Azylan started the recovery meals the morning after the delivery.
Not the standard menu. Something else entirely, the particular focus of a chef who had been given a specific person with specific needs and had decided this was the most important thing happening in the kitchen until further notice.
Broths first. Long-cooked, the bones going in before dawn, the herbs from Elficia's own plots added in sequences Renna had specified, the timing precise. The mana-bearing varieties went in at low heat to preserve their properties. The Glowfruit in small amounts, just enough to support the mana restoration that elvish recovery required without overwhelming a body that was still finding its new equilibrium.
Then the solids. Soft at first. Then more substantial as the days passed and Elficia's strength came back in the steady, visible way of someone who was being properly fed for the first time after a significant expenditure.
Elfaren brought every meal to the house himself and came back with the empty bowls with the expression of someone reporting good news in the most understated way available to him.
The settlement checked in through Elder Elka, who checked in through Elfaren, who gave his daily update at the Sequoia tree in the evenings with the brevity of someone who understood that the information was what mattered and not the delivery of it.
Day three. Eating well. Resting.
Day four. Sitting up. Good color.
Day five. Asking to go outside.
On the sixth morning Elficia came out of the house.
I was in the corner of the outer residential zone that I had cleared for the purpose.
Not a large space. Just enough for the work. The wood was on the ground beside me, the best pieces from the lumber reserves, selected the way I selected things that mattered, which was carefully and without settling for second choices.
Seasoned hardwood, dense grain, the kind that held joints without movement and lasted across generations if it was worked correctly.
Torra was beside me.
He had appointed himself to this role without being asked on the first morning I had come out with the wood and the tools and sat down to start, showing up at the work site with the settled air of someone who had decided their presence was required and had arranged their schedule accordingly.
He was currently holding a piece of wood still while I worked the joint, which was genuinely useful, and narrating the process to himself in a low voice, which was less useful but not harmful.
"That piece goes there." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"And that one goes there." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"And then this part-"
"Torra." I said.
"Yes." He said.
"Hold it still." I said.
He held it still.
The crib was taking shape in the way things took shape when they were being made without magic, which was slowly and with the particular satisfaction of seeing each piece become part of something that would outlast the afternoon. I had built hundreds of structures in Eryndor with magic. Walls and houses and the marketplace hall and the brewery and the clinic, all of them produced in the time it took to form the intention clearly and push the mana through the working.
This was different.
The chisel and the plane and the joining work and the time it required. The wood responding to the tool in the particular way of material that hadn't been told what shape to take but was being persuaded into it.
I had not done this in either life.
I was finding that I wanted to do it correctly.
"Brother Leigh." Torra said. Still holding the piece. "Why aren't you using magic."
"Because this one should be made by hand." I said.
He thought about that.
"Because it's for the baby." He said.
"Yes." I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"That makes sense." He said. In the tone he used when something made the kind of sense that went beyond the logical and into something else he didn't have a precise word for yet.
We worked.
The morning moved around us. The settlement doing what it did. The marketplace opening, the farm rotation beginning, the brewery's temperature system running its quiet cycle in the southeastern corner. Flame came by once to look at what I was doing, said nothing, and went back to his patrol. Theron came by and looked at the wood and the joint work and nodded once with the expression of a craftsman acknowledging another craftsman's material choices before going back to the brewery.
Then Torra looked up.
"Brother Leigh." He said. "Elficia."
I looked up.
She was walking toward us from the residential zone. Slowly, the careful pace of someone who was stronger than they had been three days ago and still learning the new limits. Elfaren was beside her, one hand at her elbow, the particular attention of someone who was not quite holding someone up but was fully prepared to.
In her arms, a bundle.
Small. Wrapped in the soft fabric Olivia had set aside specifically for this purpose three weeks before the delivery, the deep blue-green Tarant fabric that caught light the way the sea caught light, which had not been the reason Olivia chose it but had turned out to be appropriate anyway.
They came to where I was working and stopped.
I set the chisel down.
Elficia looked at the crib. At the wood, the joint work, the shape of it emerging from the materials. She looked at it for a moment without speaking.
"You're making it by hand." She said.
"Yes." I said.
She looked at me.
