Wind roared around her.

Taru awoke to pain flaring in her hips and great pressure all along her back, forcing her face down into her hard mattress. The roaring diminished in a series of retreating gusts. After that, the pain left too. As she rolled over onto her side, letting out a grunt of effort, she realised it must have been a waking dream. Her face was damp with drool where it had pressed into her pillow. She wiped it away and it crumbled, smearing wetly across her cheek. 

With her eyes still squeezed shut, she tried to grasp onto the soft warm feeling of unconsciousness, but it had fled the moment the pain had begun.

The first thing she noticed in the peace of her eyelid-shuttered morning was a rising chorus of repetitive whistling. Nothing like the whistling she had heard in the rig, these myriad lilting patterns, notes, and rhythms mingled into a symphony of joy so splendid, she wondered if she was still dreaming. To prove she was awake, she opened her eyes.

“What in the weave…?!”

Instead of peeling wallpaper and suspect ceiling stains, she was surrounded by trees and stumps. The hard mattress she had been lying on was a mound of mossy ground rising from an ocean of branches and wood chips beside a stepping stone path. A percussion of rustling underscored the whistling. It came from layers of variously green leaves, all dancing idly in a breeze she couldn’t feel. Through the few gaps between them, Taru could see blue. The sky?

“Hey, you, you’re finally awake.”

Taru spun round to find a marble-skinned, black-haired person of uncertain gender with long legs and pointed ears leaning leisurely against a tree.

“Good morning, Taru Aether Charsen. How are you feeling? I suppose you’re wondering why you’re here, or where here even is.”

Taru stared at them. They smirked back.

“Or maybe you’re not wondering anything at all. Maybe, like little Samuel, you are quite in shock.”

Taru shook her head vigorously in an attempt to clear it.

“Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

“Who are you?” Taru demanded, and the person’s smirk deepened, eyes darting narrowly around her face.

“It’s complicated, but you can call me grandparent.” They frowned. “Nope. Don’t like that. Call me… which continent are we on? Kasata? Then, call me Truce.”

Taru climbed to her feet. “Grandparent?”

“Truce,” Truce insisted, seeming to float over the ground towards her. “I am… your ancestor. A distant one.” They stopped a polite distance away and grinned. “Closer now, though.”

“What is this place?”

“Right here? This is a clearing in Denlinne Forest, on the path to the village of Laringden.”

Taru shook her head, her bottom teeth scraping along her top lip in search of dry skin.

“You haven’t heard of it.” Truce offered her a sympathetic smile and, nodding, said, “Yes, you are all very sheltered in Shude, aren’t you? I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve left that place in the last two decades. Including you.”

“Am I dreaming?”

Truce chuckled and looked around the clearing. “Does this look like the weave to you?”

“Why am I here?”

“Ah.” Truce offered her a wry smile, then held a hand towards the path. “Walk with me, won’t you? I have something to share.”

Utterly lost, Taru knew she had no choice. Following Truce on the path, she remained a step behind as they strolled deeper into the forest.

Only when the broad leaves of the trees completely blocked out the sky did Truce speak again, and when they did it was low and solemn. “I have it on good authority that Samuel’s family were going to lynch you, sweetheart. Apparently, they’ve convinced themselves you’re a magical creature. Not only that, but did you know that you actually orchestrated Samuel’s accident? That Aunt Sally and Uncle Mark of his are real pieces of…” They paused as a little brown bird with a bright red breast flitted over the path and landed on a nearby branch. “Robin,” Truce said as it puffed up into a ball, tilted its head to look at them with one beady black eye, then whistled a glorious ditty much too loud for its tiny frame. “Anyway—” Truce turned back to the path “—I don’t usually get involved in these things, you understand. I’m very hands off. I’ve had my fingers burnt far too many times. So you see, getting involved is hazardous to not only my standing with my friends—” 

Taru stopped walking.

“—but my reputation as a… free spirit, shall we say. But... well, you remind me of your father: always staring at the exit, waiting for it to get closer. Never moving your feet. This time, helping you served the dual purpose of getting you out of that city and keeping you alive, meaning you get to entertain me with your nonsense for at least a few more months. Sorry: a few more accords.” Though they hadn’t looked back once, Truce stopped walking. Their shoulders lifted around a deep breath before they turned to the side so their profile’s neat angles and ivory skin stood stark against a curtain of ebony hair. “Go on,” they drawled.

“Who are you?” she asked. 

The corner of their lips curled up in grim amusement. Then, it stretched wide into a nasty grin around glinting sabre-teeth, punctuated by a vast red dragonstone eye.

Taru barely had time to gasp before she found herself quite alone. 

“Wait!” she cried, spinning to see where they had gone, but there was no where. They had simply gone. “How do I get home?” she asked the forest. After a moment, the trees rustled. With their indecipherable answer lingering in her ears, Taru decided to do the only thing she could think of: she continued along the path.

It wasn’t long until she reached a portcullis set into a vast wall made of vines woven into intricate patterns. She recognised wolves and bears in the patterns from pictures Enna had drawn in the margins of his ledger. She recognised dragons from her dreams.

“No closer!” cried a voice of uncertain gender from atop the wall.

She stumbled back in surprise, looking for the source. Instead, she found a glint of metal and a creak of bowing wood.

She swallowed thickly. “I’m sorry,” she stammered, “I’m lost.”

“You bet you are,” called the armoured archer, their accent rolling, lyrical, and most unShudelike.

“What’s this, then?” Another armoured figure was pointing a second arrow at Taru before she had fully registered they were there. “State your name and business, lass,” they demanded.

“Says she’s lost.”

“Then go back the way you came. We’ve no use for your kind here.”

Her kind? Taru shook her head. “I was brought here. I don’t know how to go back.”

