By morning the whole city knew.
Nobody had announced anything. Sito came down from the branch at sunrise and the bridges were quieter than he had ever heard them, and the two women who argued across forty feet of open air every single day were not arguing, and the hammering had stopped.
On the eastern terraces, about half the usual number of elves were training, and they were training hard and without talking.
He found Willem at the foot of the stair, watching them.
"They found out fast," Sito said.
"Aye." Willem was quiet for a moment. "My lad, you want to understand something. These people have been here longer than anyone can put a date to. There's no year they started. You ask them how old this place is and they look at you like you've asked how old the weather is."
"I know."
"So when a man walks into their council trunk and tells them there's a hole under it," said Willem, "that's not the same as it would be at home. We've had numerous kingdoms, some known and most forgotten in time, fall over and get built back up in the time this city's been sitting here not counting."
---
The council reconvened at midday and did not bother with the trunk.
They held it on the terrace instead, in daylight, with the King and Queen and every elder present and the branches packed with elves who had not been invited and who nobody moved along.
Marcus laid the whole survey out. All of it, flat, in order, with no shaping whatsoever, which Sito understood by now was itself a choice.
Five levels. Sixty-eight miles paced twice. Eleven dead.
Then the parts nobody had wanted to say the night before.
"There is worked stone on the fourth and fifth levels," Marcus said. "Cut blocks, set by hand, in seven places. Two of those walls have doorways standing in them. Finished doorways, with lintels."
"Elven?" said an elder from the north.
"No."
"You are certain."
"Your own people were down there, Elder. Ask them." Marcus turned a page. "It is not elven. It is not dwarven — we have two guildsmen from Magh Daruhm on the survey and both of them say they have never seen the technique. It is not any human style in our records, and I have read the records, and they go back a considerable way."
"Then whose is it?"
"Nobody knows," said Marcus. "That is the honest answer and I would rather give it than a better-sounding one. Somebody cut that stone and set it, and whoever they were, they did it before the rock around it was where it is now, and there is no account of them anywhere that I can find."
The elder sat back down.
"And the mage's reading," said Queen Lirien.
Marcus looked at the page for a second.
"A dungeon has a core. It sits at the far end and it is the only thing that kills the dungeon, and a survey mage's chief job is to tell the clearing team how far they have left to walk." He put the page down. "Ours took the reading at sixty-eight miles and got a distance she did not believe. She took it again. She took it nine times over two days and got the same answer every time, and then she wrote it down and would not put her name under it."
"What was the answer?"
"More than a hundred miles further north."
Somebody on the branches made a sound.
"She also measured the ambient mana at the furthest point," Marcus said, "which is routine, and which is the part I would like the elders to sit with. It was denser than anywhere her instruments have ever read in the Mist Forest."
"That is not possible," said Elder Vaeneth.
"It is written down nine times, Elder."
"Nothing is denser than the deep groves. Nothing in the world is denser than the deep groves."
"Then something down there is making it," said Marcus.
---
Ithriel had not spoken once in six weeks of council.
She spoke now, from the back, with her arms folded, and every head on that terrace turned.
"May I say the thing nobody has said."
King Sylvaen gestured, once.
"When it goes, we lose the city."
The terrace was absolutely silent.
"I would like to be understood plainly, so I am going to be blunt and the elders will forgive me." Ithriel came forward through the seated council and stopped at the open edge, where she could look out over the whole valley and everyone could see her doing it. "We do not have ground. We have never had ground. We have never needed it. Everything we have ever fought, we fought in the forest, at the edges, on our terms, in a place where an army of ten thousand comes apart into four thousand lost men and six thousand corpses."
She pointed down.
"That works because a thing coming for Thelvarion has to walk here. This one does not have to walk here. It is already here. It is under our feet and it is under the southern groves and possibly even under the Queen's own hall, and when it ruptures it does not arrive at a border. It arrives everywhere at once, from below, in a city where every home is a hundred feet in the air and every road is a rope."
