“Why not?” I asked.
“Old Maun never told us why he fled the Fireborn’s army. The Wood provided his family the sanctuary they desired, far from the machinations and monsters of the south. They made peace with the wraiths of the weald and became caretakers of the Wood, even as the wraiths became their guardians. We stay for the same reasons he did. It is our home.”
Not for all of you. “Why did Johanna leave?” I asked, thinking of our encounter in the Widdermere.
Frega gave a violent start, nearly upending the jug. “Where did you hear that name?”
Alastair leaned forward in a conciliatory gesture that only just disguised the hand resting on his axe hilt. “We met her in the Marshes. She saved us from a harbinger of valkyries.”
The furrows in Frega’s brow deepened.
“Madam Mauntell?”
“My granddaughter has no part in our family anymore,” she said at last. “We do not speak her name within the Grove of Maun.”
“She said she comes back here once a year,” I tried.
“She serves her penance every year before the Long Night, it’s true,” Frega said with a dismissive gesture, “but we do not speak her name. I did not give you the guest-right to tell me of the exile. Give me news of the world, Daireds, or leave.”
Curiosity gnawed at me, but I ignored it, conscious of the warning in her tone. Between the two of us, Alastair and I gave Frega a halting account of the War of the Worm and the events that had brought us to Castle Selwyn. She had surprisingly little interest in the rise of either the Greater or Lesser Lindworms, but our news of ghastradi unsettled her.
“When you mentioned the ghast-ridden earlier, I thought you were speaking in jest,” she said, “but now I see you were not. You say you’ve met not one but two? And these walking freely through the kingdom?”
“Aye.”
“These creatures spoke to you with one mind, one voice?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I said, “but they did both warn us—”
She rose as if I hadn’t spoken, her gaze turned inward. Her gnarled hands tugged at the direwolf pelt she wore around her shoulders as she paced. “I don’t understand. This evil was broken ages ago, sundered and separated, buried and unmade,” she muttered. “Thell’s circle is complete; what was bound cannot walk the waking world again. Not now, not ever.”
Movement across the hut caught my eye and I drew in a sharp breath. “Alastair.”
A dark shape was moving beneath the bark, moving in an agitated rhythm that matched Frega’s furious pace. Alastair sprang to his feet. “Madam Mauntell, what is that?”
She stared at him as if she’d forgotten we were there. “Eh?”
“The weald-wraith.” I stood and backed toward the wall as the dark stain spread across the wood. “The thing that healed Goryn. The thing you said was not a ghast.” I pointed. “That . . . thing.”
Frega brushed her fingers across the trunk. The shadow rose slightly and wove dark tendrils through her fingers before sinking out of sight. “I ask you here to share with me your tales of the world, but it seems you know less than we do. I shall have to teach you your own history. What do you know of the An-Eskatha, Lady Daired?”
“The what?”
“The root is in Eth. Surely the Rider knows it.”
“It means the eldest,” Alastair said carefully.
Eldest. Where had I heard that before?
“They were the creatures that came before humans, Tekari, Idar, and Shani, old before even the oldest of the Oldkind,” Frega said. “The Eskatha came from the first things the gods shaped from emptiness, the four great guardian spirits bound to the world at its birth. We call them Elementari, for their true names were banished in their breaking and— You scoff, dragonrider. Do you doubt me?”
“There are no creatures older than the Oldkind,” Alastair said.
“And why should there not be?”
“If there were such things, the Nestmothers and the Vehryshi would know of them. My family would know of them. There’d be stories, histories—”
“Yet there are none. Telling, this silence, is it not? Why do you think dragons have put it from their minds? Do they wish to be replaced as first among the gods’ creations? No, dragonkind has chosen to forget. Even the dragons of the Ruined East, who forget nothing, have put it from their minds. Humans are no different. The Oldkind who do remember do not speak of them anymore, for the Elementari rose against their makers, and for that, they were unmade. Broken without remedy, their sundered spirits faded into the wood and water, stone and storm. They became An-Eskatha: the Tohu and Ummerue, weald-wraiths and the Woman of the Waste, elemental ghosts surviving on what life they can borrow from the living.” She tapped the tree. “Whatever form that takes.”
The Green Lady. I remembered now where I had heard the term Eldest before. “What about ghasts?” I asked.
Frega shifted and the weald-wraith fluttered beneath her touch. “An-Eskatha were born of the breaking of the three great Elementari,” she said slowly, then stopped.
“And the fourth?”
She spun on me with sudden violence, “No! We Mauntells might not know much of the outside world, but we know better than to speak of that. Do not mention these creatures again.”
I opened my mouth, but Alastair put his hand on my shoulder. Anger swelled inside me, not at him, but at the answers that Frega dangled before us, only to snatch them away at the last second. We’d come too far for that. “You say the weald-wraiths aren’t ghasts,” I said, “yet they healed your grandson’s wound like a ghast. How do you expect us to believe you?”
Frega snorted. “Because our wraiths demand neither hearts nor heartstones for their protection, girl. They asked nothing of us except that we guard the trees that keep them alive. It is a fair exchange.” She moved to the door. “I am keeping you from your rest, Daireds. Good evening.”
“Madam Mauntell, wait.”
Alastair caught her arm as she raised the door-pelt, then dropped it just as quickly as the weald-wraith leapt from the tree, its snarling shadow form diving between him and Frega. He fell back with a cry. From beyond the door Akarra growled.
“Khela?”
“Do not harm me and it will not harm you,” Frega said, watching as the wraith took on a wolf-like form and stalked closer to Alastair, its tail drawn out long and thin to keep it tethered to the tree.
“Khela!”
Alastair spoke to Akarra in Eth and her growling subsided. The wraith stopped and looked to Frega. She made a motion with her hand and it retreated, its shadow-stuff spooling like black wool back into the tree.
“Well?” Frega said with a raised eyebrow.
“You said the wraiths don’t demand your heartstones,” Alastair said after he was sure the weald-wraith was gone. “What did you mean by that?”
What anger had filled her expression at the mention of ghasts drained away, replaced by surprise. She looked from Alastair to me. “You don’t know? You understand, of course, the nature of heartstones.”
“They’re gems,” I said, “formed from the last drop of lifeblood—”
Frega laughed. “A drop of lifeblood? Is that what the holy scholars of your kingdom have taught you? A tale fit for children, that. A heartstone forms from the last drop of blood, yes, but they are so much more than pretty trinkets. They are the gift of the gods to all living beings: all the beauty, all the pain, all the little hatreds and loves of a life condensed into a gem, faceted like the Godself and given to remind us of our mortality.”