The Ashwood Confrontation

Year 0, late winter. The road into the Greenwood-now-Ashwood, the flat clearing at the third bend, the Ashwood's interior.

They rode out at the second bell of the morning.

The riding party, this time, was twelve. Kaelith. Captain Moren. Nyra. Brother Aldwen. Sister Mara. Two of Nyra's senior paladins (Brother Carrick and Sister Eira). Two of Captain Moren's house guard. Three of the council's new investigative branch, which had been formed in the four weeks since the elected stewardship's signing and which was, by Borren's recommendation, attached to the chapter house for purposes of Cult tracking.

Nyra's investigation over the past six weeks had identified the Cult's appointment of the new Ash-Wolf.

The new Ash-Wolf was a young woman of twenty-eight. Her name was Aleri Pennarith. She was the daughter of the Lord Pennarith who had been killed in his bed by his own household guard the morning of the council's collapse. She had been, since her father's death, in the small private grief of a young woman whose father had been one of the seven names on Lord Malrien's list and whose father had been killed by Cult-aligned hands, under the Cult's own internal protocols, once the chain had begun to break.

The Cult had, in the four weeks after her father's death, approached her.

The Cult had told her, by their careful working, that her father had been killed by Sunward retainers in service to a young Sunward heir who was attempting to consolidate power. The Cult had told her that her father's work had been honor work, that the Sunward heir had been the man who had broken the council and that the Sunward heir was, by the Cult's reading, the one she should set herself against if she wished to honor her father.

The Cult had, by this careful working, recruited her.

She had accepted the appointment of the new Ash-Wolf at the second bell of a ceremony four weeks ago in an unmarked chamber three streets from the High Hall.

She had been, since the appointment, walking the careful Cult-working of the Ash-Wolf's slow becoming. She had been on three attacks since her appointment. The third attack had been the Sunward courier (Yefa Marraine and her two companions) at the second bend of the eastern road six weeks ago.

She had not, in those four weeks, been the Cult's primary operative on the new Ash-Wolf duty. She had been the Cult's visible one. The primary operative had been a senior Cult administrator who had handled the appointment's administrative working. The administrator had died, by his own hand, in a Free Cities tavern three weeks ago, when the Cult-aligned line of records had begun to dry up after the records cellar fire.

Aleri had been, since the administrator's death, alone.

She had attempted to attack two further targets in the past three weeks and had, in both cases, withdrawn before completing the attack. The withdrawals had been, by Brother Aldwen's careful reading of the targets' accounts, the withdrawals of a person who was beginning to reconsider.

The riding party rode to the encampment in the Ashwood's interior where Aleri was to be found.

They rode for two days.

On the morning of the third day, they reached the flat clearing at the third bend of the eastern road. The clearing was the clearing where the original Lord Malrien had died twenty years ago. The clearing was where Halric Vendell had stood with Kaelith four weeks ago and wept briefly for Lyanna and Elena.

This morning, the clearing was empty.

They rode past it. They turned onto the old path that branched south at the fifth marker. They entered the Ashwood proper.

The Ashwood was the Ashwood. The trees, gray and dead since Year -20, stood in their long quiet rows. The bark of them was the gray of stone. The road through the Ashwood was the road one had walked since the Cult's working had taken the Greenwood.

But this morning, the Ashwood had a change.

He noted it at the seventh-bend mile-marker.

He said: My lord. Look at the trees on the eastern side.

Kaelith looked.

The trees on the eastern side of the road, at the seventh-bend mile-marker, had particular shoots. The shoots were perhaps the length of a thumb. They were green. They were not many. They were perhaps three or four per tree.

The trees were, by every visible reading, beginning to recover.

Brother Aldwen said: I have not, in any year of riding the Ashwood Road, seen this.

Sister Mara said: I have not either.

Captain Moren said: Nor I.

Nyra said: The trees are remembering being alive.

She said it without inflection. She said it the way she had been saying things since the Vow at the chapel three days ago. She had taken her sword back. The cold at her right hip was the warmth of the sword's hilt. She had, in the three days since, been speaking with the authority of a paladin who had given the sword and taken it back as a slightly different paladin.

The riding party rode past the seventh-bend mile-marker.

They rode for another hour.

They reached the encampment.

It was, in the Ashwood's late-winter early-morning, a single fire pit, a single canvas tent, a single small horse picketed to a tree. The horse was a steady gray. The tent was old canvas. The fire pit, by the cold of the ash, had been put out the previous evening.

A young woman sat at the fire pit, on a log, with her back to the road.

She was facing east, toward the Greenwood-now-Ashwood's deep interior.