"You cannot fight in Thelvarion," she said. "There is nowhere to stand. There is no gate to hold and no line to form and no ground to give. There is a canopy full of my people and a long way down."
Nobody argued with her.
"How long do we have?" asked Lirien.
"Ambassador?"
Marcus shook his head. "Nobody knows, Your Majesty. The occludes slow it. They have never been observed to stop it. It has been held for nine weeks and there is no precedent for nine weeks, and I will not stand in front of this council and pretend there is a number."
"Then the answer is that we do not know," said Ithriel, "and we plan as though it is soon, because the other way of planning has no survivors in it."
She stepped back.
"That is all I wanted said out loud."
---
Sito had been put in the room.
Not the doorway. Marcus had walked him in that morning, sat him down at the end of the human delegation, and said one sentence to him beforehand.
"Watch what I do not do."
So he sat, and said nothing, for three hours.
---
What he watched was a man being handed everything and declining most of it.
He understood that much within the first quarter hour, because he had spent a month watching Marcus work a room and knew what it looked like when Marcus had someone.
The elders were frightened. They were frightened in front of him, out loud, with their own general having just told them their city could not be defended, and the only door into the only thing that could kill it was in Epirian rock.
Marcus opened by giving something away.
"Before terms. The occlude rotation stays entirely Epirian. Your people will not stand shifts in that doorway and I will not ask them to, now or at any point in the clearing."
Vaeneth blinked. "That is — the shifts are the worst of it."
"I know."
"Why would you give that up before we have agreed anything?"
"Because otherwise it becomes a thing I am holding," said Marcus, "and I would rather not hold it."
He asked for four things after that, and every elf on that terrace had braced for considerably more.
All mithril under Epirian soil to Epiria outright, which nobody disputed because nobody could. A third of everything lifted from under Vradia — not half, which Sito had heard him rehearse on the road, and not the two-thirds Duncan had told him to open at.
A fixed portion of that Vradian third to be spent, before any of it went south, on arming and supplying the clearing teams. The mine paying for the thing the mine had found.
And no surface works in the forest. Nothing. No shaft, no head-frame, no road, no camp. Everything in and out through the Epirian mouth, however much slower and more expensive that made it, which was considerably.
Then he gave them one more thing without being asked.
"Elven overseers underground, with standing authority to halt work. Not to protest it. To stop it, on the spot, with no appeal to me or to my king, and the work stays stopped until they release it."
Duncan Elbrus would have had a seizure.
"Term of ninety years," Marcus finished, "renewable by agreement, and I will sign it today. I speak for the Crown of Epiria in this and my signature is final. His Majesty will not be reviewing it. There is nothing in it for him to review."
---
It was Queen Lirien who asked, in the end.
The elders had gone off to argue and the terrace had mostly emptied and the sun had moved a long way, and she came down the steps to where Marcus was standing over the table with a pen in his hand.
"Ambassador."
"Your Majesty."
"You could have had half." She said it flatly, the way she said everything. "You could have had half and the northern groves besides, and a road, and I think you know that, and I think three of my elders would have voted for it this afternoon out of sheer fright."
"Probably four."
"Then why?"
Marcus put the pen down.
"May I be impolite?"
"Please."
"Because in ninety years there will be a young elf on that seat who has never met me and never met you and has no memory whatsoever of being afraid," said Marcus. "And she will read this treaty. And she will either think, that was a fair arrangement between neighbors, or she will think, they had us by the throat and they squeezed."
He tapped the page.
"If she thinks the second one, then everything I have done here is worth nothing, and my grandchildren inherit a border instead of a neighbor. Epiria is not going anywhere, Your Majesty. Neither are you. We will be looking at each other across those stones for a very long time after everyone in this conversation is dead."
Lirien studied him.
"That is a strategic answer," she said.
"It is a true one."
"It is both, and you gave me the strategic half because you are a diplomat and it is easier to say." She turned to go, and then stopped. "I will take the other half now, if you have it."
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
"I did not want to be the man who put a price on this city," he said.
"Mm," said Queen Lirien, and went up the steps.
---
They signed it four days later.
