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WHEN AERHRIL AND Dathor got married in the chapel, her belly starting to grow rounded with the babe growing within her, Dathor said that he was the steward and Celedin objected.
When Celedin married Hafindel only two months later, he said he was the steward and Dathor objected.
When Dathor moved them into the steward’s chambers, Celedin said that he didn’t like that room and had never wanted to stay there anyway, and besides, all his clothes were in his old chambers, and that this did not make Dathor the steward.
When the baby was born, a little boy with elfin features, a shock of black hair, and smooth skin that was tinted gray-ish green nonetheless, Dathor declared the child the heir to Foxglove Peak.
And Celedin said that his child would be the heir, just as soon as he got one on Hafindel.
But that never happened. They remained entirely childless, and Aerhril and Dathor had three children, two boys and one girl, and the children played in the fields of wildflowers and learned when the sky was so dark that the bad storms were coming, and they climbed to the tops of the turrets of the Peak and they snuggled warm into their parents arms at night.
Celedin never left the keep, and he claimed to be the steward until the day he died, and Dathor never agreed he was, and they all lived there together.
It was big enough.
And it was their home.
She did not know if they were happy.
It was an odd thing, she thought, the way happiness was reckoned.
It required one to weigh the joyous elements of one’s life as more important than the elements that were pain and agony, she supposed.
Perhaps some people had lives in which there were more joyous elements than there were painful ones.
That had never been their lives, not before the revolution, and not after.
There were all manner of hardships.
There were marauders who came in during the ensuing wars—the dwarves invaded after the elf general’s failed invasion on their lands—and they defended the keep from those who tried to take it from them.
There were years when they had no harvest and they had little to eat, and the forest had been hunted clear of game, and the children cried to her of their empty bellies and she lay awake at night, crying softly into her pillow as Dathor slept exhausted sleep next to her, for he had spent all day trying to kill something for them to eat.
There were storms that tore through the countryside and toppled the stables.
There was a fire once, in the village, and they had to bring in the homeless elves and house them all in the keep until their houses could be rebuilt.
There were sicknesses and there were trials and there were tribulations.
This was to say nothing of the fact that she and Dathor argued.
Often.
That she battered Dathor with her fists for some years before she learned to stop herself, before she managed to tame her passion, that he screamed in her face that she was the most selfish elf whore he had ever met, that the world did not revolve around her comfort, that the children fought, too, with each other and with the children of the servants and the village children, and that sometimes the other small elves were cruel to their little half-breed babes and sometimes her children were vicious and strong and as they sought their vengeance.
There was a great deal of conflict and strife, in fact, and she thought there was more of it than there was of any period of joy.
Nor did she think the joyous times were worth more.
She thought, instead, it was the pain and the strife that changed her more for the better than anything else, if only because it taught her better lessons.
But she knew this, and knew it deep down, in a way that sustained her.
She knew the joy she felt was an explosion of triumph, that when she felt joy, it was earned, if only because there was so much time in between that was so harsh and difficult.
And she valued it more, she thought, the good times, the sweet times.
She valued it and she sought those moments each and every day.
No matter what happened, she found some time to put her lips to her husband’s skin, even as the years passed, and he had lines around his eyes and she had aches in her back, and their children towered over her, no longer children but young men and women.
When she touched him, she always remembered how it was that she had fought for him, that she had gone to the edge of it all for him, that having him was not something guaranteed, that the entire world had been against them.
And to have fought, to have triumphed, to be able to do this, to casually run her hands through his hair, to feel his thick hand curve around her hip, his deep voice in her ear, to have each other, against all that prevented them.
It was nothing short of miraculous.
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Thank you so much for reading!