[Year 1108. Deep summer. The healing-house]
[Selas POV]
Mireth was wrapping a gash on a builder's palm when I came in.
She did not look up. She had a way of knowing who had entered a room without looking, which I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
"If this is about tomorrow's training roster," she said, fingers still working the bandage, "I don't have time."
"It's about Lindariel."
Her fingers paused for half a heartbeat, then continued.
"Is she ready?"
"She think so."
I let out a breath.
Lindariel was the Lindar woman who had come forward first, six months ago, after the council-fire teaching. She had four children already. She and her husband Aeron had talked about it for weeks. She had come to Mireth, and to me, and she had said: I want to try.
She had been holding her Light now for half a year. Not perfectly, but consistently. The body settled into the practice after the mind learned to trust it; that was something I had learned on the far shore as a boy, and Mireth had confirmed it in others.
And 9 months ago, Lindariel had become pregnant.
Mireth tied off the bandage. Patted the builder on the shoulder. Sent him out.
Then she turned and faced me fully, and I saw how tired she was.
"If I lose her," she said, quietly, "or the child, I want you to understand what that costs me."
"I know."
"No, you don't. You think you do. But Selas, I deliver these children. I hold them the first time they breathe. If this one does not breathe, it will be my hands. "
"Mireth —"
"I am going to help her anyway." She picked up a fresh length of cloth and began folding it with the same precise movements she did everything with. "I am going to be with her for the whole birth, and I am going to do everything I know to do. I am telling you only so that, whichever way this goes, you know what we are risking."
"I understand."
[The same night. Lindariel's home]
I did not go into the room.
I sat outside on the stones of the little porch Aeron had laid himself, and Aeron sat beside me, and neither of us spoke for a long time. From inside came the steady low voice of Mireth guiding another woman through pain, and sometimes the sharper sound of Lindariel herself.
Aeron's hands were shaking.
I put my own over one of them. Left them there.
"She's all right," I said quietly.
"You can't know that."
"No. But Mireth is in there."
Aeron nodded jerkily.
Time went strangely. The stars did their slow wheel. Nothing seemed to happen for hours, and then everything seemed to happen at once. A sharp cry. A long pause. Mireth's voice, pitched a fraction higher. Another pause.
And then a new sound, thin and indignant: the first cry of someone who had just arrived without being asked, and was furious about the cold.
Aeron broke down. Not quietly.
I held on to his shoulder while he shook.
A little while later Mireth appeared in the doorway. Her sleeves were pushed up. There was blood on her forearms. Her eyes met mine, and for a second she just stood there with the door framing her, and I understood before she said anything that it had worked.
"A son," she said.
Aeron was on his feet before the word finished.
I stood more slowly.
"Lindariel?"
"Tired, but whole and fierce. Demanding water and complaining about me." Mireth's mouth made an exhausted wry shape that was nearly a smile. "She is going to be fine."
"And the child?"
"The child is bright. As bright as any of them I have ever held." Her voice cracked a little on the last word, and she covered it quickly by pressing a wrist against her own eye. "He glows like a small star."
I went in.
Lindariel was propped against the pallet with a small wrapped thing at her breast. Her hair was damp, stuck to her face. Her eyes found mine and they were enormous and bright with something that was not just exhaustion.
"Come see him," she said.
Wa came.
The baby was very small and very red and very loud, and around his skin, absolutely unmistakable, was a halo of Light strong enough that I could see it even against Lindariel's own glow. He wasn't diminished. He was what any newborn Avari was, and there were already four other children of this woman asleep in the next room, and this was the fifth.
Something inside my chest let go that I had not realised had been clenched for two years.
"He's beautiful," I said. My voice was hoarser than I meant.
"He is," Lindariel agreed. "He is going to be called Lindion. For the song you taught Aeron before he courted me."
"I didn't teach Aeron any song."
"Oh yes you did." She was smiling.
Then I did not rest. I walked down to the lake, and I stood on the shore, and I looked out at water.
It worked.
It really worked.
Something in my theory had not been wrong. Something in my teaching had not been ruinous. A woman had held her Light, had fed what she saved into a fifth child, and the child had opened his eyes into the world still bright.
And then I turned and walked back to the settlement, because tomorrow was another working day.
[Year 1108 onward. Various moments]
Lindion was the first. He was not the last.
Word ran through the settlement faster than I would have believed possible, which was, in retrospect, naive of me, because elves gossiped, and elves remembered, and a miracle does not need help to travel.
