The voices sighed and hummed and sighed some more. –Do not be sad, Penderrin– she whispered. –I am not sad. I am happy. You can hear it in my voice, can’t you? I made a choice. The aeriads asked me to join them, to help you and myself. While you slept, I went with them from the surface of the earth to the Downbelow. From the sunlight and air world of Father Tanequil to the darkness and earth world of Mother Tanequil. She roots deep, Pen, to provide for her children, to give them life, to allow them the freedom she can never have. I saw the truth of what she is. Of what they both are. Joined as one—Father, the limbs; Mother, the roots. One lives aboveground, but the other must forever live below. She gets lonely. She needs company. I was a gift to her from Father Tanequil. But it was what I wanted. Perhaps he knew that when he sent me to her. Perhaps he knows us both better than we know ourselves. They are very old spirits, Pen. They were here when the world was born, when the Word was still young and the Faerie creatures newly made. We are children in their eyes–

“We are Men!” he snapped. “And they don’t know what’s right for us! They don’t know anything about us because they aren’t like us! Don’t you see? We were manipulated! We were tricked!”

A long silence punctuated his angry words. –No, Pen. We did what we thought was best. Both of us. I don’t regret it. I won’t. We have the lives we have chosen, whether fate or the tanequil or something larger pushed us to that choice–

He took a long slow breath to calm himself. She was wrong; he knew she was wrong. But there was nothing he could do about it. It was over and done with. He would have to live with it, although he couldn’t imagine how he would ever do that.

“Did it hurt at all?” he asked quietly. “Your transformation? Was there any pain?”

–None, Pen–

“But what of your body? Did it just . . . ?”

He couldn’t finish the thought, unable to bear the image it conjured—an image of her turning to dust, disintegrating.

Laughter greeted his failure, gentle and soothing. –Kept safe and unchanging in her arms, I sleep with Mother Tanequil, Pen, down within the earth, in the darkness and quiet, where she takes root. She nourishes me, so that I can live. If I were to die, I would cease to exist, even as an aeriad–