What the Grove Keeps

Maeril kept her hand where Rishi’s pulse had ended.

Her other hand remained over his right forearm, holding it against the wound as if pressure still belonged to care. His blood warmed her palm. His open eyes no longer changed to find her.

The Staff of Warding lay along his left side.

One of his fingers rested against the wood. It had not moved.

Nothing had.

The healing word was gone. No remnant gathered itself for another attempt. No delayed breath lifted Rishi’s chest. Across the Grove, the Suldusk stood outside the small space his body and Maeril’s knees made in the leaf-mould.

For one suspended moment, death received no answer.

Then a thorn let go of Maeril’s torn coat.

The hooked point had remained caught near her hip after the fight. Now its stem softened. It lowered itself to the ground without tearing more cloth.

Around Aestra and the dryad, the protective bloom lost its weapon-shape.

Stems unbraided. Thorns turned inward and sank beneath opening bark. The roots that had trapped the clearing released their grip on stone and soil. One withdrew from the place beside Rishi’s boot, leaving a dark groove where it had tried to close around him.

The growth remained sick, but ceased trying to hurt.

Moisture gathered on the nearest leaves.

There had been no rain. The canopy held no moving cloud. Still, clear beads thickened along every edge above Rishi and fell one by one through the air.

Water formed on bark. On the ridges of exposed roots. On the closed white flowers covering the fallen limb. It gathered against Maeril’s horns and ran cold behind her ears. The air grew humid enough that every painful breath clung inside her throat.

The drops fell faster, though no weather moved above them.

One of the small white flowers opened.

Its face did not turn toward the grey morning beyond the canopy. It turned toward Rishi.

Another followed. Then another. Petals loosened from the fallen limb and crossed the clearing on no wind Maeril could feel. They landed against Rishi’s sleeve, his shoulder, the dark cloth below his right forearm.

One touched the staff beside him. The worked wood remained only wood beneath a wet white petal.

Maeril looked up.

The lynx stood beyond Rishi’s feet. Its head had lowered. Condensation caught along the pale slash in its ruff and darkened the fur around it. The fury had gone from its eyes. Judgment remained, but it no longer looked clean.

Near the spring, the younger huntress held her damaged fighting staff upright. Her gaze followed the flowers crossing ground she had read so exactly during the fight. They passed her. They passed her sister. They passed the cloaked woman and both guards.

Every pale face turned toward the man they had killed.

Inside the loosening thorns, Aestra broke.

Her breath left as a sob.

The dryad’s split arm opened wider at the same instant. Clear sap welled through the black at its edge, trembling there like water too heavy to fall. Aestra bent over their joined hands. The dryad bent with her. Above them, the duskwood’s leaves shuddered from trunk to crown.

Aestra wept with her whole body.

The dryad had no tears Maeril could name. She grieved through bark drawing tight around her ribs, through roots pulling toward Rishi and stopping before they touched him, through leaves that shed their water without wind.

Two bodies.

One grief moving through both.

The lynx looked from Aestra to the petals on Rishi’s robes.

The younger huntress’s staff lowered until its end rested against the earth.

Behind them, the cloaked woman lifted one hand.

She removed her hood.

There was no flourish in it. Cloth passed back over dark hair touched with age, revealing a grave face that needed no weapon to hold the clearing. She took one step between her guards. They did not turn or make way. Their stillness showed that the space had always been hers to cross.

The younger huntress drew breath.

“Root-Mother.”

The lynx shifted its weight before the older woman spoke. Its shoulders remained high and strong, but the stance that had filled the path to Rishi altered by a fraction. The animal head turned. For the first time since the fight began, the leader looked away from the threat before her and toward the judgment behind her.

The older woman regarded the dead man beneath the falling water.

Then Aestra and the dryad.

Then the Grove that had turned every flower toward a trespasser.

“Did we listen to ourselves first?”

She spoke quietly.

The lynx did not bow. It did not retreat. A shiver passed through the tawny body, beginning at the shoulders and ending in the forepaws stained by what its decision had done.

The younger huntress looked down at the staff she had used to read the field so exactly. Her grip loosened around the damaged wood.

The older woman said nothing more. Neither did the guards.

