Chapter 162: Terms of Receipt (Patreon)

Neither of them spoke for a while.

Mirethiel lifted the dish half an inch, rotated it a quarter turn, and set it down on the same faded ring of stain it had come from. Then she reached past him and straightened a wooden paddle on its hook. It had been hanging straight already.

When she turned back, the spectacles were exactly where they belonged and her mouth had found its usual line.

"Now, tell me where you heard it."

"I told you. In the Reach."

"That's—" She stopped, and started again with more control. "I've been there, you know. Hundreds of times more than you have. I walked those groves before your grandfather was born, and I didn't hear any of it."

Kage had planned this conversation for after the guild meeting. He'd planned to have an escort lined up, a route he trusted, and a short version that sounded less insane. He had none of those. What he had was a petal that had just sung her family's working song back at her, and an elf who had stopped accepting in the Reach as an answer.

Should have stuck with handing over the flowers and leaving.

"The flowers you've been gathering and commissioning," he said. "The Duskblooms. They're what's left of an archive."

"An archive of what?"

"Everything. Court business. Trade agreements, births, private things people wanted kept. The elves who planted them spoke into the buds and the petals held it. The whole sanctuary in the Reach was a library. They just didn't bother with books."

Her thumb pressed into the side of the brush handle. "Go on."

"I saw them working. Bloom-weavers tending the beds while a choir sang underneath. Same rhythm you just used. Same pause." He nodded toward the dish. "One of the weavers—a woman—had a mark on her sleeve. A silver leaf crossed with a dyer's brush. And under it, a name."

He let the half second go by.

"Vael."

Mirethiel took a fresh scrap of paper from beneath the counter and a stick of charcoal from the pot beside the mirror, and put both in front of him.

"Draw it."

"I'm not much of an artist. My sister took all the talent for that."

She looked at him over the spectacles. Given the coat he was wearing, the plume on his head, and the fact that he'd just hummed a hundreds-of-years-old melody from memory, it was a fair look.

He drew it.

The leaf came first, long and narrow, the veins angled back toward the stem the way the weaver's embroidery had shown them. Then the brush across it, handle low and to the left, bristles fanned at the top right. He remembered the bristles had been split into three short strokes, and he drew them that way. The name went beneath, small. He didn't know the script, so he copied the shapes and hoped.

Mirethiel turned the paper toward herself with one finger.

She studied it for a long time. Long enough that Kage started second-guessing the angle of the handle.

"The brush is wrong," she said at last. "It crossed higher. Here." She touched a point near the leaf's midrib. "And the leaf had a notch at the tip. Small. You'd only see it on fresh stock."

"Fresh stock?"

"My grandmother stamped this onto the selvedge of every bolt she sold. Carved it into a pearwood block. It wore down to nothing by the time I was apprenticed, and she never replaced it. Said the trade knew whose cloth it was without it." She set the charcoal down. "I thought it was a dyer's mark. Ours. Something one of my great-grandmothers had made up."

"Maybe it was. Just earlier than you thought."

"How much earlier?"

"Before the forest grew over the sanctuary, I don't know how many years exactly." Kage leaned his elbows on the counter. "That's why I came to you."

“And you think that woman was one of my ancestors?”

"Everything points toward it, yes."

"Points."

"The name. The mark. The song. Your family's been working the same flowers for generations without knowing what they were." He shrugged. "I can't prove the rest. Something down there can."

That earned him the spectacles coming off.

She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and held them there, eyes closed. Kage waited. The shop smelled of mordant and warm wax, and somewhere in the back room a vat ticked as it cooled.

She put the spectacles back on.

"What, exactly, are you asking me to do?"

There it was. Kage had been trying to find the version of this that didn't sound like a con.

"There's a chamber beneath the center of the reach, beneath the Central Well. The elves wove their last decree into the oldest blooms and laid it down there before the sanctuary fell. And a guardian was left down there. It's been keeping the Decree sealed ever since, as far as I know." He kept his voice flat. "I collected enough petals to wake it. Don't ask how many. So, now it's awake. It says the Decree opens for one voice, one person. Someone with the Court's blood. And that person has to come willingly and hear what it is before they decide anything."

