Lady Hennessy broke the silence of her candlelit dining room by announcing, “I have an apology to make,” over her wine glass. She took a hearty swig of red. Then, she said, “I’ve been informed by the locals many times that they consider the word elf something of an insult, but that was how I referred to them when I introduced them to you, wasn’t it?”

Taru couldn’t remember, so she pushed a pea around her plate, smothered a sigh and nodded.

“Yes well, don’t,” Lady Hennessy said. “Don’t call them that. It’s alfar. Elf is pejorative.”

Taru frowned at her. 

The lady threw her attention to the ceiling and yanked the wine glass from her lips down to the table. “Insulting,” she explained, returning the glass to her lips and her attention to her plate. “Apparently,” she muttered against it.

The way she said apparently made it clear that she doubted it. Taru, on the other hand, wondered what there was to doubt: why someone would ever claim to be insulted when they weren’t. Instead of voicing this, she stabbed the pea and ate it, followed by a casing of crisp batter around soft white fish. Giving her teeth something to sink into meant they couldn’t chatter.

“Coraidh called again today. Said you hurt your hands while out walking yesterday and that he’d forgotten to take you to the healer on the way back. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Taru shrugged and looked down at her smooth, white palms and their familiar but shrinking yellow callouses. “Didn’t cross my mind,” she muttered. “They don’t hurt or owt.”

“Owt?”

Taru blinked. “Aye, owt.”

“And what does owt mean?”

“Uh…” Taru couldn’t help the nervous smile from taking her lips as she looked away and rubbed her forearm. “Well… anything, I guess.”

“You guess?”

Taru narrowed her eyes at the lady, who suddenly recoiled and covered her mouth with her hand.

“Dear me! I’m being ever so rude, aren’t I? It must be this acrid weather.” Lady Hennessy stood from the table and snapped open her fan, fluttering it under her chin as she went to the window.

“It’s probably all the stuff what’s happening,” Taru muttered before filling her mouth with a perfectly fried chip: crispy round the edges but fluffy on the inside.

“Do you think so?”

Taru said nothing as she chewed.

“Why, yes, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’ve been here so long I’ve become one of them, the elves.”

“Alfar,” Taru said through a mouthful of hot fish and crispy batter.

“Gods, when will it sink in?”

Taru swallowed and said, “You’ll get there,” remembering how she struggled when someone in engine 2 announced they had a new name. Everyone had helped one another learn it. “Just have to keep practising. Say it outloud when you’re alone.”

Lady Hennessy’s eyes glinted with light from the window. “Talking to oneself is the first sign of insanity.”

Taru scoffed. “Everyone’s insane, then,” she said. “I don’t know one person who dun’t do it.” Enna said it was the only way he could have a sensible conversation.

Lady Hennessy hummed an uncertain note before turning back to the view outside. “I worry for us all, I really do. If it has spread this far already then where will it stop?”

“What?”

“The darkness.”

“Oh.” Taru lost her appetite again and stared at the last chunk of golden batter on her white plate. She sighed and dropped her knife and fork on the table either side of it.

“We really need to get the elders to open up the deep forest again. We’re trapped between their fear and the humans’ greed. Both of which creep closer on the daily.”

“It’s like I said to Coraidh, there’ll be an opening somewhere,” she said.

Lady Hennessy scoffed. It was a particularly derisory sound that made Taru feel incredibly small. “And how do you know?” the lady drawled.

Taru bristled, annoyed at being doubted and judged in the sly corner of that one glinting eye. “There always is,” she insisted. “Whenever I’ve been told, ‘oh, there’s no way in, Taru,’ or ‘oh, the gap’s too small, Taru,’ I always find a way.”

The air was still. The fan had stopped.

Slowly, Lady Hennessy turned to face Taru, her head tilted. “Oh?” she asked, but Taru was pressing her lips tight together, too late. 

Her shoulders bunched around her red ears. 

“An expert at finding your way into tight spaces, are you?”

