They were given rooms in a trunk.
Sito had assumed it was a figure of speech right up until an elf showed him through a doorway cut into living wood and he found himself in a round chamber forty feet across, with a floor of fitted planks, a bed built into the curve of the wall, and a window looking out over a two-hundred-foot drop into green.
There was no door for the entrance, just a simple curtain.
He spent several minutes trying to work out where the tree stopped and the room began, gave up, and went to find the bath.
The bath was a carved stone basin fed by a wooden channel that ran in through one wall and out through the other, and the water was cold enough to take his breath.
He scrubbed until his skin went pink and his fingers wrinkled and twenty-six days of road came off him in grey water that ran away down the channel to wherever.
When he came out, somebody had laid clothes on the bed. Epirian clothes, from the wagons, the formal ones Aunt Lia had packed and he had entirely forgotten about.
Black and deep red. Fitted. Stiff at the collar.
'Great,' he thought. 'Four weeks of dirt and freedom and now I get to be a doll again.'
He put them on. He put the pendant on over them, because he'd promised, and because it went with the black.
Then he stood in the middle of a room in a tree with three hours to wait and nothing at all to do.
---
Willem and Ramsey were posted outside his curtain, and they lasted about forty minutes.
To be fair to them, it wasn't carelessness. Sito simply waited until an elf came past with a tray and the two guards both turned to look, and then went out the window.
There was a branch. It was the width of a road. He'd been looking at it since he arrived.
He went up rather than down, because down meant people, and up meant nobody was there to tell him he couldn't.
The bark of the great trees was deeply ridged, almost stepped, and there were pegs and cut handholds in places where somebody had clearly made the same climb a thousand times before him.
He climbed for a long time. His arms started burning about halfway and he kept going because they were supposed to burn.
Eighty feet up he came out onto a flat spur of wood where a branch had broken off centuries ago and healed over into a platform about the size of a dining table.
There was a girl on it.
She was sitting with her back against the trunk and her legs stretched out, and she had a book open face-down on the wood beside her which she was very pointedly not reading.
She looked about his age, which meant nothing, because he had no idea how elves aged. She was a head taller than him. Dark brown hair with a green cast where the light hit it, and pale gold eyes that fixed on him with open irritation.
"No," she said.
Sito stopped with one leg over the edge. "No what?"
"No. Go down."
"I just got here."
"Yes. And now go down." She had an accent that turned all his vowels slightly rounder, and she spoke slowly, picking each word up before she used it. "This is my place. I came first. Eight hundred years of trees and you come to my branch."
"I didn't know it was yours."
"Now you know."
Sito considered this, and then finished climbing up and sat down on the far edge of the platform with his legs hanging off, about as far from her as it was possible to be while still being on it.
She stared at him.
"That is not going down."
"It's not," he agreed.
"You are very rude."
"Yeah." He looked out. From up here the city fell away below in layers, bridges and terraces and water, all of it going down into green dark, and the mist sat overhead close enough that he felt he could have stood up and put his hand in it. "Wow."
The girl opened her mouth, and then didn't say anything, and after a moment she looked out at it too, the way people do when somebody else has just noticed a thing they stopped noticing years ago.
They sat there for a while.
"You are the human," she said eventually. "One of them."
"I'm one of them."
"You smell better than the others."
Sito laughed out loud. "I had a bath."
"Yes. It is better." She said it as flat fact, with no sense whatsoever that it might have been a strange thing to say. "The others smell like horse and like— " She made an irritated gesture, hunting for a word she didn't have. "Like a fire that has been put out with feet."
"That's Ramsey."
"Which is Ramsey?"
"He talks the most."
"Ah." She nodded. "Yes. That one."
---
Her Epirian, he worked out over the next half hour, was very good and very full of holes.
She could construct anything she wanted to say. She simply didn't have all the pieces, and instead of softening around the gaps the way an adult would, she went straight through them.
It made her sound extraordinarily rude and it took him about ten minutes to understand that almost none of it was meant that way.
She told him his clothes were stupid because they did not let his arms move. She told him his hair was interesting. She told him human faces were "too much in the middle," and then spent some time trying and failing to explain what she meant by that.
She also told him, without appearing to think it worth mentioning, that she was hiding.
"From what?"