By the end of the year, four more families had come to Mireth. By the end of the second year after that, the number was in the dozens.
The Avari had a next generation that was larger than the old laws allowed. And the old laws, it turned out, had been not laws but inferences from the way things had always been.
The settlement grew with the children. Houses were added. The wall wa had been pushing outward for years stretched further to accommodate new gardens. Eol's forge had doubled in size and then doubled again. Bronze had come, grudgingly; then bronze had stopped being a miracle and started being a routine, and the forge had moved on to quietly obsessing about iron.
Other things grew that I had not asked for.
A pair of Lindar women found a clay bed in the southwest, worked out kiln-firing by themselves in the course of two months, and invented pottery without my having to say a single word about it. I praised them in a council meeting. They did not stop glowing for several days.
A carpenter called Orion took the idea of the potter's turning-plate, watched it for about an hour, and came back the next week with two small wooden discs joined by an axle and a short plank laid across them.
A wheelbarrow.
I looked at it. I looked at him. I said, "What else could you do with this?"
He frowned, then said, slowly, that you could perhaps make it larger. That if it were much larger, and drawn by something, you could move a great deal more than a man could carry.
I told him to try.
By the end of the year, we had three carts.
I did not tell anyone what I thought the carts were really for. But I ordered more built. There was always more stone to move, more timber, more harvest coming in.
Always a reason.
The language grew faster than anything else.
I had seeded it with what I remembered, the structure mostly, the idea of letter-shapes, the concept of writing things down so they did not have to live in someone's head to survive. The Avari did the rest themselves, and did it shockingly fast.
Elven memory was a resource I had not fully appreciated until I tried to use it for something deliberate. A word invented at the council fire in the evening would be known across the whole settlement by the next morning. By the next week it would have three variants, two of which were being quietly corrected by whichever elder spoke the best Primitive Quendian and considered themselves the arbiter of good sense.
We had Avarin. Rough, still. Growing. But ours.
And we began to write it. On bark first. Then on thin hammered leather, which held up better. Eol swore he could beat out a copper leaf so thin we could scratch letters into it; I told him not yet, we had better uses for the copper, and he sulked for a week but agreed.
The Avari were becoming literate.
Not all of them, not yet, but enough.
[Year 1110. Late autumn. The unfinished wall]
[Selas POV]
"You look tired."
Celestia settled beside me on the top of the wall's northern section. The last section, the one Caldor's crews were finishing this season. Below us the forest stretched dim and wide and full of whatever lived in it. Above us the stars turned slowly through their long silver hour.
"I am tired."
"When did you last sleep properly?"
I thought about it. Could not come up with a specific answer. Settled for: "Recently."
"That is not an answer."
"I know."
She let the silence sit.
We had been friends for a long time. Long enough that she could sit beside me without needing me to talk, and long enough that she could wait out my deflections if she wanted to. Tonight she was in a waiting mood.
"You made a Council," she said at last. "So that you could share the weight. And now you do everything yourself and come up here alone to stare at the trees. What is the Council for, Selas?"
"They handle what they handle. I handle what I handle."
"You handle everything."
"Only the things that matter."
"Which is, by your definition, everything."
I did not answer. She was right.
She shifted. Leaned her shoulder lightly against mine, not romantic, the way a friend does, an old friend, a sister-in-arms. I let her.
"You are not going to last like this," she said quietly. "I don't care how right you are about what is coming. If you run yourself into the ground, you will be no good to anyone when it arrives."
"The wall is almost done."
"And?"
"The forge is making bronze. The fields carry us through every harvest now with a surplus. The population is climbing. Orion's carts are making timber-running a morning's work instead of a day's. The Council meets each month and does not need me in the room for most of it." I rubbed my face.
"We built something real, Celestia. I know. I know we did."
"But."
"It isn't enough."
"It won't ever be. Not for you."
"No."
She didn't argue. She just let it sit. The wall was warm under us from the day's work of the crews. Somewhere below, a child laughed, high and piercing.
"You're lonely," Celestia said.
I did not turn my head. "I have friends."
"Not that kind."
I touched the pouch at my belt without meaning to. The acorn was in it, still warm, still pulsing against my palm through the leather.
Every evening, before sleep, I opened the pouch and fed it a thread of my own Light. A small ritual, almost unconscious now after five years of repetition. The acorn drank what I gave it and hummed faintly in response, as if something inside was growing without soil or water, sustained on Light alone and patient.
I had not planted it yet. Nothing had felt like the right ground.
