[Cuiviénen. Years 1101 through 1105 of the Trees]
The emissaries did not come back.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into years, long slow Years of the Trees that stretched and stretched and stretched.
And in the stretching, the settlement changed.
Not visibly. Not in the way a human town might change under the same strain. No one packed. No one fought. The Quendi were not built for that kind of rupture. But underneath the surface calm, a hairline crack ran through every conversation, every shared meal, every long-familiar glance.
The question had been asked. The question could not be unasked. Would you go, if they said yes?
Everyone was living around the question. Some days you barely saw it. Some days you saw nothing else.
[Year 1102. The training clearing. Afternoon]
[Selas POV]
The games had grown up with us.
Now we played what I was calling, only in my own head, capture the pole. Two teams, ten to a side. A wooden post driven into the ground at each end of a clearing. Touch the enemy's post, you win. No weapons and biting. Past that, almost anything went.
Almost anything turned out to cover a remarkable amount of ground.
"LEFT!" Novë's voice ripped across the grass. "Their left, two on their left!"
He sprinted to intercept, caught the nearer Tattyar around the waist, and brought him down in a tangle of elbows, grass, and a long creative string of curses. The second Tattyar cut inside the tackle and ran straight into Celestia, who put a shoulder into his chest so cleanly that he was on his back before he had finished deciding to be surprised.
"Down!" I shouted from our end. "Stay down, Heletor, you're out."
The fallen Tattyar groaned, staring up at the stars he was now quite close to. "Since when is she allowed to hit like that?"
"Since always," Celestia said, offering him her hand up. Almost friendly.
On the far side of the clearing, Eol was leading a flanking group through the treeline, low and quiet, using hand signs I had taught them weeks ago and which they had since improved on.
Archean held the enemy's pole with three defenders. Reading the field.
Mireth was not playing.
Mireth never played.
She sat at the tree-line with a pile of clean cloth strips, a small wooden bowl, and an assortment of crushed leaves she had been refining with embarrassing speed. Her expression was that of a tired physician who had already mentally triaged everyone in the field and was waiting patiently for the inevitable.
Novë's tackled opponent was going to be her first patient. The one Celestia had hit would be her third. We were already running four games ahead of our injury rate.
"Your games are getting worse," she had told me at the end of the previous week's session. She had been wrapping a split lip on a young Lindar who had caught an elbow. "People are getting hurt."
"People are getting stronger."
"Maybe, but for what purpose?"
She had looked up from her bandaging just long enough to give me the look she reserved for very stupid things people said to her, then she had gone back to work, because arguing with me was not how Mireth spent her energy.
[That evening. Walking back]
Eol fell into step beside me as we made our slow way back toward the settlement. He was favoring his left leg, though if I mentioned it he would deny he was favoring anything.
"You're pushing them hard, Selas."
"Not hard enough."
"Parents have started talking about it. Saying you're making their children aggressive. Those are the words now."
I laughed, a short dry sound. "They see us throw stones at targets and they call it aggressive — fine."
Eol walked a few more steps in silence. Then, carefully, the way he carefully approached a new piece of metal on the forge:
"What if they're right?"
"About the games?"
"About Aman."
I stopped walking.
He stopped too. We stood facing each other on the dim path, and Eol's dark eyes held something I had not seen in them before, something closer to hunger than to doubt. Eol was too decisive for doubt.
"Would you go?" I said. "If it comes to it?"
He did not answer immediately. When he did, it was not the answer I expected.
"The forge is here," he said. "My work. Everything I've built. Everything I know."
"Yes."
"But." He rubbed the back of his neck. "If Aman is really what they'll say, if it is what I think it might be, then there are things there that I…" He broke off, tried again. "There are crafts. Masters who could teach me in a season what would take me a century to stumble across alone."
His hands lifted, palms up, as if weighing something.
"You understand?"
I did.
Whatever I thought about the Valar and their summons, I could not pretend not to understand this. Eol was a craftsman. Finding him was pulling him apart, the rooted thing that loved this place and the hungry thing that wanted to learn.
"You want to go," I said quietly.
He looked at me. He did not drop his eyes. He did not pretend.
"I don't know what I want," he said. "I know what I have. And I know I haven't heard the offer yet."
I let out a breath.
"Fair enough."
[Year 1103. The lakeshore. Night]
"What do you actually think, Selas?"
Novë's voice cut clean through the comfortable murmur of our evening circle.
We had drifted down to the water after the day's work, ostensibly to cool off, but everyone had known from the start that the swimming was an excuse.
The question had been coming for weeks. I had watched it building in Novë's face.
I set down the bow I had been smoothing, the same long yew-style thing I had been trying to make for three years now with steadily improving but still insufficient results, and looked around the fire.