"Epirian." She kicked the book beside her with her heel. "Three days in the week. A man comes and he makes me say your words about buying grain. Sixty sacks of grain arrived at the harbor. Why. I do not want sixty sacks of grain. I do not want a harbor."
"Who makes you do it?"
"My mother."
"Sounds rough."
"It is very rough," she said bitterly, and then squinted at him. "Why do you laugh."
"Nothing. It's just — I have the same thing, except it's laws. I have to memorize laws. Every third day a man comes and asks me about grain levies."
She sat up slightly. "Levy. I do not know that."
"It's a tax. On grain."
"Ugh." She dropped back against the trunk. "Yours is worse."
"Mine is much worse."
"Good," she said, with enormous satisfaction, and Sito decided he liked her.
---
"What's this tree called?"
"Which."
"This one. The one we're on."
"Vereth," she said.
"Vereth. Okay. And that one?" He pointed at an enormous pale-barked thing across the valley with a crown wider than the Epirian arena.
"Ilmaen."
"And the skinny ones down there by the water?"
"Sannath. When they are young. When they are old they are still sannath but you do not say it the same." She frowned. "There is a — the sound changes. I cannot say it in your words."
Sito nodded slowly, working through it.
"Okay. So what's the word for tree?"
Naeva looked at him blankly.
"For tree," he said again. "Just — all of them. Any of them. The word for the thing they all are."
"Why would there be that word?"
"Because they're all trees."
"They are all vereth and ilmaen and sannath." She was genuinely bewildered, and then, slowly, something else replaced it. "You have one word? One word for every one of them?"
"Yeah."
"That is—" She stopped. Started again. "That is like having one word for your mother and for a man you do not know. They are both people. So. One word. Why bother with the rest."
Sito sat with that for a second.
"That's a really good point," he said.
"I know it is a good point. I am making it."
---
He got four words out of her before the sun moved.
Vereth. Ilmaen. Sannath.
And then, because he asked what the mist was called, and because she seemed to think the question was finally worth her time, a fourth.
"Hlaevir," she said.
"Hlaevir."
"No."
"Hlaevir."
"No." She sat forward, exasperated. "Not with the front. You say it in the front of your mouth like all your words. It is here." She tapped the side of her own jaw. "You put the air past the sides. There is no voice in it. Watch."
She said it again, slowly, and he watched her mouth.
It was not a sound Epirian had. The air went out around the edges of the tongue with nothing behind it, cold and flat, and then the word arrived after it.
Sito tried it. It came out as a wet hiss.
Naeva made a face that suggested he had physically injured her.
He tried again. Closer. Wrong in a different way.
He shut his eyes, and thought about where his tongue actually was, which was a thing he had been doing to his own body for two years under a man with a cane, and moved it about a quarter inch.
"Hlaevir."
The platform went quiet.
He opened his eyes. Naeva was staring at him with her head slightly tilted, and the irritation had gone out of her face entirely, replaced by something much more alert.
"Say it again," she said.
"Hlaevir."
"Again."
"Hlaevir. Am I still doing it wrong?"
"No," she said slowly. "You are doing it right."
She kept looking at him.
"My tutor is over fifty years old and he cannot say thank you in your language without it sounding like a cough," she said. "It took him eleven years to hear the difference between your ship and your sheep. Eleven years. He is still not sure."
"So I got lucky."
"Yes," said Naeva, in the voice of someone who did not believe that for a second.
Somewhere below them a horn sounded, long and low, and rolled around the valley twice before it faded.
She scrambled up so fast she nearly went off the edge.
"I have to go. You have to go. *Go.*"
"What is it?"
"It is the humans." She was already at the trunk, reaching for the first handhold, moving down the bark like she'd been born on it. "They present the humans tonight and I have to be there and I am supposed to have had a bath hours ago—"
"Wait — what's your name?"
"Naeva," she called up, already fifteen feet below him. "What is yours?"
"Sito."
"Sito," she repeated, trying it out, and then she was gone into the leaves.
---
Willem was standing at the window of his room when he climbed back in.
He did not shout. Willem never shouted. He simply looked at Sito for a very long moment with an expression of profound and weary betrayal, and then said, "Your highness. Never again."
"Sorry."
"I have been a royal guard for nineteen years. I have never lost a principal."
"I said sorry."
