“Why do you need us?” asked Bryndine. “Why have you not done it before now?”
“We cannot. When your people burned our forest, we whose trees were spared removed ourselves from the Wyd so that we would not share in the madness of the others. If we open ourselves to it again, we will become as the Burnt, or be destroyed. It must be a human with the Gift.” It pointed Wynne’s hand at me. “We have waited many years for one like this to come to us.”
“If I am so weak,” I asked with a scowl, “how can I possibly be of any use?”
“You must wake the Eldest.”
“The Eldest?” Orya sounded as puzzled as I felt. “They’d let the Dragon bugger every one of us and not lift a finger to help. And what’ve the Children got to do with it anyway?”
“Do you think that your people were the first to worship the Mother and the Father?” Again, that slight almost-arrogance colored its voice. “The humans who call themselves Eldest learned the name from us, centuries ago. We do not speak of them. We speak of the true Eldest, the first of our kind.”
Deanyn raised an eyebrow. “You want us to fetch your parents? What will they do, scold the Burnt and send them to their beds without dinner?”
The Wyddin actually seemed affronted by the question. “The Eldest have great power, human. The Wyd is theirs to command, and only they can resist the agony that corrupts it. Their word binds us all. They will command the Burnt to join their slumber, and the Burnt will obey.” It shifted Wynne’s feet in a surprisingly human show of impatience. “Come, mount your horses. We will take you to the First Tree, where the Eldest sleep. Any questions you have, we will answer on the way.”
Sylla objected before the Wyddin even finished speaking. “It could be a trap, Bryn.”
Elene nodded. “Let Selvi and me scout ahead first, Captain.”
But Bryndine’s face hardened with resolve, and she shook her head. “No. We must not delay. We are not well hidden here; those scouts may still lead others back to us. And the Kingsland suffers more with every hour that passes. We came here to speak with the Wyddin—if it is a trap, so be it. Without their help, we are doomed regardless.” She strode to her horse and mounted gracefully, then looked down at the Wyddin that bore Wynne’s face. “Lead us.”
It did not take long for us to mount once more, and soon we were following our Wyddin guide into the trees. It sat astride Wynne’s mount with a stiff, unnatural posture, but had no apparent difficulty directing the animal towards the heart of the First Forest. I rode at the head of the company, alongside Bryndine and the Wyddin, unwilling to let Wynne’s body out of my sight.
The smaller maples and birches of the outer forest gave way to great oaks and towering firs, and more and more often, broad-trunked fireleafs bursting with green leaves. The air was thick with the earthy smells of the forest: old soil and sap and decaying leaves, laced with the sharp scent of evergreens. Overhead, the canopy thickened as we made our way deeper, and sunlight penetrated only in scattered patches, breaking the shadows with thin shafts of brightness. We picked our way through heavy undergrowth—undisturbed for centuries, it was so tangled in places that passage was impossible—and around huge trees that often grew too closely together for our mounts to fit between. At times it seemed the forest had blocked our way altogether, but our guide always found some path that the horses could manage.
As we wended our way through the woods, I thought back to what the Wyddin had said earlier.
You must wake the Eldest
. Whatever I was meant to do, I was quite certain I could not. I had no more control over the voices I heard than I did over the beating of my heart. I glanced sidelong at the creature riding beside me. Even looking at the thing while it was wearing Wynne’s form made me sick to my stomach, and I certainly did not want to hear it speak with her voice again, but I could not deny my curiosity. Finally, I blurted, “How am I supposed to wake these Eldest? I know nothing about them.”
“You must speak to them through the Wyd, and convince them of your need,” it replied. “We cannot tell you what words will suffice, only that they will not wake easily.”
“Why? Why do they sleep at all?”
It looked at me for a long while, and I thought I saw a glimmer of sorrow in Wynne’s green eyes. “What short lives you humans live. To have forgotten the Eldest already… you remember so little.”
“Tell us of them,” Bryndine said. “It may be useful.”
It gave a single nod of Wynne’s head. “The Eldest were the first of the Wyddin,” it began, “created by the Mother and the Father in the time before the Divide. When the Earth and Sky were separated to make the world, the Mother and the Father charged the Eldest with watching over mankind, and they swore to do so gladly. And from the Eldest we were born, the lesser Wyddin, to aid them in their task.”
