Paul had known that Flann would be awake. She had probably slept no more than his father had the night before, and no more on any of the other nights. The ladies said she was having a difficult pregnancy—but at least she was having it.
She looked up and smiled. “Good morning to you, Paul.”
Paul rolled over, turning his back to the pink window and its piercing dawn. The days were already growing shorter, though even to an elf the change was imperceptible as yet. But he loved the sunrise, and he would soon rise himself to watch it as he did every day, no matter how short the night and how little he had slept.
Still, he found himself looking forward to the dark half of the year, and especially early winter, when the nights were longer than needed for sleep, and an elf and his wife would be obliged to find something else to do with their time in bed.
“Stay in your bed, Rua,” her father warned as he went to open the door.
“But it sounds like Vash!”
Malcolm silently asked the Lord why it was that just when a man’s firstborn got to sleeping till dawn, his secondborn came along. He was beginning to fear that he would have to do as his father had done in the early days of his marriage: go to war frequently just for the chance to get a full night’s sleep.
Fortunately he was only a father and not a mother, and when the baby cried he was permitted to squint his eyes against the moonlight and try to go back to sleep.
Vash knew what that face meant. There were the eager, uplifted eyes, and there the lips parted in a breathless smile. It was a look of timid love. It was a look of joy restrained.
For years he and Iylaine had each pretended to feel nothing but cousinly affection for the other, so masterfully that both had been fooled—even he, who should have known better. He had learned too late what that face meant.
Hila was trying to slow herself to a walk, but the hill was so steep that she skipped and skittered a long way down.
Meanwhile Kia kept running, as if she had not seen the stranger at all.
“Son of a serpent! Is that a baby or a chin with diapers?”
“My son, the chin,” Godefroy chuckled.
The old elf Elara met Lar outside of her little cottage—politely, but it was clear she was frightened to see him. It was no wonder: the elves knew that time was a wheel and life a series of recurrences, and anything that had never happened before was necessarily troubling.
He had never come before.
Britamund had not been foolish enough to expect a cozy chat with her father, but she had hoped he had only wanted to discuss some detail of her wedding.
As soon as she saw the little pink casket on his table, she understood. She understood that someone—most likely he—had searched her room. He had found her letters. He had read them.
“I think I can help you.”
Like most boys of his age, Surr’s mind roiled with a swarm of conflicting emotions he could not control. Dre found this tended to make them bothersome pawns, but in Surr they were burning hot and pure enough to interest him. These elves were passionate in proportion to their suffering.
“And Eirik was the Lord God.”
Chapters
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