The Long Walk Home

Synopsis

They were still in the Twisted Grove’s courtyard, the life-tree shedding leaves for the first time in an age and the death-tree burning cold behind them, when Koa called in the promise. Nancáro remembered Gwen: unwell, of a disease out of a time long past, near-uncurable and survivable only by surrendering a portion of who you are. Vëné corrected him, and he was surprised to be told something he did not know. His information was antiquated. In his absence Gwen’s family had worked toward a resolution, unfinished, and needing her to return to her roots.

Gwen had settled above its prison. The thing under Haudh-Gwenn is ancient, and was shut in there by the Mól, the very people the two of them had been trying to destroy. It feeds on feelings and on dreams, and once it has your deepest sorrow and your desire it gives you the means to live your dream out. Not as a bargain: without your consent, its own will seeded in you, so that you go on growing more of what it eats. The Slumbering Queen is not a thing living inside Gwen. She is Gwen’s own dreams, manifested, which is why the two can never be awake at once. Years ago a call for help went out and a gnome of some arcane order answered it. The thing seeded him too and left him strange and modified, and he is no longer around.

With him gone and the Queen no longer feeding it, the entity is starved, unguarded and working itself free. It is eternal but not immortal, killable in principle and well past what mortals like them could manage, so Nancáro offered to buy time and left the shape of it to Koa: press it back down and have years, with Gwen exactly as she is, or cut it away from her now and have almost none. Koa said leaving her in that state was cruel. “Cruel if it’s not her choice,” Vëné said, gently, and he asked for a way to put it to her. Go to where the wound is inside the land and call, Nancáro told him. Silence would be an answer too.

Asked what the bond would mean when one of the three died, Vëné said they would feel it more deeply than perhaps any mortal has, but would not be taken along. Mikhail caught Nancáro silently disagreeing, not with her opinion but with her stating it, and got something icy for pressing. Then Vëné put a hand on Aldo’s shoulder and he was whole for a moment, and he asked her, barely audibly, where he had been. “Nowhere. Nothing,” she said. “Because you tried.” The two of them dissipated mid-sentence, and only then did the party feel how much pressure they had been standing in.

Aldo did not answer to his name and spoke only Galden, so Mikhail translated in both directions. Asked how long it had been for the rest of them, they said a few minutes. “Too long. Uncountable.” They opened the map room on Hinta, who nearly put a weapon through them, and told her the curses were broken and the Shattered Throne with them. Inside, the death-tree still burned dark fire, which gave cold instead of heat and no light most eyes could catch: not combustion at all, Mikhail worked out, but negative energy diffusing into a world made of the opposite. Around the live tree it ran the other way, into moss and blossom and razorleaf at three times its size and a squirrel as big as a small dog. They carried unlit wood out in the lead box inside the Oubliette.

They made the safe rock by dusk. The stillness in the woods was ordinary stillness now, and a small animal crossed ground that would have killed it a week earlier. Aldo talked in his sleep in every language he had at once, then began asking what he had done and how he behaved and who he had been, and Mikhail answered him every time he asked. Mikhail’s own hand healed at no rate a physician could account for, and it hurt to play, which is how he thinks. On the second morning Aldo slid back into Peren in the middle of small talk. “I don’t know if there’s words for it, but it was wrong. An absence of everything.” Further on, the wet cold of the Water mote reached them from well outside where it had ever been felt.

Loshev took them back like a homecoming. The bridge was still down, and the town had begun sinking a river gate to toll for the work, because the old blocks can only be got out of ruins. Two letters waited under their door. The first said Torgun Kurvroc was dead and buried, the funeral held while they were north; the second called Mikhail by name to the reading of the will, which they had made with days to spare. The room was full of Draazstone hobgoblins who had traveled hundreds of miles, and bequest after bequest turned out to have been carried off by the raiders. Hinta was left the Mól sword she had spent months restoring, and Mikhail the house, whole and undivided, in praise that read as though someone else had written it. As every face in the room turned he noticed he was the only one in it who was not a hobgoblin.