Chapter 33 - The Oldest Tree

Chapter 33: 33 - The Oldest Tree

They had been walking a while when Adrien finally asked.

"Is it much further? I didn’t think a forest could actually be this big."

"You sound like a kid in the back of a cart." Amelia did not slow down. "And no. We’re almost there."

"One more thing, then."

"Go on."

"Your friend. Or whatever he is to you. Lucien." Adrien pushed a branch out of his way. "He’s not going to put an arrow in my head, is he? The way he did with those bodies."

"No. Don’t worry about that."

’I’d still rather not run into him.’

They came out onto a stretch of open ground a few minutes later, and Adrien stopped walking before he had decided to.

There was something in the air ahead of them. He could not see it, and it was there. Something sitting across the whole width of the forest in front of him, thin as glass and about as obvious once you knew to look.

And it explained the last twenty minutes. The whole way here his head had been trying to talk him out of the direction he was walking in. Nothing loud. A sort of low, reasonable suggestion that the path bent left back there, that the good ground was further north, that he had probably come the wrong way. He had put it down to being tired.

Absolute Mana Sense had been doing something similar. Every time he pushed it forward the readings slid, like trying to look at a word out of the corner of his eye.

"There’s a barrier here, isn’t there?"

Amelia turned round. "You noticed?"

"It’s been telling me to go somewhere else for the last half hour."

"My grandfather put it up centuries ago." She sounded a little impressed. "Monsters and people who shouldn’t be here walk into it and their senses go cloudy. They lose track of which way they came from and which way they’re going, and eventually they wander off. Most of them never work out that anything happened to them at all."

"That’s pretty clever."

’If I watched it for long enough, I might be able to take it apart. Having one of those around Greymoor would solve a lot of problems.’

’Assuming I can.’

Amelia stepped through and Adrien followed her, and the pressure came off the inside of his skull the way a hand comes off your shoulder. His talent went back to reporting properly.

And Elyndor was in front of him.

The trees were the first thing, because they had to be. They came up out of the ground wider than any house he had stood in and went so far above him that the tops of them were somebody else’s problem, and the city had been built into them.

Bridges ran between the trunks at four or five different heights, and there were windows in the wood, and doors, and lamps burning along the walkways in the late afternoon. Whole houses were sitting inside those trees.

Underneath all of it, the ground level was a working town. Paved roads. Shopfronts. A cart going one way and something with no horses in front of it going the other, low and quiet with light coming off the underside, and Adrien got most of the way to a comment about it before he decided he had used up his surprise for the day.

Elves everywhere. Guards at the road junctions in the same white armour he had seen a hundred of on that hillside.

And they were not all elves.

"There are other races here," he said. "Not humans, though."

"Merchants, mostly. They’re here for business and they go home afterward." Amelia glanced at him. "As for humans, my grandfather and the current king of your kingdom never got on."

"That I can understand."

Two guards came off the road junction toward them, and they were smiling at Amelia until they saw who was walking beside her.

Both of them stopped smiling at exactly the same time. Adrien did not move his hands. He was aware of about six other people along that road doing the same arithmetic, and of a woman who had picked up a small child without appearing to think about it.

"Lady Amelia."

"He’s a guest of my grandfather’s."

The guard’s eyes came back to Adrien and stayed there. "Forgive me, but nobody told us."

"Nobody knew until this morning." Amelia said it without any weight on it. "Adrien Clairmont."

The name did something to the pair of them that Adrien was not expecting. They straightened up, both at once, and the one who had been doing the talking bowed from the neck.

"We didn’t know you were a Clairmont, my lord. Apologies for the rudeness."

"Don’t worry about it. I’d have done the same."

They went on past, and Adrien waited until they were out of earshot.

"Why does my surname get that reaction here?"

"Your father saved my grandfather’s life," Amelia said. "And everyone in Elyndor knows it. We don’t like humans very much, generally speaking. The Clairmonts are the exception, and they’ve been the exception for a long time."

"Good to know."

They came to the base of the largest tree in the city, which was saying something, and went in through a set of doors with guards on either side of them.

Inside was a circular platform of pale wood, big enough for eight people, with a rail around the edge and runes cut into the boards. Adrien could see where the mana went and had a decent idea of how the thing worked before Amelia had finished stepping onto it.

She pressed something on the rail and the platform started to rise.

"My grandfather’s at the top," she said. "That’s where the house is."

Adrien watched the inside of a tree go past. Windows, landings, whole floors sliding down out of sight beneath them, and it kept going considerably longer than he had expected.

’This is a lift. They’ve got a lift inside a tree. Sick.’

The platform came to a stop, and Absolute Mana Sense went off like an alarm.

He had felt something like this once before, standing on a road with his head out of a carriage window.

It was not the same. Whatever was on the other side of the wall in front of him was a fraction under what had come down out of the sky at him, and only a fraction, and it had been sitting up here quietly the entire time he had been walking around the city underneath it and asking about the traffic.

Adrien got hold of the rail without making a show of it.

"Are you alright?" Amelia had turned around. "You’ve gone pale."

"I’m fine." He came off the rail and put his hands back in his pockets. "Completely fine. Yeah."

...

AN: You have the character art in the discord!! :) Link in the synopsis or my profile bio.