“That… wasn’t what I’d planned,” I said.

  I sat with Seriana and Luthiel in the small room they shared in the lower portions of the keep. It was sparsely furnished: a bed with a stuffed mattress, the small table we all sat at, and a shelf that held many sheafs of the rough parchment we were still using to copy out the archive.

  We’d come here after the judgment. They’d said little on the way, instead simply walking ahead of me and holding hands. Now that we were alone, there faces seemed as composed and emotionless as ever.

  “Perhaps if I’d been more aggressive in my counterarguments,” I said. “Been more rigid in attacking her position….”

  “It’s not your fault,” Seriana said. “I doubt that would have appealed to many of the people who intended to vote for exile.”

  I pursed my lips, then nodded. There was no point, for the moment, in dwelling on what had already passed. “Still,” I said. “Ten years is a long time. We’ll see how the people feel in the times to come. My power will only rise with the completion of my ritual. And Hassina? I love her, but at this rate she’s going to become her own worst enemy. Tonight’s decision may yet be—”

  “No,” Luthiel said.

  Seriana had gently closed her eyes. Luthiel’s face was impassive and firm.

  “It’s not worth it,” he said. “Let this be. Stay the course.”

  My mouth formed a hard line, and I glowered at him. “This is your decision, is it?”

  “I know you’ll do as you will,” he said. “And I know I’ve no right to give advice, here. But I also know that you’re always willing to take counsel into account. Take mine.”

  I looked between them. Seriana looked pale and tired. “You two have discussed this, then?”

  “There will be advantages to my absence,” said Luthiel. “Seriana can step out of my shadow. Her authority will, in time, cease to be as fragile and dubious as it is now. Her support in any endeavor will mean something. She’ll be able to contest you, if she sees fit, and not be looked upon as a traitor for doing so.”

  “It’s all too important to risk,” added Seriana.

  I listened to all of this and said nothing. Defeat threatened to settle over me like a chill. I sat. “If this next century is so important, then it should be important enough that we at least try. Ten years is a long time, and we need only change a few minds.”

  Seriana was shaking her head. “Don’t tempt me, Aziriel. Please.”

  “It may be better for me to leave sooner,” said Luthiel. “Not right away, but soon. Once I’m gone, no one can see Seriana as my proxy.”

  “I want to be as far as possible from their judgment when it comes time to found new settlements,” Seriana said. “Otherwise Zirilla will have the last say in all matters regarding the re-establishment of the sea elves.”

  I was still quiet for a moment, trying to see a way out of what they had decided. But there was no way to even try to go against the judgement, even in the long term, without their support.

  And they had good points to make. Pushing against what had been voted for was foolhardy. So was sending Luthiel out into the wild, but I had to accept that it wasn’t going to be my decision.

  I stood. “You’re both right,” I said. “The archmage must speak with authority, especially with the work ahead of us in nurturing our arcane traditions. I’ll leave you to keep one another company.”

  “Stay,” Seriana urged.

  “I won’t,” I said. “You two know me: I’m bitter in defeat. I need time to myself.”

  I turned and moved for the door, and a moment later I heard a motion behind me as Luthiel stood.

  “Aziriel,” he said quietly.

  I turned to regard him.

  For a moment he said nothing, simply staring after me. Then he asked: “Do you know?”

  “Know what?” I asked in reply, a note of impatience in my voice.

  His expression seemed to falter. “How much it torments me that you’ve said nothing,” he said. “Nothing of my failing, nothing of your feelings on it, nothing but cold calculations—dealing with the problem of it by way of strategies. It is as if I became a statue in your eyes.”

  I stared at him for a moment. My brother. How things could have, should have been different.

  “Yes,” I said at last, my voice brittle. “I know.” Then I turned to leave. “Goodnight, Luthiel, Seriana.”

  Perhaps it was petty, but I wouldn’t give him whatever release he stood to gain by having me finally rip him to pieces for what he’d done. I’d leave him to guess at my feelings, guess at how I truly felt—and I knew he’d suffer all the more for it.

  The next morning, everything more or less carried on as it had been.

  Nobody could afford to spend any lengthy amount of time reeling at the announcement of Luthiel’s fate. A community of elves who lived in comfort and had many hours to devote to discussions might have found itself split in two, even after the decision had been made. But everyone in the colony was constantly at work.

  The council meeting on the morning after the judgment was quick and productive: we all just wanted to move on to what was ahead of us, and we didn’t have any immediate planning to do on account of the judgment’s outcome. Luthiel, as a consequence, was barely mentioned.

  Hassina and I both wanted it made clear that neither of us was in favor of anyone wearing their uncast stone around their neck, as it would simply create a line to divide us along. The word was quickly spread, and I was glad to see none of the stones hanging about anyone’s neck as I set about the day’s work.

