His mother's hands were never still.
Liam had noticed this early – young enough that he still spent most of his day being carried or supervised, before he had developed the motor control and spatial awareness to do much on his own. While she held him, her hands were moving. While she worked, her hands were moving. Even in the evenings, when the day's labor was finished and dinner had been cleared and Jingahr was doing whatever Jingahr did in the hours before sleep, Litrial's hands found work. Mending. Weaving. Preparing something for the following morning. They were never loud about it. They simply moved the way water moves – constant, purposeful, finding the path of least resistance to whatever needed to be done next.
She was not what Liam had expected. He had not had specific expectations, which was perhaps the problem – he had arrived in this new life with no framework for mother at all, having grown up with one in his previous life who was competent and distant in roughly equal measure, and had assumed, in the unexamined way of assumptions, that this would be similar. A functional relationship. Warmth measured out in appropriate portions.
Litrial Emrold was precise and contained and moved through the world with the particular efficiency of someone who had learned that waste – of time, of material, of energy – was a luxury they could not afford. She was not, by any outward measure, effusive. She did not make speeches. She did not exclaim over things. She said what needed saying and left the rest in the space where other people would have filled it with noise.
But her hands, when they were working near him, had a habit of finding ways to be also near him. A touch on the top of his head while she reached past him. Her fingers checking the temperature of his forehead when she thought he looked pale, quick and matter-of-fact as a diagnosis. The way she had, when he was very small, held him while she worked so that the rhythm of her movement became the rhythm of his sleep.
Liam had spent a not-insignificant amount of time in his first few years trying to decide whether this was simply how dark elf mothers were, or whether it was specific to her. He had eventually concluded it was specific to her. He had no evidence either way, but it felt true.
Today she was doing settlement labor – the kind that the whole community rotated through, necessary and shared. The root-homes needed reinforcement along the northern boundary where the winter-damp had softened some of the packed earth between the root-walls. It was slow, physical work: mixing the dark forest clay with the binding compounds that dark elf craft had developed over generations, packing it carefully into the gaps, sealing the spaces where cold and moisture and, less immediately but still relevantly, small opportunistic creatures from the deep forest might eventually find their way in.
Liam helped where he could, which at seven was mostly carrying materials from one place to another and staying out of the way of the adults who knew what they were doing. He was useful in the carrying. He was very, very good at staying out of the way.
"You're watching again," Litrial said without looking at him. She had her back to him, both hands deep in a gap between root-walls, working the clay in with practiced pressure.
"I'm helping," Liam said.
"You carried the last batch ten minutes ago. Since then you've been watching." She pulled her hands back, examined the repair, pressed one more section. "What are you watching?"
He considered. "How you know where the weak spots are before you press them. You don't check each section equally. You already know which ones need work."
Litrial was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "Sound. When the root-walls are solid, they sound one way when the wind moves through the forest. When there's a gap or a soft spot, the sound changes." She pressed the heel of her palm against the section she'd just repaired and then against the solid wall beside it. Different, slightly, even to Liam's ear. "You learn it."
"How long did it take you to learn it?"
"I don't remember not knowing it." She moved to the next section, hands finding the wall, beginning the same careful assessment. "Ask me something easier."
He sat down on a nearby root-ridge and watched her work. The settlement around them had the particular midday texture of people doing necessary things – other adults further along the boundary working on their own sections, children either being supervised in the central clearing or corralled into small tasks of their own, the ambient sounds of Thalia's deep forest pressing at the edges of everything like a patient reminder that the world beyond the boundary had its own business it was attending to.
"There were wood elf traders this morning," Liam said after a while. He had seen them from the root-tree at the settlement's edge – a small group, three adults with loaded packs, who had stopped at the trading post near the settlement's entrance.
Litrial's hands did not change their rhythm. "I know."
"You traded with them?"
"Mael traded. I sent some of the shadow-work candles with him." She finished a section, moved on. "They pay better for those than the valley markets do."
Shadow-work. Liam had been trying to understand this for years. Dark elves who had developed any meaningful shadow affinity used it in various craft applications – candles that burned in spectrums of light unachievable with conventional fire, textiles woven with shadow-fibers that had insulating or concealing properties, small enchantments pressed into objects. It was practical and it was trade-viable. It was also, Liam had gathered from every conversation that touched on the subject, considered lesser by everyone outside the dark elf community. Wood elves bought it because it was useful and they could get it cheaply. High elves did not buy it. Humans occasionally bought it through intermediaries without inquiring too carefully about the origin.
"Do the wood elves pay well?" he asked.
Litrial made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Better than nothing."
Liam filed this alongside everything else he had filed about the trade dynamics of the settlement, which was building into a fairly detailed mental picture of exactly how marginal the community's economic position was. They were not starving. They were not desperate in the immediate, crisis sense. They were simply operating in a permanent condition of not quite enough – not enough resources, not enough trade access, not enough standing in the broader world to negotiate from any position except the one where they were grateful for whatever was offered.
He had read about this in the political fantasy novel – the one with the complicated royal court. The author had described the economic position of a minor house with a line that had stayed with him: they were not poor enough to be pitied or rich enough to be respected, and so they were simply overlooked, which was the worst position of all because it was the one that nobody ever thought to fix.