"A guardian. Sounds pleasant and not ominous at all."

"It wasn't hostile. It was polite, actually. More polite than most people I've met this week."

"And getting there?"

"That's… well, if nothing goes wrong, it should be safe." He counted it out for her, because she would ask anyway. "The approach is held by a guild. Greenlanders. They've claimed the zone and they're guarding the entrance today because I asked them to. The guardian opened a safe passage, too."

Mirethiel looked at him with an expression he couldn't read and suspected he wouldn't enjoy if he could.

"You're very forthcoming all of a sudden."

"You'd find out on the walk."

She picked the brush up off the dish, examined the bristles, and set it in a jar of clear solvent. Practical motion. Her hands needed something, he suspected.

"And this decree. What is it?"

"All I know is what the guardian's told me: a charge. Something whoever hears it is meant to carry."

"What charge?"

"No idea, it wouldn't tell me."

"But you'd like me to go and find out."

"Yeah." Kage met her eyes. "You can still refuse when you get there and hear it."

That landed about how he'd expected.

He had walked in here asking a woman to cross a contested forest and stand in front of some guardian, to accept a responsibility neither of them could describe. If a client had pitched him that deal back when he was running contracts, he'd have blocked them. He couldn't tell her what accepting the charge would mean. He could give her the right to walk away once she was informed.

"The guardian said so himself," he said. "The Decree would stay there. It's kept it this long. It said it could keep it longer."

"And you?"

"Would have spent a very unpleasant night collecting flowers."

The corner of her mouth moved. It was gone almost immediately.

"You expect me to believe that you did all of this," she gestured at the dish, the petals, him, "and you'd shrug if I said no."

"I wouldn't shrug," Kage said. "I'd be annoyed for some time, true. I'd live."

Probably. There was a quest log behind that sentence and a seed somewhere in the Glimmerwood that rhymed with all of this, and he wasn't sure live with it was how Morpheus liked its stories to end. That was his problem, though. It wasn't hers.

Mirethiel came around the end of the counter and pulled a ledger off the shelf, opened it, and uncapped a pen. She didn't write anything. She held the pen above the page, and Kage recognized the posture. It was the way she'd stood over his coat before quoting him two gold.

"Who controls the entrance?"

"The Greenlanders. An officer named Erthrix."

"Is he expecting me?"

"He's expecting someone. I didn't give him your name."

"Good." The pen made a small mark. "Who accompanies us?"

"Me."

"And?"

Kage hesitated a fraction too long.

"I'm working on it."

She looked up. "You don't have an escort."

"I have a guild holding the entrance and a meeting this afternoon about the rest."

"So you don't have an escort."

"Not yet."

Fair. He'd been thinking of this the way he thought of everything in Crown. If the run went bad, he'd respawn, lose experience and currency and some items. She wouldn't. Whatever Morpheus did with NPCs who died in a ravine at the bottom of a forest, there was no corpse run for her. Forty years of shop, a new dye line, a grandmother's pearwood stamp in a drawer somewhere, and all of it would end on one mistake. Every question she was asking was one he should have asked himself on the way here.

"The Greenlanders want this to work," he said. "The guardian told them the wells have been drying for years because nobody's tending the keeping. If the sanctuary comes back, the wells run again, and they're farming better ground than they've ever had. The only person who can start that is… you."

"They've agreed to let us through."

"Yes."

"Have they agreed to let us leave?"

Kage opened his mouth and closed it.

"They need you alive and willing," he said. "Both. If anything happens to you down there, they lose the one thing they're guarding the hole for. That's leverage." He made himself say the rest. "But it's an arrangement between people. Erthrix is solid. His council, I don't know."

"So I'm the goods being delivered."

"If you put it that way. You're the only one who can sign for them."

She considered that. The pen tapped once against the ledger's spine.

"Then here are my terms," she said, the same way she'd said two gold. "The route is settled and the escort is settled before I set foot outside the east gate. I won't be making up arrangements in a field with people who've been burning my reagents. Not by you halfway there, and not by some officer on the rim."

