The dare came from Faelen, who was older and had recently discovered that being older was a kind of authority.
He had other kinds by then. At seventeen Faelen Starbough was tall, and easy in it, and could make a story out of a walk to the well. That spring the Cenarion Enclave had agreed to take him as an acolyte at the turn of the season, and for a month he had talked of little else. Half the young of Dolanaar gathered on the lakeshore below the village most evenings to hear him do it. Nyssara gathered with them. She sat a little apart, on the root that ran down into the water, where she could see all their faces.
Tonight it was the Archdruid. Faelen had been up to Darnassus for his examination and had seen him cross the Enclave lawn.
"He stopped," Faelen said. "Right in the middle of the grass. And he looked at me. Not at the masters. At me. As if he was deciding something."
Merith, who was sixteen and laughed at everything he said half a beat early, drew in her breath. Tavar said, "Deciding what?"
"Last time," said Nyssara, "he was forty paces off with his back to you."
There was a silence. She had not meant to hurt him. The two tellings did not match, and a thing that did not match itched at her until she said so. She had been saying so to Faelen for eight years. She was the only one in Dolanaar who did. She had long suspected it was why he kept her near, and why, about one evening in five, he could not stand her.
This was one of the five.
"Nyss counts," he told the others, smiling. "Have you noticed? She sits on her root and counts. How many owls. How many paces. She could tell you how many times Tavar has scratched his ear." He skipped a stone, and it went six hops. "What she has never done, in her whole life, is anything."
"That isn't..."
"A cup from the moonwell," he said. "At night. While the Sentinels are standing right there. You can't."
Merith laughed. Somebody whistled. The moonwell of Dolanaar had a guard on it from dusk to dawn, and the water was the priestesses' to give. A child caught with a hand in it would be walked home to her mother by the ear, past every open door in the village.
Nyssara was fourteen, all elbows and certainty. She did not want the water. She wanted to know whether it could be done, which was a far more dangerous thing to want.
"When?" she said.
"Before I leave." He was already sure how it would end. She could see him being generous about it in advance. "Ten nights. I'll even keep count for you."
She watched the well for nine nights first. That was the part the others never understood. They thought it was about quick hands. It was about knowing.
There was a branch above the well a hand's breadth wider than she was, screened by a spray of new leaves. She lay on it from the lighting of the lanterns until the grey before dawn, on her stomach, chin on her fists, in the brown wool her mother had judged too dull to sell. Then she went home along the root-path, ate what had been left for her under a cloth, and slept through the day to the sound of the loom. Her mother did not ask where she had been. Her mother told the shuttle that the red was running short.
By the third night she had the shape of it. There were two Sentinels on the well and one who was not, strictly, on it. The tall one stood at the north curb and shifted her weight from her left hip to her right every two hundred breaths, give or take five. An old hurt, Nyssara guessed, that she would sooner shift than show. The younger one stood south and watched the road, because the road was where trouble had always come from, and never the trees. The third was a glaive-thrower who slept in the guard post up the slope and left her nightsaber lying against the well curb like a rug with teeth. The cat did not sleep. But the glaive-thrower's cat always, always looked up at the turning of the moon through the leaves, when the light slid off the water and onto the roots. For the space of perhaps forty breaths it watched that brightness move and nothing else.
Two hundred breaths. Forty breaths. A road. She laid them over one another like threads on a frame until she found the place where all three left a gap. It came once a night and was eleven breaths wide.
On the sixth night something happened that had nothing to do with her.
It was late, well past the hour when the priestesses came to bless the water. A priestess came anyway, alone, with no bowl and no lamp, and stood at the curb with her hands folded. The Sentinels saluted and let her be. Some while afterward a druid walked in off the Darnassus road. He wore the Archdruid's colors, the dark green mantle and horn clasp of the Archdruid's own circle, and the younger Sentinel, who watched the road, stood up very straight for him.
He did not look at her. He went to the well and bowed to the priestess, and she bowed back, and in the bowing something passed from her sleeve to his: a scroll of pale bark the length of a hand, closed with a blot of wax. He did not read it. He did not thank her. Neither of them spoke a single word. He drank a palmful of water like any traveler and went back the way he had come. The priestess stood a little longer for the look of the thing and left by the other path.
From the ground it would have been two people being pious. From above it was a hand and a sleeve.
Nyssara did not know what she had seen. Priestesses and druids were both, as far as she understood the world, on the side of everything good, and had no need to pass each other notes in the dark like children at lessons. She thought, for no reason she could name, of a rain barrel and a gauntlet knocking on bark. Then she put it away with the rest: the hour, the mantle, the wax, which had been dark, green or black. Things she did not understand she kept anyway. They took up no room.
The tall Sentinel shifted her weight. Nyssara went back to counting.
On the tenth night she came down out of the canopy like a held breath being let go.
The cat's head was up, turned to the sliding light. The tall Sentinel had just settled onto her right hip. The younger one was frowning at the road, where there was nothing, where there had been nothing for ten nights. Nyssara went down the back of the root on her fingers and toes and crossed four strides of open moss, and nobody in the world knew she was there.