Aestra lifted her head.

Water ran over her face. Her eyes still did not settle on the dryad’s features, but her changed sight held the wounded shape without turning aside.

When the dryad tried to breathe, Aestra’s ribs answered. When a new split traveled down the duskwood, pain tightened Aestra’s mouth before the bark opened.

“Was I chosen?”

The dryad’s sound hand rose toward her cheek.

Aestra flinched before allowing the touch.

“Or was I stolen?”

The hand stopped against her skin.

No one answered. The dryad’s fingers moved once against Aestra’s face.

Then Aestra looked toward Rishi.

Petals had gathered along his left shoulder. His hand remained open beside the staff. Maeril’s palms held blood and a body that had crossed law for Aestra twice without pretending the cost belonged to someone else.

“I wanted to live,” Aestra said.

“I wanted to learn what my sight was when it was mine. I wanted to go somewhere because I chose the road.”

Fear shook her breath. Anger held it upright.

“I did not choose blindness. I did not choose her need. I did not choose to feel myself end every time she breaks.”

The dryad’s hand began to fall.

Aestra caught it. She held those bark-covered fingers against her wet cheek and wept.

Then she turned her face toward the whole listening Grove.

“I did not choose this, but I will choose what remains of me.”

Aestra stepped through the loosened thorns.

Her first step shook. Her second caught on a lifted root, and she nearly fell. She kept hold of the dryad’s hand and pulled herself forward rather than allowing anyone to carry her.

The dryad pushed away from the duskwood.

Bark tore where one shoulder had joined the trunk. The sound drove a gasp from Aestra. She did not stop. They moved toward one another until no space remained between flesh and wounded wood.

The dryad opened both arms. The split wood shook.

Aestra entered it.

The dryad’s arms closed around her shoulders. Aestra’s arms went around the split body in return. For one breath, they remained two women holding each other beneath a dying tree.

Then Aestra’s feet took root.

Fine pale fibres passed through the leather of her boots and entered the earth, growing as she kept leaning forward. The marks of bark-pressure returned across her hands, climbed her wrists, and met the dark grain of the dryad’s arms.

Aestra cried out.

The sound continued after her mouth had entered living wood.

Her skin became pale heartwood without leaving flesh behind. The dryad’s wounded bark softened without falling away. Where their chests met, separate surfaces opened into one another. Sap and blood touched and ceased to keep their names.

The duskwood drew both of them closer.

Roots rose around their legs. Branches lowered. The clear water falling through the Grove changed direction near them, running along bark and skin toward the joined body instead of down.

Aestra’s hand remained visible against the dryad’s back.

The dryad’s hand remained visible in Aestra’s hair.

Then the grain crossed both wrists.

The hands were no longer separable.

Maeril watched Aestra’s face change last.

Fear remained in it. So did grief, anger, and the decision she had made while feeling all three. Pale grain entered one cheek. Dark bark entered the other. The features did not vanish into the dryad’s and did not preserve themselves untouched.

They opened into a face that had not existed before.

At the same instant, the dryad’s shape entered the duskwood and the duskwood entered her. The joined roots drove outward through the clearing. Every living tree answered with a pressure Maeril felt beneath her knees.

Two separate bodies ended. In their place stood a new being with Aestra’s choice in its first breath, the dryad’s old relation in its bones, and the Grove extending its living body through every root that answered.

The new face lifted.

Its eyes opened.

Maeril could not tell what they saw.

For a breath, the new being stood with both palms open against the duskwood.

Then the old working caught her.

A line of cold tightened through the root beneath Maeril’s knees. The spring rose against one side of its basin without spilling. High above, the duskwood’s smallest branches bent inward, their leaves pressed flat by a pressure that had nothing to do with wind.

Life was moving through the Grove again. The broken mythal was forcing it into the same damaged course.

The new being’s mouth opened. Her first free breath stopped halfway out.

Maeril looked down at Rishi. His forearm had begun to slip from the wound. She eased it back, uselessly, because she could not yet bear to leave his body without even that small care.

The cold tightened again.

“I know,” she said, though no one had spoken to her.

She drew her hands away from him.

