“I would like to be alone for a while,” Kieri said. “I don’t—I can’t—meet the Council right now. I need time to calm myself down, and try to calm the taig, just that.”

“I will place Squires to guard your privacy, then,” Garris said.

Kieri listened to his footsteps on the garden paths, then the gentle thump of a door, and stared at the falling water. He tried techniques Orlith had taught him, slipping his mind into the water. Cold water, winter water, ice-edged wherever it slowed down; he shivered, thinking of Arian off somewhere in the winter woods, alone.

“She would be very angry if she knew I had done this,” a voice said. As beautiful as harp music, a gentle melancholy in it … Kieri looked aside and saw Arian’s father sitting on the next bench.

“What—how did you—?”

The elf made a gesture with his hands, and a pattern of light formed. “The Lady’s quarrel with me goes beyond my predilection for human women,” he said. “We elves have gifts in different measure, as do you humans, and in my case—my sensing of the taig is greater than hers.”

“How can that be?” Kieri asked. “She’s the queen, isn’t she?”

“She is the Lady of the Ladysforest,” the elf said gravely. “She has great power—greater than mine, in many ways, but not in all. I honor her, but she resents that the taig tells me more than it tells her.”

“If you know the taig so well, you know it rejoiced when Arian and I came together.”

The elf said nothing.

“I do not know your name,” Kieri said. “She did not introduce us.”

“She did not intend us to know each other,” the elf said. “My name is long and difficult in human speech, but Dameroth will do.”

“Well, Dameroth, why have you come to me? And against the Lady’s wishes?” Kieri had not known any elf to cross the Lady before.

“I want you to understand my daughter. Of all my children—and all are half-elven, as I sired no full elves—one of the Lady’s complaints—Arian inherited most my sensitivity to the taig. It was her taig-sense, that and her mother—”

“Her mother?”

“Her mother had a strong sense of duty, and brought her up to the same. Put those together—” Dameroth placed his long-fingered hands palm to palm, then interlaced his fingers. “—the taig-sense and the duty, and she could do no other than leave.”

“She could have trusted me—” The pain and humiliation he’d felt when Arian turned and ran down the hill stabbed him again.

“It was not lack of trust in you, Sir King,” Dameroth said. “I know her well; I knew her as a child—and a stubborn little fireball she was, too. She befriended the taig early, and as a ranger bent her whole attention on the taig. She cannot ignore its distress any more than she could ignore a splinter in her eye. The taig and this realm have been her whole life. Her love for you has grown out of that, root and leaf and flower, and to live and flourish must remain so. She cannot sever that connection; the flower would wither and fade.”