Chapter 98: Morning Beauty, Barefooted

They walked into the camp at half past six with the light coming grey through the trees, and Theo did not say anything at all for the first two minutes.

It was not a camp. That was the thing.

It was a hollow between two ridges with a lot of people sitting in it, and they had built almost nothing, because building takes strength and none of these people had any. There were three lean-tos made of branches.

There was one cooking fire with nothing over it. There was a woman lying on her side under a blanket made of somebody’s coat with two children pressed against her back, and she did not sit up when sixty-one people turned to look at the human coming down the slope, because she could not.

Nobody reached for a weapon.

That was the other thing, and Theo understood it a second later and wished he had not.

They did not reach for weapons because Asterion had been the weapon. All of him. The archer with the ruined shoulder walking down the slope beside him with his hands open was the whole army.

’He shot at us with four arrows and a whistle and let me think he had a forest full of them.’

’And he was right to. If I’d known there were nineteen children in here, I’d have known there was nothing behind him at all.’

The Forest Spirit was at the bottom of the hollow and Theo would have walked past it.

It was a tree. It was not even a large tree, perhaps twice his height, thin through the trunk with pale bark and about nine leaves left on it, and it was standing in a circle of ground that had been cleared and swept by hand, and there were four small stones set around the base that somebody had carried a long way.

[Target: Forest Spirit]

[Condition: Severely Weakened]

[Growth Environment: High Wood Affinity — Suitable]

[Estimated remaining: 40 days]

Theo stood in front of nine leaves and read that number.

’Forty days.’

Behind him, sixty-one dark elves watched a human look at their god.

"It doesn’t need much," Asterion said, and his voice had gone somewhere careful. "It needs ground that will hold it and it needs to be left alone. It is not a weapon. It has never been a weapon. It grows things and it keeps the soil honest and when it is well, we are well."

"And when it dies?"

Asterion did not answer that either.

Theo crouched down at the edge of the swept circle, careful to stay outside it, and put his hands on his knees.

’High wood affinity. That’s what he said. That’s why they stopped here... could it have been that they were drawn here by Thall’s extremely high wood affinity.’

Theo deliberated carefully.

’But Sesan and Estea is as much danger to them as Thall’s affinity is beneficial. I can’t imagine Sesan having another episode and freezing everywhere.’

He stood up.

"I have a small concern, that I think I should give you a heads up on."

Asterion tilted his head slightly.

"I have three wives whom I will die to protect, I still need to ask what they think of this entire thing. If they don’t want, you guys will have to go back."

Asterion was silent for a full two seconds.

’A man that respects his wife... mother, perhaps he is a good person after all.’

He nodded.

"That is fare."

"Alright, then move it.

Asterion’s head snapped.

"What?"

"Not far. Two hundred yards north-east, there’s a slope above the lake where the ground stays wet all year and the trees are older than anything else on this property."

Theo was already walking it in his head, the way he walked a kitchen.

"It’s inside my boundary, it’s got no road on it and nobody drives past it by accident, and I will put a fence round the whole thing this week and tell the men who build it that I’m growing something expensive."

"You want us to move it," Asterion said slowly, "when I have just told you it will not survive a move."

"It won’t survive forty days where it is."

Theo turned round.

"So you can be careful for forty days and then bury it, or you can be careful for one afternoon and give it ground that’s actually alive. I’m not telling you which. It’s your god."

The dark elf stood in the middle of his dying people and did not have anything to say.

They ate at eight in the morning.

Theo made three trips to the house and back on foot, because a cab coming down the lake road would have been noticed, and he cleared out the pantry and then the cellar and then the Coffer, and he cooked over their cold fire with Odette standing beside him having said exactly one sentence about it, which was:

"Nineteen children, and you told me last."

The elves would not eat first. Asterion had to tell them twice.

Then a boy of about six, who did not care what his elders were doing, took a bowl and sat down in the dirt and put his whole face in it, and after that it stopped being a negotiation and started being breakfast.

Theo stood back by the trees with his sleeves pushed up and watched sixty-one starving people eat rice out of his kitchen and felt the golden panel come up in the corner of his eye, and for once he did not want to read it.

He read it anyway.

[Note: No Investment has been detected]

[Note: These actions have no measurable return]

[Note: You did them anyway]

’...Was that sarcasm?’

’Did my system just—’

He was still frowning at it when he noticed that the noise had changed.

Not stopped. Changed. Sixty-one people eating in a hollow makes a particular sound and that sound had gone quiet in one half of the camp, and Theo looked up.

At the bottom of the slope, in the swept circle nobody was allowed to stand in, beside a tree with nine leaves on it, a woman with frost-pale hair was standing barefoot in a nightdress with her hand flat against the bark.

Nobody had heard her arrive. Even Uthed had not heard her arrive.

Every dark elf in that hollow was on their feet.

And the frost was already going out across the ground from under Sesan’s feet, thin and white and spreading, into the roots of a god that had forty days left.