[Selas POV]
The wall was finished in Year Eight of the Avari and promptly became too small.
Caldor's crews extended it three years later, and the new perimeter was too small by the time it closed. We built a third ring in Year Nineteen, this one set much further out, with allowance for gardens and orchards that were not yet planted and for houses that had not yet been built.
Inside the rings, the settlement tightened.
The crooked clusters of huts we had inherited from before the Sundering had, one by one, been replaced. Real houses went up in their place — framed, roofed, built to weather rain and cold and the slow subsidence of old ground. Some were wood. The newer ones, more and more of them, were stone. That was the real surprise of the second decade.
It started with a nudge.
Early in Year Seven, I had been watching the potters work their kilns and thinking about limestone. There were deposits south of the settlement, pale veins of chalky rock running through the clay beds.
I knew what those deposits could become. But knowing a thing and handing it to someone fully formed are two different acts, and the second one kills something that the first one doesn't.
So I didn't explain. I pointed.
"That white stone you keep clearing out of the clay pits," I said to two Lindar women who ran the southern kilns. "What happens if you heat it the way you heat clay?"
They looked at each other. Then at me. Then at the stone.
"We hadn't tried," the older one said.
"Try," I said. "And when whatever comes out of the kiln cools down, crush it to powder and mix it with water and sand. See what happens."
I left it at that.
Three weeks later they came back up from the pits, very dusty, very excited, and very certain they had found something.
The powder from the heated limestone, mixed with water and sand, had set. Hardened into something closer to rock than to clay, and it was still getting harder.
They brought a sample to me.
"Look at this," the older one said, unwrapping a cloth. Inside lay a fist-sized block, roughly rectangular. Smooth on one face where it had been poured flat against a board. Grainy on the other sides.
I set it down on the table very carefully.
They had done the work. I had pointed at a rock and asked a question. Everything between that question and this block — the kiln temperature, theite ratio, theite mixing, the curing time — that was theirs. Their hands, their instinct, their craft.
"This is a marvel," I said, and I meant it. "I am going to ask you both to train apprentices, to write down every step of what you have done, and to keep a great deal of it coming. We are going to build houses out of this."
They glowed.
I took to calling the powder cement and the hardened blocks stone — no special name.
That was the pattern I had learned to trust. Point at the right rock. Ask the right question. Then get out of the way.
By Year Twelve, half the new houses in the settlement were stone. By Year Twenty, almost all of them were.
[Year 1120. Deep summer. The forge complex]
[Eol POV]
The first bronze sword Eol ever made he snapped across his own knee, testing it.
The second one bent when the young warrior trying it out struck too hard against a stone. The third one held. The fourth was better. The fifth was almost a real weapon. By the sixth he was starting to understand what he was doing.
That was five years ago.
Now he stood at the head of a proper forge — not the pit he had started with, but a complex of six hearths under a long timber shed, with bellows worked by apprentices and quenching troughs large enough to dunk a body in.
Twenty-eight apprentices and journeymen answered to him. Five under-masters handled their own projects when he was not looking over their shoulders.
The Avari had bronze.
The transition had taken Eol fifteen Years of the Trees, and he was still a little shocked at himself for having managed it.
But today he was holding something else.
Not bronze. Not the good amber bronze he had gotten so comfortable with.
Iron.
A lump of iron, about the length of his hand, pulled from the forge that morning and hammered flat in three stages. It was ugly. It was full of slag and dark spots and he was not sure he could make a blade out of it without the blade shattering the first time someone swung it hard.
But the metal itself was iron, and it was not bog-iron spongework either — it was something denser, something that had held an edge during the test-scrape.
A beginning.
"Tavor."
His old apprentice, now a master in his own right, came over. Tavor had a short silver beard. He had been Eol's shadow for so long that he did not have to be told what was in the cloth before Eol unfolded it.
"How much?" Tavor asked.
"This one lump. That's all. The rest of the batch was useless."
"Chief will want to see it."
"Selas can't have it yet," Eol said, and heard his own voice go a little flat. "Tavor, understand me. This is not a weapon. This is an object I can show the Council, so they stop looking at me like I am holding them back. But it is not a sword. It is not even a knife worth carrying. It is one lump of iron in twenty Years of the Trees of work, and I have no idea when the next lump is coming, because the bog beds are almost gone."
"The bog beds?"
"Gone. A season more, maybe two. We have used them hard. I have been telling you this for three years, and you have not been listening."
Tavor had the good grace to look at his own boots.
"I know," Eol said, more gently. "I have been hoping too. I have been opening new pits on every hunch, and every hunch has given me less than the last one. There is no true iron bed within a day's walk of this settlement. I have known that for a long time. I have just not been saying it."
