“Ah. Tell me, little mortal, does The Terafin not own you?”
“No.”
“Yet all around you, invisible to eyes as weak as yours, is a wall that all but screams mine to the wilderness. Do you not just argue semantics?”
“No. Ah, yes, sometimes I do—but that is often a matter of entertainment or education. I am hers because I am family to her. She is mine because she is family to me. The use of the word mine doesn’t mean ownership. It doesn’t really mean control.”
“Yet you obey her.”
“She is seer-born,” Finch countered. “When you say you want to own Jarven, what you want is not what The Terafin wants from us.”
“You are not Jarven’s equal.”
“No. But I have never attempted to be that. He is Jarven. I am Finch. I can do things he can’t do.” Not that she felt that confidence on most days. But she felt it now, debating words with a talking fox. “No, that’s unfair. What I do, he could do. He is unwilling to do it; there is no reward in it for him. No challenge. He is aware that the things that need doing are necessary even if he is unwilling to see to them. It’s one of the reasons he’s fond of Lucille.”
“And yourself?”
“I couldn’t be Lucille. In a different life, The Terafin could. When it comes to the Authority offices, Lucille is fearless. She defends them from all attacks, subtle or otherwise; she doesn’t care whether the attacks are from internal sources or external. If you’re not part of her office, you are an outsider.” She smiled. “And yes, I’m fond of Lucille. But The Terafin could have been Lucille. She has the temper and the rest of the instincts. Instead, she’s . . .”
“Finch, it is seldom I offer mortals advice; they are not of a mind to take it when it is good because they find it unpalatable.”
“I wouldn’t offer Jarven advice if I were you.”
“Oh? Even if he requests it?”
She smiled. “Even then. But I suppose you could offer the advice that best aligned with your future interests.”
“Yes. However, although I seldom offer advice, I am inclined just this once to do so.”
“And that?”
“Your Sen will not be your Terafin for much longer, in anything but name.”
Torvan stiffened. He didn’t stop, didn’t turn back, didn’t break stride. But he was listening.
“She will be Terafin—”
“I express myself badly. And no, not deliberately at this time. We did not oft keep mortals; your kind was far too delicate to survive even a passing ill temper. We have, therefore, never learned to communicate well with you. Yes, she will be The Terafin. She will be Sen. She will reside in the dwelling she has claimed. All of this will be true—if she survives.
“She hopes, even now, to avoid the fate we all see. Do not,” he said quietly, “entertain the same hope. You are pragmatic, but quietly so. What she must be if you are to survive is not what she is. Accept it.”
“Do you only give advice you know can’t be followed?” The question was casual; she was genuinely curious.
“No. You do not understand the wilderness. You do not understand the Sen. I am ancient. I could have chosen, upon waking, to relocate; my roots are deep, Finch. Very deep. But there was, about the voice, something very like the first spring; I found it compelling. And I realized that the person who had taken these wild lands, who had claimed them, was mortal.
“I was curious. And mortals do not last. If the choice was unfortunate, well. It would correct itself in short order.”
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
“There are many, many things beyond your comprehension.” Her smile deepened; the fox’s ears twitched. “You are not like Jarven.”
“No, although more like him than like you.”
“You are content not to understand, then. Ask your question.”
“Why could you not claim these lands, this wilderness?” Feeling the way his entire body tensed, growing heavier in an instant, she added, “If the question offends, accept my apologies. I am ignorant.”
“I am of the land,” the fox eventually said. “I am of it in a way you and your kind will never be.”
“But the White Lady—”
“Yes. She is not. Nor are her sleeping, disobedient Princes.”
“Could they do what The Terafin has done?”
“No, Finch. Nor could Viandaran, no matter how he gained in power or wisdom. You do not understand what the Sen are . . . or were. But that is perhaps to be expected; they did not understand it themselves.” He fell silent for some time, and then said, “The gods created the world—all worlds. They were not, however, rooted. They were not their own creations. The firstborn were like unto gods. They were a thing in and of themselves. But many, many of us were not. We woke in the wake of creation, but our creation was not their intent.
“And that is neither here nor there. You are not rooted in the same fashion we are, but you are hers. We take shape, form, wakefulness hearing the echo of her desires. She does not give commands to us as your kings would give them to you, but what she does give is absolute. Not from within will these lands fall, except by the treachery of the rootless.
“You will understand, in time.”
• • •
It was obvious to Finch that Jay had returned when she entered the Terafin manse. There was an excitement, an eagerness, a stiff formality that suggested something like joy poured into rigid lines, and it permeated the Household Staff. She did not immediately set the fox down and enter the forest; she went, instead, to find Teller.
He was waiting for her in the great room.
She lifted her hand to sign, but stopped, as she had an armful of fox. He smiled and signed in reply. Yes. Home. Hesitating, he added, cats.
Finch grimaced. She was intimately aware of how much damage the cats caused when they were sulking, having seen the financial cost of replacing what had been destroyed. Before she could ask, the door to the room was flung open, where it slammed into the nearest wall.
