Chapter Text
Whitehaven, Early March 2026
The alarm went off at five, as if the world needed reminding that dread could, in fact, arrive before daylight.
Julia lay still for a moment, listening to the house breathe. The Old Post Office held its usual quiet, that particular hush of Sandwith mornings where even the pipes seemed too polite to clank. Outside, the wind worried at the hedges. Somewhere down the lane, a gull started early with its daily campaign against existence, because of course it did.
The sky beyond the curtains had shifted from pitch to that early-March almost-dark, the kind that promised dawn sooner than it used to, but not soon enough to be kind.
She rolled onto her side and found Elrohir already awake.
Not sitting up. Not brooding theatrically. Just lying there, eyes open to the dark, as if sleep had tried him and failed.
“You’re doing the thing,” she murmured into the pillow.
“I am not doing a thing,” he said, very calmly, which was always how she knew he was absolutely doing the thing.
“The silent staring into the void,” she clarified. “The pre-battle ranger special.”
His mouth twitched, almost a smile. “If we are going to battle, I would prefer someone tell the harbourmaster. He seems like the sort to charge extra for it.”
That got her up. If he was making jokes, the world was still technically intact.
In the kitchen she moved on muscle memory: kettle, mug, second mug, toast she would forget to eat. The familiar ache of routine tried to assert itself, the old shape of mornings with Tom, with the twins, with music drifting through the house. She shoved it aside with the efficiency of someone who had become good at surviving herself.
Today was not for looking back.
Today was for the slip.
Whitehaven before sunrise was all hard edges and damp light.
The harbour lay under a flat, pewter sky, the cranes hunched like sulking giants, the water dark and patient. Sodium streetlights threw orange stains onto wet cobbles. The boatyard gate was open, the padlock hanging loose like someone had forgotten how to be cautious.
They were already there, of course.
Elladan stood near the travel lift like a commander who had mistaken Cumbria for a battlefield and decided it would have to do. High-vis jacket zipped to the chin, clipboard in hand. Not because the clipboard did anything. Because it apparently made him feel as if the universe might obey rules if he wrote them down.
Tirwen hovered beside him with a thermos and an expression that suggested she was about three seconds away from making a pun about “lifting spirits” and getting murdered for it.
Meren and Elfaron were closer to the slings, hands in pockets, watching the lift as if it were a creature that might suddenly decide to eat them. Václav had turned up in a coat that looked expensive enough to pay rent on its own, and Thavron, wrapped in something vaguely woollen and entirely ancient, simply leaned against a stack of timber with the serenity of a man who had survived the sinking of continents and was not about to be impressed by machinery.
Calad, meanwhile, was vibrating.
Julia had brought him because she could not bear to leave him behind on a day this sharp with change, and because he had recently decided he was part of the crew. He trotted between boots, sniffed every rope, and kept trying to insert his nose into the slings as if this was a personal invitation.
“Calad,” Julia hissed, catching his collar. “If you get lifted with the boat, I swear to God I will never forgive you.”
He wagged harder, delighted by the attention.
Elrohir slipped his hand into hers, briefly, a quiet touch that said: I am here. I am still here.
A few steps away, Graham’s daughter was already setting up.
Tripod legs clicked open on the damp concrete with the brisk competence of someone who had made “shipyard content” a personality. She adjusted the angle, stepped back, squinted, shifted it three centimetres to the left, and gave the hull a look of proprietary pride, like it was personally responsible for her engagement metrics.
Graham, the yard manager himself arrived behind her, hands in his pockets, shoulders set in that resigned stance of a man about to supervise nonsense safely. He glanced at the tripod, sighed once in the specific way fathers did when their children were unstoppable, and then turned his attention to the actual physics.
Behind him trailed the harbourmaster, a shorter man with a hat and the unmistakable air of someone who had been woken too early and was determined to make it everyone else’s problem.
