Birgide was surprised, but said nothing. Sigurne was the guildmaster, but it had never appeared to Birgide that she had any interest in those who were not mages. She clearly had enough interest to at least take note of those who were externally respected.
“Thank you, Guildmaster.” The Exalted of Cormaris turned, once again, to Birgide. “My father wishes to speak with you now.”
Birgide did not ask if she had the right of refusal. In theory, she did. Theory was always tenuous in politics, and given the presence of the Ellariannatte, she chose not to assert that right. She was, however, nervous. Although it was common knowledge that the god-born could bespeak their parents, she had never witnessed it personally. “I would be honored.”
• • •
Braziers were lit.
The white smoke of burning incense filled the room. Instead of rising, as smoke generally did, it wafted toward the ground from the height of braziers set up in several places on brass tripods. Priests attended to the burning; the Exalted remained on their thrones. The Kings, however, rose.
To Birgide’s surprise, the smoke impacted the visibility of dense strands of colored light; they thinned as she watched. This meant, she thought, that the transition to the Between was a more literal transition than she had previously assumed. Then again, while men and women of power might speak—with care—of the results of such a transition, they seldom described it.
In one day, Birgide had seen—and fought—demons. She had seen Duvari injured—something that had literally never occurred during her training—or anyone’s, to her knowledge. She had planted Ellariannatte in the grounds of Avantari, and they had not only taken root there, but had instantly grown.
Their presence implied much about the nature of the forest behind the Terafin manse, and to underscore this, the Guildmaster of the Makers had come, and he had gathered leaves and retreated with them. Any of this might have led to the interview with a god, but she suspected that it was only the latter that mattered.
She could no longer see her own feet. Since she was relatively certain they were still attached, she was not concerned. But she could no longer hear the forest, either—and only in the silence of this gray, other world did she realize that she could, in fact, hear it constantly, no matter where she stood.
She was surprised to see the mists roll over Duvari; surprised as well to see Sigurne Mellifas fade from view. Even the Kings had absented themselves from this meeting; only the Exalted remained. In the thick, formless mists of the Between they seemed larger than life, the golden light emanating from their eyes a fire which, left to burn, shortened mortal lives.
And the god-born were mortal.
Emboldened by the lack of the three men who ruled her life, Birgide said, “Why am I here, Exalted?” She directed her question to the Mother’s Daughter, although it was the Exalted of Cormaris who had demanded her attendance.
“Do you not know?” was the quiet reply. “In all the years that my temple has resided upon the Isle, there have been none who have chosen the responsibilities that you have, perhaps in ignorance, undertaken.”
“No,” Birgide replied. “In the life of the Isle, I do not think the forests of Terafin existed.”
“They existed. But we were not able to walk them until very recently. I understand that you do not feel they are a threat.” The comment made clear that the Mother’s Daughter did.
“In what way are they now considered a danger, Exalted?”
“Ask that question again after the guildmaster has returned to your side. And be careful when you treat with him; he has long been obsessed with a single quest, and in you, he believes he might—at last—achieve it.”
“What quest?”
The Mother’s Daughter exhaled. “I should not speak of it. Were I not here, I would not.”
“I would counsel caution regardless,” the Exalted of Cormaris added, in a clipped, reproving tone. This surprised Birgide. She could not imagine a time in her life when she would have dared; nor could she see one in the future.
“Your counsel is duly noted,” the Mother’s Daughter replied. Her smile was gentle. It was also somewhat condescending. “Gilafas ADelios accepted guardianship of a wild child. He lost her to the wild roads and the Winter Queen, and he has searched—without hope or peace—these many years for some way to retrieve her.
“In you, Birgide, in your fallen leaves and your Ellariannatte, he sees the beginning of a road that will end with that retrieval.”
“I would not think the guildmaster would—”
“She was an Artisan. And it was her hand, and hers alone, that remade what Fabril gifted the first of our Empire’s Kings, in the hopes that they might continue to rule in the war that is to come.”
“That really is enough,” the Exalted of Cormaris said.
“She will know it, and far better than we or the gods, by the end—if she survives. If she does not, there is no harm in the information. She has been trained to hide and guard her secrets. Come, let us not be quibbling like children when your father arrives; he is unlikely to be impressed.”
“The quibbling of mortals,” a vast voice replied, “is merely part of their conversation; it does not concern us. Indeed, in such minor fractures of social grace, they reveal much their words would otherwise hide.”
The ground that Birgide could not see shook beneath her feet as the voice—the multitude of voices—filled the very air. The god was commonly depicted as male, but Birgide understood, hearing the roar of a crowd, that the depiction was flat and far too simplistic, for there were women’s voices in the mix—young and old, quivering and strident—and children’s voices, too. There were voices that were a thing of gravel, and voices that were velvet and honey. In a crowd of any size, those voices blended, syllables becoming as undistinguishable as the individual voices themselves.
