I handed the bags to Frostina and Torra when we arrived back in Eryndor.
"Gather everyone at the Sequoia tree." I said. "I have something to announce."
Frostina took this seriously in the way she took things seriously when they didn't require her to do anything difficult, which meant she was already calling out across the settlement before I had finished the sentence. Torra ran ahead to cover the residential zone, knocking on doors, his voice carrying the particular urgency of someone who has been given an important task.
They came quickly. Whatever they had been doing, they stopped it. Elfaren and Elficia came from the herb plots. Azylan came from the kitchen with a cloth still over his shoulder. Gringo and Mikayla came from the workstation. Benneth came from the farm. Flame dropped from somewhere on the mountain stairs and landed near Torra, and the two of them stood together at the front of the group with the expectant attention of people who expected to find out something interesting.
I waited until everyone was there.
Then I told them.
Twenty gold coins. Each person. Every month. Distributed on the same schedule as the supply runs.
I waited for the questions I could already see forming.
"Everything the settlement needs, housing, food, supplies, building materials, all of it comes from Eryndor's funding." I said. "That's separate. Your allowance is yours. You won't need to spend it on anything here because anything that needs to be spent here isn't coming out of your pocket. This is for whatever you want."
I held up the pouches.
"Line up." I said.
They moved. There was a moment of the particular hesitation that happened when people were processing something unexpected and hadn't finished yet, and then the line formed because the line was something concrete to do while the processing continued.
I handed the pouches down the line. Each one the same weight. Each one the same amount.
Elficia and Elfaren were at the back, still standing slightly apart from the main group the way they sometimes did, the habit of a century of living among only their own kind not yet fully dissolved.
When the line was done I had two pouches left.
I handed them to Torra.
He looked at them and understood immediately, the way he often understood things that weren't fully explained.
He walked to the elves.
"Brother Leigh said everyone." He held the pouches out, one in each hand. "So it's everyone."
Elficia took hers slowly, looking at it with the focused attention she gave things that surprised her.
Elfaren looked at the pouch in his hand and then at me over Torra's head.
He said something in Elvish. Elficia followed, a beat behind him.
I answered in the same language.
Both of them looked up immediately. Not with shock exactly. More the expression of people who had already stopped being surprised by me and were now simply recalibrating upward again.
They smiled. The quiet kind.
"That's all." I said, in the common tongue, to the group. "Dismissed."
I left them to it and went to the tarantula enclosure.
Somehow...
The enclosure needed expanding.
The baby tarantulas had grown faster than the original timeline I had planned for, which was becoming a pattern with everything in Eryndor that I calculated in advance.
The mother tarantula had settled into her senior position among them with the particular authority of something ancient that has stopped needing to demonstrate its authority. The younger ones produced their colored webs constantly, the colors consistent to each individual, the output collectively overwhelming.
Frostina and Benneth had been doing collection runs twice a day and still falling behind. The elves had started helping, which had added capacity, but the production was increasing faster than any of them could keep pace with.
I expanded the enclosure walls outward and upward, giving the growing tarantulas the space they needed without disrupting the web structures they had already established. The work was straightforward.
The enclosure understood the expansion the same way the rest of Eryndor's structures understood adjustment, the magic in the foundations accommodating change without resistance.
Below me, through the gate, I could see the Sequoia tree area where Celina and Favio had started transforming the outdoor dining space for Mikayla's birthday.
I watched them work for a moment.
Birthdays.
Mikayla's was tomorrow. The first proper birthday celebration Eryndor had organized, with decoration and a cake from Amanda's shop and a gift chosen in a jewelry store in Amlada's capital. The first one because it was a milestone. The eighteenth. The rest hadn't warranted the same attention.
Torra had turned seven recently.
I had missed it entirely. Found out a week after the date had passed, from an offhand comment Celina made while she was cooking. I had filed it away and moved on because there was nothing to be done about a date that had already gone.
But I thought about it now.
The settlement had been living in survival mode for so long that celebration had become something reserved for events that carried weight. A milestone birthday. An official founding day. Things that had earned acknowledgment. The smaller ones, the ordinary birthdays, the days that were just the day a person had been born without any particular significance attached to the number, those had passed without notice for as long as any of them had been here.
And now they weren't surviving anymore. They were living.
The distinction was one I had made before about other things. It applied here too.
I finished the enclosure expansion and climbed back down the stairs.
I went looking for Mathilda.
She was in her house, the small one she shared with Nalvik, working on something at the table by the window. She looked up when I knocked and came to the door with the mild surprise she usually showed when I came to her specifically rather than through the general group.
"I need the settlement's birthdays." I said. "Everyone. Written down with their dates on the Philantrian calendar."
She blinked. Then nodded with the quiet practicality that was characteristic of her.
"All of them?" She said.
"All of them." I said. "Including the ones that have already passed this year."
She pulled out paper and a pen and looked at me with the expression of someone ready to work.
"Yours too." She said.
I had turned twenty-one somewhere in the middle of everything. I knew the date had passed. I had noted it the same way I noted weather, as a fact about conditions that didn't require a response.
"Mine too." I said.
She wrote.
I went back to the enclosure to finish what I had started, running through the list of dates in my head as I worked. How many had already gone by. How many were coming.
I wasn't going to miss another one.
Not because birthdays mattered to me particularly. They didn't. My own could keep passing without ceremony indefinitely and I would not find the loss significant.
But they mattered here. To these people. Or they should, now that there was room for them to matter.
That was enough reason.