Nyssara Duskwhisper was six summers old when she decided that owls were the only honest creatures in Teldrassil.
Everything else announced itself. The nightsabers padded loudly on purpose so the fawns would bolt toward their sisters. The wisps hummed. Even the Sentinels, who thought themselves silent, wore armor that ticked like cooling embers. But an owl crossed the whole of Dolanaar's lantern-light and arrived on its branch as if the branch had simply grown one.
So she counted them. Each evening, when the violet deepened under the great boughs and her mother's loom began its long conversation with itself, Nyssara slipped out along the root-paths and counted owls, and copied what they did.
The loom was the loudest thing in the house and the only thing her mother spoke to. Yselle Duskwhisper said "there" to it when a row lay flat, and "no, you don't" when the weft tried to wander, and once, late, when she believed her daughter asleep, "I know. I know." To Nyssara she said what needed saying. Wash. Eat. Not the good wool. She was not unkind. She was a house with the shutters closed, and Nyssara had learned early that a person could live quite comfortably beside such a house so long as she did not knock.
On the wall across from the loom hung a glaive. It had three blades, each as long as Nyssara's arm, and a grip wrapped in leather gone black where a hand had worn it. Her mother dusted the shelf below it and the beam above it and never the thing itself, so that it had grown a soft grey coat, like a moth. It had been her father's. Nyssara knew that the way she knew his name, from other people's mouths: neighbors who said "Thalanor's girl" and then found something to look at on the ground. Under her own roof nobody had ever said a word about it. She had worked out for herself that a thing nobody mentioned was not a thing nobody thought about. The whole house bent around that glaive the way the stream bent around the big stone below the bridge.
Outside there were owls, and owls were simple.
She learned them by their places. The grey one with the torn ear-tuft kept the dead limb over the moss bridge. Two small ones shared the lantern post by the inn and bickered. A big pale female held the fork above the moonwell and did not bicker with anybody. On a good evening there were nine. Nyssara wedged herself into the crook of a root with her knees drawn up and watched how they did it, and learned that silence was not the same as stillness. An owl moved all the time. It turned its head, shook out a wing, tipped off its branch into the dark like something being poured. It only refused to argue with the air.
She tried it on the root-path. Coming down heel first was an argument. So was hurrying. So, she found, was holding her breath, because the breath that came after was loud. The trick was to go slowly on purpose and to put her feet where other feet had already pressed the moss flat. By midsummer she could cross the moss bridge without waking the frogs.
That was the autumn old Orendil died.
He had tended the lanterns of Dolanaar since before there was a Dolanaar, people said, carrying the same hooked pole and the same clay pot of embers from some other village under some other tree. His hair was white. Nyssara took that to be simply his color, as hers was dark blue. It was the grown elves who stared at it. They stared at his hands, which had begun to shake, and at the way he stopped halfway up the inn stairs with his palm flat on the rail, and then they looked at their own hands and went quiet.
One morning the lanterns were still burning at noon. Ilyenne the baker climbed to his room over the lamp-store and came down again very slowly.
Nobody had killed him. That was what the village could not get past. Nyssara sat under the inn's porch among the stacked baskets, where she could see most of the green, and heard it said eleven times in one afternoon: no wound, no fever, no poison, no demon. He had gone to bed and his body had finished. The kaldorei had been laying their dead in the ground for ten thousand years, and every one of those dead had been taken by something. There were rites for the slain. Nobody had ever needed a rite for this.
They buried him at dusk in the soft ground above the lake path, because the druid sent down from Darnassus said that was fitting, and then everyone stood around the hole and waited for someone else to know what came next. Nyssara counted forty-three people. Her mother stood at the back with her fingers moving against her skirt, over and under, working a loom that was not there.
The priestess began the prayer for the fallen and stopped at the line about valor. She tried the one for those lost at sea and stopped again. The druid said that all things returned to the root. He glanced up as he said it, into the enormous young branches of the tree that held them all, and whatever he saw there made him leave the rest unsaid. In the end it was Ilyenne who stepped forward. She had brought a loaf, not knowing what else to bring, and she broke it and dropped half into the grave.
"He liked the crust," she said. "He lit my ovens every morning and never once let me thank him for it. Elune keep him. That's all I have."
It seemed to be all anyone had. The sky went from violet to the color of a bruise, and Nyssara noticed, a little before the adults did, what was wrong with the evening. The lanterns were dark, every one, all through Dolanaar. Of course they were. There was nobody whose task it was.
It was the Starbough boy who moved. Faelen was nine, three years older than Nyssara, and already the child the other children arranged themselves around. He had once ridden a nightsaber cub the full width of the green before a Sentinel hauled him off by the collar. Now he walked out of the crowd to where Orendil's pole leaned against the lamp-store wall with the ember pot still hanging from its hook. He blew on the coals until they woke. Then he went along the path and lit the lanterns, one after another, with a pole twice his own height.
Everyone watched him. Several people wept, and a Sentinel put her fist to her breastplate. It was the right thing, the thing the whole village had been waiting for without knowing it, and a boy of nine had seen it first.
Nyssara watched too. She saw the lanterns come up gold along the path. She also saw that after each one, before he walked on to the next, Faelen looked back over his shoulder to make sure they were all still looking.
She did not think less of him. She thought: he counts too. He only counts different things.
By the first frost she could stand behind the baker Ilyenne for a slow count of thirty while moonberry tarts cooled on the sill.
