May I braid your hair?” Elwing said.
Uinen’s head tilted. “You may.”
Elwing kissed Uinen’s back where her hair parted to reveal it. She sat up and gathered thick auburn locks into both of her hands. The water weighed them down and should’ve clumped them, made them awkward, but they fell in perfect loose curls. Elwing hummed. She reached up to Uinen’s temple and separated the hair there into two strands. “When I was a child,” she said, “an Elf called Voronwë told me a story. Do you know of Voronwë?”
“Of course,” Uinen said.
“Of course. Well, he told me a story of a goddess of the sea. She was Ossë’s wife, but in many ways she was his opposite. Ossë raged, but the goddess was calm. Ossë’s voice boomed across the waves, but the voice of the goddess was quiet. You had to listen for it to hear it. The goddess lay on the bottom of the sea. Her hair extended to every corner of it, every place the water carried salt, no matter how distant. It reached a little ways, even, into the rivers of Beleriand. Voronwë took me down to the estuary of the Sirion, and there he helped me pray to her.”
“I remember.”
“You do?”
“I hear all the prayers made to me, so long as they are made near the sea. Yours were particularly…” Uinen seemed to hesitate. Her head turned towards Elwing, and her eyes flickered. “Fervent.”
Elwing forgot the sweet story of her devotion she’d meant to tell. She tried to laugh but couldn’t, and in the end said slowly, “Yes. For years afterwards, I’d go down to the estuary, and I’d cling to the reeds imagining they were your hair, and I’d ask you to preserve me. To not let anyone or anything, not even my own despair, sweep me away. Do you remember that, too?”
The answer was in Uinen’s eyes. Elwing leaned forward until their foreheads knocked together. Uinen tilted her head, and their lips brushed.
“Uinen, love,” Elwing sighed. Once, a thousand years ago on another shore, Eärendil had said that his love for the sea consumed him, that to ignore its call would be his death. Elwing had asked him why he imagined that was not true of her as well. When he’d left again, she’d gone to the estuary and crouched with reeds in her fists, and she’d dunked her head underwater and screamed. She’d imagined the subtle shift in the current was an answer.
Maybe it had been.
Elwing leaned back and set to work on the braid again. “There,” she said when she was done, settling the fishtail among the seaweed. “Something to remember me by.”
Uinen felt the ribs of the braid one by one. “I’ll keep it with me,” she said, and Elwing cupped her fingertips and kissed them.
The clouds came in that night. Elwing went to the top of her tower and looked over the sea beginning to roil with waves, looked up into the starless sky. Uinen, she thought, and, Eärendil, Eärendil! She wished for the clouds to part, for the light of the Jewel to lance between them in answer. But there was no answer.
Time would pass. It always did. A thousand years she had spent on this sandy, rocky shore, whiling away her days waiting for her lovers to return from the sea and from the sky. What did this night matter, she demanded of herself, when there were so many thousands to come?
Rain began to fall. She went downstairs to shutter the windows and wait out the storm.