“Brought here?” the first archer asked as someone cried,

“Wait!” behind the gate.

The first archer turned their back as the second lowered their bow and stepped closer to the edge, peering at her from their helmet. “Are you in your jammies?”

A flush of terror ran through Taru and she looked down at herself. With her orphanage-given nightdress and tatty cotton slippers, she was most certainly in her pyjamas.

“Is that Aether Charsen?” came the voice from behind the gate, a welcome distraction from her state of undress and the sniggering guard.

“It is,” she called, stepping closer and crossing her arms. 

The creaking of bows cut off the guards’ laughter.

“Not another step!”

“It’s all right, Daidh. She’s no woodsman.”

The first guard disappeared, arguing just quietly enough with the disembodied voice that Taru couldn’t follow. After a moment Daidh turned back and snapped, “Open up!” before the gate shrieked open. 

As Taru tentatively passed through, the second guard grumbled down to her, 

“I’ve got my eye on you, jammy-man.”

The town inside the gate was nothing like Shude. All the properties were wrought from trees growing in the shape of habitation. Some were ground level, others were dots in the canopy, others were anywhere in between. All were reached by branches or leaning trees. Only a few stepping stones and the well in the centre of the square were stone. 

If the architecture was nothing she was used to, then the fashion was inconceivable. The people here—all dark like Shudean nobles and eyeing her with wary curiosity or else outright hostility—wore tunics and leggings or baggy skirt-like garments gathered around the ankles. If the clothing was gendered, Taru couldn’t tell. The only bustle and corset in sight were green ones sculpting the frame of a tall woman beside the well: the only person smiling at her.

“Aether Charsen,” she greeted, and Taru—reading the darkness of her skin, the ribbons in her curly hair, and the fine fabric she was wearing like the open book that they were—hesitated a moment before bowing not quite as deeply as Enna had taught her. “Oh!” the lady laughed awkwardly. “Don’t do that. Get up.” She smacked her on the shoulder with her folded hand fan. “Come now.”

Taru straightened. 

“We don’t do that here. We greet as equals. A nod will do for acquaintances, like so.” She tucked her usually upturned chin, closing her eyes. “There we are.” She flipped her fan out with a snap and began fluttering it under her chin, delicate as a butterfly wing. “Now we’re greeted, let us find somewhere to talk, hm?” Without waiting for an answer, the lady whirled around and glided away. 

Taru spared a glance for their wary audience as one of them pulled their whispering child closer. Setting off at a jog, she caught up with the lady at the foot of a ramp of twisting tree trunks. They climbed until they were in the canopy and Taru dared not look down. She may have lived all her life much higher than this, but there was something different about not having a sizeable chunk of stone city below and around her. The treehouses here were not packed nearly densely enough to ease her discomfort. It all felt very open. Very… loose. 

“Do you know Truce?” she asked as they passed a door with a real rose for a handle.

“Patience, my dear. Patience.”

On they walked until Taru’s feet began to ache. Then, in an unpopulated corner quite some way from the gate, they entered a clearing with a gurgling river. The tree path carried the pair over it before depositing them on the far bank where they were met by a short gate and a vibrant garden. A cobbled path meandered through the flowerbeds to a thatched cottage, attached to which was a great wooden wheel turning with the river’s current.

“Home sweet home,” the lady announced, opening the door. “Welcome to Hennessy Cottage.”

Inside was a small but radiant entrance hall in which everything was marble and brass, with the occasional shadow of mahogany. Though unlike anywhere Taru had ever been, the sharp angles and straight lines felt much more familiar than whatever was going on outside.

“This will be your home for some time, I should think, until the trees decide whether they will accept you. My name is Lady Ethel Hennessy. Oh! You have mud on your cheek, my dear, did you know?”

And that was it. One moment Taru was rigid, pressing her lips tight together and clenching her fists; the next, she was on her knees on a plush silk rug, bawling her eyes out into the heels of her hands.

-~*~-

Sniffling on a sofa in the morning room, bundled up in an endless silk shawl and cradling a tiny teacup and saucer, Taru stared sightlessly at the leaded glass doors leading out into Lady Hennessy’s garden.

“How are you doing, petal?” the lady asked from beside her.

Taru nodded, her attention fixed to the point where two lead lines met.

Lady Hennessy made a noise of doubt before asking, “Shall I have the fire lit?”

Taru shook her head.

Quieter, the lady said, “Should I stop talking?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Taru shook her head. Lady Hennessy’s soft and gentle voice softened time’s jagged edges as they dragged otherwise infuriatingly under Taru’s skin.

“Well then, I think I should apologise for the locals. They’re not usually so… brash? We’re all a little on edge at the moment. There’s something playing on everyone’s mind. I’m sure you saw stumps on your way here? Recently, the villages outside Denlinne have been taking more trees from inside. Do you know much about elves?”

Taru shook her head and sipped her tea. Floral.

“Well, their ancestral homes were abandoned after centuries of war with humans who stole their trees. Many of the people here are worried something similar will happen, so they’ve been trying to talk with their elders, who live in a place called the Enwoven Grotto. Unfortunately, it might as well be called the Enclosed Grotto. Since the humans crossed the River Dubh last month, the elders have shut themselves off. And when I say shut themselves off, I really mean it. They’ve made the forest around them so thick that getting through is impossible. We lost a dear friend of mine when it happened. Bhaltair. I should love to see him home and safe but… well… it has been some time, and—” Lady Hennessy stopped and made a solemn noise. She said no more.

As Taru settled into the silence of a lady sipping tea, she remembered how she navigated equipment and squeezed through tight gaps every day in rig 1.3. Slurping a mouthful of tepid flower-water, she shoved the thought away.

She didn’t want to clamber through tangled trees for these unwelcoming people. She wanted to go home.