Sito was there for that too, and it was almost disappointing — a table, a page, eleven elders and a king and a human in a good coat, and then it was done and everybody went to eat.
He caught Marcus afterward on an empty terrace, looking out at the valley with a cup of something he wasn't drinking.
"Can I ask now?"
"You have been sitting on it for four days and I have been watching you not ask, so yes."
"My father's going to be furious."
Marcus laughed, shortly. "That is not a question."
"He wanted the mine. He said it at dinner. Duncan said the amount of armor and weapons we could make would be invaluable, and Father said go and get it, and you got a third and paid for their soldiers out of it." Sito frowned up at him. "He's going to say you gave it away."
"He is going to say exactly that. In those words, probably, and in front of people."
"So why?"
"I told the Queen the reason and it was true." Marcus turned the cup around. "Here is the part I did not tell her, because she is a queen and it would have been a card.
"Your father is a very good king and he is going to be angry with me for about a year, and then he is going to be a very good king about it, because he did not appoint a Master of Diplomacy in order to have his own opinions read back to him from two hundred miles away."
"And if he isn't?"
"Then I have been wrong about him for nineteen years and I would rather find that out now." Marcus shrugged. "I signed it, your highness. It is not a proposal. The elves know it is not a proposal, which is the entire reason they signed it too, and if your father breaks it he does so in front of a kingdom that watched me put my name on it."
Sito thought about that.
"You did that on purpose. Made it so he can't undo it."
"I made it so that nobody has to spend six months wondering whether he will," said Marcus. "Those are quite different and the difference is the whole job."
Sito asked the other question after that, and it was not the one Marcus was expecting.
"What happened to the man?"
"Which man?"
"In the mine. The occlude. The one I talked to." Sito was looking at his hands. "He said his wife was due in the spring. That was nine weeks ago."
Marcus looked at him for a long moment.
Then he pulled the communication crystal out of his ring and sent the question south, and the two of them sat on the terrace and waited a very long time for somebody at the Baron's camp to go and find out.
The answer came back after dark.
The man's name was Edrin Fell. He was still there. He had taken forty-one shifts and was still taking them, and had been promoted to rotation lead about a month ago, which meant he now stood the worst of them himself rather than assigning them.
His daughter had been born five weeks earlier. Both well. He had named her Mira, after nobody in particular. He had not been home to see her and did not intend to until the thing was closed, because the camp paid double for the men who stayed through.
Sito sat with that.
"Forty-one," he said.
"Forty-one."
"He's not even a soldier. He said he cleared rat dens."
"No, he is not a soldier." Marcus put the crystal away. "Your highness, I am going to say something now that I would like you to remember for a long time, and then I am going to go to bed, because I have been awake for most of six weeks.
"In every conversation you will ever have about a treaty, there is a person like that standing at the far end of it. They are never in the room. Nobody in the room knows their name. They do not come up.
"What we signed on that table means a clearing operation goes into that hole with elven guides and proper supply and enough steel to do it once instead of four times. It means Edrin Fell stands maybe eighty more shifts instead of six hundred. It means he probably gets to go home and finally meet his child."
He stood up.
"That is what it is for. Not the mithril. The mithril is how you get anyone to pay for it."
---
Marcus stayed out on the terrace a while after the boy had gone.
He had, in his ring, a signed agreement that had cost him the better part of two months and eleven lives that were not his fault and would feel like it anyway.
It was a good treaty. He knew that with the flat certainty of a man who had made a number of bad ones early on and could tell the difference.
He also knew, with the same flatness, what was going to happen when he stood in front of the throne in Epiria and read out one third to a king who had sent him north for a mountain of mithril and a border victory.
Xerxes would be perfectly courteous about it. That was the thing people got wrong about him. He would listen to all of it, and ask three questions, and thank him for his service, and Marcus would be able to see the exact moment somewhere in the second question when the King decided this had been a failure.
And he would be wrong, and there would be no way on earth to tell him so.
Marcus finished the drink he had not been drinking.
'Ah well,' he thought. 'I have had worse Mondays.'