Ashenvale was older than Teldrassil and did not care who knew it.
Nyssara felt it the first night out of Astranaar. On the tree there was always a light somewhere: a moonwell throwing silver up into the leaves, a Sentinel's lantern rocking along a root-path, her mother's window. Here the dark went all the way down. The trunks stood as broad as houses, furred with moss on the wet side, and between them the ground kept its own counsel: old leaf, black water, the white knuckles of roots. Nothing here had been planted. Nothing had been asked.
She had crossed the water with a single instruction, which was Maethril's way. A grove-tender near Raynewood had been robbed. What was taken was a seed, grey and no larger than a thumbnail, cut from a tree that had stood since before the Sundering. The satyrs who took it meant to plant it in spoiled ground and see what grew.
"Bring it back," Maethril had said. "Do not bring back anything else. Not a trophy, not a wound, not a story for the tavern."
That had been in Darnassus, at the end of a day Nyssara had spent being good company to Faelen Starbough over a dish of river-pears. She had come away knowing which of the Enclave's stewards kept the storeroom keys, and feeling as though she had picked the pocket of a sleeping man. She had been glad of the errand. A satyr, at least, would not ask after her mother.
On the third day she knelt at a stream to fill her flask, and was seen.
She knew it before she knew how. The frogs downstream had gone quiet in the wrong order. She went on filling the flask, let her eyes go soft as she had been taught, and found him in the ferns on the far bank: a green face, small, with the tusks only just through. An orc child. He had a short bow across his knees with no arrow on the string, and a wolf's tooth on a thong, and he was holding his breath so hard that his eyes watered.
A scout, then, or a boy playing at one in a place where the Warsong played for keeps. Their lumber camps lay a day to the east. She had heard the axes on the wind that morning, steady as a slow clock.
He bolted. He was quick and he knew the ground, and neither helped him. She crossed the stream without a splash and took him at the foot of a deadfall, a knee in his back, her dagger laid along his throat. Then she stayed there, breathing, because she did not know what came next.
She knew what the lesson said. Nobody of the Hidden Bough was ever seen. To be seen was to have failed, and there was one way to make a failure small again.
He was perhaps twelve. He smelled of wood smoke and wolf. He had stopped struggling, which was worse, and he was saying something in Orcish, low and fast. Maethril had made her learn enough of the tongue to follow a quarrel. This was not a quarrel. It was a name, and a father's name after it. He was telling the forest who was about to die in it.
"Dragha," she said.
His breath went in. She turned him over. He looked up at her with a hatred so pure and so frightened that it was almost a courtesy.
She thought of the lesson. She thought of a girl with a wooden cup, four steps from the tree line, and of a woman in grey who had every reason to hand her to the Sentinels and had poured the water home instead.
"You saw a cat," she told him in his own words, badly. "Big cat. No elf."
Then she took the top of his left ear between two fingers and cut a notch out of it, quickly, the way herders mark a kid. He did not cry out. Blood ran down his neck into his collar, and he stared at her as though she had done something far stranger than kill him.
"So you remember," she said, and let him up.
He ran. She watched the ferns close behind him. A boy who came home with a tale of an elf would be believed, and the camps would be stirred up for a week. A boy who came home marked and spared would have to explain why he was alive, and no boy of twelve had ever wanted to explain that. Shame kept a secret better than fear did. It was sound reasoning. She went over it twice and it was sound both times, and she washed the blade in the stream a good deal longer than the blade required.
The satyr camp squatted in a hollow where the trees leaned away. Nyssara lay above it in the crook of a branch for a day and a night, counting, as she had once counted owls. Five by the fire. Two who walked the edge and hated each other. One who slept on a chest and wore the key around a horn.
It rained in the afternoon and she let it. She ate a strip of dried fish in pieces small enough not to need chewing. When her left leg went dead she woke it one muscle at a time, from the hip down, as she had learned to do in the log.
At the north end of the hollow there was a pit, dug and then filled again with something. Nothing grew within ten paces of it, and the flies kept away. At dusk the one with the key went and stood over it and spoke to it for a while, fondly, like a farmer to a field, and Nyssara understood that she had until morning. They would plant at sunrise. Satyrs liked an audience, and the sun was the only one that would come.
From the same branch, if she turned her head, she could see down the long fall of the ridge to where the Raynewood road crossed a ford. It lay a mile off and well below her, a pale thread with water shining on it. A Sentinel patrol had gone out along it the afternoon before: six riders on nightsabers, an owl working ahead, and in front an officer who sat her cat as if she had been carved there. Nyssara had known the set of those shoulders before she could see the face. Captain Shaleth Moonspear had caught her on a rooftop in Darnassus once, and looked at her as one looks at something found in the flour, and let her go.
Knives in the dark are how the Highborne began. The captain was said to say it often. Nyssara had needed to hear it only once.
The patrol would come back by the same road at first light. Sentinels did. It was one of the things that made them Sentinels.
In the dead middle of the night the orcs came to the ford.