“You’re sure she clears the cradle?” he said without preamble, eyeing the hull as if it had personally offended him. “Last thing I need is you lot wedging her like a beached whale and blocking the slip. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Elladan’s head lifted fractionally. The clipboard might as well have been a sword.
“She clears,” Elladan said.
Graham made a noise that was almost a laugh. “She clears. We measured it. Twice. You think I want to explain to my insurance that I let a… whatever this is… get stuck halfway down the slip?”
The harbourmaster grumbled something about “bloody hobbyists” and “Instagram” and “if she so much as scratches the dock I’ll have your hide,” and then, with the inevitability of men who complained as a love language, he signed whatever paper Elladan presented.
Julia stared at the signature for a second too long.
This was it. The point where paperwork turned into physics.
The travel lift rumbled into place with a sound like an annoyed animal. The slings lay ready, wide and thick, damp with cold. Men in work gloves moved with practised ease, and the elves moved with that quieter skill that made it all look like a ritual rather than labour.
Elladan stepped into full Competence Mode, and Julia privately admitted it was terrifying.
“Slings under,” he said, calm as a metronome. “Even. Keep her level. Do not rush.”
Václav lifted an eyebrow. “Yes, Captain.”
Elladan ignored him with the skill of someone who had been ignoring nonsense for centuries and saw no reason to stop now.
“Julia,” Tirwen said softly, nudging her thermos into her hands. “Tea. Before you start vibrating like the dog.”
“I’m not vibrating,” Julia lied, and took the tea anyway. Her fingers were already numb in the particular way they always got near water, near rope, near a day that could not be undone.
Elrohir was down by the keel, checking the placement with a precision that was almost gentle. The hull, off-white above the line now, looked so harmless it was insulting. Only the black band of pitch below hinted at what she really was, what she carried.
White Wake, they had named her. A name for the harbour, for radios, for the world of Men. Lindetië beneath, for the song and the sea.
Julia watched the letters on the bow and felt her throat tighten.
A year ago, she had been counting days just to get through them.
Now she was counting tides.
Somewhere off to the side, Graham’s daughter adjusted her tripod again, crouched, frowned, shifted it half a handspan, then straightened with the satisfied air of someone who had decided the universe would look better in portrait mode.
“Ready?” Elrohir asked, stepping up beside Julia.
She wanted to say no. She wanted to say: please, can we pause the world for a moment, I have not caught up with myself.
Instead she nodded. “Ready.”
The travel lift took the weight.
The hull rose.
It was not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the slow, impossible reality of several tons of wood and promise leaving the ground. The slings tightened and the boat lifted clear, dripping last night’s rain, and the air seemed to sharpen around them.
Julia held her breath.
“She’s clear,” Graham called, voice cutting clean through the machinery.
The harbourmaster muttered, “Good,” like it pained him.
Elladan made a small motion with his hand. A cue. A command. The lift rolled forward.
White Wake swung slightly, and Julia’s heart tried to climb out of her ribs and go home.
Calad barked once, offended, as if the boat had stolen his spot.
“Does she clear the cradle,” the harbourmaster said again, because apparently he believed anxiety improved outcomes through repetition.
Elladan’s gaze flicked to the supports.
“She clears,” he said, for the second time, and this time it was less reassurance and more threat.
The lift eased down the slip. Metal wheels rattled on the wet tracks. Everyone leaned in without meaning to, bodies mirroring the line of descent as if they could steady the world by sheer attention.
The hull touched water.
Not a splash, not a grand moment. Just the quiet, unmistakable shift of weight as the sea accepted her.
For a heartbeat White Wake sat there, suspended between states.
Then she floated.
Julia exhaled so hard it hurt.
Tirwen’s hand found her elbow. “Look at her,” she whispered, as if speaking too loudly might scare the boat back onto land.
White Wake lay on the water like she had always belonged there, off-white sides reflecting the sickly harbour lights, mast a dark line against the greying sky. The pitch band vanished beneath the surface, as if she kept her true face for the sea alone.
