“You are half-elven,” Orlith said. “You should be able to follow either.”

“I am but one person,” Kieri said, “and for fifty years knew nothing of my elven heritage. Do not bend hardened wood until it breaks.” He took a breath and dared more. “I am, after all, the king the Lady chose to rule with. She and I together, I thought: making decisions, taking actions. You know I have asked her, more than once, to talk with me, help me bring our people closer. Yet she does not come, and I do not believe she spent a full quarter of the year searching out a mate for me.”

“You criticize the Lady?” Orlith looked furious again.

“I ask why,” Kieri said. “Does she want me to fail? This realm to fail?”

“Of course not!”

“Then she should do her duty.”

“You have no right to speak of her duty!”

“I am the king,” Kieri said. “That gives me the right. This realm is my responsibility, and I am not going to let it fail because the Lady will not stir herself to tend it. She can spare the time for this, out of her immortality, or she can give up her claim to sovereignty.”

“You dare! This land was ours; we share it with lateborn out of generosity.”

“I dare because I must,” Kieri said. “This land survived so long because—so the tales say, at least—elves and humans worked together. Now, as you well know, they do not—and she is not helping. Was she like this when my mother was queen? Did she help my sister when she came so young to the throne? Or did she withdraw to her elvenhome whenever my sister asked for her help?” That, after all, might explain his sister’s sense of betrayal, if after losing mother and brother, her grandmother refused to have anything to do with her.

Orlith’s expression was suddenly guarded. “Your sister did not ask.”

“Why not, do you think?”

Orlith shrugged. “How would I know? She never spoke to me.”

“Perhaps the Lady never offered,” Kieri said. “I wonder if she even cares that my sister and I were her grandchildren.”

“The Lady saved you,” Orlith pointed out. “If she did not care, do you think she would have come?”

It made no sense. “I’m grateful for that,” Kieri said. “But I don’t understand why she is so … so changeable.”

“She is the Lady,” Orlith said, as if that explained and excused everything.

“And I am the king,” Kieri said, “but that does not mean I can do whatever I please from moment to moment.”

Orlith glared but said, “Then perhaps the king’s majesty will condescend to have the lesson which I came to give. We shall go to the garden.”

Kieri sighed inwardly, but he might as well comply. Though he felt—he was sure—that he was gaining taig-sense even when not around elves, he knew he needed more instruction.

In the garden, surrounded by the roses in full bloom and the other flowers, birds, insects, he tried to do as Orlith wanted, and use only his taig-sense to identify the components of the garden, but he could not keep his nose from telling him where the roses were, his ears from noticing the wasp that zipped past his ear.