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Hithui, 5897 PB (Elven Reckoning)
The City of Rivendell, Capital of the Kingdom of Rivendell
It is considered a great blessing for an elven child to be born on one of the great feast days of their people. Even with the ever-increasing amount of interbreeding between the various races of the continent elven births are still not so common that more than a handful occur every week, so those that are born on holy days are a rare minority even amongst other rarities in kind.
It is considered a great, great blessing for an elven child to be born on one of the great feast days of their people, Lady Celyn Faingær both patiently and painfully reminds her panting mistress - and friend - on the bed beside her as the other woman does her best to break Celyn’s fingers with the unnerving strength of her grip on Celyn’s hand. It is the seventh time Celyn has been forced to utter the reminder since Her currently-not-so-Serene Majesty, Consort Alanna Sigurlín of the House of Magor, went into labour six hours ago, as it is the seventh time Alanna has thrown her head back, groaning, on the pillows behind her and inquired with several less-than-savoury phrases why, just why, the thrice-damned gods-blessed baby just had to pick Aeor’s Day, the Feast of First Frost, to arrive into this world.
Weeks before, His Serene Majesty, Sovereign Coen, had promised his beloved and heavily pregnant wife a veritable buffet of all her favourite seasonal treats to mark the day of First Frost. It had been an obvious bid to restore some of the Elvenqueen’s flagging spirits as the weather turned colder, the nights longer, and the last wearisome days of her pregnancy dragged on, but it had been an effective one. Alanna has always been fond of First Frost. Of the glittering decorations hung upon every window and door-frame in the realm for feasts and balls, and the parade to the Church of Aeor in blue and gold and white. Of how every deer mount in the entire Kingdom of Rivendell has their hooves polished and hides brushed until gleaming, their antlers bedecked with golden chains and charms as every single one of them is spoilt utterly rotten all day. Every elf exchanges scarves and gloves, blankets and mittens and hats with their loved ones - a wish for the other to stay warm through the winter -, and both markets and homes are packed with sweet delights: warming drinks and refreshing icewines, elaborate snowflakes and baskets spun out of sugar syrup then filled with iced biscuits, and little glittering cakes in white and blue.
Consort Alanna’s waters had broken long before dawn, well before even the most devout of Aeor’s priests had woken to greet the day of their patron god - and so the Elvenqueen has been deprived of her day of distraction, of festivities and delights. Coen had still sent sweet drinks and little cakes of course – Alanna had threatened to take her heavily labouring self and scowl her husband down in the dining room unless she had her cakes as promised -, and there must be at least a thousand warm blankets stacked up now in the consort’s receiving room: gifts from the kingdom for their beloved consort, and for the royal babe whose arrival is expected with great joy. And there are celebrations, celebrations everywhere but the birthing chamber where all the hard work is being done: the heir is coming (oh, how the Elvenqueen and those attending her know the heir is coming), and Aeor’s Day, a great feast in Rivendell and for all elves everywhere, is an especially auspicious birthday for a royal babe.
It has been hours – many long, tedious and painful hours for Alanna – and still Gaila, the Royal Physician, remains cheerful in the face of the consort’s wearied complaints.
“Everything is proceeding just as it should,” she tells the Elvenqueen, and Celyn watches with a worried eye as Alanna takes the news by thumping her head back into the mound of pillows behind her once again. It has been two hours since Alanna found Celyn combing through the long, sweaty strands of her malachite-coloured hair soothing, and the tangles Alanna has put into the braid Celyn did for her will only be making the consort even more frustrated. “It seems Aeor has blessed the child with a perfect sense of timing. Today was your estimated due date.”
“Of course your child would decide to be as punctual as you are,” Celyn says lightly, trying to lift Alanna’s spirits with a little humour and a tentative smile. She squeezes back against the death-grip the consort has on her hand – and, bless the path the holy stag has laid out before all of them through the driven snow, Alanna smiles back at her.
“I swear,” the consort says. “I swear- oh, if I swear to never scold you for being five minutes late for anything ever again, Celyn, do you think Aeor will let this all be over soon?”
