Chapter 100: Ask Your Wives

Theo put Sesan to bed first, because that bought him about four minutes to think, and then he came back out onto the porch and sat down on the boards beside the wheelchair rather than standing over it.

Estea let him get comfortable before she started.

"There are people in my woods."

"Yes."

"How many."

"About Sixty-one I think."

"And you have fed them."

"Everything in the pantry and most of the cellar," Theo said. "And the Coffer’s down to about four days."

Estea’s mouth thinned.

"So we are now short of food, in a house that was already hiding two invalids and a corpse in the basement, because you found some strays."

"Thall isn’t a corpse."

"No," she agreed, without any softening at all.

"She is a very expensive machine with a woman inside it, and everything else I said stands."

He told her the whole of it anyway, because there was no version of this that survived a half-truth.

The arrows in the woods, Asterion, the seal, the aperture they had been thrown out of. The hollow with the lean-tos and the woman who could not sit up. The tree with nine leaves on it, and Sesan barefoot in the swept circle, and the frost going backwards.

Estea listened without interrupting, which was not her habit, and by the end of it her hands had gone still on the arms of the chair.

"Say the last part again."

"It absorbed her ice. And it grew a resistance to it. And the day count went up by one."

"That is not a thing that happens."

"Asterion said the same. He said cold kills it and they lost fourteen people carrying it through a burning floor to keep heat off it."

Estea sat with that for a while, looking out at the treeline.

’She’s not angry,’ Theo thought. ’She has to be calculating something, I’m sure. Does ’she know something.’

"You want my permission," she said eventually.

"I told him if my wives said no, they go back."

"You told a starving man with sixty-one dependents that he might have to leave, and you meant it."

She turned her head.

"You are aware that if I say no, they will die out there."

"Yes."

"And you would still do it."

"I’d hate it," Theo replied.

"But it’s your woods too. I’m not going to house an armed people at the bottom of your garden because I felt sorry for them and never asked you."

Estea was quiet.

Then she said, in a flat voice, "Wheel me to the rail."

He wheeled her to the rail.

She looked at the woods for a long time and started:

"Understand what you are asking. Not what you think you are asking. Sixty-one elves in a treeline is not charity. It is a garrison. They see everything that comes down that road and everything that comes over the water, and they owe you their lives, and starving people are the most loyal people in the world for exactly as long as they are starving."

"That’s a horrible way to put it."

"It is the correct way to put it. You may find a nicer one afterwards."

She did not look at him.

"There will come a night when somebody comes here for us, and on that night I want sixty-one pairs of eyes in those trees and I do not care one bit how they got there."

"...So that’s a yes."

"That is a yes with conditions."

’Of course it is.’

"First. They do not come past the treeline. Not for water, not for medicine, not for anything. Whatever they need, you carry to them."

"Agreed."

"Second. Nobody in that camp learns Thall’s name, or what is in that basement, or that Sesan is anything other than a sick woman who wandered off. If they find out what we are, we are worth more sold than sheltered, and those starving people would be fools not to think about it."

Theo opened his mouth.

"Do not..." Estea gave him a piercing side glance. "tell me they would never. You have known them for one morning."

He shut it again.

"Third." She finally turned her head. "The one with the arrows. Asterion. You will bring him here and I will look at him myself."

"He’s not well enough to—"

"Then carry him. You are extremely good at carrying people."

He got up to go and she stopped him with four words.

"Why the wood affinity."

Theo turned back.

"Sorry?"

"You said they came for high wood affinity in this ground. This ground is a lake and a stand of old trees and it is not remarkable."

Her amber gaze had not moved off him.

"Whose affinity is it?"

’...Ah.’

’She has got there in about nine seconds.’

"Thall’s," Theo said.

Estea faced front again.

"Then they did not find us," she said.

"They were pulled here. Something in that forest can feel her through fifty feet of stone and a suppression array, and it walked sixty-one people across a floor and out of an aperture to get to her."

She let that sit.

"And you have just agreed to move it two hundred yards closer."

Theo stood on his own porch with his mouth slightly open.

"...I’ll move it further out."

"You will do nothing of the sort. You will move it exactly where you said, where I can see the slope from this rail."

Her hands settled on the wheels.

"If a thing is coming for my sister-wife, I would rather it did so somewhere I can watch it."

He went down to the basement afterwards and sat with Thall for twenty minutes and told her all of it, the way he always did, from the arrows to the frost to Estea at the rail.

The monitor kept its rhythm.

"So there’s a tree... and it might be here because of you, which I don’t understand at all, and Estea’s decided that’s a good reason to keep it close, which frightens me a bit."

He turned her hand over and rubbed the knuckles.

"Also she called you a very expensive machine with a woman inside it, and I want you to know I did object."

Theo kissed her forehead and went back up the stairs, and by the time he came out into the light Odette had already emptied the last of the rice into a sack and was standing at the door with it, wearing her coat.

"Two hundred yards north-east," she said. "That is what I heard you say. Are we carrying, or are we watching them carry?"

"You’re not doing either. Your shoulder—"

"Mr Chadwick." She put the sack in his arms. "Nineteen children. Walk."