Shadow, bristling, wings high, stood across the threshold, glaring at everything with so much malice, Finch was surprised that anything in the wing was still standing. She did not have Teller’s affection for cats, and even had she, one as obviously maddened and dangerous as this required caution. Or flight.
The fox said, as Finch stiffened, “Do not put me down.”
Finch said, “I’m not sure I could, even if I wanted to. I’d have to be able to move.”
The soft sound of a surprised chuckle could be heard over the rumble of Shadow’s anger. “You will have to move.”
Protestations aside, she did. She moved toward Teller, who had abandoned his chair when Shadow slammed the door open.
“That is far enough,” the fox said. “I apologize in advance.”
“For what?”
The small fox opened its delicate mouth and roared. Had Finch not already been half frozen, her arms clenched too tightly in the position in which she carried him, she might have dropped him. Teller was not in the right-kin’s office; his hands came at once to his ears and remained there while the fox spoke.
And he did speak; she had no doubt of that; Shadow’s attention swiveled immediately, and he roared in reply. The hair on the back of Finch’s neck was, she was certain, standing on end; the rest of her hair was so firmly fixed in place a gale wouldn’t have moved it.
But when Shadow’s voice ascended into words, she knelt.
“I told you not to put me down,” the fox told her, without apparently looking in her direction.
“Yes, I know,” Finch replied. “But you didn’t say that for our safety. If Shadow is speaking—and he is—he won’t harm us. He might destroy the great room, yes.” Which would be enormously politically costly, but would not, in theory, kill them.
“I begin to understand why Jarven chose to teach you,” the fox said. He did not sound at all pleased.
“No, you don’t. But if you want the truth, he did not
choose to teach me. He was ordered to provide employ and place for me.”
“He has disobeyed the orders of the powerful before.”
“Well, yes, of course he has. But he would have had to have reason, pragmatic reason, for doing so. And it pleased him greatly to annoy Lucille, through me.”
Shadow said, “I’m sssssspeaking.”
Finch placed the fox on the carpet. To her surprise, he immediately became almost transparent. This was probably for the best; Shadow leaped instantly, landing—heavily—on the spot the fox was no longer completely occupying. And then, as Finch rose and took a step back, he snarled in rage and ran claws through the rug. Teller winced.
“You will never bring him here again. Never.”
“He came to the Merchant Authority and summoned me home. He said Jay’s here.” It was odd. When speaking to outsiders, she used the title Jay had chosen to carry; she used Jewel when speaking to Haval. Only among the den did she use the name Jay—the name she’d chosen for herself so many years ago.
“Birgide stopped by the office,” Teller said.
“But you didn’t go to Jay’s rooms?”
“She isn’t in her rooms. And . . .”
“What?”
“Haval told me to wait for you.”
Shadow was still hissing and spitting. Finch would have attempted to stop him, but the rug could not be saved. “Haval?”
“I’m not sure I understand what’s happened, but . . .”
She lifted her hands.
Yes, he signed back. Bad. Shadow, however, held most of his attention. “The fox is one of the forest elders.”
“Yesssssss?”
“He serves The Terafin.”
The great gray cat’s eyes widened so completely he seemed to be trying to eject them from the rest of his face. Finch wasn’t surprised when he expressed his outrage at Teller’s stupidity, but it was impossible to take personally since he used the words so often.
Night peered around the doorframe. “Did you find it?”
“Of course.”
“Snow says—” The rest of the sentence was lost to the enraged roaring that was only barely identifiable as the aforementioned cat.
Shadow screeched in frustration.
Finch’s fingers were flying. So were Teller’s. Clearly, Haval understood something neither the right-kin nor the regent did.
“Wait, Shadow—where is Jay?”
“She is by her tree. Go to her while we do all the work.”
• • •
They did not comply immediately. Teller went to speak with the Master of the Household Staff. Given the noise the cats were making, it would be necessary. The older woman was terrifying enough that fear of disobeying her would be greater—barely—than fear of enraged cats.
She was not surprised when the Chosen changed shifts. Nor was she surprised when they accompanied the regent and the right-kin into the forest. She was surprised at how they were armed; the swords with which the household guard were armed had, in some hands, been replaced by different weapons. They were not here as a dress guard. Torvan, in fact, insisted on preceding them on the path that led from the manicured grounds to the forest.
Shadow joined them.
To Finch’s alarm, he had a passenger. Ariel, the girl who had lost fingers in the Dominion of Annagar, before she had been rescued—if that was the word for it—by Jay. Both of her hands clutched gray fur; her arms were trembling.
“Shadow, what are you doing?”
The gray cat gave her the side-eye, which was, in some ways, an answer. “It is your fault,” he sniffed.
She understood then and accepted it as truth. She had done as the fox demanded, and she had done so without consideration of the cost. But the fox was not Shadow, or rather, not wild in the way Shadow was. He was Jarven. He was as much Jarven as the wilderness, ancient, unknown, could be. She bowed her head.
“Why do you think he looks like that?”
“For the same reason Jarven looks frail and helpless.”
Shadow snorted. “He is.” He muttered imprecations against stupidity. He growled as Ariel lowered herself across his back and hid her face. She had never been comfortable around the Chosen; had never learned to accept their presence. Finch was surprised that she had come with Shadow at all. His wings rose to either side of the child, and this seemed to calm her.
