Aneira of the Red Clan
Year 635
The British Isles had been home for four years when the Blue clan arrived.
She had been expecting them — the Blue clan's migration had been moving in parallel with the Red clan's for the past three decades, following the same westward pressure but from a more northerly route, arriving at a different section of the coastline before making the sea crossing. Oceanus had been tracking their approach through the Covenant's coastal network and had sent word two months before they arrived that the crossing was imminent.
She had used those two months to prepare, because preparation was what competent leadership did with the time between knowing something was coming and it arriving. She had assessed the territorial question — which high ground belonged to whom, where the boundaries of range and resource access should be drawn — and had arrived at a position that was honest about what the Red clan needed and what it was willing to give up. She had spoken to the beings in the old forest, through Zara's developing translation capacity, about the arrival and what it would mean for the specific quality of the land in the territory adjacent to the Red clan's current settlement. She had consulted with the Orange clan representatives who had made the crossing — still four of them, still observing rather than committing, but observing with increasing engagement — about the specific resources of the coastal territory that the Blue clan would likely claim.
When the Blue clan arrived, in their dragon form, from the northern sea crossing, she was on the high ground to meet them.
The Blue clan was different from the Red clan in ways that were visible even at distance. Slender where the Red clan was broad, quick where the Red clan was powerful, with the specific quality of something that had adapted to cold and speed in the way that the Red clan had adapted to heat and endurance. Their elder — a dragon of perhaps two hundred years in her human form, silver-haired and with the quality of someone who had been making decisions about her community's welfare for a very long time and had found the practice clarifying rather than depleting — landed first and shifted immediately, which was the Blue clan tradition in formal contexts.
Her name was Caer. She looked at Aneira with the assessment that Aneira associated with beings who had spent a long time reading situations accurately and who were doing it now.
"Red clan elder," she said.
"Blue clan elder," Aneira said.
They stood on the high ground looking at each other for a moment that contained all the accumulated weight of two communities that had been adjacent for centuries without formal relationship, that had now arrived at the same territory through parallel decisions and would need to find a way to be adjacent here without the established informal understanding that proximity over time had produced in the eastern territories.
"The northern coast," Caer said. Not a question. A statement of where the Blue clan intended to establish.
"Yes," Aneira said. "We expected that. The land there suits your nature." She paused. "The interior high ground is ours. The southern coast—" She paused again. "Is not established. We have been leaving it open. There is something in that territory that we have not yet understood, and we thought it better to leave the question open until we understood it."
Caer looked at her with the quality of someone receiving a gift they did not expect. "You are offering shared unknowing rather than divided territory."
"I am offering honesty about what we don't know," Aneira said. "What we do with the territory we don't know yet can be decided when we know it better."
It was not the territorial negotiation that Aneira had expected to have. She had prepared for the territorial negotiation she had expected and was now improvising the one that was actually happening, which was a different one. She had prepared for a negotiation about specific resources and specific claims, and what she was having was a conversation about the quality of approach to a new place.
Caer sat down on the edge of the high ground, in the human form that fit that particular action, and looked out at the territory that would become both their communities' home.
"We have been told," she said, "that there are beings in the old growth forest that were here before any of us."
"Yes," Aneira said. "Zara has been in communication with them. She is the most accurate term I have for what she does."
"I had heard of Zara," Caer said. "The border-walker. The crossbreed who has been with the Covenant for—"
"Six hundred years," Aneira said.
Caer was quiet for a moment. "She is not aging."
"No," Aneira said.
"That is not—" Caer stopped.
"No," Aneira said. "It is not. She appears to be something that does not fit any of the existing categories. Which seems to be appropriate for someone whose work has always been exactly that."
Caer looked at her. Then she made the specific sound that Aneira had learned, from three hundred years of interaction with other clans, was the Blue clan elder's equivalent of laughter — not humor exactly, more the specific recognition of something that the universe had arranged with more irony than was strictly necessary.
"All right," Caer said. "Tell me about the southern coast. And the beings in the forest. And whatever else you have learned about this place that I should know."
Aneira sat beside her on the high ground and did exactly that.
Two elders. Two clans. A territory that was larger than either of them and older than both of them combined. The beings in the old forest, who had been waiting for something that had arrived.
The specific quality of a new beginning, which always contained in it the weight of everything that had preceded it and the shape of everything that would follow.
Aneira was two hundred and seventy years old. She had perhaps thirty years left. She would not see most of what this territory would eventually become.
She was building it anyway.
That was what elders did.
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