by Dawn Cook
“M-m-m,” she said, but just what he was, she still wasn’t sure.
Lost in what was apparently a fond memory, not a nightmare, Lodesh gazed at his ugly horse. “I was about Kally’s age,” he said softly. “Earan, my brother, took me out and stuck some salt weed on me, tricking me into choosing Frightful. He thought that by having an ugly horse, I would lose my bevy of girls.”
“There were a lot, huh?” Alissa said with a laugh.
Lodesh wasn’t embarrassed and only grinned. “There were quite a few—for a time.”
“So what happened?”
“Girls,” he said dryly, “like mothering the downtrodden.” He laughed, and Frightful responded with a soft nicker. “They fell all over him. Brought him apples and grain. I didn’t find out I’d been tricked until later when it came out during a— discussion.” Gaze distant, Lodesh rubbed his chin. “But that,” he finished, “is another story.”
“Tell me?” Alissa asked.
“Later.” Standing up on the rock, Lodesh looked into the east as the wind shifted his hair. Alissa felt a chill, realizing that Lodesh, her ever-familiar, always-predictable Lodesh, might already have a past he was trying to forget. “Come on,” he said, extending a hand to help her rise. “I want to show you where I grew up.”
“The citadel?” Alissa guessed.
His eyes sparkled eagerly. “No. The grove.”
12
“You there!” It was an angry shout, shattering the peace the circle of mirth trees had instilled in her, and Alissa spun. “Yes. You!” it came again. A squat, square man strode toward her under the trees, anger etched in every motion. “What are you doing here?” He started slightly as she felt Lodesh slide next to her, and the man’s ire vanished in a single breath.
“Lodesh!” he called out, his pace never slacking, but now he gave off a sense of unconditional welcome. “Why didn’t you tell us you would be back so soon?” he said as he halted beside them, his eyes full of pride. “Sorry, lass,” he directed briefly at her. “I didn’t know Lodesh had brought ’cha. I never would have shouted had I known. And why,” this was aimed at the grinning Lodesh, “didn’t you come to the house first? Your mother is going to be sore. I’ll have to listen to her gripe all—”
“Father!” Lodesh broke in, giving him an expansive smile. “I’m at the Hold tonight as planned. I just brought someone to meet you while Kally picked out a horse.”
Suddenly shy, Alissa dropped her gaze to the moss, damp under the shade of the trees.
Lodesh cleared his throat and took her hands. “Father,” he said formally, “this is Alissa Meson, a Keeper of the Hold looking to Redal-Stan.” Alissa’s hands were transferred to the short man’s, and she glanced up, startled at the heavily callused feel of them.
“The old beast took another student, did he?” the man mused, his sharp gaze seeming to go all the way to her core.
“Well,” Alissa offered, “he was the only teaching Master there when I arrived.”
“Ha!” he admonished. “Redal-Stan wouldn’t bother unless he saw something in you.” The unassuming man turned his attention to her fingertips, smiling at something he saw.
Lodesh shifted impatiently. “Can I finish?” he asked, then turned to her. “Alissa, I’d like you to meet the man I deem has the second most important job in the city, the caretaker of the mirth trees and the man I’m fortunate to say raised me from a small boy, Caretaker Reeve.”
As Reeve bobbed his head in greeting, Alissa’s fingers slipped from his in confusion. “But I thought your father was . . .”
Reeve chuckled and stepped back. “Ah, well, I didn’t sire him, true enough, but Jenna and I raised him as our only child.”
“You were abandoned!” Alissa blurted, then flushed.
Lodesh laughed, the sound lifting through the trees, seeming to belong as much as the moss under her feet. “No,” he said. “They were forced to take me in.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Reeve growled. “We wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
“I don’t understand,” Alissa said.
Reeve took one arm and Lodesh the other, leading her to a distant bench. “Well, you see,” Reeve said, “one evening ’bout this time of year, Jenna and I were disturbed by the sound of a child’s weeping. Being no one but us about, we went to investigate, finding Lodesh here nestled at the base of . . .” Reeve cast about. “. . . that tree there.”
Lodesh caught her eye and discreetly pointed to another.