“I always heard the Wyddin hated us,” Orya interrupted from behind. “For takin’ their place as the favorite children.”
“Those lies came later. No, we treasured mankind. How not? Humans were our beloved younger brothers and sisters, clever and creative and always curious. But some viewed us with distrust—your kind has always been given to superstition, and our… intangible nature confounded them. They fled from our forests to the plains. Those who remained, though, lived their lives in the presence of the Eldest, and the strength of the Wyd seeped into them. The Eldest taught them of the Mother and the Father, and showed them how to open their hearts to the Wyd and harness the Gift of the Sages—but only for peaceful means.”
“The Elovians,” I guessed, hating myself for the eagerness I heard in my voice. I could not forgive the creature for possessing Wynne, but there was no denying the draw this tale held for me. I had never dreamed that I might hear the story of Elovia from one who had lived during the fabled kingdom’s golden age.
“Yes. Those humans founded Elovia, and it was a peaceful kingdom. Our two races lived in harmony for many years. Using the Wyd, they erected great cities and palaces, and coaxed endless crops from the land. But in time, the tribes of the plains grew jealous of Elovia’s prosperity. War began.
“The Elovians had their Sages, but the people of the tribes were born warriors, unmatched throughout history. Humans were greater and more powerful then—the divine might that created them still lingered within. Imagine an army of men and women, all as tall and strong as this one.” It pointed at Bryndine, and I imagined tens of thousands of her charging towards me with swords drawn. The image was terrifying. “The war lasted generations. Hundreds of thousands died. Each side made demons of the other, and their hate grew with every battle.
“It might have gone on for centuries more, but for Alistan, the last king of Elovia. After his wife and son were killed by the tribesmen, Alistan begged the Eldest to teach him and his Sages how to use the Wyd as a weapon. To turn the Earth and Sky against their enemies. He claimed it would be used only in defense, and eventually the Eldest relented, trusting the humans to use their power wisely.
“In truth, King Alistan meant to use this knowledge to seek vengeance, to destroy the tribes entirely. He had the Sages summon the fire that burns in the belly of the world. But the Wyd is only a language, at its heart—it can make requests of nature, but not truly command it. The Earth’s fire was too mighty to be controlled. It rose up and swallowed Elovia whole, leaving nothing but smoke and ash.
“The Eldest were heartbroken. It was their duty to protect and guide mankind, and they had failed. Swearing to remove their power from the world so that such a thing could not happen again, they entered a deep sleep, leaving us to watch over your kind in their place. And with their absence, the strength of the Gift dwindled in humankind, and was forgotten.”
There it was. The history of Elovia laid bare in a way it had not been for a thousand years. Yet something was missing from the tale, and a terrible suspicion gnawed at the back of my mind. “All of our stories tell of how the Wyddin hate mankind,” I said. “How they destroyed Elovia. But if your story is true, the King and the Sages were at fault.”
“No more than we were, human. It was our duty to teach and guide them. If they misused the Wyd, we led them to it.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “Share the blame if you like; that is not the issue. My question is this: our first queen, Aliana, was supposed to have been the last princess of Elovia. She would have been King Alistan’s daughter?”
The Wyddin nodded, but did not speak.
“Then she could not have been ignorant of her father’s role in the cataclysm. She chose to hide his mistake, to blame you instead. Erryn would not have been difficult to convince; he was of barbarian stock, and his people never trusted yours. And Aliana must have known what the Burning would do to you—she grew up in Elovia, alongside the Wyddin.” The pieces fell together in my mind, but it brought no exhilaration, no excitement. I did not want it to be true, though I was certain that it was. “It was not done simply to clear the land—it was an attack. They meant to destroy you.”
It held its silence for a time, then quietly said, “Yes.”