He had been nine chapters into that novel when he died. He still wondered how it ended.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You've been asking me things for an hour."
"Something different."
Litrial glanced back at him. Her face, in profile, had the strong-boned structure of dark elves – angular in the jaw and brow, silver-white hair pulled back practically from her face, eyes the pale amber that was common among their people. She looked, as she usually did, like someone who had considered several responses and chosen the most efficient one. "Ask."
"Why don't we go to the human cities?"
The stillness lasted only a moment – just long enough to be noticeable. Then her hands resumed their work. "What brought that on?"
"The traders this morning. They come here. We don't go there." He had been careful about how he asked this. He had noticed, early, that direct questions about the politics of their situation tended to be deflected or answered with a kind of careful vagueness that suggested his parents had decided, somewhere, that he was too young for the full picture. He wasn't, obviously, but correcting that impression would require explaining things he was not prepared to explain. "I was wondering why."
"Because this is where we live," Litrial said. "This is the settlement."
"Other people leave settlements. Wood elves travel. The traders today came from further than the valley."
His mother worked in silence for long enough that he thought she might let the question drop entirely. It was a technique she used sometimes – simply not responding until a subject found its own way out of the conversation. He waited. He had learned patience in two lifetimes.
"The world is not comfortable with us," she said finally. Her voice was even, without particular heat or bitterness. It was the voice she used for stating facts. "We go where we must go. The ceremony, when it comes. Trade, when we cannot avoid it. Otherwise we stay in Thalia because Thalia is ours."
"What happens at the ceremony?"
Litrial's hands slowed slightly. "We'll talk about that when it's time."
"When is it time?"
"Not today." She turned to look at him fully then, and something in her expression shifted – a softening so slight that anyone who hadn't spent seven years studying her face would have missed it. "You think too much for someone your age."
"I think the appropriate amount," Liam said, which was true from his perspective even if it wasn't particularly helpful as a response.
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. The precursor to one. "Jingahr says the same thing about himself."
"Does it run in the family?"
She turned back to the wall. "Ask your father."
He stayed on the root-ridge and watched her work through the afternoon. She moved through the boundary reinforcement with the same quality of attention she brought to everything – complete without being consuming, present without being distracted. When she needed materials, she asked him and he carried them. When she didn't, he sat and observed and thought about everything she had said and everything she hadn't said, cataloguing both with equal care.
The world is not comfortable with us. He had known this, in the abstract. He had seen it in the traders' body language, in the careful way the settlement existed at Thalia's deepest margin, in the conversations that stopped or changed register when children came too close. But hearing it stated plainly by his mother – in that flat, factual tone, the tone she used for things that simply were what they were – made it more concrete. More immediate.
He thought about the fantasy novels. In the cultivation story, the protagonist had come from nothing and climbed to the top of a hierarchy through strength and cleverness. In the political fantasy, the minor house had found a way to leverage a hidden advantage nobody expected them to have. In the reincarnation story – the one he had found most implausible – the protagonist had walked into their new world already knowing exactly what they were meant to do, as though being reborn came with a manual.
He had no manual. He had observations and questions and a mental catalogue of everything he had noticed in seven years of being very, very attentive to his surroundings.
He also had, he thought – pressing the thought carefully, like his mother pressing clay into a wall – something. In the dark. In the shadows that he moved through every day. Something that had flickered once, at the edge of his awareness, when he concentrated in a particular way that he had not yet learned to replicate reliably.
He didn't mention this to anyone.
The afternoon moved toward evening, the diffuse light of the forest canopy dimming through its stages toward the full darkness that the deep forest became at night. Litrial finished the last section of the boundary repair and stood back, assessing her work with the same focused attention she'd brought to doing it.
Then she came and sat beside him on the root-ridge, which she almost never did. She smelled of forest clay and the particular herb she used in the shadow-candle work, faintly resinous and warm.
She didn't say anything. She sat, and after a moment she began to hum – low and shapeless, more breath than melody, the kind of sound that wasn't quite a song and wasn't quite silence. He had heard it before, this specific non-song, in the years when she had held him while she worked. He associated it with the feeling of being very small and very warm and not required to be anything in particular.
He sat beside her on the root-ridge, in the dimming forest light, and listened to her hum.
The world was not comfortable with them. The ceremony was coming. The human realm existed beyond the trees with its cities and its hierarchies and its apparently very particular opinions about where dark elves fell in the order of things. There were novels he hadn't finished and a magic he didn't understand yet and a father who trained alone at night for reasons he hadn't determined and a blessing ceremony that the adults talked about in whispers and a class system that apparently determined every person's worth and a whole world that he was eight years into and still only barely beginning to map.
All of that was true, and all of that was waiting.
But for right now his mother was humming beside him, her hands finally, briefly still, and the root-tree at their backs was older than anyone knew, and Liam sat with his spine straight and his hands in his lap and felt, very quietly, that he had been given something in this life that Loki had never quite managed to have.
He didn't have a word for it yet.
He thought he would recognize it when he found one.