The Staff of Warding still lay at his left side. Maeril reached above his head, lifted his loose fingers from the wood, and drew it toward her. A petal stayed in the hollow of his palm.

She had made this staff to come between him and a blow. The worked grip fitted her hands almost as well as his. She braced its lower end against the root beside his right shoulder and set her free palm on the root itself.

The ward answered. Small. Familiar. Hers.

The mythal was not.

She could feel the place where her healing had been torn apart. Beside it lay the strained junction she and Rishi had worked before the fighting: two old purposes crossing, one still trying to protect living growth while the other crushed whatever attempted to mend it. Beyond that, the working continued through depths and distances she could not follow.

She kept her attention on the crossing within reach.

“Here,” she said to the being at the tree. “I can hold it here.”

She drew the staff toward herself a fraction. Her ward caught along one arcane edge and slipped. The root splintered beneath her other hand, opening the skin of her palm. She changed the angle instead of pressing harder.

The next pulse struck the wood and traveled down through the ward into the earth beside her knee.

For the first time, it missed the living root.

The new being turned toward her.

Clear sap pushed through the black seam in the duskwood. It reached the open air, gathered, and fell. Another bead followed it. The grey film on the spring broke into separate patches as water began running through the basin again.

Maeril held the angle.

One of the great roots shifted beneath the tree. It no longer ground against its neighbor. The two settled apart, leaving a channel through which water could pass. Along the fallen limb, closed buds opened in sequence, their stems lifting under their own weight.

The change moved outward from the new being, root by root. Dead leaves fell. Living ones unfolded. A branch that had hung over the clearing with its tip scraping the ground rose slowly enough for Maeril to see the torn place knitting at its base.

The pressure against her ward increased.

Her bruised ribs seized. The next breath would not come deeply enough to carry a word. She leaned her forehead against the staff and held the working she had already made.

Beyond Rishi’s feet, the lynx shuddered. Its tawny body drew inward, fur giving way to skin and dark cloth. The white-streaked woman stood where it had been, spear in one hand. She looked at Maeril’s bloody palm, then at the root passing beneath it.

Her free hand lifted.

Maeril bared her teeth at her.

“Do not touch that.”

The woman’s hand stopped.

For several breaths she stood with nothing to do with it. Then she lowered the spear point and stepped back from the root.

The older woman turned to the remaining armed figures.

“No more cutting.”

The younger huntress laid her broken staff on the ground.

Maeril saw none of what followed in their faces. The old force had found another way to bear down on her boundary. Each time she followed the new pressure, the first edge threatened to slip toward the root beneath her palm.

The circlet cooled against her brow. She fixed that first angle in the clarity it gave her and traced the second without letting the first go. Where they almost met, she eased the staff sideways. The next pulse passed through her ward into bare earth, close enough to shake soil from the living root.

“Hurry,” she said to the being at the tree. “I cannot hold this much longer.”

Across the clearing, the new being laid both hands against her own chest. The remaining dark fissure there closed beneath them. Bark grew along it in a fine, unbroken grain that continued through her wrists and into the tree behind her.

The duskwood’s next breath reached every leaf.

Warm, wet air passed over Maeril’s face. The sourness had gone from it. Water overflowed the spring’s basin and ran clear between the roots. Light reached places on the ground that had been hidden beneath curled leaves when they arrived.

The Grove was living without tearing itself apart.

Farther down, the mythal still pulled. Maeril felt its damaged course continuing beyond the clearing, an unfinished strain too large for her to mend from here. But the living roots were finding their own support. They no longer needed her to carry each returning pulse.

She eased the staff back.

The new being moved before she could release it.

One bare foot came free of the duskwood’s root. Then the other. The tree did not tear. The grain along her body moved with the same slow flex as the branches overhead.

She crossed the clearing and knelt opposite Maeril, with Rishi between them.

Her eyes rested on his face.

Maeril shook her head once. The movement hurt. Everything hurt.

“He is dead.”

The new being placed her palm on Rishi’s chest.

His body did not stir. Beneath the stillness, a faint warmth answered from the place her hand covered. Maeril felt it through the staff: smaller than the pulse of any root, nearly lost among the stronger lives returning around them.

The being’s other hand reached toward the wood.

