"Will there always be a wall."
Cael said it from his place at the parapet.
He had asked to be set down at the lower walkway, which the keep women had reinforced two years ago with the small additional inner-stone course that made the parapet height safe for a child to stand at and look over, and he had been standing there for perhaps a quarter-hour with his small hands flat on the worked stone of the top course. He was looking out across the long view to the south — the long view that ran down from the keep's western wall over the long curve of the orchard, the small inner river that came in from the upper meadow, the new south road that had been completed by the road-crew in the spring of last year, and the long line of the settlement's outer houses where the small steady lights were, at this hour, coming on.
The lights were coming on later than they had been a year ago.
There were more of them.
The Dunlending part of the settlement — the four small streets the keep had built out from the eastern wall over the spring, with the south-facing courtyards the clan-women had asked for in the small careful way of women who had grown up with south-facing courtyards on the north-Dunland coast — had its lights on first this evening. The keep settlement's older streets came on next. The dwarven quarter, which had not used the long evening-lamps in earlier years because the dwarves of Grimgar's settling-down had been on their own night-rhythms for a decade, was now lit at the long forge-window and at the two small lamps Grimgar's daughter had set on the inner courtyard wall at the spring fitting.
The evening's small cooking-smell was rising over all of it.
Aldric registered the small cooking-smell. He registered it as he had been registering it, in the last hour of the long day, since he had come up onto the parapet with Cael at the seventh hour and Tauriel had set Lúthien — eight months old now, by the keep's count, in the small carry-shawl the keep women had taken to making for her in the spring — back in the upper room with Arethil and had come up to the door of the parapet to listen.
She was at the door.
He could feel her, the way he could feel her at any door of any room of the keep when she was in it; he did not, at this hour, turn his head to confirm her. She did not, by any movement at the door, make the listening into anything other than the listening.
Cael was still waiting for the answer.
He had asked the question without looking up. He was looking out at the southern lights. The question had not been — by Aldric's reading of the small flat steady voice the boy had asked it in — a question of fear or of complaint; it had been the question of a three-year-old who had been told, in the small careful answers his parents had been giving him for a year now, that the wall was a thing that had been here for some time, and who was, at the dusk on the parapet on a quiet September evening, asking the next question after the one he had already been told the answer to.
Aldric crouched down beside him at the parapet.
He set his elbow against the stone.
He thought about the question.
He thought, for the count of perhaps three breaths, about the small wooden palisade that had stood on this same line at the end of the first year of the founding — eight pole-courses high, with the small gaps at the joints that he had filled in over a winter at the hand of the original carpenter who had been one of the first forty-seven and who had died at Razorpeak in the third year. He thought about the first stone-course they had laid on the south curve the spring after Razorpeak, in the year of the third winter when the country had been three hundred souls and had not had any of the long things the country had now. He thought about the wall as it stood now, in the late evening of the day, with the long unbroken line of stone running from the south postern to the western tower and on past the western tower to the long curve of the orchard, and about the small fact that the wall had been, in every one of the eighteen years it had taken to build it, the wall that the country had needed at that particular year and not in any other.
He thought about Fornost's outer circuit, eighty miles north.
He thought about the new south road and the four Dunlending streets.
He turned to Cael.
He said, in the small flat voice he reserved for the small careful answers he gave the boy when the boy was asking the right question: "Yes."
"Always."
"Yes, Cael. Always. There will always be a wall here. The wall may, in your lifetime, be moved further out — to take in the streets the country has built outside it. The wall may, in your son's lifetime, be moved out again. But there will always be a wall."
A pause.
"Why."
"Because some things need walls."
He did not, at first, say more.
He let the small flat answer sit. He had been told, by Tauriel three years ago when she had set the small private rule of how they would speak to the children, that he was not to dress the small flat answers up in any of the small clever things a man of his particular kind dressed answers up in. The boy was three. The boy did not need dressed answers. The boy needed the small flat true thing, at the height of the question. The dressed answers would come, by their own pace, in his own years.
Cael was thinking.
He turned his small head to look up at his father.
"What things."
Aldric drew a slow breath.
"Cael — when you have a thing that you love, you put it in a place where it cannot be taken. The thing your mother and I love most is what is on this side of the wall. We love the houses below us, where the people you have grown up among live; we love the orchard with the apple trees, where you walked with me when you were two and ate the apple I gave you on the bench; we love the keep where your sister sleeps right now; we love each other and we love you and we love her. The things we love are on this side of the wall. The wall is — it is the line we have drawn around the things we love, so that the things we love can grow without being taken. There will always be people in the world who do not love what we love, and some of those people will want to take what we love, because they have not been able to make a thing they love of their own. So we put up a wall. The wall is not — Cael — the wall is not a sad thing. The wall is the small careful thing a family does, when the family has a thing it loves. It is — it is a fence around the orchard. Do you remember the fence around the orchard."
"Yes."
"Why does the orchard have a fence."
"So the deer not eat the apple."
"So the deer do not eat the apples. Yes."
"The wall is the apple fence."
"The wall is the apple fence. Yes. The wall is the apple fence around the country."
Cael, for a beat, turned this over.
He turned back to the southern lights.
He said, in the same small flat voice in which he had asked the question: "Big fence."
"Big fence."
"Many apple."
"Many apples."
He set his small hand against the stone of the top course again, in the small confident way he had been setting his hand against stones since the spring trip to Fornost; he did not, on the setting, ask any further questions. He stood at the parapet looking at the southern lights, and Aldric crouched beside him at the parapet looking at the same southern lights, and behind them, at the door of the parapet, Tauriel was listening. She did not, at the door, come out.
She did not, in the long quarter-hour that followed, come out.
The lights on the four Dunlending streets multiplied as the long dusk went down. Below them, at the inner courtyard, two Dunlending children — perhaps six and four, by Aldric's reading at distance — were running between the small lamp-posts of the inner courtyard with a small carved wooden hoop in the older child's hand and the smaller child chasing. They were laughing. The small Dunlending words for catch and behind you, which Aldric had been learning over the spring at the slow pace of a man learning a language in the small intervals of a long working day, came up to the parapet on the small evening air.
Cael, at the parapet, registered them.
He did not, on registering, ask who they were. He knew. He had been playing with the older one — by the keep women's account of the spring afternoons — every other day for two months.
He said, in the same small confident voice: "Tarra."
"That is Tarra. Yes."
"And Brann."
"And Brann. Yes."
"Going inside soon."
"They will go inside soon."
"For dinner."
"For dinner."
"And we for dinner."
"We for dinner. Yes. As soon as your sister wakes from the small nap. We will go down."
The boy nodded once.
He set his small hand against Aldric's at the stone.
He did not, on setting it, take it off.
Aldric stayed crouched at the parapet for some further minutes with his hand under his son's small hand on the worked stone of the top course, watching the lights of the country come on along the long line of the southern view. The smell of the evening's small cooking went on. The Dunlending children, at the inner courtyard, came in. The smaller streets of the older keep settlement came in. The dwarven forge-window kept its long single light.
Tauriel, at the door of the parapet, was still listening when he turned at last and lifted the boy to come down.
She did not, on his coming through the door, say anything.
She set her hand against the line of his jaw, the way she had set it three years ago when he had ridden back from the southern ridge with the eleven names; she did not, this time, ask him to tell her anything. She turned, and went down the stair ahead of him, in the small slow careful way an Elven woman with an eight-month-old daughter sleeping in the upper room went down a stair at dusk, and the boy in Aldric's arms set his small head against the side of his father's neck and did not, on the going down, speak.
The lights of the country were on.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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