"Fine."

"You walk with me. The whole way. You don't hand me over to a stranger with a shield and go off chasing petals."

"I wasn't going to. Trust me, I've had enough of the petals."

"I didn't ask what you were going to do." She made another mark. "And understand this. I'm agreeing to go and listen. If I don't like what that thing has to say, I leave. You don't argue with me in front of it."

"Agreed."

"You say that very easily."

"It's the only term I could have written myself."

She set the pen down.

For a moment she didn't do anything. Then she pulled the charcoal sketch back across the counter and looked at it again, the leaf with its missing notch, the brush he'd crossed too low. Her eyes moved from the paper to the jar of solvent where her brush stood with its bristles slowly clearing.

"My grandmother corrected that pause every time I hurried it," she said. "Every time. I was forty before I stopped hurrying it, and she still corrected it, because I'd started holding it too long out of spite." She almost smiled. "I asked her once what the rest was for. She said it was where the binding listened. I told her bindings don't listen and that it's stupid. She told me to hold it anyway."

She turned the sketch toward herself.

"Eleven years I've been working on this line. Eleven years of baths that came out muddy, and matrices that took the color and dropped it in a day, and pigments that sulked. I thought I was inventing something." She tapped the paper, right where the brush crossed the leaf. "My grandmother… her mother… we kept the strokes and lost the reason, and we were proud of keeping the strokes."

She looked at the dish, where the petal lay violet and quiet.

"Someone knew."

Kage didn't say anything. There wasn't anything he could add that would improve it.

Mirethiel closed the ledger.

"Arrange your escort," she said. "Then come and tell me when."

[New Quest: The Legacy of Vael]

The panel hadn't finished forming when the filigree around it started to move.

Silver roots crawled inward from the edges, closing over the new entry line by line. Then they reached farther up the quest log and caught around The Final Sylvan Decree. Kage watched the two entries draw together until their lettering overlapped and vanished beneath the roots.

A new title appeared.

[Quests Merged: The Legacy of Vael / The Final Sylvan Decree]

[Unique Quest Discovered: The Restoration of Sylvarath]

[Grade: Unique]

[Objective: Restore Sylvarath, the Silver-Leaf Sanctuary.]

[Current Stage: Escort Mirethiel Vael to the Root-Choir Chamber to hear the Final Sylvan Decree.]

He read the objective. He'd agreed to bring someone down a staircase. Apparently, the quest expected him to put the sanctuary back together afterward.

Mirethiel was already working. She'd pulled a slate from beneath the counter and was chalking a list onto it, her handwriting small and fast.

"I have three commissions in the vats," she said without looking up. "One of them is a wedding. It cannot be late, and it cannot be finished by my apprentice, who would cheerfully turn the bride's mother aquamarine. I'll need the afternoon to settle those." The chalk kept moving. "When?"

"I have commitments this morning that I can't move," Kage said. "Meeting this afternoon. I'll know more after that. Evening departure, if it comes together."

"If."

"I'll confirm before I bring you anything."

"You'll confirm before I close the shutters," she said. "I'm not sitting here in my walking coat waiting to find out whether your friends came through."

"Before the shutters."

She nodded and wrote something that might have been his name, or might have been idiot. It was upside down and in a hurry.

Kage stood and pushed the stool back under the counter. At the door he paused, hand on the latch.

"Bring something suitable for walking," he said.

Mirethiel looked at him over her spectacles.

"Oh, please. I've spent more time in the woods than you've been alive."

He didn't have a comeback for that. He let himself out.

The artisan district was waking up now. Shutters were going up along the lane toward the Promenade, a cart of raw wool was blocking half the street, and an apprentice two doors down was swearing at a kiln. The light was clean and ordinary, nothing like the gold he'd pulled out of a hollow tree last night.

Kage checked the time.

Later than I wanted.

And somewhere under all of it, with barely nine hours left on the timer, a blank page was waiting for a verse that would tell a room full of nobles the truth about a painter from Greywater.

He hadn't written a single line of it.