“He was only a wee bit of a thing then, not the great hulking giant he is now,” Reeve continued. “No more than six, and sobbing as if a lifetime of woe was upon his soul. Jenna fed the tyke and rocked him to sleep as it was late. He never said a word, so, come morning, I took him to the Warden’s holdings as that’s where I would go if my child went missing. Imagine my surprise when I found the snot-nosed brat was the Warden’s nephew.”
Lodesh rubbed the back of his neck, looking terribly uncomfortable.
“The tears,” Reeve said as he sat her at the bench, “were for his mother, recently overcome in childbirth.” He paused as Lodesh sat down at the far end of the bench, his gaze ramrod straight.
“We never saw the tears again,” Reeve said. “But he kept coming back. More often than not, we’d find him curled up at the base of a mirth tree, wet with dew and shivering. His mornings with us got longer and our partings at the Warden’s gate harder, until it was decided he should stay with Jenna and me—providing I taught him something.”
Reeve rested a foot on the bench between her and Lodesh. “By the way, son,” he said. “What is, in your opinion, the city’s most important job?”
Lodesh smiled. “The trashman, Father. The trashman.”
“Course.” It was dry and sour, and Alissa felt the last of the solemnity evaporate. Reeve then looked questioningly at Alissa. “But I thought everyone knew Lodesh’s story.”
“She isn’t from Ese’Nawoer,” Lodesh interceded before Alissa could open her mouth. “Alissa is straight from the foothills.”
“Really?” Reeve squinted at her. “You’re quite tall for the foothills, and dark. And your accent is decidedly Ese’-Nawoer.”
“My father was from the foothills,” she said, instinctively having no fear of recrimination for her mixed background from Reeve. “My mother is from the plains.”
“Ah, well then.” Reeve placed a meaty finger to his nose, and Alissa smiled, recognizing one of Lodesh’s mannerisms. “You really are Ese’Nawoerian. Something of both, and not fully of either. How did you ever escape my son’s notice through your Keeper studentship?”
“Alissa is rogue, Father,” Lodesh said evenly.
Reeve pulled his foot from the bench and straightened. His eyes were wide. “Rogue!” he exclaimed. “But you’re of Keeper standing?”
“Yes.” Lodesh glared at Alissa, daring her to deny it.
“Sort of . . .” she muttered, and looked to where the sun made it through the canopy. The dappled patterns shifted in the breeze that never reached the ground. Reeve let the silence sit, waiting. “Earan,” she offered hesitantly, “seems to think I’m not.”
“Earan is a fool!” Lodesh said with an unusual anger.
“To put a fine point on it, he’s right,” Alissa said. “I haven’t been recognized.”
Reeve nodded. “And likely won’t until winter when a quorum of Masters is present.”
Lodesh stood and began pacing, his outrage demanding action. “Earan makes a stink every time he sees her. He drove her to eat in the garden this morning!”
Thinking it must bother Lodesh more than her, Alissa drew her legs up and sat cross-legged on the bench. “I like the garden,” she said. “And it’s too noisy in the dining hall.”
“Noisy?” Reeve eyed her with a sharp look.
Embarrassed at the fuss, Alissa shifted her shoulders. Reeve was silent, peering at her as if trying to solve a puzzle. Uncomfortable with his scrutiny, she uncrossed her legs and put h
er feet on the moss where they ought to be. Reeve grunted deep in his throat. “Well, if Earan won’t let you eat in the Keepers’ hall, you can walk in my grove.” His brown eyes glinted in mischief. “Be it work or rest day, sun or moonlight. You’re welcome.”
Lodesh’s mouth fell open. “Father!” he finally choked out.
“Be still, boy,” he said, grinning at Alissa. “It’s my grove. I’ll invite who I want.”
“But, Father!”
“I said be still!” He took Alissa’s hands and drew her to her feet. “It’s not as if I granted her citizenship to the city.”
“You may as well have!”
Alissa gave the short man a smile as she took his arm. “Thank you,” she said, delighting in his invitation to the grove for its own sake as much as for the bother it put Lodesh in.
