So I half remembered these books I read ~15 years ago involving a special child of some sort that was born--a half-elf, I want to say, and maybe the only of his kind--and I think his mother, who I think was an elf, was around a lot, and there were a ton of elves who lived, I think, forever, and they had a separate world to which they could retreat or some such, and in one of the books the main character was palling around with, iirc, his elf uncle who was also a ship captain and liked to sail his ship around the southern portion of the globe in the super-fast winds coming off the antarctic.
Or something like that.
And that's all I remember! And it's driving me insane!
Anyone have an idea?
I was way, way off on this but finally tracked it down. Just one book, though part of a larger series: Dennis McKiernan's Silver Wolf, Black Falcon.