"We wanted to find you." She said. "We've been looking since this morning."
"I've been here." I said.
"We know that now." Elfaren said. The tone of someone who had checked three other locations first.
Elficia looked down at the bundle in her arms. Then at me.
"We want you to name her." She said.
I set the plane down on the wood.
"There are better choices." I said.
"There aren't." Elficia said. Simply. The way she said things that were simply true, which I had noticed was a quality she shared with Torra despite them having arrived at it through entirely different experiences. "Without what you built here, without the Aphrodesia, without Eryndor, the elves would still be dreaming about this." She looked at the bundle. "Not holding it."
Elfaren nodded beside her.
"Elf names." I said. "They all begin with Elf."
Elficia and Elfaren looked at each other.
The look lasted a moment.
Then they looked back at me.
"Old traditions." Elfaren said. "Can be changed. She's the beginning of something new for us. We don't want to hold her to the old ways when there's so much more for her to know." He paused. "Name her what you want."
I had known this was coming.
Not as a specific certainty. But the shape of it had been present somewhere in the past weeks, the way some things arranged themselves into an inevitability before they arrived.
I put the tools down and looked at my hands. The sawdust and the wood residue from the morning's work.
I cast a quick cleaning spell over myself. Hands first. Then the rest of it, the dust from the work settling away, my clothes and face and hands clean in the way I couldn't reasonably hold a baby without being.
Elficia stepped forward.
She held the bundle out.
I took her.
She was light. Small in the way that new things were small, the particular smallness that came with being entirely new, the weight of her in my arms less than I had expected and more significant than the weight suggested.
I adjusted the hold the way I had learned in the other life, standing in a hospital corridor at two in the morning while my sister slept and the nurses had handed me something they probably shouldn't have and I had been too afraid to say so.
She was asleep.
Small face. The particular stillness of a sleeping infant, which was different from every other kind of stillness in the world, the absolute rest of something that had not yet learned to hold tension in the body.
The pointed ears of her heritage, barely visible at the edge of the wrapping.
I looked at her.
And I smiled.
Not the slight, barely-there expression at the corner of the mouth that appeared occasionally and was gone before most people caught it. Something else. Warmer. The kind of smile that didn't ask permission and didn't perform itself for an audience.
It simply was.
Elficia's hand went to her mouth.
Elfaren went still beside her.
Torra made a sound that was the sound of someone trying to contain something that was too large for containing and not quite succeeding, a giggle suppressed into a hum and then escaping anyway.
Across the path, two of the Seaphero women who had been walking toward the marketplace stopped walking.
The settlement, in the particular way Eryndor had developed for noticing things that mattered, noticed.
I was not wearing the illusion. Had not been wearing it for weeks, the habit of it having become more trouble than it was worth once Aldren had seen through it and the reason for it had started to feel like a weight I had been carrying for someone else's convenience rather than my own. I was just my own face.
Crescentine Fleur's face.
Leigh's face.
The face of a man who had grown tomatoes for three years and built a settlement and healed a hundred people he hadn't been asked to heal and made crib furniture by hand because some things should be made by hand.
Smiling at a sleeping infant.
I looked at the baby's face for a moment longer.
Then I gently touched her cheek with one finger. The light touch of someone checking that something is real.
She was real.
"Sena." I said quietly.
My sister's name. The one person in the other life who had looked at me the same way Torra looked at me. Who had called me cold and then climbed into my lap anyway. Who had put a nephew in my arms in a hospital corridor at two in the morning and said stop being scared, you're holding him fine.
Elficia made a sound.
Elfaren put his arm around her.
"Sena." Elficia said. Testing the sound of it. The way it sat.
She looked at Elfaren.
He looked at her.
"Sena." He said.
They both looked at me.
"It's a good name." Elficia said.
"Yes." I said.
She reached forward and took Sena back gently, the baby shifting slightly in the transfer and then settling back into the particular absolute stillness of someone who had not been disturbed at any level that registered.
Torra was at my side.
He slipped his hand into mine the way he had at the door six days ago.
I let him keep it.
"Brother Leigh." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"You smiled." He said.
"Don't make anything of it." I said.
He was already making everything of it.
I picked up the chisel and went back to work on the crib.