“That boy of mine,” Reeve said ruefully as Lodesh flung his arms dramatically into the air and turned his back on them. “Always making more of a situation than what it is. And as for Earan? Things have a way of working out—if you watch them close and jump when you ought.”
Alissa had no idea what he was talking about, but he smelled like dirt and growing things, so she went willingly with him as he escorted her among the trees. “It’s a beautiful spot you tend, Reeve,” she said, gazing up at the distant branches. “It must have been breathtaking this spring when they bloomed.”
“Bloom?” Reeve said. “They have yet to bloom this year.”
“Aye,” came Lodesh’s sigh from behind them as he gave up on his sulk and joined them. “It’s been five long years.”
Confused, Alissa turned from Lodesh to Reeve. “I thought they were a spring bloomer, even before the leaves opened.”
Reeve glanced at the shifting boughs. “Spring or fall, sometimes in between—if they choose to do so at all.” He hesitated, glancing at the shadows. “Alissa,” he said, his tone going formal. “I have a question for Lodesh concerning a fungus that has become a problem recently. Would you mind if I stole him from you for a moment?” His eyebrows rose, saying more clearly than words that it wasn’t fungus he wanted to talk to Lodesh about, and she nodded.
“You’re most kind,” Reeve said.
Lodesh opened his mouth to protest, and Reeve gave him a quick jab in the ribs. With a soft grunt, Lodesh’s mouth snapped shut and he hunched. The square man led his tall, handsome, and sometimes dense son out of earshot, loudly explaining that the fungus was “over there, behind that far tree.”
Chuckling at the spectacle of someone bullying Lodesh, Alissa turned to the grove. The trees seemed no smaller than she remembered. At the center of the grove was a wide circle of open ground surrounded by large hummocks of moss-covered earth, looking like ripples spreading out in ever-widening bands. It was, she decided as she got closer, a theater of sorts: the stage was the open circle and the seats were the rising mounds of earth. Apart from the theater, the grove looked the same as when she had left it.
“Except for . . .” Hiking up her skirt, Alissa moved to the largest tree. “You,” she pointed accusingly and shifted her attention. “And you.” She frowned at a second. “And you, I think,” she muttered to a third. These three had fallen by the time she had found them.
“What do you mean by outgrowing your roots?” Alissa lectured as she ran a hand over the largest. “Reeve spends so much time with you, and you repay him by falling over. Shame!” She strode to the second. It was some distance. A bit breathless, she gave it a sharp thwack.
“Outgrowing everyone is fine,” she said, looking up at the unlistening trees, “except when you forget it’s your roots that keep you upright.” It was the third tree’s turn, and she walked about it, wondering how such a strong-seeming thing could fall. “What you don’t show the world,” she said gently, “is what allows you to reach the heights you do. Never neglect your foundation. Nurture it more than the handsome face of leaves and limbs you show. For even if they are destroyed, you can still rebirth from your untouched, unseen, never-realized roots.”
Alissa let her hand drop from the smooth, gray bark, wondering if she should harken to her own words instead of heaping them upon helpless trees. “Grow,” she sighed as she watched the toes of her boots. “And maybe bloom? Just a little? It would please Lodesh, so.”
Not sure why she felt sad, she turned away. The western breeze gusted and dropped, and gusted again, sweeping under the trees to bring her a vague sense of unease.
13
Reeve pulled Lodesh nearly halfway across the grove be-fore Lodesh dug in his heels and halted them. “You didn’t take me from Alissa to ask my opinion of a fungus,” he accused.
The man took his elbow again. “Don’t be dense, boy,” he muttered with a dour look.
Lodesh twisted his arm free. “What then?”
For a moment, Reeve looked him full in the face. There was a tinge of despair in his gaze, but he dropped his eyes even as Lodesh recognized it. Hunched and alone, Reeve continued on without him. “Your father came to see me this morning,” he said over his shoulder.
“My father!” Lodesh glanced behind him to see if Alissa had heard, then jogged to catch up. “What—” he said as he drew him to a stop. “What did he want?”
Reeve hesitated. “He wanted to know if you’re satisfied with the status I can give you.”
“Yes! To tend the grove is all I want.”
“Are you sure?” he asked with a soft persistence. “You could easily slip the skills I’ve taught you into a finer glove than that of a gardener.”