Maeril turned it into her grasp.

Living warmth entered the staff, met the old pressure at its base, and scattered. A broken syllable sounded beneath the ground in Maeril’s own voice.

The new being waited, one hand on the wood and one on Rishi.

Maeril understood what she was being asked to try.

“Once more,” she whispered.

She set her palm back against the root. Her blood found the splintered place. This time she used the ward already running through the staff to hold the crossing open along its length. The wood could carry what her failed word had not. She knew its grain, its limits, every small repair she had made to it on the road. Rishi’s hands had worn the grip smooth in places her own fingers found without looking.

She had to keep that familiar working intact while something much older passed through it.

The new being bowed over Rishi.

Warmth moved from her hand into the staff. It traveled down the grain, through the held crossing, and into the roots beneath his body. Maeril felt it falter at the wound, then reach farther.

Nothing happened.

Rishi’s chest remained still. His eyes remained empty. The blood around him had cooled.

Maeril’s grip began to fail. She shifted the wood into the crook of her thumb.

Do not look at his face, she told herself. Hold the crossing.

The new being pressed her hand more firmly against his chest.

The warmth answered from within him.

His back arched from the ground.

Air tore into him with a sound too rough to be a gasp. His heel struck the root. His forearm jerked away from his abdomen, and torn flesh drew together beneath the ruined cloth. The wound closed into a raw, uneven seam.

Rishi tried to breathe again. His body convulsed around the attempt.

The new being kept her hand on his chest until the air entered. Then she moved her other hand from the staff to Maeril’s wrist.

The pressure had eased.

Maeril unwound the boundary instead of letting it snap. The old force withdrew along its damaged course, leaving the staff ordinary, bloodstained wood between her fingers. She laid it down clear of Rishi’s body and caught him as he tried to turn onto his side.

“Rish.”

His eyes opened on the wet canopy. Closed. Opened again while another breath dragged itself through him.

She eased his head into the bend of her arm.

“I am here.”

His gaze moved toward her voice. Recognition arrived slowly and hurt when it did. His hand found her sleeve and closed on it.

Maeril held him through the next breath and the one after it. She had counted them beside sickbeds, through frightened nights, after blows that should have killed him. She could not count these. Each arrived before she had finished believing the last.

His mouth moved.

She bent close enough to hear.

“Aestra?”

Maeril looked across him.

The being who had returned him sat beside the root, watching. Maeril could find parts of Aestra’s face there when she tried, and then the movement of an unfamiliar expression made them something else.

“She chose to join,” Maeril said. “Her whole self. The dryad too.”

Rishi followed her gaze. He waited for the young woman’s voice.

No answer came in it.

His grip tightened on Maeril’s sleeve. She held him while he looked, until his eyes closed and the breath left him with a small, broken sound.

The new being remained beside them.

By the time Rishi could drink, the light had moved across the spring.

Maeril held the cup because his hand shook too badly. He swallowed once, waited, and tried again. Water reached his stomach with a coldness so ordinary that tears came into his eyes.

He was thirsty. His back hurt where he had landed. His abdomen hurt when he swallowed, though he could not understand why those two things should have anything to do with one another.

Maeril’s thumb wiped a drop from his beard.

He turned toward her. A bruise had begun darkening the side of her face. Mud covered one sleeve. Her right palm was wrapped in a strip torn from her own clothing, and blood had come through it already.

“Your hand.”

“Later.”

He looked up at her.

“It will keep,” she said, more gently. “Let me have this.”

Rishi let her give him another mouthful.

He lay with his shoulders supported against her folded cloak. She had brought the staff within reach, and his fingers rested on its familiar grip. The wood gave him no strength he did not have. When he tried to lift it, his arm shook and Maeril steadied the far end.

Across the clearing, the woman who had killed him spoke quietly to the older woman. He knew the white streak. He remembered the claws. His body braced before he could stop it, pulling hard against the new seam below his navel.

Maeril followed his gaze.

“They are staying there.”

He breathed until the pain loosened enough to let him answer.

“Good.”

She set down the cup. For a while he listened to the spring, and to the air entering her lungs beside him. Every few breaths she checked the pulse in his wrist with two fingers. She did it even while looking straight at him.

