[After the ceremony. The celebration]
[Selas POV]
The ceremony ended. And then the Avari did what the Avari always did.
They celebrated like it was the last night before the end of all things.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, three thousand people stood in sacred silence beneath a blazing tree. The next, someone produced a fiddle, someone else uncorked a barrel of berry wine, and a roar of joy went up that probably startled every deer within ten miles.
Bonfires appeared as if by magic. Food materialized on long tables built from construction planks that Temeryl would certainly miss tomorrow. Whole roasted game, river fish wrapped in clay and baked in coals, baskets of bread and dried fruit and honeycomb dripping gold.
The music hit almost immediately. Not the gentle, reverent melodies of the ceremony. Battle drums. Racing fiddles. The raw, driving rhythms that the Avari had developed on the March, music you felt in your teeth, music that grabbed your feet and moved them whether you wanted to dance or not.
And everyone danced. Warriors still in formation gear, boots stomping in the mud. Children spinning in circles until they fell down dizzy and shrieking with laughter.
Two young warriors near the river got into an argument about something, probably a girl, and settled it with a brief, enthusiastic fistfight that ended with both of them in the water and both of them laughing.
A group of farmers started a singing competition with a group of smiths, which the farmers won decisively because smiths, it turned out, had lungs built for bellows but not for harmony.
Somewhere in the crowd, Eol was explaining the metallurgical properties of the wedding rings to anyone unfortunate enough to stand still near him, and a cluster of women had cornered Ilvëa's bridesmaids for a detailed account of every word she'd said while getting dressed.
Berry wine flowed. Conversation roared. Laughter erupted in waves from different corners of the crowd, overlapping, building, until the entire forest hummed with the sound of three thousand people being unreservedly, uncomplicated happy.
I stood in the middle of it with my wife and grinned like a fool.
Then the games began.
The first was "Hold the Light." Ilvëa and I stood palm to palm, maintaining a steady flow of Light between our hands, while our beloved friends and advisors did everything in their power to break our concentration.
Vertalas asked me a detailed question about moat drainage specifications. Yalinim dropped a live fish down the back of my leaf-shirt. I felt it flop against my spine.
Mireth leaned in close to Ilvëa and whispered something. Ilvëa turned crimson from her collarbones to her hairline.
Celestia howled like a wolf.
Grim the Younger, apparently misunderstanding the assignment, howled back from the forest edge. Then the entire pack joined in. Thirty wolves singing at the stars while three thousand Avari laughed so hard some of them had to sit down.
Our Light-flow survived. Barely. Ilvëa's grip on my hands was hard enough to bruise, and my face ached from the effort of not laughing, but the glow between our palms held steady.
"Disappointing," Celestia declared. "I expected better from my wolves."
"Your wolves performed perfectly," Mireth said. "Your strategy was the problem."
Next came the water wrestling.
Young warriors waded into the Taurion in teams, stripped to the waist, grinning like maniacs. The goal was simple: push the other team under. No rules beyond that. What followed was twenty minutes of roaring, splashing chaos that looked like a shield-wall drill designed by someone three cups deep into berry wine.
Which, by this point, most of them were.
Vertalas himself waded in to demonstrate proper technique and got dunked in the first thirty seconds by three of his own soldiers.
His expression as he surfaced, water streaming from his hair, outrage warring with grudging respect, was worth the entire celebration.
Yalinim's victory celebration lasted approximately four seconds before the opposing team dragged him under as well. He came up sputtering something about "unsportsmanlike conduct" that nobody heard over the laughter.
Along the bank, spectators cheered and shouted tactical advice that was universally ignored. Children threw pebbles into the water to increase the chaos. Several women were placing bets. Balga, I noticed, was winning.
Then came the Three Sips of Trial.
The ceremonial drink was a concentrated berry liquor, the strongest the Avari had managed to produce. It burned going down with an authority that suggested it held personal grudges against throats.
Several of Avari who'd already sampled it were standing at a careful distance, watching us with the sympathetic expressions of people who knew exactly what was coming.
First sip: drink without blinking. I managed. Ilvëa's left eye twitched but technically stayed open.
The judges debated. Voices from the crowd weighed in. A minor argument broke out. The crowd ruled in her favor by volume.
Second sip: name three virtues of your partner.
