time and the interest to do this, to watch the performance while other elves, selected by lot or from the family retainers, brought them food and wine. It was the sort of reading that you only saw in abbreviated form among the busy money-making elves of Lothern. It was like stepping back into the past, into the golden age of the first Everqueen, and he knew it was deliberately so.
He looked for notes of falseness and because he was looking, he found some. Here and there, some of the audience were asleep. Others paid no attention and inspected their nails, but this had probably been so during the golden age as well. Perhaps this was part of a different golden age, but a golden age nonetheless. These elves were keeping the old ways alive. They saw themselves as guardians of a certain sort of elfness, and he did not doubt that they were correct to do so.
Lothern was the future, if the elves were to have a future. It was commercial, home of an outward looking, sophisticated, mercantile Phoenix King. It was a city of trade, a hybrid cosmopolitan place where the elves mingled with other peoples and learned from them and adapted to the new and altered world.
In Avelorn, the elves were behaving as they had before the age of Aenarion. It was beautiful and moving and rather sad. Sad because all of this took an effort to maintain and it was dying away. It was an enclave frozen in amber.
No, he told himself. That was not fair. This place still lived. It was the beating heart of asur society. It was where artists and poets and dancers came, to compete, to find an appreciative audience, to seek fame and a certain kind of glory. It was not the sort of glory that he himself was interested in, but he could understand why some elves were.
He moved into another glade. Elves in green raiment practised archery, drawing and firing at targets hundreds of paces away. These were not competitors in the tournament he realised. These were just ordinary citizens of Avelorn, training with their weapons as was their right and duty. The practice made them the finest archers in the world, and the backbone of the elven citizen-armies.
He inspected them, as a general might inspect his troops. Each of them was an elf in his or her prime. All of them must have handled bows for decades, if not centuries. All of them were hale and hearty and would remain so for hundreds of years.
No other troops would or could have their skill or their discipline or their experience. Simply by virtue of still being alive for so long, they would have fought in dozens of skirmishes and battles. They would have survived encounters with numerous foes.
Like the poets he had just witnessed, they too were part of an older Ulthuan, one that dated from the age of Morvael, of the first great citizen-soldier levies. They were part of the culture. They too moved to a different beat than the elves of Lothern.
It came to Tyrion that elves like these could be found all over the island-continent. In aggregate, they must far outnumber the elves of Lothern although they had no single town or city that was even a fraction of the size of the city-state. Probably they were much more representative of the people as a whole. And they looked at least as much to the Everqueen as to the Phoenix King for leadership.
Perhaps for the first time in his life, in this place, he started to get a sense of what his own people were like, all of the folk beyond the city in which he lived and the mountains he had called home from his earliest youth.
For these people here, the folk of Lothern were something new and strange. The people here were the ones who represented the mainstream of life. Looking at them, he saw the majority of the elves as they wanted to see themselves and he realised that he was not at all like them.
He passed on, entering a vast clearing in the forest filled with silk pavilions and corrals for proud elven steeds. The symbol of the Everqueen was on everything and he realised that this must be the place in which she currently dwelled. Maiden Guards strolled everywhere, but no one looked at him suspiciously. It was inconceivable that anyone would want to harm the ruler of Avelorn.
Magic shimmered in the