Rishi turned his hand beneath hers and held on.

“You can keep hold.”

Her face changed. She bent over him carefully, stopping when her ribs would not let her come farther. He lifted his free hand to the back of her neck, and her forehead reached his.

She was crying again. Quietly this time, with her mouth pressed closed and her breath warm against his cheek.

He stayed where she could feel him.

The roots moved near his feet.

The new being approached along them, leaving clear water where her steps pressed into the moss. Rishi watched her lower herself beside the staff. She touched its far end, then withdrew her hand.

The grain warmed beneath his fingers.

He looked from it to her. Her open palm waited a little above the wood. When he did not move, neither did she.

Maeril lifted her head.

“There is something in it she recognizes.”

“The passage?”

“That. The working that carried you back. And what it was before either.”

She ran one finger beside a ward she had cut into the staff at Candlekeep. The being’s attention followed the gesture. Warmth reached the mark and waited there.

Rishi remembered Aestra’s hand between theirs at the camp: her discovery that the staff let her hold them together through the roots. He remembered the dryad offering her injured arm to his unseen hands.

“What would it bind?”

Maeril rested her uninjured palm on the wood. She breathed in sharply.

Rishi felt the answer change under his hand. The Grove’s warmth drew nearer, and with it the small, exact resistance of the wards she had made. Neither reached into his body. They waited at his grip.

“Us,” she said. “Through this.”

She took her hand away. The offered warmth receded with it.

“It can wait.”

Rishi looked at the being beside them. The face was unfamiliar. He could not ask Aestra what she wanted, or thank the dryad as though she still stood apart from the Grove. This person had reached for him through both their losses.

He turned his palm upward beside the staff.

She put her hand in it.

Her skin was warm, with a fine grain that shifted over the joints as her fingers settled against his. He held it for a moment, then guided it to the wood.

“I am here,” he said. “With you.”

Maeril moved closer. She supported the staff across his thighs, clear of the healing wound, and placed her hand beside his.

Three hands rested on the same worked wood.

The being’s fingers tightened first. Living grain ran beneath them and stopped where Maeril’s wards crossed it. Her breath caught. She turned her wrist, and the pale ward-lines opened beneath her fingers.

The living grain passed through those openings.

Rishi’s next breath moved through the staff.

He felt the change before he saw it: the weight settling against his thighs, a small adjustment beneath his palm as the wood answered the effort that kept his hand closed. He loosened his grip. The response eased. When he breathed in again, warmth moved with him along the length of the staff.

Maeril stared at her hand.

She gave a startled, breathless laugh.

“There is water moving in it. I can feel where it goes.” She turned her hand slightly, following something Rishi could not sense. “The wards are growing with the wood.”

A small leaf opened near the being’s thumb. A second unfolded beside an old repair Rishi had smoothed on the road. Beneath Maeril’s hand, the pale lines of her warding deepened into the grain. They remained hers. He could still see where she had corrected one uneven cut, and where his grip had worn the ridge beside it smooth.

The staff held all of it.

The new being withdrew her hand. The warmth continued beneath theirs, gentler now, present even when Rishi let the wood rest entirely on his thighs.

He could feel the spring through it. Not its course or the shape of the forest beyond it; only the steady movement of water he had already been hearing, reaching him by another way.

Maeril touched the little leaf without plucking it.

Beyond them, the younger huntress bowed her head. The white-streaked woman remained upright, staring at the staff with her spear grounded beside her. The older woman watched for a long time before inclining her own head. Rishi could not have said to whom she bowed.

None of them came nearer.

The being returned to the duskwood. Her hand rested against its healed trunk, and the leaves above them moved though the clearing held no wind.

Rishi shifted against the folded cloak. Pain caught him, and Maeril steadied his shoulder until it passed. The staff stayed across his thighs, one of her hands beside his on its living grain.

“Stay here a little.”

Maeril looked at him, then at the space beside the root. She sat close enough for him to lean against her without pulling at his wound.

“Yes.”

He rested his head against her shoulder. Over the smell of blood and damp cloth, the spring carried the clean scent of water moving through earth.

The small leaf brushed Maeril’s wrist when Rishi breathed.