The festival happened every year in late spring, when the planting was done and the waiting had not yet made anyone anxious.
I had seen two of them before but had been young enough that my processing was limited to sensory data without significant emotional context. This year I was five and a half, old enough to be moving through the event rather than being carried through it, old enough to watch rather than simply experience.
Maxentius did not have a large festival. It was scaled appropriately to a village of ninety people, which meant shared food from every household, a fire in the open ground at the center of the village, and a rotating cast of musicians who were, charitably, enthusiastic.
It also, apparently, had Aldus.
I did not fully understand what was going to happen until it was already happening.
The tradition, which I gathered from overheard context had been happening for as long as anyone could remember, was that Aldus Duren gave the toast. I do not know how this had become the tradition. Aldus, when asked about it, said he was simply the one who had been there longest with something to say, which was such an Aldus answer that no one ever pushed further.
He stood up.
The village quieted.
Aldus gave the toast. I will not reproduce it in full because it was long and made several jokes that required local context I am still not entirely certain I have correctly assembled. But the structure of it was this: he thanked the village for being what it was, he made three or four observations about the past year that were accurate and gently funny, he said something about his family that made Mara cover her face with her hands and Rynn make a noise of protest, and then he said something about the next generation of this place, about what it meant to grow up somewhere that knew your name, that he clearly meant but delivered in a way that was slightly undercut by his simultaneous attempt to avoid stepping on the dog that had wandered into the space next to him.
The dog sat on his foot.
He finished the toast with the dog on his foot, which was, I found, funnier than it had any right to be.
The village laughed.
Not at him. With him. There was a difference that I had not always understood intuitively but which I understood perfectly now, watching ninety people at a fire in a village that no one important had ever cared about, laughing with a farmer who had a dog on his foot and a family behind him and enough goodwill built up over a lifetime that he could say true things and have them received as gifts.
I laughed.
This was not something I had catalogued in advance. It was not a decision. It was simply what my face did in response to Aldus and the dog, and it was followed by the slightly disorienting realization that it had happened before I noticed it happening.
Mara, who was next to me, looked over.
She put her arm around me and pulled me closer in the easy, unselfconscious way she had, and I let her, and we sat like that while the toast wound down and the food came out and the musicians started up with their enthusiastic inaccuracy.
Later, I sat between Mara and Rynn while Aldus talked to the headman across the fire, and I watched the light on the faces of the people around me, and I thought about the question I had been turning over for a long time.
What had I been missing?
Not the money. The money had been a means and I had known it was a means even when I was building it, though knowing something is a means does not always prevent you from treating it as an end.
Not the success. The success had been real, had meant something, but it had been solitary in a way I had never fully let myself see clearly, because looking at it clearly would have required admitting what was absent.
This. Specifically and exactly this.
A fire in the center of a small village. A woman's arm around my shoulders. The sound of bad music played with sincere enthusiasm. A dog sitting on my father's foot at the exact wrong moment.
The feeling of being somewhere that knew your name not because your name was worth knowing but because you were there, and being there was enough.
Nathan Arva had spent thirty-two years building things and had never once had this.
Kael Duren had it now.
The fire burned down slowly while the village talked around it, and I sat in the warmth of it and felt something that I had not known was possible, something that had not fit into any framework I had previously used for understanding my own internal states.
Simple, uncomplicated happiness.
It was, I found, everything the word implied and nothing more complicated than that.
It was, without question, enough.