“I wouldn’t make promises I couldn’t keep,” Celyn teasingly warns her friend – for she and Alanna are friends, and have been for hundreds of years now, since they were both young girls, two daughters of noble elven houses. When Alanna had married Sovereign Coen and become consort of the realm, who else but Celyn was going to be her chief lady-in-waiting? Her closest friend and confidant beside the Elvenking?
Alanna simply laughs at her – tired, but sincere. “It’d be much easier to keep them if you were ever on time.”
“Between you and the little one…” Celyn gives Alanna’s hand another squeeze, eight fingers and two thumbs interlocked like tree trunks spliced and woven together as one. “I’m sure I will have plenty of reminders.”
Gaila’s advice is one of the few things that keeps Alanna sane through her long day in labour. (That, and Celyn beside her, and Coen spending every moment he can at her bedside when the solemnities and festivities can spare him.) Babies arrive, for the most part, when they choose to arrive, and this is remarkably little to be done about chivvying them along.
Rivendell’s newest royal might have chosen the perfect day for his arrival on earth, but he still takes his sweet time deciding the final hour. Evening has fallen by the time Alanna has gone into active labour, and the ball taking place elsewhere in the royal palace covers up the sound of the consort’s pained noises as she pushes, and pushes, and pushes hers and her husband’s heir out into the world.
The child – the boy – the prince is born with a gasp from his mother and his own wail breaking through the music of the night. He is healthy, he is strong, and the proud Elvenking is at his wife’s side to meet their son. A winged elf, like his father, and Coen’s parents before him. Gaila wipes away the afterbirth from the little prince’s skin, from the tender flesh clinging to the still-featherless jut of tiny wings against the baby’s back, and she and Celyn step back from the bed to give Alanna and Coen the most privacy they can to greet their child.
The baby’s eyes blink open for the first time in his mother’s arms, and all present gasp to see it.
Rather than the pale watery blue of almost all newborns, the baby’s eyes are gold. Gold and glowing, like the divine light of starlight itself.
“Aeor,” whispers Coen, as startled as he is reverent, his thumb soft against his son’s small squashed cheek. Small, sleepy eyes blink at him, their long lashes almost as silvery a hue as the hair on Coen’s head, as the fine, faint wisps of hair the prince himself has circling his crown. “He’s been blessed by the Great Stag Himself.”
“God-touched,” Gaila more grimly agrees, but draws the sign of Aeor against her forehead anyway.
“Two blessings in one,” Celyn tells Alanna, her smile warm at her mistress, still not too far from the bed. “The kingdom will rejoice twice-over.”
Alanna herself is as full of wonder as the others are, her heart so full of love she could die of it – and a strange, haunting feeling of dismay she thinks best not to voice aloud. This thing, this small being she has carried under her heart and lungs for so many months, has the hand of the divine upon him already. What could Aeor want with a baby, her baby, so young and so vulnerable and so small? He’s smaller than a snow-bunny right now; a large mountain wolf could snap him up in one great bite. He cannot hold the weight of his own head up yet on his soft little neck, let alone carry whatever fate the Great Stag wishes to bestow upon him.
“What will you call him?” Celyn asks, and the world pauses for a moment of startled quiet once more.
In many elven families, it is the bearer of the child who is granted the privilege of giving their newborn their names. Halfway through the pregnancy, Coen had insisted that Alanna would have that same privilege for their child, and so Alanna had spent the months between then and now drawing up lists and shortlists of ideas. So many lists and shortlists of ideas.
None of them suit a baby already blessed by Aeor, a child claimed from the womb rather than from being consecrated to the Great Stag with a sign made upon his head in meltwater.
“Asterin as a middle name,” says Coen after a few minutes in which Alanna says nothing at all, “as is his right as the firstborn prince.” Every firstborn son in the House of Magor has taken Asterin as their first middle name. Coen himself is Coen Asterin Aneurin Magor: a beautiful, mighty name for a beautiful, mighty Elvenking with eyes as silvery, as hypnotic, as Moon Leaf, and great wide wings as soft and white as the purest driven snow.
