ALIAH CROSSED THE BOUNDARY INTO Sollin-kel a little after dawn. Behind her, the Simmaron Woods in autumn was a dim place, all rust and shadow with the scent of leaves hanging over it. Ahead, the light came softer and from more directions than the sky allowed, and the air carried a sweetness belonging to a flower her mother had once told her about but whose name escaped her.
A week and three days ago, they had defeated the witch, drained the Well of Darkness, and set things right.
But still, something was wrong.
That something remained elusive, so Aliah walked the perimeter of the dryad grove, as she had every day since returning here.
She stopped to watch the stream because a running stream was worth watching. Upstream, outside Sollin-kel, its water was the color of old bark. The witch’s doing, her release of the Well’s power lessening each day but still tainting the Simmaron. But here inside her mother’s grove, the water ran clear, untouched by the rotting effect. The bed’s polished stones lay beneath a glistening stream, and small fish held steady against the lazy current. Below the second bend, where the banks widened, sand lay pale and fine along both shores, combed into ridges by the current.
By almost any measure, all seemed well. But this was Sollin-kel, a dryad grove, and a place of pristine beauty and otherworldly fae energy. The Well’s taint had never reached here. Yet the glade faded all the same.
Her mother’s home had never been a quiet place. The few outsiders allowed here expected cathedral stillness, and found instead a racket—water over stone, wind working the high canopy, insects buzzing, and birds past counting. Before the witch’s act of murder, Sollin-kel had held more birds than any other square mile of the Simmaron, drawn in by safe nesting and the abundance the dryads cultivated for them. At the turn of spring, the dawn chorus often woke sleepers three hundred yards outside the boundary.
Aliah positioned herself in the middle of it and took a tally. A nuthatch worked a trunk somewhere north. Two crows, passing through rather than staying. The stream.
Nothing else.
The air still carried the familiar sweetness, thinner every visit, the way the scent of scattered petals lingered after flowing downstream. Aliah indulged in the scent as she traversed through the western glade to the grove’s heart. The dryads had opened this area generations ago, cutting neither branch nor bough, persuading the canopy apart until moonlight lit the floor, and they had danced in it at the turn of every season long before the Hall of the Wood had existed. Leaf fall lay across it uncleared. Bramble had come in along the southern edge, thorny and thriving how bramble thrives when uncontested. In a year, when the glade closed over and the forest reclaimed it, no one would remember a clearing had ever stood here. Some time after that, despite everything Aliah might do, Sollin-kel would exist as nothing more than a memory. The witch’s taint had taken the grove’s dryads, leaving only Aliah, a half-dryad without the prowess or abilities of the others to make any difference to that outcome.
Acorns lay everywhere underfoot.
For as long as Aliah remembered, her mother and aunts had spent their autumns shaping them—a night’s work over a handful, and by morning one acorn in twenty held something. A small warmth, a knot of green, or a stubbornness potent enough to carry a seedling through a bad winter outside the grove. Her aunts had pressed them on her whenever she left. Those destined to grow and become new trees, she scattered throughout the forest. Others—the truly special ones—she carried for years, using them only when needed.
She had gathered a double handful on her first morning back, sitting with them in her lap until dark, waiting, wishing, for someone to come to shape them once more. No one came.
Eleven oaks stood at the heart of the grove.
She knew them the way another woman recognizes the faces down a long table. The second from the stream had been Sellaya Duskbough’s, her bark smooth and gray and warm on the southern face even in cold weather. The fourth, Talveya Greenmantle’s, forked low and wide and the easiest in the grove to climb, which Talveya had spent two hundred years pretending not to enjoy. The seventh lost its crown to lightning before Aliah was born and grew a new one at an angle, stubborn and lopsided. Ondeya had been stubborn and lopsided herself, so she had appreciated the humor in it.
Two of the eleven had never quickened.
Nine once held dryads.
She visited each, laid both hands flat against the bark, and listened. Eleven different voices gave her the same answer. Not her mother and her ilk, who were no more, but the trees themselves.
The magic fades, but we will remain.
The dryads had died protecting this place, sacrificing themselves for what? Without their influence, the glade was becoming something else. Not something unsavory, but something normal. Someday soon, she expected to find it unrecognizable.
Aliah strode up to the great oak on the eastern rise, the oldest of them. She sat down at its foot with her back against the roots and remained quiet.
Vadeya Dawnoak had blended with that tree centuries ago. The oak was her mother now, in the way that mattered to dryads and in no way at all that mattered to a daughter. Aliah had yet to decide whether sitting here was comfort or cruelty. She did it anyway. Grief was not a thing she relished, though she had discovered she preferred to take it in the open, where the trees could see her do it.
“I went back to the cave,” she said. “The witch’s bones remain. The Well of Darkness is empty. The druid wards are silent.” She paused, waiting for an acknowledgment that was never coming. “The druid’s shade asked me to restore the wards, to give each statue a druid stone. But the stones drank the Well’s evil instead. I know it isn’t what he asked me to do, but the stones dispelled the darkness. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Another pause. “The sorcerer took the stones to keep them safe. But you feel it as well as I do, don’t you?” She wasn’t sure if she spoke to the tree or to the memory of her mother. “Something isn’t right.”
Aliah remembered carrying the Gemstones of Morann out of Delbin Kinkaed’s tomb in a pouch at her waist. She had gone down into the Cavern of the Well to give one unto each of the four sentinels and put an end to the whole business. She had climbed three steps before the witch’s trap had taken her mind. When she finally surfaced from the black place Saress had drowned her in, and they’d stopped the witch, the Well stood dry, and the stones had gone drab and lightless.
It was what he told me to do, Holly had said. He said...the Stones...
Nobody had questioned the priest’s motives because they had won.
But the power of a dead god does not stop existing. Delbin had told her as much in the dark of his tomb, in that dry voice that sounded from everywhere and nowhere. The druids had not destroyed the Well for a reason. They contained its power because containment was the only possibility.
Murik had carried the Gemstones of Morann—the druid stones—to the Simmaron Hall, where he packed them alongside the witch’s belongings. He planned to take it all outside the forest, where the denizens of the Simmaron would never have to think about it again.
Aliah rose and touched the bark of her mother’s tree.
“I have to go,” she said. “I do not know for how long. Perhaps I should seek Delbin’s counsel again. Perhaps I need to visit the Hall.”
When it seemed the oak meant to give her nothing, she turned away. But before her hand left the bark, she felt something on her fingertips—not words, nothing so clear. But a pressure, like a sleeper shifting.
She remained motionless, listening.
“The patrollers?” she asked. “You still trust them.”
Aliah waited for more. But that was all.
“I let go of my need for vengeance, and so I will trust them, too.”
She let her fingers slip from the bark, and then she left the grove and headed for the Simmaron Hall.
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