She did not see them arrive. She saw the ferns on the near bank lie down in a line, against the wind, and stay down. Then she counted. Twelve, she thought, and four wolves held well back among the alders with their jaws bound. They made no fire. They worked without talking, like people who had done the thing before: two went up into the trees over the water with throwing axes, and the rest settled into the banks on either side until the road was a throat. One of those minding the wolves was small. He had a rag tied round his head, pale in the dark, over the left ear.
She could not be sure of that, at a mile, by starlight. She was sure.
So. A mile down the ridge and half a mile along the road, to meet six riders before they reached the water. She could do it before the moon had moved a hand's width, and without a sound. And then she would be standing in a road at dawn before a Sentinel captain who knew her face, with the camp awake behind her and the seed going into the pit, and her first errand a story told in every barracks from there to Auberdine.
Or a cry. The owl-call the Sentinels used for hold. Every child in Dolanaar knew it. It would carry to the ford. It would carry to the hollow, too.
Do not bring back anything else.
She lay along the branch and looked at the two things, the camp and the road, and found that she could see both with perfect clarity. That was the trouble with the gift. It showed her everything and weighed nothing.
She kept to her orders.
She went in at the grey hour before dawn, when even wicked things are tired. She did not hurry. Hurrying was a kind of noise. The key came off the horn with a touch softer than a spider's. The chest opened on a breath of oil she had brought for its hinges.
The seed was warm. It lay in her palm and, faintly, it was afraid.
That was where it nearly ended, because one of the edge-walkers chose that moment to come and pick his quarrel by the fire, and his hoof came down a hand's width from her face. It was yellow and split up the middle, and there was pit-dirt packed in the crack. Nyssara lay in the shadow of the chest with a dagger drawn along her forearm and understood, with perfect clarity, that she could kill him before he drew breath.
A blade is an answer. She asked the question properly.
She waited. He kicked his sleeping fellow, was cursed at, and stalked away.
She had reached the lip of the hollow, with the seed in a pouch against her breastbone, when the horn sounded down at the ford.
It was a Sentinel horn and it blew half a note. After it came a sound she had never heard and knew at once, a nightsaber screaming, and then others, small and far off and in no order, like crockery going down a stair. The satyrs heard. Eight heads came up and turned east, away from her, and one of them laughed.
It was the best cover she could have asked for. She used it. She would remember that she had used it.
By sunrise she was most of a league gone, and ought to have been a full one. She had gone round by the ridge.
From the rocks above the ford the road looked very clean. The orcs had left and taken their own with them. Three cloaks were laid out on the bank with the shapes of people under them. Two cats lay on their sides in the shallows, and the water ran past them a color it should not have been. One Sentinel stood holding the four cats that were left. One sat against an alder with her leg stretched out stiff. The owl was on a branch above them, turning its head and turning it back.
Captain Moonspear had her helm off. She went from cloak to cloak and did something at each, some small tidying of a fold, and when she had finished the third she straightened and looked up at the tree line: a long slow look, east to west, the look of a person who has been surprised once this morning and does not intend it twice.
It passed over the rocks. It passed over Nyssara, who was by then a patch of lichen and had been taught by the best.
Six had gone out. Nyssara counted the one standing, and the one sitting, and the captain, and the cloaks. She counted them again, as though it might come out differently.
She reached the grove before noon. The tender was an old druid with bark-stained hands who kept a ring of saplings north of Raynewood and talked to them more than was good for him. He wept to hold the seed again, and asked the name of his rescuer.
"Nobody came," said Nyssara. "You must have dropped it."
He looked at her a moment as if he might argue. Then he looked at the seed and forgot her, which was correct. And she left no tracks going home.
Maethril heard the whole of it standing at a window with her back turned. Nyssara told it in order and left nothing out: the stream, the ear, the branch, the ford. Her voice stayed level. She was rather proud of that, and then ashamed of being proud.
"The boy was a risk," Maethril said. "I would not have taken it. But you made it smaller than it might have been, and I see why you did. Let it stand."
"And the patrol."
"You were sent for a seed. Planted in that pit, it would have sickened the roots of Ashenvale for a thousand years, and hundreds would have died of it who will now never hear your name." She turned around. Her face was as it always was. "Those Sentinels knew what a road was when they took their oaths. You chose correctly."
Nyssara had come up the bough braced for anger. She had prepared for it the whole crossing, sentence by sentence, the way one packs for cold weather. She found she had nothing to set against being told she was right. That was the worst of it.
"Their names were read at the Temple yesterday," she said. "Anarial. Thessa. Orwyn."
"I know. I was there. I always go."
That was all. Maethril gave her the next thing to do, which was small, and concerned a steward's keys.
Nyssara went out by the Temple gardens. Three new lanterns hung in the mourning tree there, low, where a hand could reach to trim them. She had been told to bring back no trophy, no wound and no story, and she had obeyed in every particular that anyone could check. She counted the lanterns as she passed. Then she walked on between them, where their light did not quite meet.