  In the days leading up to the judgement, I’d made good progress with the plants. With a lot of trial, error, and test subjects, I’d composed a slate of runes to help funnel mana into the blooming vine that I intended to use for the ritual.

  Before, only I and a small handful of others could have done the needed work in growing and spreading the manavine. Now it could be done by almost a hundred of us who were skilled enough in manipulating mana that they could plant a new bloom, cause the vine to spend essence and grow a new one in its place before growing to connect with the old one, too.

  The entire surface of the cliff leading up to the second layer of mist was being covered with soil, then planted with the rapidly spreading vine. A few dozen elves could be seen cutting, infusing, and then replanting the many bloom at all hours, creating a narrow strip of tightly-packed blooms that ran all the way up to the point where the river spilled over the cliffside.

  We were going to grow them further, of course: across from the river, the cliffs eventually rose until they were too steep to plant, becoming a part of the mountainside. We’d have to push our vine-farm up into the stretch of sparsely forested grassland that rose to meet the woods that cloaked the upper mountain.

  But that could be done by people other than myself. I was left free to take stock of everything else we still needed to do for the ritual. It was hard to gauge which component we would be waiting on the longest, now that the mana vines were well underway.

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  We have to carve the location for the ritual out of the rock, with many features to help us channel such as caverns nearby and beneath us to stow the vines in and channel mana through. But Zephanel informed me that this was well underway, even if it wasn’t taking shape yet.

  We needed to have everyone who would be helping channel and shape mana for the ritual be trained in performing their role, an effort which Zirilla was leading. This would take longer than the carving, but she still assured me that we were making good time.

  Instead it was Fireesha who I expected would take the longest in her task. There were simply too many things that needed sophisticated enchantments to help us conduct and shape the mana for the ritual. My drums had to be enchanted, but so did two dozen other instruments as well as several slabs of stone, many tons of soil, and a large collection of body paints.

  Beyond all of those, however, she needed to enchant the quartz crystals and implements that Seriana and the mages would be using to observe the whole effort. The amount of work it would take to do this outweighed even that which would be needed for the ritual itself, but I insisted that we spare nothing in taking our notes and measurements.

  The magic we were working with had been created by a god, after all. We wouldn’t get a chance to observe this kind of spellcraft again. I’d have us wait as long as was needed to be sure we did it right.

  After speaking with Fireesha, I visited the archmage in the archive. She was my second-last appointment for the day, and I knew that I might spend a while with her: unlike with the others, Seriana’s task was something I could contribute crucial expertise to. We were observing my own spell, after all.

  “Oh good,” she said, looking up at me as I entered. “You’re here. Do you have a lot of time? There are things I wanted to discuss.”

  My next appointment was with Hassina, and while things had been cordial at the council meeting that morning, I wasn’t looking forward to it. “I have time.”

  “A moment,” Seriana said. She exchanged a few words with the two mages she’d been working with, then led me away to a smaller side table, taking a sheaf of pages—my spell formula—with her. We sat.

  “Well for one, I’d like to pass on my compliments.” She set the pages before her. “You like to let everyone forget it, don’t you?”

  “Forget what?”

  “This,” she said, nodding down to the spell. “I can’t think of any mage among us who is so casual about their excellence, both in spellcraft and spellcasting.”

  I shrugged. “I, at least, know that I’m good at this.”

  Seriana let out a laugh. “If you were of the [Arcane], none would fail to mention your name among the greatest of our mages. You might be considered first among equals. And yet you are of the [Primeval], and so we let your many other abilities and accomplishments overshadow the fact that you are, without a doubt, one of the greatest magical composers elvenkind has seen.”

  It was all said matter-of-factly, in the manner of a researcher reporting her findings. As she spoke, Seriana had begun to pore over of the pages. “I know Alcuon helped you,” she continued. “And so did Luthiel. But this is clearly your spell, not theirs.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t much for false humility, or even just humility: I knew she was right. Primeval mana was wily, and the aspects it encompassed were raw. Taming and weaving both of them together required the utmost in skill, care, and creativity.

  Of course, it was only the spellcasters who weren’t wild elves who let my skills go unnoticed, but I didn’t tell Seriana that much. Instead I just took the compliment.

  “Still, I want to ask,” Seriana continued. “You’re about to cast one of the most sophisticated pieces of magic I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling a little.

  “You’re not exactly working with the circle room of the Sable Tower or the Ellistaran megaliths,” Seriana said. “You’ve got to conduct this ritual with a drum that Fireesha has a week to enchant and a hole that we’ve carved in the ground.”