Lodesh took a quick, almost frightened breath. “This is what I am,” he said overly loud. “I have found what I’m good at, and I have found what gives me joy, and I’m lucky they’re one and the same and that it didn’t take me half my life to discover it.”
Reeve smiled at him with a quiet pride. “When did you become so wise, Lodesh?” The man looked away, and Lodesh knew.
“They want me to return to the citadel,” Lodesh said, tensing as Reeve nodded.
“It’s believed your uncle’s wife is barren.” Only now did Reeve meet Lodesh’s eyes, seeming to plead with him, as if to convince him it wasn’t his fault. “Your uncle plans to shift the title to your father, the Masters and elder families willing. In due course, it will likely fall to one of his children.”
Lodesh stepped back, cold from more than the shade of the trees. “I don’t want it.”
A thick hand took his shoulder in comfort. “Relax, boy. No one is going to make a twenty-two-year-old the Warden, but perhaps you should mull it about in your thoughts for the next decade and see how it fits.”
“I know already it fits fine, but I won’t do it,” he said frantically. “They can pick someone else! There must be half a dozen of us.”
“But as your sister declined her Keeper studies, only you and Earan have ties to the Hold.”
“There have been Wardens who weren’t Keepers,” Lodesh asserted, reassured somewhat that they weren’t going to descend in force and make him leave his home.
“True,” Reeve admitted, his gaze on the branches high overhead. “But, Lodesh?” He hesitated. “Who would you rather see in the citadel?”
Lodesh took a deep breath and looked away. “Earan is the eldest. He’s the logical choice,” he said, his voice flat.
“The people don’t know him,” Reeve said.
“I’m sure that will change,” Lodesh said miserably, knowing it wouldn’t. But he couldn’t leave his home, his trees, or his only memory of his first mother beneath them, singing softly while she rocked him to sleep as the mirth trees bloomed and the moon rose high.
There was a short silence. “Perhaps you’re right.” Reeve straightened, dropping the subject with an accustomed shortness. Turning, they spotted Alissa with her hands on her hips, regally assessing the ring of trees from her central position in the dancing court.
“What really brought you here today?” Reeve asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“I wanted you to m
eet Alissa.”
The short man snorted, his tongue jammed in his cheek. Slowly he closed one eye. “I’ve managed to meet all your ladies, but you’ve never brought any to see me.”
Lodesh felt himself color, and he tore his eyes from Alissa. “I can’t seem to put my finger on it. It’s almost as if she knows me already.”
“Sometimes it’s like that—at first,” Reeve cautioned, and Lodesh laughed, the last of his unease melting away.
“Trust me. I have fallen in and out of infatuation so many times, I can spot it before the girl’s overly protective brother does. No. It’s exactly as if she knows me.” He pursed his lips, struggling for words. “When I introduced her to you,” he said, “she blushed. I can’t make her do it. The Navigator knows I’ve tried. It’s as if she’s immune to me.”
With a short guffaw, Reeve led them to where Alissa was walking disapprovingly around a wide trunk. “What is she is doing?” Reeve asked in wonder.
“I think she is scolding your trees.”
Reeve clicked his tongue against his teeth in delight. “I knew I liked her.”
Though he tried, Lodesh couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice. “How come? You never liked any of my ladies since—you never like any of my ladies anymore.”
Alissa slapped a smooth trunk, and Reeve started in surprise. “She’s the only one who has dirt under her nails,” he said.
“She does not!”
“You may not be able to see it yet, but wait until spring, my boy. It’s there.”
Lodesh accepted this warily. “I’m glad you like her. When the mirth trees . . . when they bloom again . . .” He swallowed hard. “I mean to give her one of their blossoms.”
Reeve stopped so quickly it was several steps before Lodesh realized he was alone. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Reeve asked, his brow furrowed as Lodesh returned.
“I don’t care if it’s a good idea or not,” he said crossly. “I spoke to Sati about her.”
“Lodesh!” It was a hissed whisper of warning. “Do you really think that was wise?”
“No,” he admitted. “But it’s done. Sati said our fates intertwine, though she can’t see how. That’s enough for me.”