"Decisive," I said. "Understanding and Wise. And she has an absolutely unreasonable talent for making things grow. Oops, that's already four. "
"Stubborn," Ilvëa said. The crowd laughed. "Patient when it matters." A pause. "And he never once forgot the acorn." The crowd laughed another time.
Third sip: name one of your own faults.
"I never know when to stop working," I said.
The laughter was immediate, universal, and sustained. Apparently this was not new information.
I heard Eol shout "He finally admits it!" from somewhere near the river. Rich, coming from a man who hadn't left his forge in three weeks straight.
"I'm stubborn," Ilvëa said.
"That's not a fault," I protested.
"You haven't tried to move me from Cuivorn when I'm not finished."
The Circle Dance followed.
The entire nation formed a ring, hands joined, surrounding us in the center. The music started slow. A single fiddle, one long mournful note that hung in the air.
Then drums joined, soft at first.
Then voices. An old song from Cuiviénen that everyone knew and no one remembered learning. The circle moved, feet stepping in patterns older than memory, and the tempo built.
Faster. Faster.
The world became a spinning wall of faces and firelight and music that pounded through the ground and into our bones. Ilvëa and I held each other's hands and tried to find our way out of the circle without letting go. Three thousand Avari, spinning and stamping and singing, forming a wall of bodies and sound and sheer joyful chaos around us.
We stumbled. We laughed. We nearly fell twice. But our hands held, and when we finally broke through the spinning wall into the quiet forest beyond, we were breathless and dizzy and grinning like idiots.
The meaning was ancient and simple: the world will try to keep you apart, the world will spin and roar and press in from all sides, and your only task is to hold on and find your way through it together.
Last tradition came the Arrow of Fate.
By now the celebration had reached the stage where half the crowd was sitting in the grass sharing food and wine, the other half was dancing or arguing or both, and a small contingent of warriors had started a spontaneous wrestling tournament near the forge that nobody had organized and nobody was going to stop.
A single bow. A single target, set at the far end of the clearing.
One of us held the bow. The other guided the aim.
Ilvëa's hand on the bowstring. My hands over hers, adjusting the angle. The crowd hushed. Even the wrestlers paused.
"A little left," she murmured.
"Trust me."
"I do. A little left."
I adjusted. She drew. Released.
The arrow struck the target. Not center. Close enough. The crowd erupted in approval, berry wine sloshing from raised cups.
"You were right," I admitted. "A little left."
"I'm always right," Ilvëa said. "You'll learn."
{image: The night Avarderon rejoiced beneath Cuivorn.}
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[That evening. The main platform beneath Cuivorn]
[Selas POV]
Ilvëa found me near the food tables, watching Yalinim lose an arm-wrestling match to a farmer half his size.
"We should do it tonight," she said.
I didn't need to ask what she meant. We'd discussed the timing of her coronation before the wedding. The original plan was to wait a day or two.
"Tonight," I repeated.
"Look at them." She gestured at the crowd. "They're all here. They're happy. They're still mostly sober."
That last point was important. Quendi metabolized alcohol slowly, which meant it took significantly longer to get drunk than it would for mortals.
But it also meant that the Avari were currently in that pleasant warm stage where everything felt wonderful and nothing hurt. In another few hours, the berry wine would catch up, and by tomorrow morning half the nation would be in no state to witness anything more ceremonial than breakfast.
And knowing my people, this celebration wasn't ending tomorrow morning. Or tomorrow evening. The Avari would ride this festival for days. Possibly a week.
By the time they finally ran out of wine and energy, the moment would have passed. Ilvëa's coronation would feel like an afterthought tacked onto the end of a party, instead of what it deserved to be.
"You're right," I said. "One more reason to celebrate while they can still stand upright."
Ilvëa smiled.
The celebration was still roaring when we made our way to the platform. The same platform where I'd been crowned. It had served two ceremonies now, and tonight it would serve a third.
Behind us, the party showed no signs of slowing. If anything, it was getting louder. Someone had started a bonfire large enough to be visible from orbit.
The singing competition between the farmers and the smiths had expanded to include the warriors, who couldn't sing at all but made up for it with volume.
Three separate dance circles were operating simultaneously, each playing different music, creating a collision of rhythms that somehow worked.
But the crowd sensed the shift. As Ilvëa and I climbed the steps, faces turned. Conversations trailed off. The music softened, one instrument at a time.
