[Year 1105 of the Trees. Summer]
[Cuiviénen. The gathering ground]
[Elwë POV]
He had lived in a dream for three years, and now he had come home, and home looked small.
Elwë had not expected that. Of all the things he had steeled himself against on the journey back, the old habits of thought that might reassert themselves, the ordinary elf things like his mother's voice and his little brothers and the smell of wet pine after rain, he had not steeled himself against the simple physical fact that Cuiviénen would look small after Valinor.
But it did.
The huts were low. The trees, which he had always thought large, were ordinary. The lake, which had been the whole of the sky in his childhood, was a body of water. A beautiful one. But a body of water.
In Valinor the light itself had been another substance. The mingling of the Two Trees had not merely illuminated a landscape, it had done something to the air.
He stood now beside Ingwë and Finwë at the water's edge, his oldest friends, and felt in both of them the same vertigo he felt in himself. None of them were quite the men who had stepped across to Valinor three years ago.
And his family was looking at him.
His father, Enel, standing proud and shining with anticipation. His mother with both hands pressed over her mouth. Olwë white-faced. Tirion, quiet as always, watching him the way Tirion watched everything.
And Selas.
Selas, last of them, standing a little apart from the family, on a small rise, his silver hair pulled back, his face unreadable.
Selas was looking at him.
And Selas was the only one of them who did not look awed.
Something is wrong with him, thought Elwë, and then he stopped, because he had heard his own thought and did not like the shape of it. Something is wrong with him because he is not dazzled, because he is not smiling, because he has not run forward to hear.
He pushed the thought away. It was his duty now. Valinor was real and good and the offer was real and good, and he had come home to tell his people so, and he was going to do his duty.
Forgive me, Selas, he thought, and stepped forward to speak.
[Selas POV]
Three years.
Three years they had been gone, and then one ordinary afternoon the shore that had been empty was not empty. Four figures stood on the sand, three elves and the tall god on the impossible horse behind them.
The horn sounded again.
Every elf in the settlement was on the shore within minutes. I had moved more slowly than most. I had wanted to see them before I was close enough to hear them.
I positioned myself on the small rise where clan elders traditionally stood, close enough to the speakers that I could be seen, far enough from my family that I could move. Tirion appeared at my left shoulder without being asked. Olwë took my right.
Along the rise, in their proper places, stood our parents.
And Elwë.
My brother.
My brother had changed.
It was not obvious at first glance, which was itself the proof. His hair and his bearing and his height were what they had always been. But there was a stillness to him now that had not been there before he left, the stillness of a man who has been handled, who has been worked on.
He caught my eye across the rise. For a second, less than a second, something in his face flickered, some old familiar thing behind the new composure, looking out through it like someone who has found himself at the wrong window.
Then it was gone, and the new composure was back in its place, and he was stepping forward to speak.
Ingwë spoke first, beautifully. Finwë followed, quieter but sure. They described a land where light was its own weather, where music filled the air the way warmth fills a hut in winter, where the Valar themselves walked in hills that had never known a cold season. They described the Two Trees, Telperion of the silver hour and Laurelin of the gold.
{Image: The Two Trees — Telperion and Laurelin}
Then Elwë.
My brother's voice was quieter than Ingwë's, but it carried farther. It had always done that. It was why the younger Nelyar imitated the way he walked.
"I have seen our future," he said.
"Peace without end. Growth without ceiling. Knowledge beside which everything we have learned here will seem like children's syllables." He paused. His eyes swept the crowd, and each of them carried that presence now, the slight afterlight of Valinor behind them. "The Valar offer us a home where we will not know fear or want or dark again. They ask only that we trust them."
Around me, the crowd was slackening at the faces, the way water goes slack when it begins to pool.
Oromë, behind and above the three, said nothing. He did not need to. His Light lay over the shore like warm fog.
I pulled my own Light tighter. The warm fog receded from my mind.
I looked around.
Nobody else was doing what I was doing. Nobody else could. The Light of the Vala was resting on every skull on that shore, quiet and enormous and kind, and I could see, actually see, looking from face to face, the softening in each of them.
It was not evil. It was a shepherd with his hand on his flock. The hand was warm. The flock was being shepherded toward something that would, from the shepherd's point of view, save their lives.
It was still a hand on a flock.
I looked at the crowd and did math I did not want to do.
Maybe a third were committed to the Journey. The Minyar, almost to an elf. A good block of Tattyar. Some Lindar, the younger ones, the ones who had never stood at the shore with Oromë's Light in their teeth four years ago and had only heard about it.
Another third were wavering.
And the final third were people I knew. Novë's parents. Archean's father, Lenwë, a good man I had sometimes hunted with. Eol's master, the smith who had let his own children come to my games.