For a moment, the question hung in the air between them like an accusation. 

Then, Taru exploded.

“I don’t know these people! And I don’t know these elders. How am I gunna know what to say to ‘em, eh? ‘Oh, don’t mind me, sir, just wondering if you had a minute to talk about your descendants in Denlinne because they’re all sodding dying!’” She shoved up from the table, snatching her napkin from her collar and chucking it onto her plate. “‘Sorry to disturb you, my liege—” she exaggerated a bow “—but I—a nobody from a city you’ve never ‘eard of—have been told to come here and get you to stop… to stop… stop being so bloody dramatic!’ Sod off, the lot of you. I just want to go home.”

Smiling sadly, Lady Hennessy said, “It’s true, you may not be the most sensitive of spokespeople, but you’ve seen for yourself that these people can’t afford to wait. If the darkness doesn’t get them, then the rending will.”

“They don’t need the most sensitive person. They just need one of them, see? One who knows about this. An alfar. Aren’t their sort supposed to be the most lithe and dexterous of all the peoples, anyway? They’ll find a way through, easy enough. I’ve no truck with any of this. It’s not my place to—”

The lady laughed bitterly, cutting her off. “The most lithe and dexterous, are they? Well, even if they are, I wonder if you would think so if you really saw us all when you looked at us, right now. We are a miserable people, Taru, exhausted by relentless attacks of sadness and anger. None of us are capable of this. Only someone like you—someone spiritually unattached to the forest—is strong enough to follow through in that darkness. Besides—” and here she smiled “—if you help us with this, and you really do just want to go home, then maybe I can convince Truce to let you.”

Taru’s heart pounded. “What?”

“You asked on your first day if I knew Truce and the answer is of course yes.”

Taru set a quivering hand on the table in the hopes it might keep her upright.

“I owed him a favour or two, so I took you in. I never thought I’d be sharing my space with a worker—he omitted that particular fact when laying out his terms—but I must say I have been pleasantly surprised. You’ve not been nearly as coarse or rude as I had been led to believe your—”

“I don’t really care what you think of me,” Taru admitted quietly, and Lady Hennessy inhaled sharply through the nose. “If you’re able to convince Truce to let me go home, then you should do it. And quick. I don’t want to be here. I know you might not understand this, because it was for you, but this isn’t a destination for me. This is a prison.” Taru shook her head. “That’s not saying you’ve not been welcoming or that you haven’t given me more than I ever asked for. What I mean is, I never wanted to be here in the first place. Truce dumped me in the forest, shoved me towards the gate, and then abandoned me. That’s not your fault, and it shouldn’t be your burden to bear. I want to go home. Tell them.”

Lady Hennessy peered over the delicate lace of her frozen fan deep into Taru’s eyes. Gradually, the lace began to quiver. Then, her attention returned to the window, leaving Taru alone in the dining room behind her. Her breath lightly fogging the window, she murmured, “Very well.”

-~*~-

Taru sat on the riverbank, watching the waters roll by as the wheel creaked noisily behind her. On the bank opposite was a little bird with a bright red breast. A robin. It hopped along the stones, puffed up into a ball, let out a shrill and chaotic song, then hopped back the other way. This happened several times before it flitted off into the canopy, too quick for Taru to track which way it went. All she knew was that it had gone, leaving her alone with her sadness, hopefulness and, confusingly, guilt.

After quite some time sitting there staring at the Dubh, she turned her head and looked upstream, to where the river disappeared around one of any number of trees before continuing on into invisibility amongst them. When she returned her attention to her hands, she found the little red robin stood not a foot away, turning its head this way and that as it assessed her. 

What did it see, she wondered. A threat? A friend? A deserter? A coward?

She sighed and it sang in response, hopping closer.

“Brave little robin,” she whispered, smiling, though the smile didn’t last long. “What would you do?” she asked as her smile disappeared. “What would you do if you were me?”

The robin tilted its head.