Chapter 99: A Gift Nobody Asked For

Theo was moving before he had decided to move.

He came down the slope through people who were getting out of his way, and the closer he got the worse it looked, because the frost had already crossed the swept circle and gone into the roots, and a tree with nine leaves on it did not have the reserve to survive being frozen.

"Sesan."

She did not turn round. Her palm stayed flat on the bark and her head was tipped back a little, the way she stood at the lake, and the hem of her nightdress had gone stiff and white where it touched the ground.

Asterion was ahead of him. The elf reached the edge of the circle and stopped there, which took more than Theo would have managed, and his voice came out cracked.

"Get her off it."

"I’m going, I’m going—"

"You do not understand. It cannot take cold. It has no strength left to fight cold—"

Then the tree lit up.

There was no sound. Afterwards, none of them could agree on that either, because some of the elves swore they had heard something like a long breath being drawn.

The frost stopped spreading. Then it reversed, running back across the swept ground toward the roots the way water runs down a drain, and it went into the trunk, and up.

Pale blue traced its way through the bark from the base to the crown, following the grain, and the nine leaves at the top turned from grey-green to a hard white-edged colour that had not been on that tree three seconds earlier.

And then it went out, and the tree was standing there, and it was not dead.

[Target: Forest Spirit]

[Attribute detected: Ice — ABSORBED]

[Resistance acquired: Ice]

[Condition: Severely Weakened]

[Estimated remaining: 41 days]

Theo stood at the edge of the circle and read the last line twice.

’It went up. It was forty and now it’s forty-one.’

Sesan took her hand off the bark.

She looked at her own palm, and then at the tree, and then over her shoulder at Theo with her head tilted, and her face did the thing it did when she had done something and was waiting to find out whether it had been allowed.

Theo made himself breathe out.

"You’re alright. Nobody’s angry with you."

She came out of the circle and put her hand flat against his chest, and Theo took it, because it was freezing, and he held it in both of his while the dark elves stood in a hollow and stared at the woman who had just done something to their guardian spirit.

Asterion had not moved at all.

"That is not possible," he said.

"It looks fairly possible from here."

"You do not understand. Cold kills it. Fire kills it. Salt water kills it. We carried it out of the aperture through a floor that was burning and we lost fourteen people keeping the heat off it."

His voice had gone flat and strange.

"It does not take an attribute. It dies of one."

Theo looked at the tree, and at the white edge on the leaves, and at a number that had gone up instead of down.

"Well, it took that one."

The elves did not go back to their food.

They came down the slope in ones and twos and stood at the edge of the swept circle looking at the leaves, and an old woman who had not stood up all morning was helped down by two others so she could see it, and she put both hands over her mouth and said something in a language the system did not bother to translate for him.

Theo stepped back and let them have it.

’They’ve stopped looking at me. They’re looking at the tree, and they’re looking at each other, and something just changed in here that I don’t have the first idea about.’

He glanced sideways at Uthed, who had come down the slope without being noticed and was standing with his arms folded.

"Sir Uthed."

"Mr Theo."

"What just happened?"

"I have no idea whatsoever," Uthed said.

"But I have been alive for fifty-six years, and when a great many people go quiet at the same time and none of them are frightened, it is usually because something good has happened that nobody planned."

Asterion finally came round the circle to him.

The elf’s shoulder was still wet through the wrapping and he had gone a shade greyer since sunrise, and he stopped a good distance away, which Theo appreciated more than he could say at that hour of the morning.

"Your wife."

"Sesan."

"Sesan."

Asterion said it carefully, as though it might come apart.

"What is she?"

Theo thought about the honest answer, which was the Queen of a frozen country that threw her away, who is being walked backwards into a child by a curse her own family paid for.

"She’s my wife," he said. "That’s the part that’s your business."

Asterion looked at him for a moment and then, unexpectedly, huffed something close to a laugh.

"You are a very careful man for someone who cooks for strangers."

"I’ve had a hard month."

They agreed the rest of it standing up, because nobody wanted to sit down near the tree.

The move would happen that afternoon. The slope above the lake, inside the boundary, no road on it. Asterion would carry the Spirit himself with three of his people, and nobody else was to touch it, and Theo did not argue with any of that because it was the first thing all morning the man had asked for instead of surrendered.

"And the fence?"

"This week. I’ll tell the builders I’m growing something expensive."

"You lie easily."

"I don’t lie at all, actually." Theo shouldered his empty pot. "I’m growing something expensive. That’s simply the whole of it and not a word more."

He walked Sesan back up through the woods with his coat over her shoulders and her bare feet in his hands for the last stretch, because she had stopped being interested in walking and had held her arms out at him, and there was no version of that where he said no.

She was asleep on his shoulder before the treeline.

The panel came up quietly while he was carrying her.

[Investment Opportunity Detected]

[Target: Forest Spirit]

[Compatibility: Low → Moderate]

[Note: The target has accepted an attribute from within your household]

[Warning: Target does not meet Villainess classification]

’Yes, thank you. We covered that.’

Theo shifted her weight and kept walking.

’Moderate. It went from Low to Moderate because Sesan touched it.’

’So it’s not just that it survived her. It’s that whatever it is, it’s now got a piece of my wife in it.’

He came out of the trees onto his own lawn with the lake flat and grey in front of him and a woman asleep on his shoulder, and stopped for a second, because there was a wheelchair on the porch and it was facing the woods.

Estea had been sitting there long enough to have an opinion about all of it.

"Where," she said, "have you been since five in the morning."