Graham gave a grudging nod, like he was handing out approval one ration at a time. “Alright,” he admitted. “She floats.”
“High praise,” Meren murmured.
The harbourmaster stepped forward, peering. “Engine next. Short loop. Keep it tight. No heroics.”
They had installed the auxiliary engine the week before, cutting the shaft hole with a kind of reverence and dread, then trusting the seal to keep the sea outside where it belonged.
Tirwen’s eyes flicked to Julia. “No heroics,” she echoed, which was funny, because everyone on that slip was currently standing around a mortal woman who had built a mythological exit route with a song and stubbornness.
Elrohir climbed aboard first, as if the deck were a familiar friend. Then Elladan, crisp and contained. Then Meren. Then Julia, because if she did not do it now she would never do it, and because she refused to be the kind of person who watched her own life happen from shore.
The deck was cold under her boots.
The smell hit her next: tar ghosting up from below the waterline, fresh paint, salt, rope, and the faint metallic tang of the engine housing. A real boat smell, layered with something stranger, something that made her skin prickle as if the world had turned its head.
Elrohir offered his hand without looking at her. She took it and stepped down into the cockpit, heart hammering.
Elladan turned the key.
The engine caught with a cough, then settled into a low, even thrum. Human technology, unimpressed by ancient destinies.
White Wake shivered.
Julia felt it through her soles, up her spine. Not fear exactly. Not only fear.
Recognition.
They eased away from the slip, slow as a held breath. The harbour water was calm, barely rippling, the surface a dark mirror for cranes and gulls and the thin smear of morning.
Graham watched from shore with his arms folded, expression daring the universe to be stupid. A few paces off, his daughter hovered near her tripod, already angling for the exact shot of “my dad said it would explode and it didn’t.”
The harbourmaster stood beside them like an anxious crow.
Elladan kept them inside the breakwater. A loop. A test. A concession to the laws of the coast.
The boat moved. Not fast, but purposeful, her bow cutting cleanly, her wake unfurling behind like a pale ribbon.
White Wake. Of course.
Julia swallowed. Her mouth was dry.
“Just… feel her,” Elrohir said quietly, not looking at her, gaze fixed ahead. “How she answers.”
“Answers,” Julia echoed, because that was the word. Boats did not merely move. They responded.
She rested her palm on the coaming, fingers spread, and for a moment she felt ridiculous. Like a woman pretending at witchcraft on a fishing boat in Cumbria.
Then the hull seemed to settle beneath her hand. Not physically. Something subtler. As if it knew where her touch was and had turned itself toward it.
Her breath caught.
Tirwen’s voice drifted from somewhere behind, amused and soft. “Well. She’s not ignoring you, is she.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Julia whispered.
“Neither am I,” Elrohir said, and there was something in his voice that made her glance at him.
He looked… younger, somehow. Not in face, but in presence. Like a man who had carried a weight so long he had forgotten what his shoulders felt like without it, and now the sea had handed him a familiar shape.
Elladan’s hands were controlled on the wheel. His eyes stayed sharp. But even he, Julia saw, was watching the water as if it might change its mind.
White Wake made the loop. Came about. Lined up with the slip again.
No drama. No accident. No cinematic disaster.
Just the quiet terror of something working.
When they returned, Graham’s shoulders relaxed a fraction, as if he had been holding his own breath the entire time and only now remembered he had lungs.
The harbourmaster grunted. “Fine,” he said, which in harbourmaster language probably meant: I will tell this story at the pub and pretend I hated it.
They secured her again, lines thrown, cleats tied, hands moving with practised rhythm. The boat settled against the dock with quiet obedience, as if she had always known where she belonged.
Julia climbed back onto the slip with knees that felt slightly untrustworthy.
Elladan stepped down after her and, for a moment, stood still beside the boat like a man looking at an old photograph.
