A delicate melody split the silent black of Taru’s sleep, bringing with it a ribbon of green light. Wrapping softly around her, it drew her out into the living world. She blinked against it before rolling over to face the front window. A pebble hit its shutter, and the percussive beat was followed by the slow creak of an opening door. The melody faltered. 

A new voice joined the first, beginning a new, less tuneful song of cautious greeting and enquiry. 

Taru forced herself out of bed and, pulling on a too-long silk robe that she pulled tight to cover herself, went to the window. She peered down through the tight slats of the shutter.

Lady Hennessy’s skirt disappeared indoors as a dark figure, just inside the gate, peered up at Taru’s window.

A knock came at her door soon after.

“Come in,” she called quietly, not moving from the window seat except to face the door.

“Good morning,” Lady Hennessy greeted, her eyes darting from the bed to the window, where Taru stifled a yawn. “I suppose you were awoken by Coraidh’s relentless attempts at doing so? I know I was.”

“Is that who it is?”

Lady Hennessy hummed a noise of agreement as she stepped into the room. “He has always been a little… hasty, for an eternal being. Though I suppose he is still young.” A delicate crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Comparatively.”

Taru pursed her lips and waited for Lady Hennessy to continue, glancing back through the slats to see that Coraidh was now crouched by the river, holding his hand under the water.

“He is requesting your company on his morning walk.”

“Me?” Taru’s attention darted back to Lady Hennessy, who nodded and said,

“You.”

“Why?” 

Lady Hennessy shrugged and shook her head. “I thought he had the wrong window, too. I should have known better. Though I am notably light on visitors, they all do seem to know my cottage as well as they know their own treehouses. Probably something to do with it being made of tree. They’re all connected, you know?”

Made of tree? But this place was marble and brass and— she looked down at the floor that she had taken to be made of mahogany planks. It was one piece of wood. The marble in the top three-quarters of the walls was also finely disguised tree: the gold veins were delicate branches curving through white board.

“Anyway, I don’t know why he wants you. I may have a better relationship with them than I did when I first got here but… well, we’re still far from being confidants.”

At the brief allusion to Lady Hennessy being from elsewhere, Taru remembered to ask, “You’re from Shude?” as she had been meaning to.

The lady smiled a lopsided, quizzical smile. “Well, I thought that was obvious.”

“Is it far from here?”

Lady Hennessy took a quick and keen interest in her own fingernails. “You really oughtn’t keep the young gentleman waiting,” she said, smoothing down her silk trousers. “Will you be joining him for a pre-breakfast perambulation?” She looked back to Taru and frowned, stepping towards her suddenly. “You don’t have to. I can make something up, if you like. Perhaps you’re suffering from a common but debilitating human illness that lasts anywhere from half a day to a full one.”

How strange… though what Lady Hennessy said eased the pounding of Taru’s heart... “I…” She chewed lightly on her bottom lip, glancing through the slats. “Well, I…” Coraidh crouched in front of the flowers. “No, thank you,” she heard herself say. “I’ll speak to him myself.”

-~*~-

Uncertain if there was a proper etiquette to taking visitors—Enna had not got round to teaching it to her if there was, and he was the only visitor she’d ever had—Taru pulled the front door open and clenched her fists at her sides. She stood in the doorway for as long as it took Coraidh to stand up, look at her, look away with a tight smile, and look at his hands, as if searching for what to say between the fingers.

He looked just like the other Laringdenese: dark like a noble and thin like a nadir worker but somehow more solid and shaped than either; a mechanism geared for a purpose. His ears were long like Truce’s, drooping and quivering as he shifted under Taru’s scrutiny. She looked away quickly, feeling somehow as though she had intruded. He spoke as soon as she did. 

“My wife said I’ve a duty. I couldnae disagree so here I am.”

Taru shook her head. “You don’t have to put yourself out for me,” she said, though she suddenly wanted to know how someone who looked younger than her could possibly be married.

“It’s not for you,” Coraidh returned bluntly before asking, “Will you walk with me?” 

Taru searched his open expression for anything hidden and, on finding nothing, looked back over her shoulder to where Lady Hennessy stood in the shadows. She smiled warmly at Taru and shrugged, and Taru looked back to Coraidh, imitating what she had seen with a little more nonchalance and a little less elegance.

“Sure,” she said.

-~*~-

They walked the bank of the river into deepening forest, as the increasingly shaded, increasingly turbulent water of the Dubh flowed back the way they had come.

“Where do rivers even come from?” Taru asked quietly, kicking a twig into the rush and not expecting an answer: Coraidh was a few steps ahead and, due to the volume of the river beside them, couldn’t possibly hear her. “Where do we come from?” she asked idly.

“It’s not far now,” Coraidh said, pausing to look back at her. “Are you all right?”

Taru shrugged.

“We’ll rejoin the path, soon,” he said.

Taru nodded.

Coraidh walked silently beside her until they reached the path, when he stopped suddenly and looked back at the Dubh. “Rivers, just like us, have a countless number of possible sources, but this one began as ice on the top of a lonely mountain. That’s why it deepens in the hotter months, while others around it grow shallower.”

Having briefly forgotten she had asked about river sources, Taru blinked at him. Then, she said, “That’s interesting. But… I do think, unlike rivers, we all come from the same… thing.”