"So this —"
"So this is the last iron this settlement will see. Unless I can find more. Which I cannot."
He wrapped the ugly lump up and put it under his arm.
[Same day. Selas's house. Evening]
[Selas POV]
Eol set the cloth bundle down on the table between us and unfolded it.
"Is it —"
"Iron. Yes." He was not smiling. "One lump."
"How much time do we have?"
"A season of bog iron left. Perhaps two." He met my eyes. "After that, we are back to bronze only, and the tin is not here forever either. There is no mine within reach of this shore, Selas. There never has been. We made do with what we could find on the surface and in the swamps, and we have used that. There is no more hiding it."
I sat down slowly on the bench beside the table.
I had known this. He had told me before, in other words, years ago. I had shelved it.
"You have known this," Eol said. A flat observation. "You have known this for some time. You are not surprised."
"I am not surprised."
"Then say it, please." There was a quiet intensity in his face that I had not seen often. "Say what you have been thinking. To me, if to no one else."
I leaned my forearms on the table.
"We cannot stay here forever, Eol. This place is not going to sustain two thousand Avari for another hundred years. Maybe not for another fifty. The fish thin out. The soil is a little tireder every harvest. The game runs further every season. The ore is gone, and there is nothing else to replace it nearby."
Eol nodded. He looked almost relieved.
"The wagons," he said.
"Yes. The wagons."
"Talanor has thought about it for years. He knows."
"Talanor is too polite to ask me to my face. But yes. He knows."
We sat there together for a minute. Outside, somewhere in the settlement, someone was singing. The song had words now, ours, composed by a young man who had never heard any tongue but Avarin.
"I am not saying we leave tomorrow," I said.
"I am saying the wagons get built. The preparations get made. The stores get laid in. And when the day comes that we must go —"
"We go ready," said Eol.
"Yes."
[Years 1115–1130. Various seasons]
We settled into rhythms.
During the day we worked — and I mean worked, the way I had been pushing the Avari to work since the Sundering, which to them still felt unseemly, but they did it, because they had become used to me.
Forges. Fields. Fisheries. Workshops. Building. Carpentry. Tanning. Weaving. Healers. Teachers.
In the evenings we rested.
The music was good now. Bards had invented themselves, a full generation of them, and they had proper instruments — reed pipes, hide drums, simple harps carved from single pieces of ashwood and strung with gut. Songs had verses, choruses, repeats.
Whole evenings were built around them. On festival nights, we would have competitions — two bards trading verses back and forth by a fire, the whole settlement voting with their hands on which one had been cleverer.
We had foot races by the lakeshore in the warm months. Swimming contests. Archery matches for teenagers and adults alike — I was firm that everyone, everyone, learned the bow.
The older ones grumbled but did it; the younger ones shot at targets for prizes and loved it.
[Year 1128. A winter evening. The council-hearth]
[Selas POV]
Here is the thing the histories would not say, because I was not going to say it in any hearing where the scribes could record it.
Twenty-five years into the project, I was not satisfied.
I sat in front of the hearth in my own house on a cold night in midwinter, looking at the latest forge-report Eol had handed me, and I let myself feel it for about ten minutes before I put it away.
We had achieved a great deal.
We had achieved far less than we should have.
In twenty-five Years of the Trees, a human civilisation would have remade itself three times over.
I had given them the conceptual shape of cement, of crop rotation, of writing, of proper tools, of a command structure, of a unified language. Each idea, once seeded, should have taken root and multiplied. Each one should have opened doors the Avari themselves then walked through without my pushing.
Some had. Those were not mine anymore. Those were theirs, and they were iterating on them past the point where I could have told them what came next.
But the rest —
The rest moved at elven speed. Which was to say, not at all, some days.
An idea I pushed in Year Three of the Avari would be mulled for a generation before anyone felt moved to act on it. Not because the Avari were stupid.
They were brilliant — sharper than any human community I had ever seen. They simply did not hurry. Eternity was their first assumption. The urgency I carried in my gut was a language they did not speak, and no matter how often I shouted in it, most of them did not learn it.
And the elders — the first-Awakened and the ones who had been adult at the Sundering —
Those, I had not moved at all.
Maethor was still in the Council. He had not softened a day in twenty-five years. When I proposed new drills for the adult bowmen, he abstained. When I pushed for actual spear training past the age of majority, he did not show up to the meeting.
They were not hostile. They were polite and immovable.
And they were right about enough things, in the language of their own experience, that I could not dismiss them.
Maethor's argument had never gone away: we refused the Valar's call because we refused to be ruled by fear. If we now ruled ourselves by fear of the same darkness Oromë had named, we had become what we refused to become. It was a clean argument.