Then he cleared his throat and became Elladan again. Clipboard, posture, control.
“She floats,” he said, as if announcing a tactical advantage.
Tirwen bumped his shoulder. “Imagine if she didn’t. We’d have to move to Scotland out of shame.”
Václav sighed dramatically. “I would prefer Switzerland. The shame is cleaner there.”
Even the harbourmaster’s mouth twitched, quickly suppressed, as if facial movement was an indulgence.
Julia laughed, once, and the sound surprised her. It came out sharp and bright in the damp air, and for a moment she felt the strange, almost unbearable sweetness of being alive.
And then the thought hit her, sudden and heavy as stone:
Now we have to actually go.
That evening, back at the bungalow, Elladan had dragged out charts as if paper and ink could tame tides.
The kitchen table disappeared under them. Soundings, tidal curves, scribbled notes in the margins. Someone had left a mug on the corner of one sheet, a perfect brown ring marking England’s last attempt at claiming relevance.
Outside, the wind rattled something loose against the guttering. Early March again, damp and impatient. The kind of night that could still feel winter-adjacent if you let it, but carried a faint softness too, a promise the world might eventually remember how to be green.
Elladan leaned over the chart with a pencil, precise and unforgiving. He marked a window, paused, then marked another.
“We do not go yet,” he said, as if announcing a verdict.
Julia blinked. She had expected urgency. She had expected Elves Do Not Dither.
Elrohir, standing behind Elladan with a mug in hand, did not look surprised. He looked tired in the particular way of someone who had waited five centuries and knew exactly how long a month could be when it mattered.
“Tides,” Elladan said, tapping the paper. “Weather. And practice. We will not take her across on a first outing like fools in a ballad.”
Václav, on the sofa, lifted an eyebrow. “But what if we are, in fact, fools in a ballad.”
“We are not,” Elladan said, without looking up. “And if you start singing, I will throw you into the harbour to see if you float.”
Tirwen appeared in the doorway with another thermos, as if the household ran on caffeine and the threat of Elladan’s disapproval. “So. How long.”
“A month,” Elladan said. “At least. Trial sailing. Handling under sail and engine. Learning how she answers. Provisioning properly. Checking every fitting twice. Safety drills.”
“Safety drills,” Meren repeated, faintly appalled, as if the idea of rehearsing emergencies would summon them.
“It reduces the chance we die,” Elladan said, and wrote something in the margin with brisk cruelty. “Which I have been led to believe is desirable.”
Julia watched the pencil move. Watched him choose a line on the sea as if it was a corridor in a building he knew.
Then he drew a neat box around a date.
“Fourth of April, just before Easter” he said.
Silence for a beat. Even Václav did not immediately offer a performance.
“Why that one,” Julia asked, and was pleased her voice did not wobble.
Elladan tapped again, twice. “Tide height. A good window at first light. Less conflict with harbour traffic. And the prevailing weather patterns are less likely to make sport of us.”
“Less likely,” Elrohir echoed softly.
Elladan looked up. His eyes were sharp, but there was something behind the sharpness, something held very still.
“We do not improvise,” he said. Then, quieter: “Not this.”
Elrohir’s gaze stayed on the chart. “No,” he said. “Not this.”
Julia found herself holding her breath.
A month, she thought. A month of looking at the boat and knowing she was real. A month of pretending, every day, that she was still the woman who had a job and a normal life and did not measure her future in tides.
Elrohir brushed past her and his hand touched her lower back, light and steady. A reminder. A promise.
Soon, the touch said, without words.
Soon.
She asked for the leave the next morning, because if she waited too long she would start bargaining with herself, and bargaining always led to delay.
The request form was online now, of course. A neat little box for dates. Another box for reason. As if the hinge of the world could be filed under “holiday”.
She sat at her desk with the cursor blinking, her throat oddly tight. Outside her office window, the day was damp and grey, but there was brightness to it too. A thin, early-spring light that made everything look a fraction more honest than it wanted to be.