She had not set out to steal. She had set out to learn how close one person could come to another, which the owls could not teach her, since an owl did not care who stood behind it. The bakery was the best place in Dolanaar to find out. Its back door stood open for the heat. Ilyenne worked facing her ovens, broad in the shoulder, floured to the elbow, and she talked the whole time: to the dough, to the fire, to an apprentice she had never got around to taking. After her mother's house it was like standing next to a waterfall.
The first evening Nyssara got as far as the flour bins. The second, the end of the long table. On the fifth she stood an arm's length behind the baker's apron strings, close enough to smell the scorched sugar on her sleeves, and counted to thirty as slowly as the big pale owl blinked.
The tarts sat on the sill at her elbow. There were six, dark in the middle where the moonberries had burst, the pastry still ticking as it cooled.
She took one. Only one. It was warm and sharp and tasted like getting away with something.
It went on tasting like that until about the middle of the night. Then she lay on her pallet with her fingers still faintly sticky and thought about the number six. Anyone who baked six of a thing and found five would count again. Ilyenne, who had put half a loaf in a grave because it was all she had, would count twice, and then she would wonder who. Somebody would be blamed. Probably Faelen, who was blamed for most things and enjoyed it.
That did not help as much as it should have.
On the second night she gave up on sleep and went out.
Her mother's loom was silent at that hour. The glaive held a line of moonlight along one edge. Nyssara went past it on the outsides of her feet and down the root-path to the bakery, with no plan beyond looking at the sill, as though the tart might have come back. She was crouched behind the rain barrel at the corner of the building when two people came up the lake path, arguing in the low hard voices of adults who did not want to be heard and could not stop.
One was a Sentinel. Nyssara knew the tick of the armor before she saw the shape. The other was the druid from Darnassus who had spoken at the grave.
"Before Hyjal he would have outlived the stones," the Sentinel was saying. "Now he climbs a stair and dies of it. And you stood at that hole and told them all things return to the root."
"They do."
"Whose root? This one?" There was a dull knock, a gauntlet against bark. "It was grown without blessing. You know that and I know that. Your Archdruid planted it anyway and told us it would give back what Hyjal took. Well, Orendil is in the ground. When does it begin giving?"
"Lower your voice."
"I have been lowering it for years."
"The Archdruid has done more for our people than you will ever..."
"The Archdruid has grown a very large tree. I grant him that."
"You carry a glaive, sister," the druid said. "Carry it. Leave the tending of things you do not understand to those who do."
They had stopped not four strides from the barrel. Nyssara could see the druid's hands, which were shaking the way Orendil's had, though he was not old. She understood perhaps one word in three. A blessing was what the priestesses did to the moonwell. She had not known a tree could need one, or that a person could be angry at a tree while standing in it. She put the words away whole, the way she put away the places of owls, to look at later.
The Sentinel said something short and went up the path toward the guard post. The druid stood a while and then went down.
Nyssara let out her breath. That was when she saw the woman.
She was under the eave of the lamp-store, across the path, in exactly the spot Nyssara would have chosen for herself had she been taller. She wore grey. It was not the silver of Sentinel mail or the white of the temple, and it was hard to keep hold of; when Nyssara looked straight at it, it seemed to be mostly the color of the wall behind. She had been there for the whole quarrel. Nyssara, who could find nine owls in a dusk, had not seen her arrive and had not seen her at all.
The woman watched the druid out of sight. Then she turned her head, without searching, and looked directly at the rain barrel.
Nyssara stopped breathing, which she knew was a mistake even as she did it.
The look lasted a slow count of five. The woman's face did not change. She did not smile or frown or lay a finger to her lips. She tilted her head a very little, as the grey owl did when a mouse was too small to be worth the drop, and then she was farther along the path, and then she was not on it.
Nyssara stayed behind the barrel until her feet went numb. She had been seen, and nothing had happened. She turned that over all the way home and could not decide whether it was better than being caught or a great deal worse.
It was three days before the guilt outweighed the tart.
She crept back at dusk meaning to confess. She had the words ready, and they were terrible words, and she never used them, because she found Ilyenne at the big oven with both hands on the door and her whole weight thrown back against it. The door was not moving. Smoke was coming through the seam, sweet and then not sweet. "Open, you miserable, you ungrateful," the baker was telling it, and behind the iron a full tray was on its way to being charcoal.
Nyssara saw the trouble from the doorway. The latch-pin had warped in the heat and jammed crooked in its sleeve. Ilyenne's hands were too big to get at it and too busy to try.
She did not decide anything. She crossed the floor the way she crossed the moss bridge. Her small fingers found the pin, hot enough to hurt, and worked it up and sideways and loose, and the door swung, and she was back through the doorway and around the corner before the baker had finished turning around.
Ilyenne stood a moment looking at the open door and the empty path. Then she got the tray out. She did not call after anyone. She did not say a word to the oven, either, for some time.
The next evening there was a single tart on the sill, set apart from the rest, on a leaf.
Nyssara looked at it from the root-crook for a long while before she went and got it. The leaf was a broad one from the tree by the well, washed, laid stem outward like the handle of a dish. Nobody put a tart on a leaf by accident. She ate it slowly, in the open, on the bakery step, and it did not taste like getting away with anything. It tasted like moonberries.
She counted eleven owls that night, the most there had ever been. Twice she lost her place and had to begin again, because she kept looking over her shoulder at the path. Being seen was one thing. She suspected, for the first time, that somebody had counted her.