“And Judicaël,” Alanna adds, “I thought, for your ancestor.” Sovereign Judicaël the Kind, who had accepted all of the refugees from the fallen Queendom of Zaethariwiran into Rivendell: altering the nature of elven biology and Rivendellian society ever after. Sovereign Judicaël is the reason there are so many avian settlements within the kingdom now, and the assimilation of so many windfolk into the population had naturally resulted in many unions between elves and the southern peoples. Leading to the birth of elves with even lighter complexions than before. Leading to elves with wings becoming a permanent fixture of the population. “And my mother’s father. So that he may be kind, as warm-hearted, as both of them.”
Coen nods in approval, one of his wings curving to wrap around Alanna’s shoulders when she adjusts herself, sitting up a little more against the pillows propped behind her head. “Judicaël Asterin Magor?”
“Majesties, they’ll call him Judy,” Gaila warns them, and Alanna cannot help but laugh again.
“Asterin Judicaël,” she tells Coen, smiling as her husband does as their son yawns in her arms, one of the prince’s tiny hands balled up into a fist that flails and flops somewhere in the direction of his own face. “As his middle names. For his first…”
First Frost is the first day of Rhîw, elven winter. From her new position Alanna can see better through the largest window of the birthing chamber, out over the city of Rivendell, out at the cold, clear, star-flecked sky. Against the vast expanse of darkness the winter stars are rising, a glittering train trailing down from the Wanderer high around what must be the pole. The Wanderer, the travelling star ousted from its position as the pole star by the push of hungry Draconis, foreign to its kin: but still bright, still proud, forging its own path.
“...Scott,” Alanna says softly. The name of a traveller in the old tales her mother used to tell her, a foreign stranger who had confounded the elves who had given him shelter from the cold one night but blessed them with riches in return. The name of a starborne king in hiding, now bequeathed to a prince with Aeor’s starlight in his eyes. “Prince Scott Asterin Judicaël Magor.”
“A name bigger than he is,” says Coen, his voice rich with amusement – but his smile, when he looks at Alanna, at their sob, is warm, is tender, is approving.
“He’ll grow into it,” says Alanna, shrugging into the softness of Coen’s feathers around her, sighing into the feeling of Coen’s lips against her brow and then her cheek – and then down against the still-damp curve of Scott’s little sleepy head.
Some of Coen’s long silver-blue hair slips loose from the ornate braids he’d been wearing it in all day and swings down against Scott’s face, and Scott’s eyes, his mouth, his little point of a nose, all scrunch up in indignation. He yas at his father, fails to hit Coen with his fist, and grabs at Coen’s hair with a tiny death-grip instead. The hair, the wings, the attitude…. he really does take after his father.
Aeor, Alanna loves them both so much.
(Aeor, please guide and protect them.)
In the morning, bells will ring out all over Rivendell and announce the safe delivery of Prince Scott to the rest of the kingdom. Songs will be sung, another feast will be held, and services will be held to thank Aeor for the gift of a healthy heir and the consort’s continuing health after labour. People will hear about the prince’s golden eyes: Aeor’s mark upon Alanna’s child.
As soon as Alanna can stand, Coen will take her to the balcony with Scott in her arms to show their son to their people – and Alanna will have to share her baby with not only her god, but the physical world as well. People will see the prince’s golden eyes, and expect miracles from him.
A few weeks after that, Scott will be consecrated to Aeor in His Church. Snow will be taken from the highest peak in Rivendell, the one closest to the stars, and melted over blessed flames so that the prince may be anointed with precious, holy oils and the meltwater, the sign of the Great Stag drawn upon his forehead.
(Aeor, please guide and protect him.)
For now… for now, Alanna prays, holding her son as Coen holds her, holds them both. Fervent, desperate, and devout, her heart full of love and wonder and fear.
(In the morning, Aeor will reward her faith. When Alanna wakes at dawn to the sound of the bells ringing throughout the kingdom, to the sight of Scott sleepily stirring awake in his crib at her bedside… Scott will be just as small in her eyes, just as wondrous and wonderful. But his eyes will be blue.)