Although he had agreed to cooperate with Barrel, Aaron did not think much of the legendary sun elf's plan.
Barrel had not said how he had recovered the War Sword. Eleanor asked a tentative question, but Barrel merely shook his head and refused to answer, so no one pressed him. Everyone needed a few little secrets of their own. That was how loyalty was guaranteed.
Secrets = loyalty!
The key issue was not that Barrel was a mage who wanted to become the chief weapons master, nor whether Aaron would support his plan to borrow someone else's resources to achieve his own ends. What baffled Aaron most was this-what made Barrel so sure that Ilsevele, a Coronal of noble sun elf blood, would take a liking to him?
Elves were obsessed with appearances to begin with, and sun elves were especially bad. Elves reached full sexual maturity at twenty-five, but to sun elves, marrying and having children before turning a hundred, before truly mastering etiquette, culture, manners, and proper speech, was a very strange and incomprehensible thing to do.
Political marriages were virtually nonexistent among elves, especially among the three "pure-blooded" peoples: sun elves, moon elves, and star elves. To them, love was incomparably sacred and had to be cherished and treated with the utmost solemnity. Marriage was an enormously important ceremony in an elf's life-elves preferred open relationships, such as brief affairs or relatively long-term cohabitation, to marriage.
If they actually married, it would inevitably be the wedding of the century, the kind that required the entire community to celebrate for weeks.
On this one point, elves were extraordinarily stubborn. No one could force them.
If Barrel wanted to become the Coronal's man, neither a brief affair nor long-term cohabitation would suffice. He had to marry Ilsevele before a