Taru breakfasted with Lady Hennessy the next day; allowed herself to be dressed in Hennessy’s old clothes; strolled through the garden with her chin turned up, eyes cast to the unfathomable canopy; and hated every moment.

She longed for Tiremy’s homemade loaves, the rasp and weight of her overalls, the closeness and persistence of Shude, and… Enna. His crinkling smile and warm chuckle. She may have had no route out this time, but Truce’s words—always staring at the exit and waiting for it to get closer—stung. She would find her way out, and sooner rather than later. There would be no right night here, just like there never really had been in Shude. 

What an idiot she had been!

So she removed the old overskirt and bustle in the silk-strewn guestroom and only paused her journey to the outside when she opened the front door. She glanced between stepping stones and her bare feet.

“Are you going out?”

Fear flooded Taru. She turned to face her accuser. 

Lady Hennessy’s dark eyebrows raised curiously as she sipped tea from her cup and saucer. “In just your underskirt, as well. How daring!”

“I… thought… that… I’d bring the back hem through the front and tie it up around my waist.”

“Ah, a faux duo-tulip-cut. That would definitely help you blend in with the locals.”

“Exactly.” She had no idea what a duo-tulip-cut was. “But the, ah, overskirt made that difficult, so…”

Lady Hennessy nodded in understanding, then smiled as she said, “And the corset?”

Taru blinked. “It… was… a little tighter than I’m used to.”

Lady Hennessy couldn’t hide her amusement as she glanced down to somewhere around Taru’s middle. “Charsen is an interesting name, isn’t it?”

Taru frowned. It was a very common name: everyone on Enna’s level was called Charsen.

“Very… working-caste. Middle class, if I remember correctly?”

“Upper class, actually. Management.”

Lady Hennessy’s smile was bright but cold. As much as it lit up her face it hid her eyes behind her lashes. “Management. What did you manage? If it isn’t rude to ask, of course.”

Taru stammered, “Um, I don’t manage anything, yet. My sponsor’s still working.”

Lady Hennessy’s smile faded. “Sponsor?”

Taru felt her face heat up and her shoulders rise around it. “Yeah, I…” She swallowed and forced her shoulders down. “I’m an orphan.”

“Orphan,” Lady Hennessy breathed the word away before smiling again, this time with warmth. “There’s some food for thought. Anyway, I’m sorry I don’t have more familiar clothes for you, petal. My old walking boots are in the cloakroom, if you want them, though the locals go barefoot. If you’re back from whatever it is you’re going to do before noon, then we can share a pot of tea and some cake.” With that, she left Taru to glance between the shadowy cloakroom and the bright green world outside.

-~*~-

Lady Hennessy’s old walking boots were loose around Taru’s feet and too delicate for her liking, but they kept her safe as she sprinted through the forest, well past the clearing she had awoken in the day before. She ran until the path ran out, then until the trees thinned out and another path led her to a denser patch, before breaking out into a clearing full of branches and wood chips, stumps and a mossy mound. She slowed and looked around. It all looked very familiar, but everywhere in this forest seemed that way. She couldn’t tell the difference between one tree and another: she’d never even seen a tree before yesterday. So she caught her breath in the clearing before picking up her pace and jogging out of it. 

The path ran out. The trees thinned out. A new path appeared. The trees closed in, then opened up into a clearing full of stumps and a moss mound. 

“Are you joking?” she asked the trees. They rustled. “Right.” Determined, she scoured the clearing for anything unique that she would notice was not there in another clearing. A dash of red caught her eye between two stumps. It was a twig slashed with paint. She placed it on the closest stump to the moss mound.

Satisfied, she set off again.

The path ran out. The trees thinned out. A new path appeared. The trees closed in. The trees opened up into a clearing. 

She found the stump closest to the mound of moss and grinned. It was bare: not a red-painted twig in sight. Now certain this whole thing had just been her mind playing tricks on her, and very proud of herself for having worked out a way to work it out, she left. 

When she arrived at another similar clearing, her doubts resumed their niggling. The stump was still empty, but she was still uncomfortable. She went to the two stumps she had found the red-painted twig between. There—“Oh!”—to her dismay—“Gods, no!”—it was. 

Filled with the pressing urge to leave, Taru blindly sprinted into the trees, some way she had never gone before. Things were new. There were new colours of tree bark, new shapes of leaves, new bird calls all around. Before long, and much more gradually than they had before, the trees began to thin. Certain that this was a sign she was progressing, she sprinted faster towards the lessening darkness.

“Have you de-branched that last one, yet?”

The ground crashed into her side. The world tilted though she had stopped. Then, she noticed she was at the treeline. After that, she realised someone was holding her down, their clammy hand covering her mouth.

“Tin Kasata was that?” came from the clearing.

Taru blinked up into the wide dark eyes of a concerned face. A long gloved finger pressed across pursed lips. Quiet, it told her.

“Dunno. Go check.”

There were footsteps through leaves and on twigs. The hilt of an axe pushed into the shadows. Taru’s captor cringed sideways to avoid it before the hilt smacked a tree. It zipped back the other way and hit another, then retreated into the light.

“Just a wild animal.”

As the people in the clearing returned to their work—“So, you snedded it or what?” “A’right, calm down, jobsworth. This’d go a lot quicker if you’d hop off my back”—Taru’s captor sat back and hissed,

“What are you doing here?” with such an emphasis on the you that it seemed like they knew her.

Taru glanced around their unfamiliar face. “Do I know you?” she whispered, frowning.

“Daidh.” They pointed at their chin. “Archer on the walls yesterday.”

“What’s going on?” she asked, sitting up carefully to peer over the bracken.