Celestia noticed the gesture. She was Celestia. She noticed everything.
She did not press on it.
"There are women here," she said carefully, "who would —"
"I know."
"You are not going to —"
"I am not."
"Because of her."
"Because I said I would carry what I was carrying." I closed my hand around the pouch more firmly. "And because it is my own choice."
She nodded slowly.
"All right," she said. "Then will you at least breathe? Once in a while? For me, if not for yourself?"
I managed a small and not entirely genuine smile.
"I will try."
"That is a terrible promise, Selas."
"I know."
She laughed at that, a short tired laugh. Then she got to her feet, brushed stone-dust off her leggings, and nodded at the horizon.
"Come down," she said. "There is food. People are asking where you are."
[Year 1110. Winter. The central hearth]
The celebration was the largest we had ever held.
Nearly two hundred Avari, two hundred, gathered around the great hearth in the middle of the settlement, under stars and against the outline of the wall that was, at last, complete.
We had finished the eastern gate that morning. Caldor had placed the final beam himself, a thing he had waited years to do, and he had wept openly while setting it, which had made half the crew weep with him.
Fires burned high. The air smelled of woodsmoke and roast fish and a new kind of stew that one of the Lindar women had invented using fresh herbs and dried forest-plums and a liberal amount of what everyone was pretending was not fermented berry juice, but which was in fact extremely fermented berry juice.
Someone had invented wine. Of course they had.
Someone had written songs. Actual songs. Verses and refrains, built to be sung by a crowd around a fire.
The old wordless Quendi songs were still there, still beautiful, still rising sometimes when the mood ran deep. But now there were also songs about things, about the Lake, about the Wall, about the first five-child birth.
Children chased each other between the fires, shrieking.
Couples were dancing. The dances were not elegant. Some of the elders were watching with expressions that suggested the dances were not decent, either. That was fine. The elders had the rest of the long night to be dignified in.
And in the middle of it all, I sat in the wooden chair that Thoron had had carved for me without asking. It was not a throne. It was not not a throne either.
Thoron appeared at my elbow with two cups of the berry wine.
He pressed one into my hand.
"Drink."
"I should not —"
"You should." He sat down on the step beside the chair. "You look like you have not had fun since the Sundering. Five years is a long time to go without having fun, Selas."
I drank against my better judgement.
It was good. Sweet and strong, it warmed the back of my throat and left an afterglow that was either the wine itself or my Light responding to it; I did not care which.
"To five years," Thoron said, lifting his cup.
"To five years."
We drank.
"When you stood up that day," he said, watching the fires, "I thought you were mad."
"I was mad."
"Possibly. But you were right, too." He gestured out at the crowd. "Look at them, Selas."
I looked.
I saw Eol near the big fire, a cup in one hand, the other hand working the air as he described something to a circle of apprentices. He was demonstrating a hammer-technique. He did not need to demonstrate it. They had seen it a hundred times. He just wanted an excuse to talk about the forge, and they were letting him.
I saw Celestia on the far side of the hearth, sitting on a log between two of her trainees, each of whom had bruises from the morning's drill and was still mad at her about it, and all three of them were laughing.
I saw Mireth standing by the healing-tent door, where she had apparently been called away from the party by a small boy with a cut hand, and she was crouched down listening to him with the same unhurried serious attention she gave everyone and everything.
I saw a little girl I did not know the name of running in circles with another little girl while a third girl tried to catch them both.
I saw, at the edge of the light, Maethor, standing with his wife's arm threaded through his elbow. He was watching the dance and he was not smiling. But he was not leaving, either. He was simply standing. Maethor, who disagreed with me on nearly every tactical choice I had made for five years running, was here, at the hearth, on the night we finished the wall.
He turned his head slightly and caught my eye across the fire.
He did not smile. He did nod, once, very small.
I returned it.
Whatever we disagreed about, we were both still here. Both still Avari.
I touched the pouch at my belt. The acorn was warm against my fingers.
Thoron followed the small movement. Did not comment on it.
"Happy Five Years, Chief," he said instead.
"Happy Five Years, Thoron."
We drank again.
Beyond the wall, the forest was dark.
Beyond the forest, somewhere very far to the north, a place I had only ever read about was breeding things whose names I did not want to say out loud, on the chance that names here still had weight.
But that was a problem for tomorrow, or for the tomorrow after that, or for the tomorrow ten years from now. Tonight we had finished the wall.
[End of Chapter 8]