Eol stood at the top of the steps. In his hands, draped in dark cloth, the second wreath.
Dirmal waited beside him, holding the Emperor's wreath on its cushion. My wreath. The one I'd placed on my own head earlier that day, which now needed to replace the flower crown I was still wearing from the wedding.
I removed the flower wreath. Set it aside. Took the imperial wreath from Dirmal's cushion and placed it on my head.
Emperor again.
Then I turned to the crowd.
"Avari!" My voice carried across the clearing, cutting through the last murmurs of celebration. "Today your Emperor has taken a wife."
Three thousand faces, lit by firelight and Cuivorn's glow. Flushed from dancing and wine and the warmth of a day none of them would ever forget. Waiting.
I looked at Ilvëa. She stood beside me, golden hair catching the glow of the Tree she'd nurtured from an acorn.
"The Avari call her the Mother of the Tree. Without her Light, without her care, without her stubborn refusal to leave its side until the work was done, Cuivorn would be a sapling. Not the heart of an empire."
I extended my hand toward her.
"Avarderon has its Emperor."
I let the words ring across the clearing.
"And now, Avarderon will have its Empress. If lere Vaeratari!"
Three thousand voices answered as one, shaking the leaves of Cuivorn itself.
"IF LERE VAERATARI!"
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Same moment]
[Ilvëa POV]
The cloth fell away from Eol's hands.
I forgot how to breathe.
The Empress's wreath caught Cuivorn's light and blazed like a captured star. Silver branches and living flowers forged in metal. Petals so delicate they seemed to tremble with each shift of air. Dewdrops of opal dotting each blossom, tiny and perfect.
I'd seen beautiful things in my life. I'd seen the shores of the Belegaer stretching into forever. I'd seen the light of the Two Trees reflected on Ulmo's island as it carried my family across the sea without me.
This was different. This wasn't the beauty of nature or the grandeur of the Valar's works. This was something made for me. By hands that knew me. From metal pulled from mountains I'd chosen to call home.
I bowed my head. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure the entire clearing could hear it.
Selas took the wreath from Eol. His hands were steady. His eyes were not.
"Ilvëa of the Vanyar," he said, and his voice carried across the clearing with the weight of everything we'd shared. "Today you are crowned not only as wife, but as sovereign of the Avari."
The silver settled onto my hair.
Cool metal against warm skin. Heavier than I'd expected. Not the weight of silver. The weight of three thousand lives looking up at me, waiting, hoping, believing.
And just like that, the years fell away.
Fifty years ago I had been a wanderer. No people. No home. No one to speak my name except the wind, and the wind never answered back.
I raised my head.
Three thousand faces stared back at me. MY people now.
Flushed from dancing and wine, tear-streaked and laughing, reaching out toward the platform with hands that still glowed faintly from the Circle of Light. Not the polished, distant reverence I'd known in Aman. This was something raw and close and familial.
These people had taken me in. Taught me their language and their customs and their terrible jokes.
They'd held me through the Rite of Becoming when my old self burned away and something new was born from the ashes. They'd trusted me with their sacred Tree before I'd earned that trust, simply because Selas believed in me and they believed in him.
I found Celestia in the crowd. She was grinning so wide it looked painful, fists raised, shouting something I couldn't hear over the noise. Mireth beside her, openly weeping, not even trying to pretend otherwise. Enasulë clutching another farmer's arm with both hands, bouncing on her toes.
Behind them all, Cuivorn blazed against the stars. Our Tree. The seed I'd carried in my heart before it became a seed in the earth. Its branches dipped toward me, leaves shimmering with gold and silver light.
Through ósanwë, a wave of warmth. Recognition. The Tree knew me.
"If lere Ilvëa, Empress of Avarstad and Avarderon!" Eol and Dirmal called out together. "Vaeratari of the Avari!"
The sound that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
"IF LERE VAERATARI ILVËA!!!"
Something broke open inside me. Something I'd been holding together for fifty years with discipline and stubbornness and the sheer refusal to be pitied.
I didn't try to stop the tears.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Later that night. The inner circle]
[Selas POV]
The court celebrated with less volume and more berry wine.
We'd gathered by the Taurion, our old spot, while the wider celebration continued at full force in the background. The bonfire had somehow gotten larger.