“Woodmen, from the village. If you’d bust out there at that pace you’d’ve grown a new hole in your face and an axe as an accessory.”

Taru watched the group of five humans, two hacking branches off felled trees while the two worked on felling two others. One watched at a distance.

“This is a sacred site they’re pilfering. Some or all of these are ancestor trees. There’s a ceremony when we’re born that binds us to a seed or a sapling from our parent’s tree, then it’s planted somewhere secret.”

Taru was no longer listening. Instead, she was watching the woodmen in the clearing, wondering if there was a way for her to step out and get their attention without taking an axe to the face. After all, a village outside the forest must be closer to home than one inside it.

“Only the arborist knows whose tree is which.”

Taru watched a woodman mark up another tree as she rolled onto her knees, readying herself to stand and go to them.

“Killers, the lot of them. If they take even one that belongs to one of us, then they’ll sever our connection to the weave and—” but Daidh could explain nothing more. They gasped and clutched at their chest. Their face screwed up in an ugly twisting of strained muscles. “Stop them…”

For one terrifying moment, Daidh looked as though they might storm the clearing themself. Then, they dropped onto their back, panting erratically with one hand twisted up in the tunic over their chest.

“Daidh,” Taru hissed, following them.

“Stop… them…”

“How?” She looked back at the clearing to see they’d begun chopping the new tree. Five people with tree-felling shoulders and axes in hand versus spindly her in her duo-tulip-cut pants and floppy shoes? She couldn’t stop them by force. And couldn’t stop them by wile, either. Daidh’s bow and quiver may have been a short way off, but she’d never used one. She couldn’t stop them. Instead, she had to deal with what was in front of her. 

She strapped the bow and quiver to her front and hoisted Daidh—surprisingly light for their frame—onto her back. Then, she carried them home.

-~*~-

“Help!” she gasped as she spotted the whirling pattern of the wall through the trees. As little as they might have weighed, the archer’s gangly limbs had made the run back extremely difficult. “Help! Please! It’s Daidh… some… something happened!”

The guard on the wall cursed and disappeared. The gate was open in moments, and they ducked under in their haste to snatch Daidh and their equipment from Taru. The pair were away into the trees before she had a chance to even catch her breath, never mind explain herself. She followed them into the square.

“Explain yourself, jammy-man!” The glint of steel was much closer to her eye, this time.

“I… there were humans… and trees… ancestor trees… cutting them… the humans cut them… then Daidh… went all weird. I should go to the doctor to expl—” She went to step past them but the bow creaked.

“You’re not going nowhere.”

Taru stared into their eyes, the only part of their face she could see through the visor of their helmet. They stared back, narrowing. After some time came a muffled sigh and the eyes darted away. The bow relaxed, its arrow returning to the quiver.

“The doctor knows,” the guard said. “There’s three more’ve come down with it this morning alone. They’re being rent from the weave.”

Taru frowned. “Rent?” The only rent she knew of was the kind workers paid to nobles. 

“Aye, torn away from it. With their ancestor trees cut, their connection is severed. I wouldn’t expect your kind to know. You’ve been rent from everything except yourselves since you started building them cold stone huts you call homes.”

Taru shifted, catching sight of the gathering crowd in the square and beyond.

The silence was so complete that she heard a young child whisper, “Did she cut down the trees?” to a guardian, who replied with shushing sounds but no denial.

Suddenly urgent that these people understand, Taru side-stepped the guard and addressed the child directly. “I… I didn’t,” she insisted, her voice shaking with nerves.

The child glanced up at their guardian. The guard scoffed behind her. She turned to meet their accusation, preferring that to a child’s uncertainty. 

“How can you be so sure?” the guard asked. “You not got wood planks and timber beams where you’re from? How’d you know none of them used to be sacred to us?”

But surely she wasn’t to blame for that. Taru shook her head and bit her tongue. She looked at the ground, her shoulders tensing and her stomach turning. 

The guard sighed, then boomed, “Aye, well.” They continued, “I suppose we can’t account for the gifts of our ancestors.” 

Taru stared hard at the brown ground between the grey stones and Lady Hennessy’s green shoes, trying to pretend the people muttering around her didn’t exist. 

The guard stepped closer, their bare toes wiggling just inside her vision. A hand clapped her firmly on the shoulder. “You make short work of the trip back home, aye?” they muttered.

Taru frowned up at them, then the crowd. It had thinned out to a few small groups, all of them now caught up in their own quietly miserable conversations, comforting one another with gentle touches and soft words. They were no longer interested in her. Even the guard was climbing the ladder up to their post on the wall. 

“I’ve got my eye on you,” they called good-naturedly as Taru stared at the closed portcullis.

-~*~-

“They’re scared,” Lady Hennessy said later, over a meal of mushroom stew and leavened bread. “You saw firsthand what happens when they’re rent from the weave. There’s much more going on inside, but that is for another time. Suffice to say, it will take at least a twelve-night for poor Daidh to recover enough to talk, again. 

“Be patient, petal. I’m working on them. All of them. Even Coraidh on the wall. It may be taking more time than we would like, but—” here, she tapped her temple and offered Taru a knowing smirk “—there is nothing I cannot achieve when I put my mind to it.” She straightened and returned her attention to her food. “They were the same with me when I moved here—very wary and reluctant. You have the added challenge of coming at a time of great sorrow and tension.

“You haven’t touched your stew! Don’t you care for mushrooms? I can have a bowl made of potato and pea, if you like?”

-~*~-

Taru stared out of the guest bedroom window at the night-blue garden and river, both glinting orange from the candle lighting Lady Hennessy’s window.

There was no moving here. Not for Taru, anyway. Lady Hennessy may have made the move from Shude just fine. There was a key difference, however. Lady Hennessy wanted to be here.