Two Lindar families whose older sons had fought in my capture-the-pole teams for years. They were standing together in a loose knot. Not one of them had moved toward the speakers.
They were afraid. I could see it, not of staying but of being swept away by something they could not name.
This was the moment.
This was the moment, and if I let it pass, it would pass, and the crowd would tip on one of a dozen other moments in the next hour, and I would lose them.
I stepped off the rise.
Down between the leaders and the crowd, into the empty space nobody was supposed to stand in.
I did not look at my father. I did not look at my brother. I could not. If I looked at them, I was not going to be able to do this.
I drew a breath deep enough that my ribs complained, and I said, clearly and without shouting:
"I refuse."
The whole shore stopped.
The three emissaries looked as though someone had slapped them gently. My father's face froze halfway through the smile it had been wearing. My mother's hands came up to her mouth. Elwë's eyes widened, and that old flicker moved behind them again, the thing from the window, looking out at me.
Tirion, on the rise behind me, did not look surprised. He had known.
I raised my voice.
"I REFUSE."
The word hit the crowd the way a stone hits water. The silence that followed was not a hush, it was an event. It was everyone on that shore simultaneously running the same calculation, this is a child of Enel, this is Selas, this is the fourth son, this is, and finding themselves unable to complete it.
Elwë's voice came first, cracking in a way it never cracked. "Brother. Explain yourself."
I met his eyes.
Forgive me, I thought back.
I breathed in.
"I am Selas," I said. "Fourth son of Enel and Enelyë, of the Nelyar."
I let the breath out.
"And I refuse to follow the Vala Oromë to Aman. I refuse to bend my will to the Valar."
A single gasp from the crowd. Then a hundred.
"We are the children of Eru Ilúvatar!" My voice had lifted without my deciding to lift it. "Made by his will, each of us with a mind and with freedom! It is our right to live by our own choices! To walk our own paths on these lands! Not to be taken up and carried to a realm we have never seen, to live by the rulings of powers who did not make us!"
Behind me, without my asking, the lake began to churn. Wind came up off the water and pulled at my hair.
"I was born here," I said, and now I was not raising my voice, I was using it. "This is my home."
The wind pulled harder. Someone in the crowd cried out.
"And I will not leave my home because the Valar have decided. That we should trade our birthright for their safety."
My voice almost broke.
"I will make my own fate. I will defend my own home. I choose freedom."
I bowed to the elders.
"I have spoken."
And I turned and walked.
Several deliberate paces along the shore, toward the settlement. Away from the speakers. Away from my family. Away from the gathered elves.
I stopped.
The wind died. The lake smoothed. And the silence that followed was the silence of a world that has just watched something happen and does not yet know what to do about it.
I could hear my own heart beating. I could hear it in my ears, in my teeth, in the roof of my mouth. I had not known it was possible to hear your own heart that clearly. I lifted my chin, because if I was going to be looked at like this, I was going to be looked at standing up straight.
Come on, I thought. Somebody, anybody. Do not let me stand here alone.
The silence went on.
And on.
And on.
And then a movement.
A Lindar man stepped out of the crowd. Grim-faced. His wife behind him, carrying a small child in each arm. A third clinging to his leg. He handed the older child off to his wife and walked three steps forward and stopped, standing between me and the speakers.
He looked at the lake for a long moment. At the reflection of the stars on the water. At the place where, somewhere beneath him, the very first elves had opened their eyes.
He nodded to himself.
Then he and his family walked across the sand and took up a position just behind and to my left.
The first one.
A second family came. Lindar again. They took the position behind my right shoulder.
Then a third. Then a fourth.
Then a Tattyar stepped out, a young smith, Eol's cousin, the soot not quite washed from his forearms. He did not look at the elders at all. He bowed to the lake. Then he came and stood.
Behind me I heard Eol's voice say something I did not catch.
A moment later Eol himself walked past me into the space behind. He did not meet my eyes as he passed. He was not sure yet. He was choosing with his feet while his mind was still arguing. But he had walked.
Novë did not come.
He stood with his parents on the far side of the shore, arm around Miriël, his whole family in the block of Lindar who had chosen the Journey. Our eyes met across the sand. He did not raise a hand. He did not have to. The look on his face was apology enough.
I gave him a small nod.
He nodded back, fast, and looked away.
Archean did not come either.
Lenwë, his father, was committed to the Journey. His mother. Two of his sisters. Archean was the eldest son of a family that was leaving, and Archean, of all the elves I knew, was not the kind of man who broke from his family.
Something in my chest went very still as he went. Archean had been my quietest, steadiest ally for four years. The one I would have put at my left shoulder in any fight that mattered.
He had chosen his family. That was an honest choice. That was the kind of choice I wanted the Avari to be capable of making, even when the direction of it hurt me personally.
