Getting out of the kingdom the first time had been an ordeal. Getting back in, then out again with all his brothers was the hardest thing Rowan had ever done. But this time returning to the ruins that were once his home proved far less difficult. He had matured during his time as a mother in the deep Evergrowth. He was not a scared child anymore, he was strong.

With climbing plant tendrils, he scaled the outer wall easily. Esther clung to his back in her harness of roots. He remembered how frightening descending or ascending the border wall could be when he was young. The sheer drop of it, the wind that howled against it, the watch towers that sat along the rampart casting shadows onto the Evergrowth below like vigilant stone demons. Enough time had passed for the kingdom’s inhabitants to deteriorate and fade, but its stone stood largely unchanged, save for the encroaching weeds and ivy that crawled up from the forest below. A twinge of childhood fear pricked Rowan’s heart and worried for Esther, who had never seen this place. But there was no fear in her large dark eyes as she scanned the green horizon, from which they had come, and the grey edifice they now climbed. She only asked her mother if he needed to rest once they’d reached the top.

“I’m fine.” Rowan said, “We can rest when we’re out of sight again.” In truth he was not tired at all. His tendrils had pulled them up almost effortlessly, with little strain on his body. When he’d asked the Goddess for power, she had not cheated him, but he’d received her power not as a gift, but as a bargain. Like the rampart wall of the kingdom, his body would soon be overtaken. His effortless power was a reminder of his limited time.

Now atop the wall, they could see the kingdom laid out below them. Its stone innards were similarly untouched as the wall, mostly in the same condition as Rowan remembered them. Only now the palace and the many houses and streets surrounding it were vacant of life. No patrols stalked along the wall, no villagers carried baskets through the streets, no chickens clucked, no goats bleated. Rowan had expected to hide from at least some eyes, but at least from this height, the kingdom appeared empty.

“You really grew up here? It’s spooky.” Esther asked, transfixed by the view. Having lived her whole life in the deep Evergrowth surrounded by dense forest, she had never seen this far before, nor been surrounded by so much open space.

“It was livelier last time I was here.” Rowan said.

“So, what are we looking for?”

“An old friend of mine. I’ve heard she still runs things in the palace.”

“What if she’s not here?” Esther scanned the streets for any sign of human life but found none.

“Then I’ll find someone else.”

“You know a lot of people here?”

“No.”

“Then how-“         

“Esther, enough.”
Rowan knew what she was doing. She wanted to convince him that this mission to find her a new home was doomed to failure, that they should return to their familiar life together in the forest. She had to know how tempting it was for him. With his eyes now laid on the state of the barren kingdom, it would be easy to conclude there was no place for Esther here. It would be so easy to return home and resume their simple life as mother and daughter. He was sorely moved to do so. But it would not stop the woody growth that crept through his veins. When he was gone, he would not leave Esther alone.

“We will find someone.” He said firmly.

 In the final months living in there, Rowan had memorized all the servant’s pathways that crisscrossed the palace in case he needed to travel unseen by his father. They used those same hidden paths now, tunnels and catwalks below and above the open halls. As they explored, they found bedspreads huddled together in the corners of ballrooms, hidden stashes of potatoes and preserved vegetables in long-dormant fireplaces. They passed the room that had once been Oleander’s bedchamber and found it stripped of any useful items. Rowan assumed his room and all the others would be similarly scavenged. There was life in this palace yet. However, it was not until they reached the throne hall that they saw other humans in the flesh.

They entered it on a servant’s walkway, a wooden plank with flimsy railing that crossed the top of the chamber at the ceiling level, where attendants of the royal family and nobles had once crossed above the heads of their master’s. There, Rowan and Esther could observe the throne hall below without being seen.

The throne hall was the largest enclosed space within the palace. Before the fall of the kingdom, it had held hundreds of people within its gothic arches for coronations, banquets, and balls. Celebrations had grown scarce since Rowan’s mother passed, but it had still stood ready for use when he’d last seen the place. Now its fine oak tables and elaborate tapestries were gone, the seven thrones of his family nowhere to be seen.

The hall still held people however, more of them then it ever had before. In place of tables and thrones were hundreds of people crowded in with each other and their bedding and their meager piles of possessions. The floor was covered wall to wall with the tiny plots of families and tinier plots of lone individuals. There were no children, of course. Excepting the princes, there had not been children in the human kingdom for a long time. There were no young people at all even. Of the many figures below them, most were gray-haired and wrinkled and the spryest among them no younger than fifty. Most laid or sat about doing nothing at all, slumped like the forgotten dolls of a god, abandoned to the ravages of time. With so many people in one place it was not silent, but the jubilant uproar of a banquet had been replaced with the depressed murmur of a dying land. Some, the lastborns, darted along footwide paths through the see of people. They distributed food and supplies and tended to the sick and dying, of which there were many. Some of the oldest lay catatonic on the cold stone floor attended by no one. There were far too many to be cared for and far too few to do the caring. It was a bird’s eye view of a civilization waiting to die.

For Rowan, who had only ever seen the masses from a distance, it was heart-rending. For Esther, who knew that other humans existed but had never before seen them, it was wholly overwhelming. She buried her face into her mother’s arm, the one still made of flesh.

“Do I have to stay here?” She asked.

“Mina will know a place for you.” He said, and he hoped she did.

He had already spotted Mina among the crowd. She was exactly where he’d expected her to be, in the palace running things as always. She had been midwife to his mother, a position that carried nearly as much importance as the king in the last days of the kingdom. She had helped delivery him and all his brothers and all the while she built up an empire among the laborers of the palace. By the time Fern was born, she held the reigns of nearly all the affairs of palace life and most everyone outside the royals respected her authority. Rowan believed she’d been the glue that held everything within the palace walls together when everything outside them was falling apart. And even if the palace too had eventually fallen (and he himself had dealt the final blow) she stayed among the rubble. He admired her. He admired her so much that now he might place his precious daughter into her hands.

But it had been years since he’d last seen her, and to say the situation was precarious was an understatement. He would need to ensure she could be trusted. 
He would have to speak to her alone.