"Ramsey is downstairs asking the elves whether there are bears," said Willem, "because I told him you had probably been eaten by a bear, because that was preferable to the alternative, which is that you climbed out of a window two hundred feet in the air."
Sito had the grace to look at the floor.
"Was there a bear?"
"There is a girl," said Willem, "who apparently owns a branch."
---
They came for them an hour after dark.
The audience was not held in a hall. Sito understood that as soon as they started climbing.
They went up through the heart of the greatest tree in Thelvarion, along a staircase cut in a slow spiral through the living wood, past landings where elves stood aside and inclined their heads, for what felt like a quarter of an hour.
Then the stair opened, and they came out on top of the world.
It was a terrace built into the crown, open on every side, and there was nothing over it but sky.
The mist lay so close overhead that the high lanterns lit it from underneath and turned the whole ceiling of the world a soft moving grey.
Lower branches ran out from the platform in every direction like piers, and elves stood along them, dozens of them, watching in complete silence.
There were no walls. There was no roof. There was nothing to squeeze the room still.
Sito thought about the mosaic in his father's throne room, and the snake of it, and how it had felt to walk under.
'Huh,' he thought.
Nobody took his swords. Nobody even looked at them.
---
King Sylvaen was not what Sito expected.
He was old, which was visible in a way it apparently rarely was with elves — there were lines at his eyes, and his hair had gone the flat white of bone.
He sat in a chair made of a root that had been persuaded upward over a few centuries, and he was leaning on one arm of it with his chin on his fist, looking down at them with frank, undisguised curiosity.
Queen Lirien sat beside him and did not lean on anything. She was younger, or looked it. Her face gave away nothing whatsoever.
On a lower seat to the Queen's left sat Naeva, in a green so dark it was almost black, with her hair done in a way that had clearly taken somebody a long time and considerable patience.
She looked up as the humans came forward.
Sito watched her eyes go from Marcus, to Osric, to him, and then stop.
He watched her work it out. He watched her face do something complicated and entirely undiplomatic, and then get shut down hard, and then very deliberately turn to face straight ahead at nothing.
Her ears had gone red at the tips.
'Oh no,' Sito thought, delighted.
"Lord Marcus Benedictus, Master of Diplomacy of the Epirian Kingdom," said a voice from somewhere. "And His Royal Highness Prince Sito Meridius, first of his name, heir to the Epirian throne."
Naeva's jaw tightened by about a hair's breadth.
Marcus bowed. Sito bowed.
"You are welcome in Thelvarion," said King Sylvaen. He had a pleasant, unhurried voice. "You came a long way and you came slowly. My warden speaks well of you, which he does not do, so I have been looking forward to this considerably."
"Your Majesty is generous."
"I am not, particularly. Ask anyone." Sylvaen sat back. "You have brought gifts."
"I have, Your Majesty. Nine chests. If I may—"
"They can wait."
Marcus's mouth stopped.
It was a very small thing, and Sito only caught it because he had spent twenty-six days watching that mouth do nothing it hadn't decided to do in advance.
"You have two hundred men digging a hole in the ground eleven miles from my border," said Sylvaen. "They have been there for five weeks. There is a dungeon in it and the dungeon is failing, and you have been feeding people into the doorway in six-hour turns to hold it open since the day you found it."
The terrace was very quiet.
"So the gifts can wait," the King said, without any edge at all. "Tell me what you came to ask me for, ambassador, and then we will find out what sort of evening this is."
---
To his credit, Marcus did not hesitate.
"Mithril, Your Majesty."
A sound went through the elves standing on the branches. Not a shout. Something lower and more unpleasant.
"The vein is extensive," Marcus said. "The entrance is on Epirian soil and the first of it is ours, and I would not have come at all if it ended there. It does not end there. As best the Baron's surveyors can judge, the body of it runs north and it runs deep, and the greater part of what is down there lies under the roots of this forest."
He let that sit.
"I am asking to dig under your forest," Marcus said, "and I am aware of what I am asking, and I would rather ask it badly to your face than have you learn it from a surveyor's map in forty years."
"No," said Queen Lirien.
It was not angry, but stern.
"You have a mine on your own soil and a hole in the ground you cannot manage. Take what lies under Epiria. Kill your dungeon. Go home." She sat back. "You did not need thirty days on the road for this, ambassador. A letter would have done, and my answer would have been one line."