Not so, the god’s voice. Although each sound was a precise concert of syllables, each voice could be separated from the whole. Or rather, the sensation of hearing each. Birgide had fallen silent not from awe, but the simple attempt to dissect and catalog what she experienced; this had oft been considered a social failing.
The Exalted of Cormaris raised both chin and face; the Exalted of Reymaris and the Mother lowered their heads. Birgide did neither; she watched the moving folds of mist as if they were a curtain—and at that, one made by a madman. Her wait was rewarded, in a fashion, as the curtain finally parted.
The god was, in her estimation, eight feet in height, or perhaps even nine. His face was not one thing but many; it was very like his voice. It should have been disturbing; it was instead strangely compelling. In watching the shifting structure of jaw and lip and cheekbones, of forehead and hairline, of skin color and even gender, Birgide thought that gods might not be so terrifying: they encompassed so much more than a single, wayward woman, surely their understanding was equally vast? Who could judge so readily something that was part of their essential nature?
He met her eyes because she had not lowered them, and she almost repented of her curiosity, then. She could not, however, lower the eyes he now met; he held—he demanded—the whole of her attention. He acknowledged his son; she heard him speak. But he walked between the Exalted and past that son, to where Birgide now stood, pinned.
“So,” he said. “It is true. What did you offer, Birgide Viranyi?”
She lifted her hand. In the fog of the otherworld, she could see the scarring that fire had caused; it was a glowing, pale light—not gold, not white, but some color that hovered between the two.
“You have chosen the path of pain,” the god said.
“Pain,” she replied, without thought, without filter, “is what I know. Pain and the peace of the forest.”
“There is no peace to be found in the wilderness; not for you and your kin.” The god bent—he would not kneel. He reached for the hand, cupping its back in
his giant’s palm. “You serve.”
She nodded.
“I see The Terafin’s name in this mark. Do you understand what she is?”
“No.” Birgide wanted an honorific with which to address a god; none came to her, and she therefore offered none. She was afraid, now. But then again, fear was familiar; it was her earliest emotion. Everything else had come later.
“My son tells me that an Artisan approached you.”
Since Birgide had been standing beside that son and had not once heard him speak, she frowned. But she answered. She did not think the ability to refuse was in her. “Yes.”
“He asked your permission to take the fallen fruits of your domain into his keeping.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand why it was you he approached?”
She started to say no, but the word froze on her tongue, and she could not speak again until she had swallowed it. “I did not consciously understand it,” she said, instead. “Nor do I now. But he required my permission to take the leaves, although the leaves did not require my permission to fall.”
“Tell me, Birgide, do the trees in your forest converse?”
She blinked.
“Do they converse with you?”
“Not—not in words, no. I have made the study of plants my life.”
“And you have made the study of the Ellariannatte your life’s work.”
“Yes. Before Terafin, that work was considered as realistic as unicorn hunts. It was tolerated, sometimes affectionately.”
“That work, as you call it, is why you are here now. You are, to my knowledge, the only mortal who is not Sen whom the wilderness has chosen to bespeak. You are harbinger, although you do not understand it, of war and death. There will be no peace in your forest, Birgide, if you falter at all. We are concerned.”
She was silent.
“We have never seen the position you now hold given to anyone mortal, save the Sen. But we see it in you now; you are Warden.”
“I was not given a title.”
“No. And a title is not required; it does not materially change who—or what—you are. Those who see it will know; those who do not will never take the necessary information from the title itself. Gilafas ADelios is an Artisan. He will see you. He will see what you represent. But he is not the only one.
“Those who walk the endless wilderness will see and know you as well. You are not Warden of the entirety of the hidden path; none could be, and survive the burden and the price demanded. But in the city in which my children are at the height of their power, it is unnecessary.
“I would ask you to lay the burden you have undertaken down, if I thought it a possibility. You will not. Nor will the forest now revoke what it has accepted unless you fail in your duties. But you are too mortal, Birgide. Your concerns are too small and too quotidian. You are wed to your concepts of justice, of power, of necessity. You must learn to expand them if you mean to be effective.”
“I—”
“They are concepts created by mortals for mortals. Mortality encompasses the god-born and the talent-born, but there are, with rare exceptions, limits to the power. The demons, of course, confound that expectation—and yet, they have been contained; they have not been more of a danger than the rogue magi themselves.
“Until now. Now, Birgide, things wake which were never part of your calculations of either decency or power. You have played the games that the Astari play. You have observed the games that patricians play. You have seen war, you have seen death, you have caused it. But the scale was—and is—mortal. Human. You have not played the games we played at the dawn of your world.”
Silence. She glanced at the Exalted. They were uniformly grim. None of this was a surprise to them.
“My sons were afraid that you presaged the ending that was once foreseen. Let me set their worries at rest. You are not the herald of the end of days. You are merely a symptom.
“And you are a surprising symptom. You are not of the wilderness. The wild is not your breath, blood, and bone. You cannot speak to the high wilderness and be understood—it must stoop to listen; it must stoop to translate, encasing the whole of its meaning in a way that you can—if you struggle—barely comprehend. We do not understand why you were chosen.