“I think not,” Coraidh said, his face somehow giving the impression of smiling without his lips changing shape. “Your source and mine are quite different.”

Taru’s screwed her face up in discomfort before laughing lightly to relieve the tension. “Maybe,” she tried, “but the act is the same.”

Coraidh’s lips parted with the mirth that had already shaped the rest of his face. “Again, I think you would be surprised.”

“I’m don’t think I—”

“Humans and alfar have quite different—”

“—want to know.”

“—mating rituals and anatomy.”

This time, the force of Taru’s discomfort screwed her eyes shut. “Gross,” she hissed through gritted teeth, and Coraidh’s chuckle was the babbling of a brook.

It was only a short time later that, a great deal graver, Coraidh said, “Here we are.”

They stood atop a drop into a chasm whose sides, though steep, were sloping. An offshoot of the Dubh plunged down, cutting through one slope in a great thunderous freefall that roared through the otherwise gaping silence. The river’s twisting path at the bottom was a black snake slithering between the thick trunks of trees that seemed, to Taru, too tall to be natural, all of them reaching much higher than any she had seen so far, despite also starting much lower. Though their exposed roots and bases were strangely dark, the rest of the bark was the same pale dun of most others this deep in Denlinne. Curiously, the homes they were woven into seemed to have begun to decompose, bits of wood hanging from splinters and sheets of flimsy fabric covering the great holes they left in the walls.

She imagined this must be the Laringdenese equivalent of the lower levels of Shude: where the poor people lived.

“This is the Lake Dubh.”

Taru frowned. There wasn’t a lake in sight.

Coraidh nodded, seemingly in response to her doubts, even though she kept them silent. “Yes, lake. In humid summers, it earns its name and these great beings seem to grow from its surface. It’s a special place to us, as the first place our ancestors settled, where sesi first forged our connection with the trees. There used to be a tree bridge from here through the houses, but it’s rotten away.”

Taru glanced between Coraidh and the empty lake, wondering if it was rude to say what she wanted to. She swallowed before trying, “It’s… it seems a shame that somewhere so… special has been left to… well, to rot away.”

Coraidh looked at her. Just when she thought he would stop, he continued. Then, he broke eye contact to point to a nearby rope coiled around a tree about a foot back from the top of the slope. “We should go down.”

Taru felt her feet root into the dirt through Lady Hennessy’s walking boots. “By rope?” she asked.

“By rope,” he replied with another smileless smile. “It’s quite secure, I assure you.”

“You’re lighter than me.”

“People much heavier than you are have used our ropes without issue.”

That didn’t make her feel any better, though she knew it should. Instead, she glanced past the edge. Her stomach dropped over it. “Do we really need to go down there?” she asked thickly, stepping back from the edge as Coraidh readied himself on it, hands and body wrapped up in rope. 

He turned to face her so the descent was behind him and Taru’s stomach returned quickly to make itself known at the root of her throat. She tasted acid and tried to swallow it away.

He offered her a brief smile and then dropped out of view. She dove to the edge. He was descending at a rapid pace, already halfway down. Hopping backwards, he fed the rope through his hands as he went. 

It certainly looked easy. He certainly looked alive.

Once he was at the bottom he waved up at her and then ducked out of view into the shadow of a nearby stone structure. When he didn’t return, she decided there was nothing for it but to follow. She grabbed the rope—it was surprisingly smooth—and turned her back to the fall. It felt both wrong and relieving, like her insides were already at the bottom, waiting for her.

She wrapped the rope around herself in what she thought was a perfect replica of what she had seen on Coraidh, then slipped her foot back, too fast. The ground disappeared. She dropped.

-

  ~

     *

“I didn’t sign you out for dinner so you could kill yoursen on the way over!” Enna scrubbed black lines over his pale brow with a grimy handkerchief, his other hand gripping Taru’s 14-year-old shoulder. “What’re you grinning at, anyhow? Never seen a person worry before?”

She schooled her features immediately: she hadn’t realised she was grinning. “Sorry,” she said quietly, and his shoulders dropped.

“It’s no bother,” he sighed, stuffing his handkerchief back into his breast pocket. “Just don’t go running near the edges of levels, you hear? The drop’d kill you before you even saw the bottom, never mind hit it.”

Taru shrunk into her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, embarrassed at how hot her nose felt and how wet her eyes were getting, like she was a child.

“Aye… well…” He was looking at her strangely now, with a look no one had given her before. Though his brow drew in and his lips pursed, none of it was in anger. “Ey, don’t get upset, now,” he muttered, relaxing his grip on her shoulder to a gentle squeeze before letting go entirely. “We’re all alive still and that’s what matters.”

Taru tried to muffle a sniffle, but the hot tear rolling over the barrier of her eyelid had already betrayed her. She went to scrub the misery away with a pair of irritable fists, but before they’d reached halfway she was in Enna’s warm arms, smelling the bitter black brew he took at lunch and the thing he called a “pipe” that he put herbs in and then set alight whenever they left the terminal.

“Shh, now. It’s all right, little skvader.”

Taru, uncertain what to do, let her hands drop to her sides and stared at the poster peeling from the wall next to them.

JOIN US it said over an ink splatter that looked like the eight-legged creatures that made homes in the high corners of her room: creatures the custodians swatted with brooms.