"Your Majesty—"
"The roots are not for sale. They were not for sale when your grandfathers asked, and they are not for sale tonight." She glanced at her husband and then back down. "I am sorry your journey was long."
Sito looked up at Marcus and saw, for the first time in twenty-six days, a man arriving at the part of a conversation he had been dreading.
"Your Majesty, I would like very much to accept that," Marcus said. "I can't."
"You cannot accept an answer?"
"Not that one. It rests on the dungeon being ours." He paused. "Most of it isn't."
Elder Vaeneth made an impatient noise. "The door is in your rock."
"The door is, Elder. The door is not the room."
This was the thing every child learned wrong, and that most adults went their whole lives without having corrected, because most adults never needed it corrected.
A dungeon portal had a location. It sat in a particular wall in a particular hillside and it could be pointed at on a map.
What lay on the other side of it did not sit anywhere at all, so far as the eye could tell. A man stepped through a doorway in a mine in Epiria and found himself in a cavern that was plainly not inside that hillside, and the natural assumption — the one nearly everyone made — was that the dungeon was somewhere else entirely. A pocket. A fold. A place beside the world rather than in it.
It was not. It lay over the world, exactly, like a second map printed on oiled paper and laid down on the first.
Walk two miles north inside a dungeon and you had gone two miles north. Descend three hundred feet and you were three hundred feet down.
The ground did not know you were there and you could not dig into it, but the dungeon sat where it sat, and it had a shape, and that shape could be measured by anyone patient enough to pace it out and honest enough to write down what they paced.
This mattered for exactly one reason.
When a dungeon finished collapsing, it did not fail at the doorway. It failed everywhere.
The whole body of it came apart at once, along its entire extent, and what was inside came up through whatever ground happened to be lying over it at the time.
The door was simply where you went in.
"The guild has surveyed two levels," Marcus said. "They paced both twice and the numbers agree to within a hundred yards, and I will put the tallies in your hands tonight if you want them, Your Majesty, along with the men who made them."
"The first level runs north three miles from the door.
"The second runs north another sixteen."
He let it sit.
"That is nineteen miles, Your Majesty. Your border stones are eleven miles from our mine mouth."
The terrace had gone entirely silent.
"The far wall of the second level lies eight miles into your boundary," Marcus said. "Not near it. Beneath it. And the stair down to the third level is in that wall, and the third level continues north, and we do not know how far north, because that is the argument my Baron's guildsmen have been having for nine days and it is why they descend tomorrow morning."
"Then it may be only a mile more," said Vaeneth. "Or it may be nothing."
"It may. It may also be thirty." Marcus turned to face him. "Elder, I have no interest in frightening this room with a number I do not have. I will tell you the only two numbers I do have. Eight miles of that thing is already under your stones. Every foot of the third level will be under you as well."
Somebody on the branches said something in Vradian. Nobody answered them.
"Take what lies under Epiria and go home," The Queen said.
Marcus said, quietly. "I would like nothing more, Your Majesty. However, under Epiria right now there is nothing but a hole in a wall and a man standing four paces inside it in the dark, counting."
"He is not holding open the doorway. There is no such thing as holding open a doorway. He is holding open all of it — every chamber and every gallery of a thing that reaches from a hillside in my kingdom to somewhere under your forest that nobody has walked to yet.
"One man. Six hours. Then the next one."
Queen Lirien had not moved.
"And when it goes," she said.
"When it goes, it does not come out of the mine, Your Majesty. The mine is the least of it. It comes up wherever it lies." Marcus spread his hands. "I do not know what is down there. Nobody does. I know that the last eight miles of what has been mapped sits under trees your people have been tending for six hundred years, and I know that the part nobody has mapped sits further in than that."
Elder Vaeneth's voice, when it came, had lost a great deal of its carry.
"Then clear it."
"We cannot reach it," Marcus said. "The core of a dungeon lies at the far end of it, Elder, and the far end of this one is under Vradia. To get a team to it we must walk thirty or forty miles inside a failing structure, and a guild team cannot carry water and food for that and fight, and if they turn back, or if they die, or if they simply become too tired to stand — it finishes.
"We cannot do it from our side. You cannot do it from yours, because the only door in or out of it is in Epirian rock and there has never been another."
He stopped.