The water lit her wrist silver. She filled the little wooden cup, and the light of it climbed her arm and got in under her ribs, and it made her feel, absurdly, that she ought to say thank you. To the well, or the moon, or the tree. She had not expected it to be beautiful. For the space of a breath she knelt there with the cup in her hand, feeling like a thief for the first time since she was six.
Then she was moving again, over the moss and up into the shadow. She was four steps from the tree line when a voice beside her ear said, very mildly, "You paused."
Nyssara did not scream. She was rather proud of that afterward.
The woman leaning in the shadow of the root was neither Sentinel nor priestess. She wore grey that was not quite any color, and Nyssara knew that grey. She had seen it once, eight years ago, from behind a rain barrel, and had half decided since that she had dreamed it. The woman had been standing there, Nyssara realized with a cold drop of the stomach, for all ten nights. Under her own branch. In the one place she had never thought to look, because she had been the one looking.
"At the well," the woman went on. "You stopped to feel sorry. That is where they would have had you. The cat came back to itself two breaths early tonight. You were lucky and did not know it, which is the worst way to be lucky."
She plucked the cup from Nyssara's fingers, walked it back in plain sight of both Sentinels, who did not so much as blink at her, and poured the water home.
"I am Maethril Quietstep," she said when she returned. "You are going to tell your friend that you failed. And then you are going to come and find me, if you can."
Nyssara found her voice. It came out smaller than she wanted. "I didn't fail."
"No."
"Then why would I say it?"
Maethril considered her. She had a narrow, unremarkable face, the kind that would be hard to describe an hour later, and eyes that rested on a thing without seeming to press on it.
"Because a girl who took water from under two Sentinels and a nightsaber is a girl those Sentinels will watch for the rest of her life," she said. "A girl who tried it and lost her nerve is a girl they will laugh about for a week and never look at again. Decide which of those you would rather be. You have until morning."
She handed back the empty cup. Then she was farther along the root, and then she was not there, exactly as before.
Faelen was waiting on the green at sunrise, a stone's throw from the well, and he had brought everyone.
Nyssara had hoped, without admitting it, that he would come alone. She walked across the wet grass with the cup in her hand and a dozen faces turned to her, and she watched them see that the cup was dry.
"Well?" said Faelen.
It was harder than the well. At the well she had only had to be quiet. Here she had to open her mouth and make herself smaller with it, in front of Merith, in front of Tavar, in front of the one person in Dolanaar whose good opinion she had ever gone out of her way to keep.
"I got as far as the roots," she said. "The cat looked at me. I ran."
Relief crossed his face first, quick as a fish. He had not been sure. Then came the rest, and the rest was worse, because he was kind about it.
"Nyss," he said, and put a hand on her head, as he might have with a much younger child. "It's all right. I told you. You watch. That's what you're for. Somebody has to sit on the root." He turned to the others. "She ran from a cat."
Merith laughed on time, for once. Tavar wanted to know whether the cat had so much as stood up. By noon it was all over Dolanaar, and by evening the younger Sentinel, the one who watched the road, called down from the guard post steps to ask whether she wanted an escort past the cubs. Nyssara's ears burned to their tips. She said nothing. She was finding out that saying nothing when she had something to say was a different trade from silence, and that she was not yet good at it.
Faelen left for Darnassus four days later with a pack on his shoulder and half the village walking him to the edge of the lanterns. He looked back, as he always did, to see them looking. His eyes went over Nyssara without stopping.
That was the cost, and she felt all of it. A few evenings on she found out what it had bought.
She was crossing the green at dusk. The tall Sentinel was at the north curb and the younger at the south, and Nyssara walked between them close enough to touch the well, in the open, under the lanterns. The younger one glanced at her, grinned, and looked back at the road. The tall one did not glance at all. The nightsaber yawned.
They had counted her and written down the wrong number, and nobody would ever check it. She could have filled a bucket.
She kept walking, and did not pause.
It took her a month to find Maethril Quietstep.
She spent the first three weeks of it looking in the dark. She went over every shadow in Dolanaar that would hold a grown woman: the eave of the lamp-store, the underside of the moss bridge, the hollow root behind the inn, her own branch above the well. She lay in each of them by turns to learn what could be seen from it. She found a great many spiders, and the place where the innkeeper hid a bottle from his wife, and nobody in grey.
In the fourth week she sat on the bakery step with a heel of bread, too tired to hide, and for want of anything else to do she counted the people on the green.
There were thirty-one. She knew thirty of them. She had known them all her life, their gaits and their quarrels and which of them owed Ilyenne for bread.
The thirty-first was a woman on the bench outside the inn, in a traveler's brown cloak, mending a pack strap with a bone needle. She had a cup of something at her elbow. People stepped around her feet and nodded as they passed, as one nods to a post. Nyssara tried to remember when the woman had come to Dolanaar and found that she could not. She tried to remember a day in the last month when that bench had been empty, and could not do that either.
She got up and crossed the green. Her legs were not altogether steady. She stood in front of the bench until the needle stopped.
"You were supposed to be hiding," Nyssara said.
"I was." Maethril bit off the thread. In daylight, in brown, she looked like somebody's aunt. "You have spent a month searching the places where you would hide. I wondered when it would occur to you to look in the places where I would."
"A month is a long time."
"It is acceptable," Maethril said, "for a beginning."
She moved her pack off the bench to make room, and after a moment Nyssara sat down.