Kieri managed not to laugh, with some difficulty. “Uncle—”

“It is shallow, you will say. But beauty is, to us, an outward sign of inward health and soundness. Carvarsin may be, for all I know, honorable and kind, but to me—to me he is a caricature of a human. Those lumps are like cankers on the trunk of a tree, signifying damage within.”

“I will not choose Carvarsin,” Kieri said. “It is not my intent to make the task more difficult for you.”

“On my part, I must ask how your work with Orlith is coming,” Amrothlin said. “I have what he tells me, but what does it feel like to you?”

An intrusion into work of more urgency, Kieri thought, but he could not say that, not now. “It feels slow,” Kieri said. “I already feel the taig, so sitting still and trying to let it enter me, as Orlith says, does not—I mean, I cannot understand what it is to accomplish.”

Amrothlin nodded. “I thought perhaps that was it,” he said. “You have taig-sense, but you do not know what can be done with it. Well … do you feel it more now than you did at first?”

“I think so. I am not sure. I don’t think I feel it the way Orlith means. He asks me to feel the taig of individual trees—that is their life-force, is it not?”

“Not exactly. Consider a tree—what do you think of? What do you see in your mind?”

“A tree—the trunk, the branches, the leaves.”

“That is not a tree,” Amrothlin said.

“Well, and roots,” Kieri said.

“Roots, indeed, but—a tree is and is not an individual. And you as well, of course.”

“I’m sorry—?”

“Orlith should have started with simpler explanations,” Amrothlin said. “A tree is not a thing, like this dish or the fruit in it—” He pointed. “A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you see. Roots to leaves, yes—those you can, in part, see. But it is more—it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.”

“You mean … it’s all connected? I knew that …”

“More than connected—” Amrothlin frowned. “It is hard to say in your speech. Your old humans had more words for it, the weaving of life’s fabric, they called it, but more specifically. You cannot rightly speak of a tree as an individual, apart from the earth in which it grows, the air it breathes, the sunlight that wakes it to life, the living things that surround it. And yet each tree is also an individual—we think of them as having personalities, you know. They have fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, throughout the forest; they have a history going back to the first Singing.”