The singing competition had entered its seventh round, and the smiths were staging a comeback fueled entirely by stubbornness and cheap liquor.
Thoron poured wine into simple cups and passed them around. The Elder's hands were steady. His eyes were bright.
"To the Emperor and Empress of the Avari," he said, raising his cup.
"To Selas and Ilvëa," Vertalas said simply. His hair was still damp from his involuntary river visit. "Who earned this."
"To the road we walked to get here," Celestia added. "And the roads still ahead."
Eol said nothing. Raised his cup and drank. That was more than enough.
Mireth looked at Ilvëa, then at me, then at Cuivorn glowing softly against the sky.
"The children of Cuiviénen," she said quietly, "we have come a very long way."
I watched my friends. My people. My wife, sitting beside me with a silver wreath on her golden hair and a light in her eyes that made the gemstones look dull by comparison.
Leaning against my shoulder now, warm and solid and real, occasionally stealing sips from my cup because hers was empty and she was too comfortable to move.
We had come a long way.
From a lakeside where I'd sat as an infant with too-old eyes, wondering how I'd survive the next decade. Through orc raids and the Sundering and a forty-five-year march across a continent. Through hundred thousand decisions that could have gone wrong but somehow didn't.
To this. A river. A tree. A circle of friends. A nation. A woman stealing my wine.
Not bad.
Not bad at all.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Late night. Walking through Avarstad]
[Selas POV]
We slipped away from the celebration as discreetly as two people wearing glowing silver wreaths could manage. Which was not very discreetly at all.
I caught at least four knowing smiles, two theatrical winks from Celestia, and one comment from Yalinim that I chose not to hear.
The path to our quarters wound through the settlement, past half-built stone walls and newly planted gardens and the quiet workshops where, tomorrow, the business of empire would resume. A pair of warriors on patrol saluted us and very carefully looked at nothing.
A cat, one of the settlement's growing population of semi-wild mousers, watched us from a wall with the supreme indifference that only cats could achieve.
Tonight, though. Tonight was ours.
"You're nervous," Ilvëa said.
"I've faced orc armies. I crossed the Misty Mountains in winter. I built a civilization from nothing."
"That's not an answer."
"I'm absolutely terrified."
She laughed. That sound. Every single time, it hit me the same way. Warmth flooding my chest, butterflies rioting in my stomach, as fresh and disorienting as the very first time I'd heard it centuries ago by the shores of Cuiviénen. A sound I could listen to for all of eternity and never tire of.
"Good," she said. "Me too."
We walked in silence for a moment. Her hand warm in mine. The sounds of celebration fading behind us. Cuivorn's glow painting the treetops gold and silver ahead.
"Ilvëa?"
"Mm?"
"Thank you. For turning around at the Belegaer."
She squeezed my hand. Didn't answer. Didn't need to.
We reached our quarters. A temporary structure, timber and stone, soon to be replaced by something grander. But tonight it was enough.
At the door, I paused. Looked back.
The fires of the celebration flickered through the trees. Music, faint now, carrying the melody of a song I didn't recognize. Someone had written it tonight, probably. The Avari wrote songs the way other people breathed.
Cuivorn rose above it all.
Ilvëa tugged my hand.
"Stop brooding," she said. "You can brood tomorrow. Tonight you're mine."
I let her pull me inside. The door closed behind us. The stars kept their watch.
And the Cuivorn glowed on through the night, its branches swaying in a rhythm that might have been wind, or might have been something very much like laughter.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—

{image: The Arrow of Fate}
(The best one I managed to generate)
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 14]
GLOSSARY
Hold the Light — Game where the couple maintains a Light-flow between joined palms while friends attempt to break their concentration.
Water Wrestling — Team sport in the river. Push the opposing team under. No rules.
Three Sips of Trial — Drinking game with strong berry liquor. First sip: don't blink. Second: name three virtues of your partner. Third: name one of your own faults.
Circle Dance — The nation forms a ring around the couple. Music accelerates. The couple must exit the circle without releasing hands. Symbolizes holding together when the world spins.
Arrow of Fate — One partner holds the bow, the other guides the aim. Hitting the target is considered a sign of harmony.
Enasulë Malaniriel — Farmer and caretaker of Cuivorn. Ilvëa's closest friend among the agricultural workers. (Introduced Ch. 14.1)