She did not, in the riding party's slow approach, turn.

Kaelith dismounted.

He walked, slowly, to her.

He stopped at perhaps ten paces.

He said: Aleri Pennarith.

She said, without turning: My lord.

He said: I would like, if you will allow, to speak with you. I will not, by my standing, ask you to surrender. I will not, by Nyra's standing, ask you to come with us. I am asking, this morning, only to speak.

She said: Yes, my lord.

He sat at the log on the other side of the fire pit, facing her.

She, at his sitting, turned slowly. She did not, in the turning, take her hand to any weapon. Her hand was at her lap.

She was twenty-eight. She had her father's eyes (by Brother Aldwen's careful prior reading of her father's old portraits in the Pennarith records). Her hair was cut short, the way Cult-appointed Ash-Wolves' hair was traditionally cut at the ceremony of appointment. Her hands were a young woman's hands. The ceremonial working that the Cult had laid on her at the appointment was visible at the edges of her shoulders as a careful darkening of the air.

She did not, this morning, look like a wolf.

She looked like a young woman of twenty-eight who had been told a thing about her father that had been a lie and who was, this morning, by the unraveling of having begun to suspect.

Kaelith said: Aleri. The Cult told you that your father was killed by Sunward retainers in service to me.

She said: Yes, my lord.

Your father was, by the Cult's own records, a member of the Cult of the Broken Chain for nineteen years. He was killed by his own household guard. Your father himself had instructed that guard, three months earlier, to kill him if he attempted to leave a sealed chamber after a public confession against the Cult. He had not yet attempted to leave. The household guard, by their own reading, killed him preemptively when the council's collapse made it clear that your father would soon be facing public confession. The household guard who killed him is, this morning, in the cells beneath the central pavilion. He has confessed. He has named the Cult senior who passed the kill order to him. The kill order originated from within the Cult's central administration, not from the Sunward house.

She did not, at the saying, move.

She listened.

Nyra came up. She stood at three paces. She did not, in the standing, place her hand on her sword.

She said: Aleri. The Order of the Silver Dawn has sanctuary by the seventh-clause provision of the council charter. The provision, as reconstituted last week, allows the chapter house to receive any person who has been recruited under false circumstances, who has not, in the recruiting, completed the working that would bind them irrevocably. The Cult's appointment of the new Ash-Wolf is, by Brother Aldwen's reading, not irrevocable. You can, this morning, accept the chapter house's sanctuary.

The Malrien-graft was not present.

Halric Vendell had died seven weeks ago. He had not, in his last hours, ridden to the Ashwood. He had ridden the eastern road only as far as the flat clearing at the third bend. He had not entered the Greenwood proper. The chapter house's Lord Malrien commemoration had been done at the family chapel.

This morning, in his place, the particular gesture he would have made was made by Captain Moren.

Captain Moren came up. He stood at three paces beside Nyra. He said, with a careful steadiness: Aleri. I knew your father. I served on the road past his estate when I was a young man. Your father, in those days, was a careful man with a quiet generosity. He was the kind of man who was easy to mistake, by the slow long pressure of nineteen years, for the man the Cult would have wanted him to be. He was not, by my own remembering, the man the Cult wanted. He had been recruited by a man he respected, and by the time he understood what he had been signing he had signed too much to walk away. He spent the rest of his life trying to undo it. He failed. He died, this morning, in part because he had wanted, by his own slow long reading, to walk away. The kill order he signed was the protocol of a man who had decided that the only way to walk away was to ensure he could not be brought back if he flinched at the door.

She listened.

She said, after a long pause: He told me, when I was twelve, that he had loved my mother. My mother died when I was four. He told me, when I was twelve, that the love had been the careful thing that had made his work bearable.

She drew breath.

She said: Captain Moren. You are not lying to me.

Captain Moren said: No, Aleri.

She placed her hand at her lap. She did not, in the placing, draw any weapon.

She said: My lord. Sister Brightblade. Captain Moren.

She paused.

She said: I am not, this morning, going to surrender. I am also not, this morning, going to attack. I would like, by my own choice, to do a third thing.

She stood up.

She said: I would like to walk into the Ashwood. The Ashwood, by my own reading these past weeks, has been, in some particular way, beginning to receive me. I have been told, in my apprentice working with the Ash-Wolf's particular cadence, that the Ashwood was the original Ash-Wolf's by the Cult's binding, but the Ashwood has, in these past weeks, not felt to me like a thing that is bound. The Ashwood has felt like a thing that is waiting.

She paused.

