Azylan outdid himself.
The table had barely enough space for everything he put on it. Dish after dish came out of the kitchen, each one different, the smells layering over each other in a way that brought people to the benches before anyone had called them.
He had done something with the boar that made it unrecognizable from the animal Flame had dragged back yesterday. He had done something with the vegetables that made Elfaren pick up a piece, look at it, and eat three more without appearing to notice he was doing it.
I sat at the end of the bench and watched it unfold.
Torra woke up from the smell.
He had been asleep in Elficia's arms through the entire preparation, through the chaos of Frostina's pursuit of Flame across the settlement, through the kitchen noise and the table being set. Then the first wave of Azylan's cooking reached wherever he was in his sleep and he came back into consciousness with his head up and one word at full volume.
"FOOD."
He was off Elficia's lap and at the table before anyone had time to react to the announcement.
Frostina was already seated. She had the barrel of rum in both arms and was holding it against her chest with the particular grip of someone who had been separated from something important and was not prepared to risk it again.
She had carried it from wherever it had been hidden, which meant she had exposed its location, which she had clearly decided was acceptable given the alternative of leaving it unguarded.
She caught me looking at her.
She pulled the barrel slightly closer.
I looked away.
Elder Elka moved through the table before sitting down herself, the way she always did, making sure everyone had what they needed first. She stopped at Elfaren and Elficia and served them personally, pointing out each dish, describing it briefly, watching their faces to see what registered.
Elficia tried the sauce Azylan had made from the Glowfruit reduction and went still in exactly the way people went still when something was better than they had prepared themselves for.
Elfaren noticed. He tried it. His expression didn't change much but he reached for more, which was the same thing.
The table filled with the sound of twenty-something people eating together, the particular noise of a meal that was working, conversations running alongside and across each other, the children negotiating over the last of the skewers with the focused intensity they brought to important matters.
I sat with my food and watched it.
Eryndor had new residents again.
I thought about the number. Twenty had felt like a small, fragile thing when I first arrived. The settlement that had started at nearly two hundred and fallen to twenty through years of loss. Now we were past thirty counting the dragons and the elves and Azylan and the twins.
I wondered, without attaching any particular feeling to it, how far the number would go.
The feast ran into the night. The adults drank. The elves, it turned out, could hold alcohol considerably better than most of the humans at the table, a fact that Benneth discovered with surprise and Nalvik discovered with competitive interest.
The teenagers sat with their juice and did not touch the alcohol. Not once. Not even when Favio offered with the magnanimous generosity of someone three cups in. They declined with the firm politeness of people who had learned a specific lesson and retained it completely.
Frostina watched Favio get a refill from her barrel and made a sound that was close to weeping.
"It's already half gone." She said. To no one. To the night.
Gringo patted her shoulder with the sympathy of someone who was on juice and could afford to be generous about it.
She did not find this comforting.
The night wound down the way good nights did, gradually and without anyone deciding it was over, people drifting toward their houses in ones and twos until the table was quiet and the lamp posts were doing their steady work over an empty settlement.
•••••••••
In the morning, Elfaren and Elficia were already in the farmlands before I finished my patrol.
I stood at the edge of the plots and watched.
Elficia was crouched near the tomatoes. She was making sounds I couldn't fully hear from the distance, low and rhythmic, and the squirrel that had been my persistent problem for the past week was sitting in front of her in the posture of something that was listening. Actually listening. Not fleeing, not stealing, just sitting there with its full attention on her.
Then it left. Through the gate, unhurried, moving into the settlement's outer territory without looking back.
Elfaren was at the orchard. The birds had come down from the Glowfruit cluster and were on the ground around him, heads tilted, the same focused listening quality.
Then they went too.
I walked to Elfaren.
"Tell them," I said, "that I'll plant a separate section in the forest with vegetables and fruit trees they can use. What's inside the fence is ours. What's outside, I'll set aside for them."
Elfaren relayed it. I didn't hear the exchange but I could see the moment it landed in how the remaining birds adjusted and dispersed.
"The birds dropping seeds out there," I said, "that's fine. Useful, actually. And if she can bring more bees toward the farm, I'll build them hives. We can use the honey."
Elficia looked up from where she was crouching and smiled.
"Bees are easy." She said. "They're already curious about the Glowfruits. I've been holding them back."
"Don't hold them back." I said. "Give them a corner and let them work."
She nodded and turned back to her conversation with the small creatures gathering around her.
I went to the forest.
The section I had in mind was just past the enclosure stairs, a patch of cleared ground I had been considering for expansion. I overturned the soil the way I had overturned the original farm plots, pulling up the ash and mixing it down, bringing the fertile layer up.
Then I sowed. Seeds and saplings distributed across the cleared section, the varieties that grew fast and bore frequently, the ones that would produce enough to sustain whatever the forest's small residents were used to eating.
Then I put the growth spell on it.
Not the subtle version. The full version, time compression folded into the soil around each plant, compressing weeks into minutes in a localized field. The plants came up. Kept going. The saplings found their height. The fruit set and ripened.
I straightened up and looked at what had been bare ground twenty minutes ago.
Elfaren and Elficia had come up beside me at some point during the process. I hadn't heard them approach, which told me something about how elves moved in forests.
They were looking at the full-grown section with an expression I recognized from Azylan's first time in the cold storage, the same quality of abundance being more difficult to process than scarcity.
"What spell was that." Elfaren said.
"Growth acceleration." I said.
He looked at me.
I walked back toward the main farm path and they followed.
I showed them the Aphrodesia plot in the afternoon, after Gringo and Mikayla had come out with sandwiches and apple juice from the new squeezer, which had been running constantly since the apple harvest came in.
The Aphrodesia had spread.
It had started as a controlled patch and was now closer to a low shrub, dense and healthy, the particular silver-green of its leaves catching the light differently from everything around it. A century of failed cultivation in the elven village's greenhouse. Here it had outgrown its original plot in a season.
Elficia put her hand on the leaves very carefully, the way she had put her hand on the doorframe of the house. Reading it.
"It's healthy." She said. Quietly. Like she wasn't sure she was saying it to anyone but herself.
"Use what you need." I said. "Prepare the amount for the elven village. My delivery schedule runs every two weeks. It can go with the next one."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
They were doing the same recalculation I had watched the guild master do, the captain of the guard do, Azylan do. Working through what they were actually standing next to and adjusting the frame accordingly.
Limitless mana. That was what they were arriving at. No depletion. No recovery time. The growth spell had been forbidden-grade magic applied to an entire forest section without chanting and without cost.
The delivery schedule ran monthly across multiple kingdoms, which meant teleportation at range and scale that no archmage in Philantria could sustain. The settlement around us had been built from nothing in a matter of weeks by one person.
Elfaren looked at me with the careful eyes of someone who had just finished a calculation they found alarming.
I didn't say anything about it.
"We'll prepare the first batch tonight." Elficia said. Her voice was steady. "For the delivery."
"Good." I said, and walked back toward the Sequoia tree.
Behind me they stayed with the Aphrodesia for another moment. I didn't need to hear what they said to each other to know the shape of it.
Whatever they had thought they were agreeing to when they signed the contract in the elder's hall, they understood better now.
They were going to honor it completely.
Not because of the contract.
Because they had seen enough to know exactly what honoring it was worth.