Chapter 16: The Great Sanctuary Tohei

You could see Tohei from a day away.

At first Fel took it for a storm cloud, a vast dark green thunderhead hanging above the forest. But as they walked, with Loria’s litter creaking between them and the ground rising toward a ridge of black rock, the cloud resolved into a canopy. It was the crown of a single tree. It spread across the sky for miles, its branches wide as rivers, its leaves shivering in a wind that seemed to come from no direction, and beneath it, hanging from the boughs like fruit, hung thousands of pale, flickering lights.

“Lantern moths,” Vili murmured. “I read of them. They spin their cocoons into lamps.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“They are a defense. Those cocoons are poisonous.”

“You ruin everything.”

“I am informed.”

The city itself began at the roots. There were no walls, only a wide green hollow between the great gnarled arches, each one thick as a castle tower, each one carved and grown into stairs and windows and balconies. Bridges of woven vine crossed a hundred feet above the ground. Dark-skinned, white-haired elves in robes of moss-green and charcoal moved along the walkways, and every one of them stopped to look at the two human boys carrying a dying girl.

A tall guard stepped out of the shadows with a spear of living wood.

“Outlanders,” she said. “You are not permitted beyond the First Root.”

Fel held out his hand and opened his palm.

The guard looked at the silver ring in it for a long time. Her expression did something complicated. She took it, turned it over once between two fingers, and said in a low, strange voice, “Wait here,” and vanished into the trunk of the city.

They waited for an hour.

When the guard came back, she did not speak. She only beckoned. They followed her up a spiral of living stair and along a corridor of pale wood lined with carved faces, and then through a doorway hung with a curtain of dried flowers into a room that Fel would remember for the rest of his life.

It was a hall inside the heart of the tree. The floor was moss, the ceiling a dome of interlocking branches, and the only light came from a single shaft that fell from far above, where a knot in the trunk let the sun through. Six thrones of woven root stood in a half-circle. Five of them were empty.

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On the sixth sat an old woman no bigger than a child.

She was ancient beyond counting. Her skin was deep grey, wrinkled like a walnut, her white hair hung to the floor in a hundred thin braids, and her eyes were the green of moss on old stone. She wore a robe of bark and leaf, and a staff of twisted root lay across her knees. She sat perfectly still, and the silver ring lay in her open palm.

“Karmina,” she said, in a voice like the rustle of dry leaves.

“Grandmother Haruvael,” said Fel, and bowed as Karmina had taught him. Vili did not bow. He had knelt, in the mud, at the foot of the throne, and he had not gotten up.

“She sends apologies,” said Fel. “She asks you to help us.”

The old woman looked at him. Then she looked at the litter, and at the girl lying on it, and her eyes softened by a fraction.

“That is Ortumocorvis blood,” she said. “I know it by the smell. That is a burning thing, and a hungry thing, and it is very nearly dead.” She shifted the staff. “She is a crow’s child. Why should the Mother spend her gifts on a crow?”

“Because she is my friend,” said Vili, into the moss.

“Your friend?”

“She is the most infuriating person I have ever met. She has nearly killed me twice. She nearly killed him at least once.” He lifted his head, and his voice shook, and he made no attempt to hide it. “She would sooner die than beg. So I am begging for her. I will beg for as long as you require.”

The old woman said nothing for a long moment.

“Get up, boy. The Mother does not like a man on his belly.” Haruvael rose from her throne and crossed the moss with the small, steady steps of a woman who had walked the same ten yards ten thousand times. She laid her hand on Loria’s forehead and closed her eyes, and a faint green shimmer ran from her fingers through the bandages, and the girl’s chest, which had been rising in shallow, uneven little pulls, drew one long breath.

Haruvael took her hand away.

“I can do it,” she said. “The lung, the arm, the burns. It will take three months. But the Mother does not give without cost, and I do not bargain lightly.” She turned. “There is a sickness in the Sorrowmire.”

“Sorrowmire?” said Fel.

“A marsh, two days’ walk east of the Root. In its center stands a willow, the eldest daughter of the Mother, planted before the first elf was born. She is dying of grief. Something in the marsh has poisoned her sorrow, and now her sap runs black and the whole mire sickens around her.” The old woman’s fingers tightened on her staff. “I cannot leave the city. My sisters cannot leave. Every healer in Tohei who has tried to reach her has come back with madness in his eyes or not at all.”

“You want us to heal a tree,” said Vili.

“I want you to bring me one cup of her sap, running clear. Clean. Untainted.” Her eyes glittered. “Only then will the Mother know that her daughter has been comforted. Only then will she lend me her hands.”

She looked from one to the other.

“It will be hard. It will be cruel. And you will not be permitted to take a single weapon that is not a sword.”

“Done,” said Fel.

“I did not say it was fair,” said Haruvael dryly. “I said it was hard.”