Novë and Olwë were carving small boats out of pine. Tirion was feeding the fire. Eol was sharpening stone arrowheads while Archean bound them to shafts with the patience of a man who has found the right thing to be doing and does not need anyone to tell him so.
Mireth was sorting herbs into a row of small pouches, each one marked by a pattern of knots that only she understood.
Every one of them had gone very still.
My brothers had leaned in.
"All right," I said. "I'll tell you what I actually think."
I folded my hands around my knees.
"I think it isn't random. Something happened. Something made the Valar decide, right now, after all this time, that we need to be relocated."
"Protected," Archean said quietly. Not a correction, a prompt.
"Relocated," I said again. "Protected is a kinder word for it. But they mean the same thing, when what follows is and you will come with us."
"Do they, though?" Novë set down his carving. "Protection isn't the same as imprisonment."
"It is when you don't get to write the terms."
"But we do get to write the terms." Archean, still patient, still methodical. "That is what the emissaries are for. We hear what Aman offers. Then we decide."
"After they have been there for years." I leaned forward. "Surrounded by Valar. Breathing air no elf has ever breathed. And you think they will come back to us as the same three men who left? Able to tell us honestly about a place, when all they've known for years is how wonderful it is?"
Silence.
I watched it land on different faces in different ways. Novë looked troubled, Archean was thinking hard, and Eol's jaw had set in the way it did when something had struck home and he was not ready to admit it.
"That isn't fair," Olwë said, very quietly, from where he was tending the fire. He had not looked up. "You're saying they'll be changed."
"I'm saying they'll be convinced. And people who are completely convinced are not good witnesses."
"What if the danger is real, though?" Archean again, steady. "What Oromë said. The shadow in the north. What if it is real, and we sit here arguing about fair witnesses until it walks in?"
"Then we fight it."
"With what?" Celestia's voice from beyond the firelight. She was honing a knife, and she had not lifted her eyes from the blade. "Stone spears. Target practice. A capture-the-pole game we invented last summer. Against whatever is large enough to make a Vala come in person to warn us."
I did not have an answer for that. She knew I didn't. She was not being cruel. She was just not being kind about the truth.
"We get stronger," I said. "We learn and prepare."
"For what?" Novë pressed. "You keep saying prepare, Selas, and you never say for what. It's always some threat, some someday, some darkness. What if there is no darkness? What if Aman really is just better?"
"Then those who go will be happy there." I looked him in the eye. "And I will have been wrong. I can live with having been wrong, Novë. I would rather be wrong and free than right and someone's pet."
"Nobody is talking about pets."
"Aren't they?" I stood up, because I could not sit still through this anymore. I paced two steps, turned, and quoted Oromë word-for-word, the way elven memory allowed me to. "A realm of beauty and peace, where darkness cannot touch you, where you may grow in wisdom under our care."
" Hear it. Just hear where the stress falls. Under our care. Not alongside. Not with. Under."
"You're reading too much into one word."
That was Ilvëa. She had been quiet until now, sitting with her knees drawn up and her gold hair loose over her shoulders. Her ocean-blue eyes held the firelight in a way I was trying very hard not to notice.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe it is the only honest word in the whole speech."
The fire cracked. I sat back down.
"I was born here," I said, more quietly now. "This is my home. This is where my people opened their eyes for the first time. I am not going to walk away from it because a stranger told me I should be afraid."
"Even if the fear is real?" Archean.
"Especially then. You don't leave your home at the first sound of something coming. You stand in the doorway and you look it in the face."
"That's brave," Mireth said, without looking up from her herbs.
"It is also how people die."
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
Mireth did not speak in these circles often.
"Some things are worth dying for," I managed.
She lifted her head then. Her eyes were dark and steady and entirely without malice. "I agree, Selas. I only want to be sure we are choosing the right ones."
I did not have an answer to that either.
The fire burned down a little while we all sat with it.
Nobody agreed with me completely. Nobody disagreed completely. And that was more honest than a circle of nodding heads would have been, and I would have to learn to live with it.
[Year 1104. Somewhere between spring and summer]
[Ilvëa POV]
She had started following him to the cove.
The first visit had been chance, or so she had let herself believe. The second had been curiosity. By the third, Ilvëa had stopped lying to herself about it, which was something she considered a personal accomplishment.
He would slip away from the settlement in the deep hours when the fires burned low.
Always the same direction. Always alone. Always, she had discovered once she had worked up the nerve to edge close enough to the boulders to see, doing the same strange thing: sitting on his flat stone above the deep water, eyes closed, his soft Light slowly dimming until it was gone, swallowed inward as if he had taken a long quiet breath and kept it.
It had taken her weeks of watching before she understood what she was seeing. Even then she did not quite believe it. It was not that elves could not do this, because she did not know what elves could and could not do. It was that nobody did. Light was Light.
