Disclaimer: This is not the final version as it will be available from the usual e-book sellers and eventually, bookstores. Rather, it should be seen as an (almost) final draft. If you are interested in becoming a beta reader, or you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts that you feel I should consider before publishing please drop me a line using the contact form.
Keeping Count
She had been in Thetwick for more than forty years since the day she had decided it would be a good idea to start keeping count. It was then that she had started keeping track of dates too and she made it a point to remember that that year had been 855 by the way the humans of Iurrak customarily counted them. She’d since learned that in Selinus they sometimes used the years of a monarch’s reign, or the elven calendar that she’d heard went back far further. She didn’t really know how either of those worked though. She wasn’t certain how long she had been in Thetwick before 855, but it couldn’t have been more than a decade or two, she thought. She remembered that the village had been little more than a hamlet when she first came to it, it had grown a lot since. She also still didn’t know how old she was, but it was much, much older than the ten human years or so that she now looked. Too many people lived in Thetwick now, but she didn’t think there were more than a handful who were older than her and they were the most ancient people in the town.
She still only had vague memories of the time before her adoptive mother, Palady, had taken her in. They were partial and dreamlike, all of beautiful, tall and slender people, musical voices and white stone cities among enormous trees. The city or cities she remembered had been filled with enormous, airy buildings and magnificent towers reaching into the sky, with the wind making nice strange noises as it found its way around the tall structures. There were figures in her memories who she thought might be her mother and father, but she hardly had more than shards of images. She remembered that there had been plants, coaxed to grow around white stone and the sound of many birds. She also remembered strange and beautiful creatures in a magnificent forest somewhere. There might have been less buildings there, but she wasn’t sure. It had smelt of spring and life. The only other thing she was really certain of was that she must have come to Thetwick after she learned to talk, since she could speak and even read, elvish, a skill which no else in Thetwick seemed to possess.
A fair number of people in Thetwick could read, which they usually learned at school. Her command of elvish puzzled her a little though. She assumed that learning to read elven must have been with her elven parent, though she didn’t even know if it was her mother or father who had been an elf. The way she learned wasn’t exactly like human children. She realised it was very uncommon for a human child who was the same size as she had been when she’d arrived in Thetwick to have already learned to read. She guessed she must have been the size of a four or five year old human child, then but she thought she might have already even been decades old, even then.
She thought that simply having more time was what made the difference, rather than learning to read being too difficult for a four or five year old human child. It was just that humans were a few years older when they mastered it, just because it took a few years to master. Even if Ala had learned when she was even smaller and it had taken her five years, she would still have looked like a four or a five year old human child by the team she’d spent far more hours learning than a human child had by the time they were eight. It seemed logical to her that she could have learned to read elvish even though she still would have looked quite a lot younger than even the youngest of literate human children.
She didn’t know how old she had been when she arrived and even Palady had never really dared to make a proper guess. Palady described it as if she had been about the size of a human four or five year old as well, anyway. What that meant in half-elf years she simply didn’t know, but she decided it must have been decades. Of course she wasn’t actually sure her rate of ageing was constant. It was quite difficult to make any guesses without anyone knowledgeable to ask.
When Palady was already very old, she had sat Ala down and explained to her in more detail about the group of the Duke’s soldiers that had left Alagariel in Thetwick. They had rescued Ala somewhere, Palady didn’t know exactly where, but she thought it might have been near a small fief to the West, named Seraphim. She told her again about the senior guardsman with the patrol, William the Bull. Mostly, Ala knew the story and even thought she remembered shards of those days which were filled with terror. Palady also told her how she had chosen the name ‘Alagariel’ for her. As a little girl she had only referred to herself as ‘Ala’. It was one of the few things she had ever said during the first few years in Thetwick. Palady thought it was probably part of a longer name, shortened to make it easier for a child to say. Trying to imagine a longer form of Ala, the name Alagariel, who was an elf queen in a popular faery tale, had seemed fitting. Her name was usually followed by her saying things in elven that Palady obviously couldn’t understand. There had been improvement though and eventually, Ala had started speaking the common tongue too.
The name Palady had chosen, was very well known name among the people of the Westmarch owing to the popular tale. It wasn’t customary to name girls ‘Alagariel’, but everyone knew it well nonetheless. Children all across Taldyr learned the nursery rhyme. It had been Palady’s favourite story when she was a girl herself. It was about an elven queen and her dragon friends who had driven the demons from the world together at the beginning of time. Palady had learned the story from her grandmother. Alagariel knew it was a common story that was always told to awe young children. The Alagariel in the story was strong and smart, a warrior, a fire sorceress and a stern though fair Queen. She was presented as someone who would come to save you if you were good. Ala loved stories, though if she was honest her favourite was a different tale, one about a Northern shieldmaiden named Kára. Still, she understood that Palady had chosen the name for her because she was a half-elf and she had found it fitting for a child who called herself ‘Ala’.
Ala was sure she had had a different name before she came to Thetwick… she was sure it hadn’t been Alagariel but she just couldn’t remember it. Once she realised that her new name was different she had spent a lot of time trying to remember what the old one was. Sometimes she thought she had it but eventually she realised she just couldn’t be sure. It was a lot longer than ‘Ala’, that was the only thing she was certain about.
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