She typed the dates that belonged to the lie.
Then she didn’t hit submit.
Instead she called her manager, because the thought of doing it quietly felt worse. Like sneaking out of her own life.
Her manager answered with the cheerful breathlessness of someone already thinking in rota blocks.
“Julia! Hi. Everything okay?”
“Yes,” Julia heard herself say. “I just wanted to talk about annual leave.”
“Oh good. Please tell me you’re taking some. You’ve been… well. You know.” A pause, gentle. “Where are you going?”
Julia swallowed. “New Zealand.”
There was a delighted little gasp. “New Zealand? That’s huge. Oh, wow. Good for you. You’ll have such a brilliant time. You deserve it.”
Julia forced a laugh into her voice. “Yeah. Thought… I should do something big.”
“That’s amazing. Are you going alone?”
“No,” Julia lied, and felt the lie catch at the back of her throat. “Meeting someone.”
Not entirely untrue, she thought, in a way that made her stomach twist. She was going to meet a shoreline she had never seen, with a boat that listened when she breathed, with a man who had been waiting for home since before her language existed.
Her manager approved it immediately, asked about handover, mentioned deadlines and a couple of routine check-ins, spoke about cover arrangements as if the world was still a spreadsheet and Julia was still firmly inside it.
Normality, Julia realised, was the worst part. It made the lie feel smoother. It made it easier.
When the call ended, she sat very still.
She had told lies before. Lies of omission, lies of politeness, lies told to stop other people worrying.
This one felt like a door locking behind her.
When she finally hit submit, the system chirped a little confirmation.
Approved.
Her legs felt strange when she stood up, as if she had already stepped onto a different map.
She booked the cover story that afternoon, because now that the leave existed on paper, it demanded a world to hang from it.
At home, she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her tea gone cold. The house smelled faintly of salt and paint on her clothes. Her fingers still tingled from the deck, as if White Wake had left a residue on her skin.
New Zealand.
The words looked absurd on a booking site, all glossy photographs and promises of volcano hikes and wine tours.
She chose flights that made sense. Dates that justified the leave. A route that would look plausible if anyone glanced at it. She picked it with the careful precision of someone building a lie that had to withstand contact with other people’s curiosity.
Then she pressed confirm.
Money left her account with a quiet click.
It stung.
Not because she wanted the money. Because it made the lie solid. It gave it weight. It turned it into something that could not be undone with a hand wave and a nervous laugh.
After that, she drafted the out-of-office message.
A stupid little thing, really. A few lines of polite absence.
Thanks for your email. I’m currently away on annual leave and will return on…
Julia stared at the cursor, blinking.
In her mind she saw White Wake on the water, her wake unfurling behind like a line drawn through the harbour.
Return on.
Return.
She typed a date that belonged to the cover story, not the truth. A day that would be believable. A day that would keep people calm.
Her hands shook when she hit save.
In bed that night, Julia lay on her side with her phone glowing in the dark.
On the screen: the New Zealand booking confirmation. Dates. Reference number. A tidy lie.
Below it: a photograph Tirwen had sent to the group chat, because of course she had. White Wake afloat in the first grey light, her off-white hull looking almost innocent.
Julia stared at the two images together until her eyes blurred.
Two worlds on one screen.
She set the phone down, face-up, and let the glow paint the ceiling faintly. Elrohir lay behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth through the duvet, his breath slow and measured.
She thought, absurdly, of packing.
Not for an airport.
For a boat. For provisions. For weather. For a song she still did not fully understand.
Elrohir’s hand settled at her waist, gentle and sure. He didn’t speak.
Neither did she.
But in the quiet, with the lie glowing beside the truth, Julia understood something with a clarity that made her chest ache.
On the 4th of April she would walk out of her front door.
England would be the least of what she left behind.
She would step off her old map, and she would do it on purpose.