Selas had taught himself to stop it from flowing.
She had known for weeks, and she had not known what to do with knowing, and finally tonight she had stopped pretending she was going anywhere else and walked down the shore to the cove.
He was there, of course, sitting cross-legged on the stone, silver hair pulled back, no glow around him at all. The cove was very dark without his Light in it. She realized she had come to rely, without noticing, on the soft halo of his presence across a room.
He opened his eyes before she had announced herself.
"Ilvëa." His voice was tired but not unkind. She had half-expected anger, and there was none of it.
"I've been watching you," she said, because she had already decided on the walk over that she was going to say it immediately and get it done.
"I know."
"For weeks."
"I know."
She crossed her arms, partly to steady herself. "How long?"
"Since the second time you came down here." The corner of his mouth moved a little, not quite a smile. "You are not as quiet as you think you are."
She took a breath. "Selas, I —"
"Come sit."
"I was going to —"
"Come sit, Ilvëa. If you're going to know, you should know it properly."
She sat.
He did not speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was low and very careful, the voice of someone turning over a small fragile thing in his hands.
"I am going to teach you," he said. "Because if I don't, you are going to keep spying on me until you hurt yourself trying to work it out. And because I would rather one more person know than nobody. And because I trust you."
Her breath caught.
She had prepared herself for anger. She had imagined, at worst, that he might ask her to go away. She had not prepared for this.
"Why?" she said.
"Why what?"
"Why do you trust me?"
He looked at her for a long moment in the starlight, and Ilvëa understood abruptly that she was being looked at in a way that nobody had ever looked at her before, not with admiration, not with the soft bland affection that all the adults in her life turned on her, but with something that was wholly for her, and wholly serious.
[Some months later]
She had learned.
Now she could keep her Light in for as long as she chose.
Now she carried a secret, and the secret was his, and the secret was hers too.
Now she sat with him sometimes without speaking, on the rock, and sometimes they talked, and sometimes she just watched the way he watched the water.
"Do you know what you're doing, Selas?" she asked one night.
He did not look at her. "Not entirely."
She wound a lock of gold hair around her finger, unwound it, wound it again.
"My parents are going to go."
The words came out before she had decided to speak them.
"I can feel it in them," she said. "The way they hold each other in the mornings. The way my mother looks at the trees and then looks away again, as if she has already decided not to get too attached. They haven't said anything out loud. But they're going to."
"I know."
"You knew before I did."
"I guessed. I didn't know."
She turned her face toward him. Her eyes were bright with something she would not yet let fall.
"And you will stay."
"Yes."
"Even if I —"
"Yes."
The silence between them was a taut thing, a rope pulled tight between two anchors that could not be loosed from either end.
"I don't know what to do, Selas."
He did not answer her for a long time.
When he did, he did not offer her a way out. He did not tell her she could make her parents change their minds. He did not tell her she could choose him over them and everything would be fine.
He said, very quietly: "Whatever you choose, I won't hold it against you. I mean that."
And she had believed him, and that had been almost worse than if he had tried to argue her into staying.
Because if he had argued, she could have resented him.
Instead, she had to sit with the knowledge that the choice was hers, and that he was going to respect whatever she did with it, and that her parents were going to go, and that when they did, the thing between them, whatever it was, this thing that did not yet have a name, was going to break against her own obedience.
She pressed her palms flat against the stone.
I am not brave, she thought. I am not brave enough for him.
The water lapped at the rocks. The stars, as always, had no opinion.
[End of Chapter 4]
Glossary
Peoples and Kindreds
Quendi — "those who speak with voices." The name the awakened elves use for themselves in these early days, before any sundering.
Minyar — the First Kindred. In ages yet to come they will be known by other names.
Tattyar — the Second Kindred. Craftsmen and makers.
Nelyar — the Third Kindred. Selas's own people.
Lindar — the singers among the Nelyar; known for voices that carry across water.
Powers and Beings
Vala (plural Valar) — the great Powers who shaped Arda in its beginning; servants of Ilúvatar.
Oromë — the Hunter. The Vala who first found the Quendi at Cuiviénen and summoned the three emissaries to Aman.
Melkor — the fallen Vala. His shadow is reported stirring in the far north, though the Quendi of Cuiviénen have not yet felt it with their own senses.
Ilúvatar — the One. The creator of Arda and of all the Children.
Places
Cuiviénen — the Waters of Awakening. The eastern lake where the elves first opened their eyes beneath the stars.
Aman — the Blessed Realm across the sea, home of the Valar. Also called Valinor.
Arda — the world.
Concepts
Years of the Trees — the unit of time used in the age before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit only by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One Year of the Trees is roughly ten mortal years.
Two Trees — Telperion of silver and Laurelin of gold; the twin sources of light in Aman.