Ore-Locks stepped in, followed by Shade. When the hide flap closed over the entrance, Wynn looked about.
Vreuvillä crouched before the flickering embers of a freestanding clay hearth at the rear. With a stick, she lifted a char-stained kettle out of the flameless coals.
The interior was bark covered, like the guild’s redwood structure, but the walls here were lined with living protrusions at all possible levels. Those shelves were filled with ceramic pots and jars. The chamber wasn’t as big as the tree from the outside, and Wynn saw another opening at the back draped with a wool cloth.
Someone had guided this tree’s growth, like the Shapers of the an’Cróan. But it was not as old as the greater trees in the city. Wynn turned back as Vreuvillä reached up to retrieve a gray porcelain jar with a wooden stopper.
As before, Ore-Locks remained silent, and Chane seemed beyond speech.
Vreuvillä crouched before the hearth, pulling a bit of yellow root from the vessel and dropping it in a rough wooden cup. She immediately doused it with the kettle’s scalding water. She rose and came at Wynn, but thrust the mug out at Chane.
“Drink it,” she ordered. “Some humans are too human for the forest ... though I have never seen one so affected.”
If Vreuvillä thought Chane was a mortal, Wynn had no intention of altering that assumption. But she doubted the root tea could do anything for an undead.
“He’s my guard ... and companion,” she explained. “He would not stay behind.”
“At least he is not another white-robed schemer.”
Wynn hadn’t come to discuss Chuillyon, but she couldn’t help asking, “Why do you dislike him?”
“Dislike?” Vreuvillä hissed.
Her head dropped forward but her narrow gaze remained on Wynn. Strands of silver-laced hair shifted across her left eye and exposed the tip of one tall ear.
“Sages and their orders!” she said; it seemed to rise from her throat like one of Shade’s rumbles. “They title themselves masters, domins, and premins to seek stipends from their kind, for their own purpose. The whites, so-called order of Chârmun, are a consumption in their midst ... as if they bear any love or reverence for the one tree in all things. But do they teach? Do they bring the people back to what is sacred? No. They hide and manipulate among ...”
Vreuvillä’s voice caught as she looked Wynn up and down, studying the gray robe.
“Even among your kind,” she finished. “That heretic and his sycophants are deviants, fallen from the true way of the Foirfeahkan. They serve themselves, with Chârmun and its children as their tools.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Wynn said. “There are greater concerns to me.”
Vreuvillä raised her head slightly and cocked it aside. Her one exposed eye glanced toward the draped entrance. Shade sat vigil there, as if she could see through the hide drape, and watched the entrance with no apparent concern over Vreuvillä.
“Perhaps so,” the wild woman answered.
Chane caught Wynn’s wrist. She looked down as he set aside the emptied mug. Wynn watched in astonishment as his irises began regaining their lost hint of brown. He nodded to her, looking suddenly fatigued in his relief.
Whatever Vreuvillä had given him had helped, but Wynn reflected on that one strange term—“Foirfeahkan.”
She knew it only from histories learned in early education, though she couldn’t remember how to translate it. It was from some lost dialect of Elvish even more obscure than that of the an’Cróan. The Foirfeahkan were—had been—a spiritual sect, though their origins and their supposed end couldn’t be traced. Wynn had never heard there were any left.
Animistic in ideology, they believed in the spiritual—ethereal and sacred rather than theistic—that existed within this world and not in a separate realm. Not quite like the dwarves, and they considered the center or nexus of it all was in one tree.
Wynn had never considered that that tree had to be Chârmun.
If Chuillyon was some pretender priest in the guise of a sage, then Vreuvillä’s disdain made perfect sense. But Wynn was uncertain concerning the reference to using the tree known as Sanctuary as a “tool.” And what had the woman meant about its “children,” as in more than one? Did that include Roise Chârmune, Seed of Sanctuary, in the an’Cróan’s hidden ancestral burial ground?
No wonder Vreuvillä despised Chuillyon’s order as heretics and traitors. They had potentially turned an ancient belief system into an organized profession.
“What does bring you here ... sage?” Vreuvillä asked.
Wynn ignored the thin disdain in that final word. She wondered how to gracefully lead into her request. But there was no polite way to broach the subject, and she was tired of subtleties. It seemed this unknown Foirfeahkan preferred directness.
“I believe an enemy from forgotten times is returning,” she said bluntly.
“And?”
Wynn faltered. That should’ve been enough to pique concern or at least interest from anyone who knew even the scant myths. Obviously, Vreuvillä did know.
“I’ve learned it had powerful devices,” Wynn went on. “It used them in the mythical war some speak of. And the devices still exist. They may be the first hint of how—”
“Not the first,” Vreuvillä cut in. “Devices are not how things begin ... but sometimes the means by which they end.”
Wynn fell silent. Did Vreuvillä know more clues—signs—of what was coming? More questions nagged at Wynn, but further hints of what she already knew wouldn’t help with what she sought. Wynn neither wished to tax Vreuvillä’s patience that much nor give Ore-Locks anything more to serve his own hidden desires.
“One device may lie hidden at a place once called Bäalâle Seatt,” Wynn continued. “I need to find that place before the device falls into the wrong hands. If it was a tool of this enemy, it cannot be used again for whatever purpose it served.”
Vreuvillä frowned.
“We’re trying to stop a war,” Wynn went on, all the frustration of recent seasons rising within her. “No one will help! My superiors and others seem obsessed with hindering us.” She drew in a long breath. “Please, if you know anything of Bäalâle Seatt ... then tell me.”
Wynn could feel Ore-Locks’s eyes upon her.
Vreuvillä stood silent, as if waiting for more, but then her expression softened slightly. “And what makes a child like you believe the Enemy is returning?”
“Because I saw the beginning of the end a thousand years ago.”
Wynn began with what she’d learned through Chap and Magiere’s experiences within the memories of Most Aged Father, leader of the Anmaglâhk. Speaking so in front of Ore-Locks was the last thing she wanted, but she kept to only events in general.
Wynn recounted the flight of Sorhkafâré—Light upon the Grass—with the last remnants of his allied forces at the war’s end. Once they reached First Glade’s safety, he and some of his people took a cutting from Chârmun and left this continent. Some of the first Fay-born, those born into varied animals, including wolves who would become the majay-hì, had followed him, as well.
“Sorhkafâré still lives,” Wynn said. “He is now called Aoishenis-Ahâre—Most Aged Father—and I have stood as close to him as I now stand to you. He believes absolutely that the Enemy is returning. I wouldn’t trust him for an instant, but I trust his fear of that.”
Vreuvillä’s voice was strangely calm. “Sorhkafâré, like the great war, is a legend ... a myth among my people. If he truly lived, he would have died long ago.”
Was that some sort of challenge?
“He lives,” Wynn said plainly. “And for his unnaturally long years, he remains convinced the Enemy will return. There are others who’ve come to believe this, as well ... even when they’ve denied so to my face!”