There were no owls over Dolanaar.
Nyssara looked for them as she crossed the moss bridge, from a habit older than her daggers. The old branch was empty. The frogs under the bridge had stopped, and the light on the underside of the great boughs was the wrong color: a dull orange that came from below and moved.
She had said forty-three on the Temple steps in Darnassus, to a commander and a priestess and a druid of the Enclave who asked whether she was certain, and she was still saying it when the first stone of fire came up over the rim of the bough and settled the question. Then she had run for the village.
The root-paths were full of families going the other way, toward the doors of light the human mages had opened in the Temple of the Moon. Ash was coming down through the leaves like the first snow of a year, and children were catching it on their palms.
Her mother's house had its lamp lit. The loom was going.
Yselle Duskwhisper sat at it with her back to the door, as she had every evening of Nyssara's life. Her hair had gone the white of clean fleece and her hands were knotted at every joint, and the shuttle crossed and came back at the pace it always had. On the wall above the clothes press hung the glaive, three-bladed, dusted, unmentioned.
"Mother. There are portals in the Temple. Get up."
"There's a hand's width left on this," Yselle said to the loom.
"The tree is burning."
"I have a nose."
Her mother weighed less than a full waterskin. She could have had her over one shoulder and been on the path in a breath.
"If you lift me I will scream from here to the Temple," Yselle said, "and you will have no hands for anyone else. Ilyenne has half the village's young in her shop and nobody to walk them. Do the sum. You could always do a sum."
She had turned her head to say it.
Nyssara's eyes went to the glaive. Yselle saw.
"Leave that where it is. It has held that wall up since before you could walk, and I would not like the wall to go before the rest." The shuttle crossed. "He could not throw it. He could not throw a stone into a pond. What they wanted him for was counting. Stores, arrows, heads. He was never wrong by so much as one."
The shuttle came back.
"At Hyjal he counted what was coming up the mountain. He did it because he was frightened, and counting was what he did when he was frightened. He took the number to his captain. His captain told him it could not be so many, and to go back to the line and count again. So he went back to the line." She beat the weft down, twice. "You were six. You came in every night and stood there and told me how many owls. Eleven, you would say. Nine. With his mouth. I could not answer that, so I talked to this."
Nyssara found that her hand was on her mother's shoulder. The bone under it was like a bird's. Yselle's hand came up and patted hers twice, the way one settles a child at a doorway, and went back to the shuttle.
"On the bench. That's yours."
It was a folded length of cloth, hemmed on three sides. Grey.
"I wove it the winter you put your name on the Sentinels' roll. It would not take a dye. It comes out a different color in every light, and I thought, well, that will suit her. Go on. You are in my lamp."
Nyssara took the cloth and went out. The loom started again before she reached the path. She heard it as far as the bridge.
The bakery was the only house in Dolanaar with its door open and its ovens lit.
There were thirteen children in it. Nyssara counted them from the threshold: on the flour bins, under the kneading table, one asleep in a proving basket with a thumb in her mouth. They were eating. Ilyenne had evidently decided that whatever else happened that night, nobody was going to meet it hungry.
The baker sat on a stool by the oven with a stick across her knees. She had been old when Nyssara first went away to Darnassus, and had gone on being old since with great application. Her niece Orina, floured to the elbow and crying without any noise, was tying the children wrist to wrist with bread twine.
"Tell her," Orina said. "Tell her she has to come."
"I cannot get to my own well without sitting down twice," Ilyenne said. "She knows what I weigh and how far it is. She's a Duskwhisper. She worked it out on the path." She looked Nyssara over with the narrow attention she gave a loaf. "Yselle?"
"At the loom."
"Hm. Yes."
Nyssara had carried one sentence since she was six, and had always supposed there would be an evening for it. "I stole a tart off your sill."
"You stood behind me for a count of thirty first. I counted along. I wanted to see how long you'd hold. Then you came back and freed my latch and ran off before I could turn around. I don't embarrass people who fix my oven."
"I never paid for it."
"No. And I've shut the till. Pay Orina, when she has a sill to put it on, and mind you add the interest." She reached to the tray beside her, took a moonberry tart, set it on one of the broad leaves she kept for wrapping, and held it out. "That's two you owe. Eat it on the road. I'll know."
There was bread in the oven; by the smell it was nearly done. Ilyenne set her stick against the latch and leaned, and nothing moved.
Nyssara knelt. It was the same pin, warped the same way, and hot enough to blister. Her fingers were not small anymore. It took her two tries. The door swung.
"There," said Ilyenne. "Go on, the lot of you. It wants a few minutes yet, and I'd like to see it come out right."
Orina kissed the old woman on the top of her head. Then she picked up the smallest child, basket and all, and went out with a face like a slammed door. Nyssara took the end of the line.
She ate the tart on the road, in three bites, with ash falling on it.
It was an hour's walk to the city with thirteen children, and the fire used the hour better than they did.
When the path came out under the arch the whole eastern side of the crown was alight. The crowd on the terrace was one creature with ten thousand heads, moving toward the Temple of the Moon, and where it could not move it pressed.
A burning limb came down behind them across the terrace with a noise she felt in her teeth. The crowd heaved away from it. Nyssara was lifted off her feet and carried ten paces with the twine cutting into her wrist. When she got her boots under her she hauled the line in hand over hand and counted.
Eleven.
The twine ended in a frayed tail. The two on the end had been brothers, the Thornbrake boys, six and eight, who had held on to each other instead of the knot. They were thirty paces back, in a crush that was still closing, somewhere among the legs.