“Do you trust him?”
Finch startled at the new voice, turning in its direction and stumbling slightly as she did. The stranger caught her before she could fall. “The roots here are exposed,” he said gently, his lips turned in smile. “And we should know.” The smile deepened in the gold-and-brown face. He was a tree.
“Yes, Finch. We are not eldest, but we are not saplings. We slept in the long, cold winter, and Jewel has called us to spring. She has returned. Can you not feel it?”
Finch shook her head. “We’re mortal. There are things we can’t hear, things we can’t feel, things we don’t know.”
“We do not pity you,” he replied. “For there are also things you can see, and things you can hear; you are free to move and move again; you look up to different skies, and you do not sleep when the winter comes. Not permanently. But more than that: you have Sen.”
“Why is everyone gathering?”
“She has not returned alone, and there may be . . . difficulty.”
Shadow snorted. “There is already difficulty. Because she is stupid.” He wasn’t specific about which “she.” Then again, it wasn’t necessary.
Teller signed, and Finch nodded. She didn’t apologize to the gray cat; there was no point. Other trees joined the Chosen, and she saw that they walked in step, although they had the longer limbs, the greater height.
She saw, in fact, that the few who joined the front ranks were armed. She stumbled, and the tree that deliberately served as an escort—how had she missed that?—caught her again. His hands were smooth, but not soft; it was like being escorted by a tabletop.
Haval, she thought.
“The elders are canny,” the tree said. “They are of the land. There are stories—many stories—about the mortals who attempted, against their very nature, to transcend their limitations. They desired eternity, endless life.”
Finch nodded, thinking of Avandar. She did not say his name.
“It is folly, always, to reject what you are.”
She nodded again.
“But it is not folly to test the boundaries that define you. And yet, one can lead to the other and often inevitably does. One reaches boundaries by pushing. How, then, is one to accept that a boundary is a boundary? How is one to accept the limitations when it is entirely by struggling against them that one gains power? There are rocks that I can break,” he continued. “And rocks that I cannot, alone. But older, wiser trees can do what I cannot.”
“He’s not a tree.”
“No.” The man laughed. “He is not a tree. And there is no friendship lost between the great ancients who once woke to the sound of the White Lady’s voice and the elder you think of as fox. We are not enemies, while Jewel rules us. It is novel.” His smile did not fade, but his eyes changed shape as he added, “and it cannot last.
“Understand, Finch, that you are Jewel’s, here. You were hers before she found us, before she woke us, before she claimed us. The ancients, the eldest, have no call upon you; they can kill you, but they cannot compel.”
“Most mortals find threats of death very compelling.”
“Ah. Yes. But that is simple fear. It is very, very unwise to give in to fear in the wilderness; fear has its own scent, and it is powerful. Fear, and you will be hunted.” He glanced down at her and smiled. Although his hands, his arms, appeared to be hard, polished wood, there was a warmth and animation in his expression that implied youth, delight, joy.
“Eldest, why did you bring the mortal child?”
Shadow hissed, tearing up ground as he all but stomped down a path Finch couldn’t discern, an opening through t
he trees. Mindful of the tree’s comment about fear, Finch gazed with worry at Ariel’s bent back.
But the child didn’t seem to be frightened or, rather, not more frightened than she usually was. Shadow—winged, fanged, and deadly—did not frighten Ariel as much as people did. She had become accustomed to servants, but even then, did not leave her room if they were working in the wing.
Only around Adam did Ariel seem to be a normal child. And, perhaps, that was fair. In the end, people had caused Finch as much damage as the wild and the ancient. Certainly more damage than Shadow or the rest of the cats.
Shadow was not inclined to answer, and the tree accepted this. Teller signed to Finch; she signed back. Arann was with the Chosen. Jester was not immediately visible. Nor was Birgide; she had requested Teller’s presence—respectfully, politely—and returned to the gardens that were, in theory, the reason for her employ.
Finch was not, however, surprised to see Haval when he appeared in the center of the path—a path that naturally widened to accommodate the growing number. He did not wear the apron that was his uniform while he worked within the West Wing, which was warning enough. He did not look martial. Nor did he look mythical, magical. Compared to the supple height and flexibility of the tree spirits, he looked decidedly mundane, an older man with a prominent nose, and slightly tired eyes.
The tired eyes, however, were enough of a warning. Finch adored Haval’s wife; she respected Haval. She had never truly feared him, but she felt a small spark of unease settle somewhere within her. Jarven liked Haval. Approved of him. Considered him almost an equal—or perhaps an equal; with Jarven. it was hard to tell.
All these facts coalesced. Haval was a danger. Had always been a danger.
As if he could hear her thoughts, as if the realization were a physical bloom, a visible sign, he tendered her a very proper, very correct bow. “Regent,” he said. He did not rise. Would not, until she had given him either permission or command.
“Haval. Rise.” She didn’t add please, but it was close. The trees were watching Haval. They were, therefore, now watching her. Her own escort’s attention she had found strangely comforting. This was nothing like that.
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