"So here is what I have actually come to say, and I apologize for taking the long way around to it. The thing under this forest has one door and we own it. The ground it will break is yours. There is no version of this in which either of us solves it alone, and there is a body of mithril running through the middle of the same rock, and I am not going to insult anyone in this room by pretending those are three separate conversations."
Elder Vaeneth stared at him.
Then, because he was a very old man who had been Elder of the southern groves for four hundred and ten years and had not become one by being slow: "You concealed it."
"Yes."
He blinked. He had plainly been prepared for an argument.
"Yes?"
"Yes, Elder. Five weeks, and not one word sent north." Marcus's voice was perfectly level. "We concealed it because we intended to ask you for the mine, and because a man does not open with the news that he has been keeping a monster under your floor. It was a poor decision. It was mine. I made it on the road and I have had several hundred miles to regret it."
"That is not an apology."
"No. It is an account. You may have the apology as well if you want it, but you would be right not to trust it, since I would have told you the same thing whether I was sorry or not."
Elder Vaeneth stared at him.
Then Queen Lirien spoke again, and her voice was quiet and everyone on that terrace stopped moving to hear it.
"Boy."
Sito's stomach dropped.
"Your Majesty."
"You came past the mine."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Did you go down into it?"
Marcus did not turn his head. Sito could feel him not turning his head.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Then tell me what you saw," said the Queen, "and understand that I am asking you and not him, and that I will know the difference."
Sito stood in front of dozens of elves on a platform in the sky with his heart going like a drum, and thought about lying, and discovered he had nothing prepared to lie with.
So he just said it.
"There's a hole in the wall at the bottom. It doesn't have edges. Your eyes slide off it." He swallowed. "There were eleven people sitting around it playing cards. A man came out while I was there and he walked six steps and then his legs stopped working and he sat down on the floor."
"Go on."
"I asked him what it was like in there. He said you go in four paces and stop and you stand in the dark and count. He said around the second hour you start hearing something big out past where the light stops. Breathing and moving around."
"Did he see it?"
"No. He said you don't turn round." Sito's voice came out smaller than he wanted it to. "He said if you turn round you might see it, and if you see it you'll run, and if you run it follows you out."
Nobody on the terrace said anything at all.
"He gets sixty-two marks a shift," Sito said. "He told me that. He told me it was more than he made in a whole year clearing rat dens, and that his wife is due in the spring."
He stopped, because he'd run out, and then heard himself add one more thing.
"He was really scared. He'd been doing it for five weeks and he was still really scared and he went back in the next day anyway."
The Queen looked at him for what felt like a very long time.
Then she turned to her husband, and something passed between them that Sito could not read at all.
"Thaen," said the King.
The warden stepped out of the dark at the edge of the terrace, where Sito had not known he was standing.
"My King."
"Your report."
"They came by the road," Thaen said. "Thirty days, with an anchor stone six days from their capital that would have saved them hundreds of miles. When I asked why, the ambassador said he did not want the first thing we knew of him to be a hole in the air outside our border."
"And?"
"One of his men cut a sapling for a picket line. An ash, eleven years." Thaen's voice did not change. "The ambassador knelt in the grass in front of his own guards and asked me to teach him where the line was."
Sylvaen raised an eyebrow. "You let it go?"
"I did."
"You have never let anything go in ninety years, Thaen."
"No, my King."
The King sat forward and rubbed his face with both hands, and for a moment looked exactly like every exhausted father Sito had ever seen, which was not a category he had expected to observe in a monarch.
"Well," said Sylvaen. "That is a great deal to have happened before supper."
He stood.
"Ambassador. You will not get an answer from me tonight, and you will not get one from me at all, because this is not mine to give. The roots are not the crown's. They are everyone's, which is an inconvenient way to run a kingdom and the only honest one."
"Then who, Your Majesty?"
"The Council of Elders will hear you. All eleven, and nine of them are not here, and three of those will take four days to come down out of the north." Sylvaen's mouth twitched. "You wanted to arrive slowly, ambassador. Congratulations. You will now be leaving slowly as well."
Marcus bowed. "How long?"
"Ten days. Perhaps fourteen." The King started to turn, then paused, and looked down at Sito. "Boy."
"Your Majesty."
"Thaen tells me you play."
Sito's ears went hot. "A bit."
"Hm," said King Sylvaen, and went in to supper without elaborating.