Orina was screaming their names. Nyssara had perhaps ten breaths in which going back was still a thing a person could do. She spent four of them looking. It was the Raynewood road again, the same branch and the same sum: eleven in the hand, two in the ferns. She chose it the same way. It was no easier the second time, and there was nobody left alive who would tell her afterward that she had chosen correctly.
"Walk," she said to Orina, and closed her own fist on the frayed end.
The line for the doors began at the foot of the Temple ramp and ran back across the bridge. Inside, at its head, she could see the light of them, cold and blue, each no wider than a cottage door. Two doors, and a city.
A small girl on the twine turned around. She had ash all through her hair and a perfectly composed face. "There's two hundred and six in front of us," she said.
"What?"
"I counted. It was two hundred and twelve when we stopped. They go two at a time, and then there's a wait."
Nyssara did the sum. Then she looked for the fire, because the sum did not come out. It should have been on them already. The lane that ran down from the Cenarion Enclave opened onto the bridge not sixty paces off, and it was a chimney, with flame standing in it higher than the roofs.
Across the mouth of it stood a wall of roots.
They had come up out of the living wood of the bough, pale and wet, each as thick as a wrist, and knitted themselves across the lane as tight as a creel. The fire was eating them. The outer weave went brown, then black, then fell away in flakes, and behind it new root pushed through, white and steaming, and closed the gap.
At the foot of the wall a druid knelt with both hands flat on the bough. His robe was burned off one shoulder. She could see only his back.
She knew how he put his left knee down.
"A hundred and eighty," said the girl.
Faelen did not turn around. The line moved up by two, and waited, and moved. Nyssara stood sixty paces behind him with eleven children on a string and watched him feed the wall faster than the fire could eat it. She saw the moment, somewhere near a hundred and forty, when that stopped being true. He leaned into the wood as if he meant to push the whole tree back from the fire with his hands.
She said his name once, in her ordinary voice. In that noise it carried about as far as her own arm.
Was it for the line? For the tree, for the Circle's good name, for a woman who drank from a cup, for her? He had not seen her. He could not have known whose children were moving up by twos at his back. She had been trained never to believe a thing because she would have liked to.
"Ninety."
"Thirty-one."
"It's us."
The mage at the left-hand door was a young human with blood running from his nose into his collar and his arms shaking above his head. Orina went through with the baby. Nyssara cut the twine at each wrist and pushed them in by the shoulders, counting aloud because the girl was counting aloud, and it seemed important that they agree. Nine. Ten. The girl went last and said "Eleven" on the threshold, like someone closing a ledger.
Nyssara looked back.
The wall had gone from brown to a red lattice with the fire showing through it, like a lamp through a basket. The shape at its foot was still kneeling. Then the lattice folded inward, and there was no wall and no shape: only the fire, coming on across the bridge at the pace of a walking man, and the back of the line beginning to run.
Somebody set a hand between her shoulders and shoved.
On the other side there was stone underfoot, and cold air, and somebody else's morning.
She counted the children twice. Eleven. Behind her the door stayed open, and people came through it burned and unburned, and the girl with ash in her hair counted them under her breath.
"Sixty-three," she said.
Then the door went out like a pinched wick. Where it had been there was a wall, with a notice on it about the tariff on wool.
They said afterward that the tree burned for days, and that ships far out at sea steered by it. Nyssara did not see that. She saw the notice about wool.
There were tables in the cathedral square, and clerks at them who wrote down the name of everyone who had come through. She had been a clerk. She knew how such lists went wrong: a name misheard, a page mislaid, a cousin entered twice. So she went to every table, and went again each morning for a month, and gave the same names in the same order until a tired young man asked her, kindly, to stop.
Yselle Duskwhisper, weaver, of Dolanaar. Ilyenne, baker, of the same. Faelen Starbough, of the Cenarion Enclave. Two boys named Thornbrake, six and eight. She asked for Shaleth Moonspear, captain, and for Lirelle Tidegrass, who had a boat, though neither had been in the tree and she knew it.
The lists were not wrong.
Years on, under Amirdrassil, the lamps hung lower than they had in Dolanaar, because the boughs were young and would not yet bear the weight higher up.
Nyssara came up the root-path at the violet hour. Nothing in the village was older than a child of ten. The moss had only that spring begun to take hold on the north side of things.
There was more silver than blue in Nyssara's hair now. She had earned every strand and could have said where.
On the bakery sill a tray of moonberry tarts was cooling, and inside a woman floured to the elbow was telling an apprentice what her aunt would have said about that crust. Nyssara stood behind the shutter for a slow count of thirty. Then she set a coin on the sill: old silver, worn nearly smooth, the worth of two tarts and a great many years of interest. Beside it she laid a leaf.
The owls had come to the new tree in its third spring, ahead of a good many of the people. Beyond the bakery a branch reached over the footbridge, and she was looking up into it when she felt the small sharp pressure of being watched.
A child. Seven, perhaps eight, wedged into the fork of a root with her knees drawn up and her breathing held far too carefully. She was, Nyssara admitted, not bad.
"You paused," Nyssara said to the evening in general. "At the footbridge. You stopped to see whether I had heard you. That is where I had you."
A long, mortified silence.
Nyssara crossed to the root and sat down in the fork of it: a woman in grey that was not quite any color, in a cloak hemmed on three sides, beside a small girl. The child's eyes went straight to the two silver leaves on their cord at her belt, and stayed there.
"I can hear you wanting," Nyssara said, very mildly.
The eyes came up. Then, because some things cannot be helped: "How many owls are there?"
"Tonight? Nine."
"There's ten."
Nyssara looked. High up, where the young bough forked, a tenth shape turned its pale face toward the moon.