I made myself look at the next face in the line.
Mireth came alone. Her family had decided otherwise. She walked across the sand with her small pouch of herbs on her belt, and she stopped beside me, and she said, very quietly, so only I could hear: "I hope you are worth this."
"I hope so too."
She took her place.
They kept coming. Not all at once. In a slow, steady trickle that the elders on the rise could not stop, because there was nothing to stop.
When the flow slowed and then, finally, stopped, I did not dare turn to count. I did not want to know yet. But I felt the weight of them behind me the way you feel the weight of a crowd in a room even with your eyes closed.
Many. More than the stories had said there would be.
The Minyar had not moved, not one of them.
About half the Tattyar, just as the legend had it.
And my own people, the Lindar, not a third but near half. Near half. Far more than should have been standing there, far more than version of the story I remembered.
Oromë looked across the divided crowd. He looked at the elders. He looked, last, at me.
I held his eyes. I had compressed my Light as tight as I could. I was shaking very slightly, with adrenaline, with the aftermath of what I had just done, with the weight behind me. But I held his eyes.
His face did not change.
After a moment, he spoke, not to me, but to the ones behind me.
"You are certain of this choice?"
I answered before anyone else could.
"Yes," I said. My voice was hoarser than I had meant it to be. "We are certain. We choose our own path. We will walk it by our own will."
Oromë watched me a heartbeat longer. Then he inclined his head, not much, not a bow, but an acknowledgment.
"Very well," he said. "Then you shall be called Avari."
The Refusers.
He turned toward the ones remaining on the shore, and his voice changed, warmer, louder, something almost close to joy.
"And you who have chosen, you are Eldar, the People of the Stars. A long road lies before us. Three days, and we begin. Gather what you need. Make your farewells."
He and the mount were gone again.
The shore broke into motion.
The Eldar scattered toward their huts, already beginning the great sorting, and the Avari, stood where they were, because nobody yet had told them what to do.
I turned to face them for the first time since my speech.
They were looking at me like men looking at a bridge they had just finished crossing and were not sure was going to hold.
I made my voice as calm as I could.
"Go home. Secure what is yours. In the confusion, do not let your belongings be taken up by accident or on purpose. Give the Eldar nothing that is not freely and knowingly given. Their Valar will provide for them. We will provide for ourselves."
"Do not be afraid of hardship. We will face it together."
They dispersed slowly, but they dispersed.
I let out a breath I had not realized I had been holding for about fifteen minutes.
Then I turned to face my family.
Mother was weeping.
Father and Elwë were standing very still. Father looked as if someone had struck him in the chest with a piece of wood.
Olwë just looked lost.
And Tirion, a little apart from the others, had tears running down his face.
"Father. Mother. Brothers." My voice came out smaller than it had any right to be after the speech I had just given. "I love you. All of you."
I swallowed.
"I am staying."
No one spoke.
"I need to walk my own path. I hope you can forgive me."
The silence held for one more heartbeat.
Then my mother broke.
She flung herself against me and gripped me so hard that it hurt, and the sobbing that came out of her was the sobbing of a woman who has just been asked to leave a piece of herself behind on a shore. "I love you, I love you, how will you, how will you live, my son, how will you manage without —"
That broke the others.
Olwë was against my shoulder before I registered him moving. Elwë's hand closed on the back of my neck, hard, almost rough, and then his forehead was against mine, and he was saying something through his teeth that I do not think I was meant to hear.
"You're a fool, Selas. A brave, stubborn fool."
"I know," I whispered back.
Father was the last. He stood for one more heartbeat outside the knot of us, breathing hard through his nose, and then he stepped forward and wrapped all of us in his arms at once, as he had not done since we were very small.
I could feel him shaking.
"Are you certain?" Mother said into my shoulder. "Truly certain, my son?"
"Yes."
"Truly?"
"Yes, Mother."
She held me harder.
When at last they pulled apart enough that I could breathe, I reached into my belt and drew out the small stone knife I had made months before.
"What is that?" Father asked, hoarsely.
"Something I made."
I lifted a long lock of my own silver hair, and I poured my Light into it, slowly and deliberately, the way I had learned in the cove over the course of years. I poured until the hair held the Light, until the strand became a cord of soft silver fire that would not fray and not dull.
I cut it free.
They watched, wide-eyed.
I went to my mother first. Took her wrist. Wound the glowing strand around it, once, twice, and tied it. The hair settled against her skin and set as a bracelet, silver and faintly luminous.
"I have filled it with my Light," I said, and my voice was not steady anymore. "It will not fade. It will not break. Let it remind you of me. Let it give you a little light in the dark, Mother."
She wept harder and touched it with one finger as if she could not quite believe it.
