The house suited them better than I expected.
I knew this not because they said anything about it but because neither of them came back out within the first hour. People who are uncomfortable in a space find reasons to leave it. They stayed.
I went back to checking the farm.
The squirrel was in the tomatoes again. I looked at it. It looked at me. I had decided, provisionally, to let this particular standoff continue until Elfaren was settled enough to address it. The elf who could communicate with animals was currently adjusting to a new home. The squirrel could have one more afternoon.
I let it have the afternoon and went to check the Glowfruits instead.
Two birds. Still working on the same cluster with the systematic patience of creatures that had identified a reliable resource and intended to exploit it fully.
I stood at the edge of the orchard and watched them and said nothing.
Eventually I went back to the Sequoia tree and sat down.
Through the afternoon, the residents maintained their distance from the elves' house with more discipline than I usually got from them when I asked for something.
They had spread themselves across the settlement at intervals that had clearly been discussed and agreed upon, present enough to be available, far enough to be respectful.
I noted it without saying anything about it.
The light had shifted to late afternoon when I looked toward the elves' house and saw the door open.
Elficia came out first. She stopped when she saw what was in front of the door and crouched down.
I could see Torra from where I was sitting. Still cross-legged on the ground in front of their door. Head dropped to the left. Eyes moving in the slow, losing battle of someone who had been fighting sleep for hours and was running out of arguments for staying awake.
Elficia crouched in front of him.
He blinked at her and straightened with effort.
"I gave you space." He said. The words came out slightly blurred at the edges. "Is the time over now?"
Something happened on Elficia's face that I watched from a distance without being able to name precisely.
She picked him up.
Torra went without any process at all, his head finding her shoulder immediately, his weight settling in completely. He was asleep before she had fully straightened.
Elfaren came out behind her and they stood together for a moment looking down at him.
Then they walked toward the settlement.
Elder Elka went to meet them, moving at her own pace, reading the situation the way she always did before deciding how to enter it.
Her eyes found Torra first. Whatever she saw in Elficia's face when she looked at him, Elder Elka filed it away quietly and didn't make anything of it.
"I can take him." She said. "If he's a burden."
"He isn't." Elficia said. She adjusted her hold slightly, settling Torra more securely against her shoulder. "He doesn't bother us at all."
Elder Elka smiled and turned toward the Sequoia tree.
I followed at a distance and sat back down on the bench while Elder Elka settled the two of them across from her and started the conversation she started with everyone who came to Eryndor, which was the conversation about food.
Azylan materialized at Elder Elka's shoulder with the timing of someone who had been positioned nearby since the moment the elves' door opened.
"Vegetables. Fruits." Elfaren said. "We eat meat as well."
Azylan's shoulders came down from wherever they had been.
"But we get sick from it." Elficia added.
They went back up.
"Sick how?" Azylan said.
"When we eat meat." Elfaren said. "We toss the boar on the fire and let it cook through."
Azylan looked at him.
"You put the whole boar on the fire." He said.
"Yes."
"And then eat it."
"When it's cooked through."
I watched Azylan close his eyes for one brief moment. Then open them.
The expression that replaced the pained one was one I recognized from the first day he had walked into Eryndor's kitchen and seen the cold storage. The look of a craftsman encountering an interesting problem and already solving it.
He clapped his hands together once.
"Celina. Helene. Savina. Mathilda."
All four of them appeared from various points around the settlement faster than was explainable.
"Flame's boar from yesterday, the unidentified horned one, the Glowfruit reduction I've been saving." He was already moving. "We're doing a proper feast. Good herbs, good board, and someone check the oven temperature because we're starting now."
They went with him, voices picking up in the organized overlap of people who had cooked together long enough to not need full sentences.
Then a hand closed around my arm.
I looked down.
Frostina. Eyes slightly wide, chin lowered, looking up at me with an expression she had been developing and refining for weeks.
"It's a feast." She said. "A proper welcome feast. For the new residents." A pause that was doing a lot of work. "Alcohol is part of a feast."
She smiled.
"Sure." I said.
The smile widened considerably.
"Bring out the barrels you've been hiding." I said. "All of them. You serve everyone yourself."
The smile stopped.
"Every hidden barrel. Behind the tarantula enclosure. Under the floorboard in your room." I looked at her. "The small one behind the second shelf in the storehouse that you moved last week thinking I wouldn't notice."
Frostina's expression ran through several things quickly. Calculation. The realization that the calculation was going nowhere useful. Then the particular collapse of someone who had been very confident in a plan and had just found the flaw in it.
She dropped onto her back in the grass.
"No." She said. At the sky.
She kicked once to the left. Once to the right.
"No, no, no."
Another kick.
"NO."
Flame had been watching from near the kitchen entrance. He started laughing. The full, open, entirely unsympathetic laugh of someone who had been on the receiving end of this exact sequence and was experiencing the other side of it for the first time.
Frostina sat up and looked at him.
Flame kept laughing.
She was on her feet and after him before the sound had finished, the ancient frost dragon in complete, undignified pursuit across the entire length of Eryndor's residential zone. The children at the playground looked up, read the energy of what was coming, and abandoned all existing activities to join in, the rules unclear but the enthusiasm immediate and total.
I watched them disappear around the corner of the storehouse, the noise continuing without interruption from the other side of it.
I looked at the Sequoia table.
Elfaren was watching the same corner where they had disappeared. Elficia had Torra still asleep in her arms, his face turned into her shoulder, completely unbothered by the chaos that had just passed through the settlement at speed.
Elfaren looked at Elficia.
She looked back at him.
"This is where we live now." He said.
It wasn't quite a question. It was the thing you say when you have just understood something and are putting it into words to confirm it.
"Yes." Elficia said.
She sounded settled about it. The way someone sounds when they have stopped looking for reasons to feel uncertain.
I picked up my tea from the table where I had left it before all of this started and found it had gone cold.
I drank it anyway and looked out at the farm fields, where the squirrel was almost certainly still in the tomatoes.
Tomorrow, I thought, the elf could handle it.