Disgust and anger welled up inside me. I had once told Bryndine that we had brought this upon ourselves, but I had assumed it was accidental, an ignorant mistake. If Erryn and Aliana had wrought such suffering on the Wyddin out of petty vengeance, it tainted the entire past of the Kingsland. “They rewrote history.” It was not the worst of their crimes, but to me—to any Scriber—it came close. “That is where the lies came from. False tales, told to make sure every generation to follow them would hate the Wyddin. They
knew
the blame was not yours, at least not entirely, and they still burned your trees.” I had never felt such shame—shame for my kingdom, for my history, for my very species. “How can you… After what was done to you, why in the depths would you want to help us now?”
“The Mother and the Father gave us life and purpose,” the Wyddin said, and though its voice was hollow, conviction burned behind Wynne’s eyes. “They charged us with the protection of mankind. Your people will not fall at the hands of our brothers and sisters if we can prevent it.”
Bryndine looked at the creature with something approaching respect. “You are keeping your oath.”
“Putting the Burnt to rest will bring peace to the Wyd. Our exile will finally end. Once again, we will be free to give mankind our aid and protection, as we promised long ago.”
Such pious devotion was unfathomable to me—I had never so much as sat through an entire Garden sermon. Had I been in the same position, I do not think I would have had the strength to spare a kingdom that had caused me so much pain, gods or no. “Is it all true, then?” I asked. “The Mother and the Father, the Divide, everything the Children preach?”
“We cannot answer that, human. We have only our faith, and that is as it should be. None but the Eldest can claim to truly know how the world was born.” Urging Wynne’s horse forward through a narrow gap between two massive firs, the Wyddin looked back at me and said, “Perhaps when you wake them, you can ask.”
* * *
Evening had enveloped the forest by the time we emerged into the moonlit clearing where the First Tree grew.
Fireleafs surrounded the clearing, standing so close together that I could not see between their trunks, their roots and branches so tightly interwoven that nothing larger than a mouse could have fit through the gaps. The result was something like a large box canyon, with great cliff walls of wood and bark and leaves. The only point of entry was from the north, a space of perhaps ten feet in a circle that must have been more than three hundred yards around, and riding through that opening was like riding between the legs of a giant. The trees rose hundreds of feet into the air, higher than any man-made structure I had ever seen, higher than the Kingshome itself. When Elovia fell they had been old already; they were ancient now, possibly the oldest of all living things.
All living things save one.
How to describe the First Tree? It was like nothing I had ever seen. Just looking at it, I could tell that it was as old as the world—nothing could have reached such a size without millennia of growth. It was nearly as wide as the fireleafs around it were tall, and taller than them by half their height again. Its massive trunk grew gnarled and crooked, bent under the weight of the ages. Bark like an old man’s skin covered every inch of its surface, so pale that it was almost white, and creased by knots and cords and wrinkle-like folds. Far overhead, its huge, nearly bald branches were silhouetted against the starry sky, bearing no more than a few scattered tufts of leaves that glinted silver in the moonlight. Twisting and weaving around one another, the branches bowed under their own weight to form a great latticed dome that ended just above the canopy of the surrounding forest.
We were all silent as we rode across the lush, perfect grass that carpeted the clearing, towards that impossible tree. It was a silence I knew well, the quiet of the library in Delwyn’s Hall, or the Old Garden before the accident. A reverent hush, as though even the air itself knew to hold its breath in the presence of something so old and so precious.
Orya, of course, was the first to break the spell. “Mother’s teats, that’s a big Dragon-damned tree.”
Deanyn snickered. “Eloquently put, as always.” But then she glanced at the Wyddin, riding ahead of us, and a look of guilt replaced her grin. I understood. When the creature was not speaking, it was easy to see Wynne in its place, to forget that she was really gone. Every smile—every moment not spent mourning her—felt like betraying her memory.
We dismounted at the foot of the First Tree, hitching our horses among the huge twisted roots. Looking up the massive trunk, it occurred to me how unlikely it was that something so huge had been undiscovered so long. Nothing was written of the First Tree in any book I had ever read. Certainly the Kingsland was rife with superstition about the First Forest, and we were in the deepest part of the woods now, where even the woodcutters of Timberhold dared not tread. But still, someone should have noticed a tree taller than anything ever built by human hands. Curious, I asked, “Why would the First Tree be here? Shouldn’t it have grown somewhere in Elovia?”