I had never been able to refute it without, eventually, admitting that I was living in terror of something I had only read about in another life, and asking everyone around me to live in that terror with me.
I could not say that out loud. So I could not win the argument.
So the elders did not train.
So about a third of the adult Avari did not train beyond the bow, which they treated as a kind of genteel hobby.
So the only ones who trained seriously were the young. The ones who had grown up playing my games. The ones who did not remember a life before walls and watches. About six hundred of them, maybe eight hundred, if I counted the half-trained ones who turned out for drills sometimes when the mood struck them.
Eight hundred lightly-trained fighters. Out of two thousand people.
Against what was coming.
I put the forge-report away and stared at the fire for a while, and I did not let myself look at the drawer where the ugly lump of iron lay.
Be patient with them, I thought.
Be patient.
I was patient.
And I was not satisfied.
[Year 1133. The healing-house. Morning]
[Lómiel POV]
Lómiel was the best healer the Avari had produced after Mireth, and she was starting to think she was going to spend her entire eternal life setting dislocated shoulders on young men who did not know how to fall.
"Breathe in," she told the latest one.
He breathed in. He bit down on the padded leather bit between his teeth.
Crack.
He made a noise that was not a scream only because his pride would not let it be one. His shoulder went back into its socket with the satisfying dull pop that meant she had done it cleanly.
"Yes, healer."
"I mean it, Narvion. I will tell your mother."
He paled. "Please do not tell my mother."
"Then do not lift a bowstring for five days."
She packed poultice against the shoulder and wrapped the arm tight. Narvion, who had taken his shoulder out during a perfectly pointless wrestling bout with his best friend three hours ago, slunk out of the healing-house with the bearing of a man who knew he was going to be mocked by his peers for a week.
Lómiel washed her hands and sighed.
Mireth was at the bench along the far wall, sorting dried herbs into labelled clay jars, which was what Mireth did when she was waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
"That's the fourth this month," Lómiel said.
"Fifth. Galen last week, the one who fell out of the tree."
"Galen wasn't wrestling. He was being an idiot."
Lómiel leaned against the table, pressing a palm to her lower back. She had been on her feet since dawn. "Honestly, Mireth, if I have to set one more shoulder from boys being boys, I am going to start refusing."
"No you will not."
"I will."
"You absolutely will not."
"Fine."
Mireth continued sorting, serene and unmoved. "The sport is a good thing."
"The sport is going to break someone badly one of these days."
"Someone being broken badly is the whole reason Selas lets them do it." Mireth did not look up. "He wants them to learn how to lose without losing badly. He wants us to be the people who patch them up and send them back, so the next bruise is the lesson and not the last one they ever get."
Lómiel frowned at her.
"You're talking like him again."
"Mm."
"You've been talking like him more."
Mireth finally looked up. "Lómiel. We used to be a people who had never seen a cut that did not come from a thorn. Look at us now. Count the things you can do that our mothers could not do. Count the things I can do." A very small, very dry smile. "Selas is too hasty. Selas is too loud. But Selas is also the reason any of us know what we know."
"All right, all right."
"He should also find a wife."
Mireth shrugged, placid. "He should. He broods."
"He doesn't want a wife."
"He wants something he does not have. That is not the same as not wanting."
"He's still pining after —"
"Yes."
Lómiel let a silence pass. Then she picked at a thread on her sleeve.
"Some of the girls —"
"You know, right?"
"I deliver the children they will have someday. I know everything eventually." Another small smile, there and gone. "He is polite to them. He does not take advantage, and he does not mislead. He is a good man, Lómiel. He will not love a thing he cannot give his whole self to. And he cannot, yet."
"Because of her."
"Because of a great many things. Her only the smallest." Mireth set the last jar on the shelf and wiped her hands. "Stop trying to put a woman under his nose. When he is ready, he will notice someone on his own, and if you try to help, he will thank you by being twice as stubborn."
Lómiel, who had been deliberating for about six seasons on whether to put herself under Selas's nose and had been abandoning the idea and taking it up again all winter, said, "All right," in a slightly thinner voice than she meant to.
Mireth pretended not to notice.
That, Lómiel thought as she went back to her sorting, was typical of Mireth. She would notice everything and judge none of it and, eventually, let you come to your own conclusion, by which point you would feel that she had been very kind, even though what she had actually done was sit there and wait for you to stop being silly.
Mireth was the person Lómiel most wanted to be when she grew up.
She was never going to grow up that much.
She set down her cup and went to fetch the next patient.
{Image: Clan heads of original Avari families in discussion}
[End of Chapter 9]