“Do you?”
Birgide frowned.
“Do not fear my wrath. There is little you could say that I would find insulting; to insult, there must be intent.”
She glanced at the Exalted of Cormaris; his lips compressed. Clearly he did not agree with his father on matters of etiquette—and it was the Exalted who would be coming back to the world with her, not the god.
“It is possible,” she said, choosing words with care, “that I was chosen because I had The Terafin’s permission to enter her forests and tend to her gardens—either of them. And possibly because of what the forest itself—as a concept—meant, and means, to me. But if I had to offer a rational guess, I would say that I was chosen because the Immortals you seemed to expect aren’t here now.
“Except for the demons, and I don’t think—”
“The dead cannot serve the living forest,” the god told her. “And in any meaningful sense, the Kialli and their servants are dead.”
“Yes, but they’re here. And standing against them, we have mortals, mortals, and more mortals. The Terafin herself is not immortal. She is not god-born.”
“She is Sen,” Cormaris replied. “And the Sen, like the Artisans, exist very tenuously in your world. They are human, but mortality fits them poorly, and in the end—” He shook his head. “To my sons, I will say only one thing: the Sen did not rule the great Cities of Man. They founded them, but they did not rule. They could not remain in the world the living occupied as a matter of course without altering it irrevocably.
“Your Terafin charts a course the Sen would never have charted. She is determined to remain true to what she perceives herself to be. But that perception, in our experience, is faulty. The world will break, Birgide. Lines will fracture. Things will seep into your mortal cities that have not walked the face of the world since the sundering.
“I have delivered this message to my sons and daughters. I deliver it now to you. You are the first sentinel. If things change, return to me.”
“Can you not tell us, now, what to expect?”
“No. I can tell you what we experienced—but it would take years upon years, even here, and I do not think you would gain useful information from the telling. There is a mage in your city, a Meralonne APhaniel.”
“He is, at the moment, resident within the Terafin manse.”
“He has walked the loneliest of roads. Do not trust him.”
“He is the House Mage.”
“He is, perhaps, the House Mage—but not for much longer. Do not trust him, Birgide. Do not allow him to speak with the trees at the heart of your forest.”
“He has been granted the same permission I have,” she began.
“No, he has not. If you mean The Terafin’s grant of passage, you do not understand the role you have taken. You are Warden. He is Prince. There is only one place you could hope to stand against him, and you will not be able to stand against him for long.”
“Why do you assume that I’ll have to stand against him at all?”
“We have had word: the heralds are on the move.”
This meant nothing to Birgide.
It meant something to the Exalted. “It is too soon,” the Mother’s Daughter said. “We are not prepared.”
“No. But were they to arrive a century from now, my children, you would not be prepared. The only hope you have—in our opinion—rests upon the shoulders of your Sen—and she is too new, and too timid to do what must be done.” The god bent to Birgide; she thought he meant to bow, and would have collapsed to the supine position of absolute inferiority had
she not feared the mists.
She was, however, mistaken.
“Our sister could not be present for this interview, but asked that we bestow a gift upon you, if we deemed you worthy of it. We do not know, yet, the full measure of your worth—but having seen you, we are both apprehensive and relieved. The Terafin is The Terafin. She is in control of her power; her power does not yet ride her. She chose to trust you. You have chosen, in your fashion, to honor that trust. The heart of the forest understands both of these things.
“We therefore give you the gifts one gives a gardener. We cannot tell you which of the seeds will grow and flourish and which will fail to take root, nor can we tell you what the outcome of successful growth might be. The wilderness is not an Imperial garden, even so fine a garden as The Ten are reputed to keep. There is a sentience to the sleeping earth, the gentle breeze, and the towering trees that the plants in your city have never—and will never—achieve. And yet you labor over them regardless.”
“Without them, we face starvation.”
“Starvation is not a concept the Immortal come to easily,” he replied. “The Mother understands it fully in a way few of her brethren do. These seeds are from her many, many gardens; they grow nowhere in the world to which you were born. Take the Mother’s gift or reject it; the decision is yours. She will take no offense should you decide to leave them with us.”
“And what does the Lord of Wisdom counsel?” she asked softly—as softly as she might have asked a similar question of the Lord of the Compact.
“Be true to your vows as you understand them. There are many responsibilities and many oaths sworn in a mortal lifetime—and the oaths are binding only inasmuch as the oathgiver desires. But there will come a time—and soon—when one who can oathbind will enter the world of men. You will see deaths then. Mortality is small, Birgide, in its passions and drives. Mortals do not focus on one thing above all others.
“The Arianni are defined by their Winter Queen. No other love, no other loyalty, is proof against that definition. Mortals, however, are torn, always: they love their families, their friends; they are responsible for their work, where work is available. They feel, on occasion, responsible for their neighbors, their pets, and their horses. They do not, and cannot, choose one thing with any ease.
Oracle: The House War: Book Six Page 57