“We should follow her?” asked Kaelith.

“No,” Kieri said. He could scarcely speak to anyone for the storm of emotions he felt. “It was her choice to leave; it will be her choice to return when she is ready.” He could feel the taig’s distress and struggled to calm himself. He didn’t want to be calm; he wanted to smack his grandmother sideways, force her to accept his choice.

Orlith appeared in the forecourt. “Sir King, the taig—”

“Is not nearly as upset as I am,” Kieri said. “I’m going to the rose garden.”

“Do you want me to—”

“I want you to talk sense to the Lady,” Kieri said. The year’s frustrations edged his voice. “If you can.”

Orlith’s expression stiffened for a moment. “Oh,” he said finally. “You have quarreled with her … about Arian?”

“Yes,” Kieri said between clenched teeth.

“Where is Arian?”

“She left,” Kieri said, “for the sake of the taig, she said.”

“Oh,” Orlith said again. “Oh … dear.”

“If you can tell that … that person anything,” Kieri said, “tell her—” But he could not say it, not to Orlith.

“May the First Singer grant you harmony,” Orlith said.

“May the gods grant my grandmother sense,” Kieri said, and stalked off. He knew his anger swirled around him like a cape; he knew it roiled the taig; for the moment he did not care. The taig should be upset; the taig should carry to his grandmother how he felt about her interference. All the year long she had failed him, refusing to help when he asked her, and now interfering when he needed only her acquiescence.

Doubt tickled his mind as he came into the rose garden, its bareness filled with the silvery chill light of winter. Not even a faint scent from the fallen petals this long after their bloom, nothing to soothe him but a quiet sadness. Was it really love he felt? Could he have come to love so soon?

He recognized the quality of light as enchantment and burst out, “Do not try that with me! I will not have it, I tell you!” The taig recoiled; the very rose stems seemed to twitch away from him. Kieri tried to reach out to the taig without encountering his grandmother’s glamour; it was like reaching through water to take a pebble from the stream, but he felt the taig open to him a little. To the taig alone, he murmured. “I began to love her earlier, but tried not to, for her sake, for what I thought I knew. We are root and branch, fern and sapling, the moss and the bark … we have grown together all the seasons since I first saw her, that day in the riding hall, and for me that is time enough.”

The glamour pushed doubt at him, but he pushed back, refusing. Finally it withdrew, but only a short distance. He thought he sensed his grandmother nearby, wrapped in the elvenhome kingdom, invisible but present.