Again, Wynn heard those words in her mind.
“Answer me,” Vreuvillä returned, her voice growing raw. “Why did you kill one of your children?”
The wind quieted only a little and a long pause followed.
Regretful ... tragic ... necessary.
Wynn had no pity for their regret.
With tears flooding, Vreuvillä shrieked at the immense shadow beyond the trees like some animal too enraged for the power of speech. When she regained her voice, Wynn followed her strange dialect more easily.
“Your descendant of flesh, a majay-hì, guards this Numan woman ... even against its own kind! You killed one of them to get to her? Would you do so again, here and now?”
She is a tainted piece of Existence, too twisted and dangerous.
“You gave birth to Existence, no matter the form of its parts!” Vreuvillä snarled back. “Is this now what you make of the bond that I serve ... that all Foirfeahkan have nurtured for ages?”
Wynn glanced aside. The pack circled chaotically, but mostly toward Vreuvillä. What they’d learned had left them confused and wary.
“How can I,” Vreuvillä went on, “or any others left of my way, serve to maintain the bond of parent to child ... if this is the price?”
No answer came.
Every root around the clearing went limp upon the earth. The wind died in the trees in all but one place. Wynn thought she saw a form hidden partly beyond the branches. Larger than any living being she could imagine, it was not as tall as the trees themselves. That shadow of whirling air and leaves beyond the branches was the only spot Vreuvillä focused on.
Necessary ... mournfully necessary.
That answer made Wynn long to shout her own denial at the Fay. They were insanely set on a course of enforced inaction, deterring anyone’s efforts against what might come. That included Magiere and Leesil and Chap, even more than Wynn herself. But Chap hadn’t agreed with his own kin, even in ignorance of what they truly hoped to accomplish at any cost.
Neither did Wynn.
She kept her tongue, letting the priestess’s tension mount. The Fay were sacred to this woman in some way, and this conflict was costing her. Wynn had to shape that outcome to her need, even to creating a crisis of faith for Vreuvillä.
“Whatever would be gained is not worth this,” Vreuvillä said. “Whatever would be made by it will never replace what is lost. I see no price or loss in what this woman seeks ... not for what you have done.”
The wind died instantly.
Wynn heard a disquieting sound in her head. The leaf-wing chorus made it hard to be certain. It could’ve been a shriek of either rage or suffering.
Leave the fallen dead of the Earth where they lie.
Wynn tensed. Was this a reference to Bäalâle Seatt? Did the “dead of the Earth” mean the dwarves who had perished there?
Leave that of the Earth in hiding ... that of ours, no longer a slave to a slave.
Wynn turned sick with revulsion at more insistence for inaction. But there was something that didn’t match up. What was this nonsense about a “slave to a slave”?
The dwarves were slaves to no one. Their people would rather die than submit. But she glanced sidelong at Ore-Locks, wondering about the descendant of Thallûhearag, that so-titled “Lord of Slaughter”—Lord of Genocide.
Vreuvillä’s brow creased, but she uttered no reply to the Fay’s last demand. In the clearing’s silence, Wynn saw nothing more hidden beyond the trees as their branches settled.
Chane had remained silent, though Wynn could feel his shudders through his hand, as he was still gripping hers. Ore-Locks was watching Vreuvillä in confusion, and then he looked to Wynn.
“Whom was she speaking to?” he whispered.
No one answered him. Wynn didn’t even know how.
The Fay were gone. All that was left were limp roots among the branch fragments on broken earth as scattered leaves settled to the clearing’s floor.
Shade whined loudly, and Wynn looked down. The dog was still trembling against her leg.
Vreuvillä turned her head, one eye peering around her dangling, wind-whipped hair. “Who are you?”
Her voiced was strained with suspicion.
“Just a sage,” Wynn answered, “thrown into the middle of all this ... who does what her conscience tells her.”
She released Chane’s hand and took a step. Shade growled in warning and tried to cut her off. Ore-Locks lowered his staff in front of her. Wynn stepped around Shade and pushed aside the iron bar.
“What are you to them?” Vreuvillä whispered, an edge of anger returning to her voice. “They tried to take your life, to have me do so ... and they have tried before.”
“So have many others, and I’m still here.”
Shade remained tight at Wynn’s side, eyeing the pair of majay-hì framing the priestess.
“My purpose isn’t as far from theirs as you might think,” Wynn added. “Though they want you to believe otherwise.”
Vreuvillä studied her. Strong as the priestess was, it was not an easy thing to have what one believed suddenly transformed into something else.
“I’ve nowhere left to turn,” Wynn suddenly begged, and the fear and reality of the last few moments sank in. “Do you know anything of a place called Bäalâle Seatt, a forgotten dwarven city or stronghold in the mountains bordering the desert?”
Several of the pack tentatively closed around Shade, sniffing at her from a safe distance. Wynn ignored this, focusing only on Vreuvillä.
“There are some writings left by my forebears,” the priestess finally answered, taking a long, haggard breath. “Mentions of dwarves who once mingled freely among the people ... my people. They came from the south. If these are true, the surest path would have been what is now called the Slip-Tooth Pass.”
Something—perhaps hope—began growing in Wynn. “Yes, I’ve seen it on a map.”
Vreuvillä looked away, glancing toward the trees before she dropped her head.
“Where?” Ore-Locks asked, his voice too eager. “Where, exactly, did they come from?”
“I do not know,” Vreuvillä answered. “But if it was a seatt that fell in the war ...”
She trailed off.
“Anything might help,” Wynn urged.
“There is a place one of my forebears found in wandering and labeled it ‘the fallen mountain’,” Vreuvillä said quietly. “It was too odd to be called anything else, as if a peak amid the range had been sheared off, crushed, or collapsed. A flat, sunken plain one would never find amid such mountains. I have not seen it for myself. I cannot direct you more than this.”
Wynn’s mind was racing. She had a crude map of the region already in her possession. If they were to trust in Vreuvillä, they simply had to follow the Slip-Tooth Pass between the smaller, northbound ridges all the way to the Sky-Cutter Range. After that, finding this so-called “fallen mountain” was another matter, but it might be closer than she had ever hoped.
A thousand years had passed, even for mountains that ran across an entire continent. Who knew what changes to the landscape had come and gone since the time of war? But at least this was something to go on.
“Thank you,” Wynn said.
“Do not thank me. Chârmun gives me no guidance in this ... as I had wanted in calling up those who birthed it.”
Wynn had little guidance, either. But mention of the tree called Sanctuary raised so many questions as to what had happened here.
“What was that out there?” she asked. “What is this Pain Mother you spoke of?”
“Not pain.” Vreuvillä corrected, scowling again. “The Pained Mother ... though it is a weak meaning in your tongue. It is the manifestation of them—what your kind calls Fay—that represents what first made all of this.”