  “True,” I said. “But we always knew that we’d have to give up our power to come to this new world. I’ve had a long time to practice getting this done with little in the way of spellcasting aides.”

  “A long time,” Seriana said quietly. “You’ve been planning for so long, but you could never have been sure.”

  “No. But I’m a soldier and a commander. Preparing for things that may never come is the only way to set my mind at ease.”

  “It would have been another hundred and fifty years before Hashephel finished another mana heart,” she said. “A hundred years before it could even have been debated. And even then, what would you have said?”

  “That I wanted the new one, along with the one I’d been trusted with, to act out a plan which must be kept secret.”

  Seriana shook her head. “It wouldn’t have worked.”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said.

  She let out a laugh. “And what about Hashephel? He doesn’t know what you meant to do?”

  I shook my head. “He’s the most obvious target if someone comes hunting us. He knew as much himself, and so he knew to trust me with my plans and secrecy. No one knows.”

  Seriana sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. Then she said: “I have another question.”

  “What is it?”

  Gently, she tapped the pages on the table before her. “There’s something else here, isn’t there?” she said. “It was hard to see at first.” She began to sift through the pages before her. “Everything seems to fit so perfectly,” she said. Then she took two pages and laid them side by side. “But there’s more than I first saw, more than is described by the formula. There are parts of it that… it’s like they rhyme. I didn’t quite know why, but they do. So I brought it to Luthiel.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said that a poet may describe nothing more than a flower being trampled by a horse’s hoof—and yet the imagery they use tells the story of an artistic tradition that was lost in the wake of an old Thanaxian conquest. Look still deeper, and the hidden story has its own masked meaning: a lament to all those finer, passionate feelings that are so often demolished by anger in heated moments. The literal story stands, but out of it arise other tales, new meanings.”

  “Luthiel has paid me a great compliment, then,” I said. “I know how he admires the works Ichloss.”

  “He paid you another,” said Seriana. “He said that in war, the good commander is always deceiving: every act of offense and position must seem to be justified in the present, and yet angle themselves toward some hidden tactic.”

  I smiled. “I think prefer that metaphor more.”

  Seriana laughed. “What are you doing, Aziriel? A tower can’t be built on an implied foundation.”

  “A beam of wood can be made to support more weight if it is arranged into the proper formation.”

  “Yes,” she said. “One involving triangles and even distribution of stress—not poetry. Are you sure this is going to work?”

  I looked down at my formula. “No,” I answered honestly. “In composing it, I had to infer things from what I’ve observed in the magical composition of other species. Part of the reason I chose to try it in the way that I did is because if it fails, there won’t be any consequences on the rest of the ritual. But I don’t think it will fail. Lord Kalak seemed to appreciate it.”

  “I see,” she said. “And are you going to tell me what it is you’re trying to accomplish, here?”

  I only smiled.

  Seriana shook her head. “Luthiel also told me that whatever you see cause to hide is whatever you feel is most important.”

  “Not this time,” I said, smiling. “But we’ll see.”

  We spent several hours going over the ritual’s arrangement: we had to be acting in perfect concert in order to do it properly and it would take many days of coordinating to get this done.

  Still, eventually I dismissed myself, conscious of the fact that Seriana needed to direct the other mages—and I had other business to attend.

  I found Hassina on a small stretch of grass before the keep. She was surrounded by a dozen elves with musical instruments, though only a few of them were playing—most of them were poring over notes that had come from the archive and only occasionally fiddling with their instruments.

  Hassina had a flute resting nearby on a cloth spread over the grass, but it was being neglected: instead one of her hands darted over the beads of an abacus, which clacked as they were moved to and fro. The other hand was writing rapidly in a ledger. Two men who I recognized as firedancers stood nearby, waiting on her for something.

  She paused when she saw me, a momentary freeze that lasted only for an instant before she turned to the two men, gave them some percentages, and sent them off.

  “Lux Irovex,” she said, greeting me.

  “What was that?” I said, glancing at the departing firedancers.

  “Mm,” she said, watching them. “I was asking them about some alloys. We’ll need other metals than iron to craft new instruments. Copper, tin, lead. I’ll bring it up at the council when there’s any chance it can be a priority.”

  “Good,” I said. “In the meantime, I hate to burden you further, but I need something from you.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Power,” I said.

  I still had to fulfill my last part of our ritual, after all.

  I needed the blood of a high-level creature, one steeped in primeval aspects. It wouldn’t be hard to find one, here, but I also needed to get the blood to the colony, somehow—preferably by killing the creature nearby. With Mirio still recovering, finding one would be harder. Leading it back to the colony might take even longer.

  “I’m going hunting,” I said. “And I think it’s time we start building my skill with 4th-ranked keys.”