I did the same for each of them. Father, whose hand closed over mine while I was tying his bracelet. Elwë, whose face twisted and stilled and twisted again, and who did not speak at all. Tirion, who could not stop crying. Olwë, who held my forearm with both his hands as I tied his, and who whispered, "Goodbye, brother," when I was done, so quietly I almost did not catch it.
By the time I was finished, even my father was crying.
"One more thing," I said. My throat was raw. "I learned something, on the far shore. I learned how to hold my Light inside, instead of letting it burn out of me. And when I hold it for long enough, there is more of it."
I met their eyes.
"I don't know if it will help you, where you are going. It might. Try it sometime, if you remember. Start with breathing. Close yourself in. Hold until you cannot. Do it again the next night. It grows."
Father nodded once. Slowly.
"Enough," he said. His voice was breaking, but he was holding the break off by force of will, because he was Enel, and Enel did not let himself come apart in front of his children unless he had chosen to. "Enough, my son. Enough of gifts. We have a journey to prepare for. And you…"
"We will not forget you, Selas."
"I will not forget you — never. I swear it."
And then we separated, and they turned toward their hut, and I turned toward the place where the Avari, the phrase was strange in my mouth, were waiting for me to tell them what came next.
I got five steps.
"Selas!"
I knew the voice before I had fully turned.
Ilvëa.
She came down the path at a run, gold hair streaming behind her like something in a wind that had nothing to do with weather. She stopped three paces from me. Her chest was heaving. Her eyes were wide and too bright and she was absolutely not going to let herself cry, and she was absolutely going to cry anyway.
"You really did it," she said.
"Yes."
She took the word like a small blow, swayed almost, and caught herself.
"I thought…" Her voice broke. She tried again. "I hoped, maybe, when the moment came, you would —"
"I wouldn't."
"No." She almost laughed, a wet and terrible sound. "No, I knew that. I knew it. I just…"
She stopped talking. She could not find the end of the sentence.
I stepped closer.
"Ilvëa."
"My parents are going." The words came out fast, tumbling over each other. "They've decided. They told me this morning. I can't, I can't do what you did, Selas. I am not, I can't —"
"I know."
"I am not brave like you."
"You are braver than I am about more things than you know."
She shook her head. Tears fell. She did not brush them away.
"Ilvëa." I kept my voice low. "Listen to me. Choosing your family is not cowardice. Going with the people who raised you is not weakness. I want you to understand that. I will not ever hold it against you. I mean that."
"You make it sound…"
"Simple?"
"Yes."
"It isn't," I said. "It just is."
We stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of her Light. Her control of it was still young and it was flaring, unsteady, the way a candle flares when a hand closes around it. She had not yet fully learned to hold it at a moment like this.
Neither had I, I realized. My own Light was not perfectly held either. Not now.
I reached into my belt for the stone knife again. My hands were not steady.
I lifted a second lock of my hair, shorter, just what I had, and poured Light into it as I had with my family. Then I cut it free.
"Give me your hand."
She gave it. Her fingers were cold.
I wound the glowing silver around her wrist.
"For your memory of me," I said. "So that on a road far from here, on some night in a land I will never see, you will still have a piece of my Light with you."
She looked at the bracelet. Her face did something I did not know how to read.
Then, without warning, she seized the stone knife out of my hand.
She cut a long lock from her own gold hair. Her hand was much steadier doing it than mine had been. She filled it with her own Light, which I had taught her how to do on a rock under a sky not far from here, and she handed the glowing strand to me.
"Tie it."
"Ilvëa —"
"Tie it, Selas."
I tied it around my wrist. Gold fire against pale skin.
Her hand stayed there over mine for a breath longer than was strictly necessary. Her thumb pressed once, gently, against the bracelet.
"Goodbye, Selas."
"Goodbye, Ilvëa."
She turned and ran, fast, toward the fires and her parents and the long road west. Her gold hair caught starlight one last time at the top of the rise, and then she was over it and gone.
I stood where I was for a very long time.
The lake made small sounds against the stones. The stars did nothing, as usual. The bracelet at my wrist was warm.
I have chosen, I thought. And she has chosen. And each of us was honest. And there is a road between us now that neither of us can walk.
I lifted my wrist and pressed the lock of her hair briefly against my mouth.
Then I turned and went to my people.
{Image: Silver-hair bracelet on wrist}
[End of Chapter 5]
Events
The Great Journey — The long westward migration of the Eldar from Cuiviénen to Aman. Begins three days after this chapter's events.
The Sundering — The moment on this shore, in Year 1105 of the Trees, when the Quendi split into Eldar and Avari. The oldest and sharpest break in elven history. Everything that follows, on both sides of the Great Sea, begins here.