She said: I do not, by my own training, know what the Ashwood is waiting for. I have, however, the steady feeling that I would like to walk into the Ashwood and see. I would like to walk in the direction of the deep interior, alone, with no working laid on me from your party. I would like the Ash-Wolf working that was laid on me at the appointment to be, by my own walking, slowly unwound by the Ashwood itself. I do not, by Brother Aldwen's reading, know if this is possible. I would, however, like to try.

Kaelith looked at Brother Aldwen.

Brother Aldwen said: My lord. By the careful protocol of the Ash-Wolf workings, an Ash-Wolf who walks into the Ashwood with no party is, by the working's protocol, given to the Ashwood. The working has, in the long telling, two outcomes. One is that the Ashwood takes the Ash-Wolf into itself, and the working unwinds, and the Ash-Wolf becomes part of the Ashwood's slow recovery. The other is that the Ashwood rejects the Ash-Wolf, and the Ash-Wolf is, by the rejection, dispersed.

He paused.

He said: In neither outcome does the Ash-Wolf return.

Aleri said: Yes, Brother.

Kaelith stood.

He looked at her.

He said: Aleri. You may walk.

He said, after a pause: I would like, with your permission, to give you something to carry on the walk.

She said: Yes, my lord.

He took, from his coat pocket, the small wooden horse.

He held it in his open palm.

He said: This horse was given to my father by the original Lord Malrien at my father's coronation as Sunward heir, twenty-three years ago. The original Lord Malrien died at the flat clearing twenty years ago. The horse has been at the bedside table of my chambers for eleven years. It has been at the bedside since I have been the Sunward heir. It has been in my hand, this morning, for the slow reason that I had wanted to bring it to the Ashwood. I had not, until your asking, known why.

He paused.

He said: Aleri. The horse has been in two Sunward generations and one Malrien generation's hands. The horse has been carried by men who have, in different ways, lost what they could not refuse losing. Carry it. Carry it into the Ashwood. Let the Ashwood, if the Ashwood receives you, receive the horse with you. Let the horse be, if the Ashwood disperses you, the small item the Ashwood remembers having been given.

She received the horse.

She held it in her palm.

She closed her hand around it.

She said: Thank you, my lord.

She said: Sister Brightblade. The Order of the Silver Dawn has, in the past nineteen years, kept a record of my father's steady kindnesses. I have, in my own apprentice work, read the record. I would like to ask, by my own request, that the record be released to my mother's sister, who is alive in the Free Cities and who has been carrying my father's name with shame. I would like her to read the record before she dies. I would like her to know, before she dies, that her brother-in-law was, in the slow telling, both the man she has been ashamed of and the man she would have, if she had read the record, been able to grieve.

Nyra said: Yes, Aleri. The chapter house will release the record to your aunt before the new year.

Aleri nodded.

She walked, slowly, past the log.

She walked past the fire pit.

She walked past the canvas tent.

She walked into the Ashwood's deep interior.

She walked at the pace of a young woman who had, in the past weeks, been preparing for this walk without knowing.

She did not, in the walking, look back.

The riding party watched.

She walked for perhaps half an hour. The Ashwood, around her, did not, in any visible reading, receive or reject.

Then, at perhaps the half-hour mark, the distance between her and the riding party became, by the Ashwood's working, no longer visible.

She was, by the half-hour, gone.

The Ashwood, in the next sleep cycle, gained another small set of green shoots on its eastern side.

The shoots were, this time, more than four per tree.

The riding party did not, in the morning, move.

Kaelith, after the half-hour, walked back to his horse.

He laid his palm on the horse's neck.

He said, very quietly: Captain.

Captain Moren said: My lord.

Kaelith said: We will, this morning, ride to the flat clearing. The original Lord Malrien is buried in the Greenwood. He has not, by my reading of the records, had a careful marker laid on the burial site. I would like to lay the flat marker the chapter house prepared in the family chapel last week. Sister Mara has it.

Sister Mara nodded. She had been carrying the marker, wrapped in cloth, in her own saddlebag.

The riding party rode the slow ride back to the flat clearing.

At the clearing, Sister Mara unwrapped the marker.

It was a flat stone of cobalt-and-silver. The chapel-keeper had carved it. It bore the original Lord Malrien's name and the names of Lyanna and Elena.

Sister Mara laid it at the place the original Lord Malrien had died.

The marker fit the place.

The riding party stood at the flat clearing for a still moment.

Kaelith laid his palm on the marker.

The original Lord Malrien's seventy seconds, in his sternum, settled by the small fraction.

The Codex grieved with him.

The Ashwood, behind the riding party, was, by some steady reading none of them had yet articulated, recovering.

The riding party rode, in the late-winter afternoon, back toward Valdris.