They spent nine days getting ready to go, which Sito thought was ridiculous for a party of twelve men and a boy, right up until he understood that Marcus was not leaving with what he'd arrived with.
Four elven liaisons were going south with them. A surveyor, two overseers with the standing authority to stop work, and a quartermaster whose entire job for the next several years would be arguing with Epirian clerks about supply. They had families to arrange and possessions to pack and none of them had ever left the forest.
One of them, the surveyor, spent an entire afternoon on the terrace staring south at nothing and then asked Willem, with total seriousness, whether it was true that humans built their cities on the ground.
"On it and in it," said Willem.
"And you sleep there. Underneath everything."
"We do."
The surveyor thought about this for a while.
"I do not think I am going to like that," he said.
---
Ithriel had him on the terraces every morning right up until the last one, and worked him harder in those nine days than in the six weeks before them.
On the last morning she stopped early.
He was on his back, which was where most of their mornings ended, and she stood over him and did not offer a hand, because she never had.
"Get up."
He got up.
"I am not going to tell you that you fought well," said Ithriel. "You fought like an eight-year-old with two swords against somebody who has been doing this since before your kingdom had a name, and you lost every single time. That being said… I have never seen such quick improvement, especially from a child, and frankly it's rather frightening."
"Thanks."
"You are welcome." She said it entirely without irony. "What I am going to tell you is one other thing, and then you are going to go and get on a horse."
She looked at him for a moment.
"I have trained soldiers for a long time. Thousands of them. Every one of them trains as though somebody will be standing next to him — not because he is told to, but because it does not occur to him to train any other way. He assumes a line. He assumes a flank. He assumes that when it goes badly there will be a voice on his left telling him where to go."
She tapped his chest with two fingers.
"You do not."
Sito didn't say anything.
"Everything you do assumes there is nobody. Your footwork keeps every direction open, which costs you power, and you have never once asked why I let you keep doing it. You count exits. You watch the ground behind you, which nobody does when there are friends behind them." Ithriel's face did not change at all. "I have watched you spar sixty times and you have never once put yourself anywhere that expected help."
"I've got a whole hundred back home. I train with them every day."
"I know," she said. "That is what makes it strange."
She stepped back.
"When the day comes that there is nobody beside you, you will find you have been practicing for it your entire life, and you will be very good at it, and you will probably survive. Do not be grateful for that." She turned to the rack. "It is not a gift. It is rather sad actually, and it is a thing that happened to you, and you should find out what it was."
Then she took a pouch off the rack and threw it at him.
He caught it. It was heavier than it looked, and it clinked.
"Open it."
Inside was an adjustable belt with six throwing knives, palm-length, flat and plain, with no ornament of any kind and a dull grey-white sheen he had never seen on steel.
"Is this—"
"Mithril. Yes. Do not make a face about it, it is about four ounces and the belt is worth more than the horse you are riding home on." Ithriel folded her arms. "They are keyed to the belt. Throw one, and the moment it leaves your hand and comes to rest, it is back in the belt. It does not matter where it lands. It does not matter if it is stuck in something."
Sito stared at them.
"You can't lose them," he said.
"You cannot lose them. You also cannot give them away — they will come back to the belt and the belt is now yours and will grow with you — so do not try to be gracious about this, it will simply be embarrassing for both of us."
"Why are you giving me these?"
"Because I do not throw," said Ithriel. "I have never thrown anything in my life. I stand where I am and I make the other person come to me, and these were given to me a long time ago by somebody who had not understood that, and they have been on a shelf ever since."
She started up the terrace steps.
"Also," she said, without turning around, "you fight like a man who is going to spend a great deal of time outnumbered, and six knives that always come back is a very useful thing for a man like that."
---
The formal farewell was held on the high terrace, and Sito had been dreading it for a week.
It went the way those things go. Sylvaen was warm and Lirien was polite and Marcus said all the right words and the elders stood in a line looking like elders.
Then, at the end of it, the King said: "Before you go."
Marcus stopped.
"Not you, ambassador." Sylvaen was looking past him. "Boy."
'Oh no,' Sito thought.
"Thaen and my daughter told me some time ago that you play. I have had a great deal on my mind since then and I have only just remembered it, which I am told is a thing that happens after a certain age." The King sat back down in the root chair. "Play something."
There were more elves on that terrace than Sito wanted to count.
He looked at Marcus, who gave him absolutely nothing, and then unslung the rook, which he had brought because Naeva had told him to bring it and had not told him why.
He looked up at the branches.
And then, because he was a bit nervous and had no better idea, he played the one Naeva had spent eleven days beating into him.
The terrace went very quiet after the first line.
He got the pronunciation right. He had been getting it right for weeks. He sang about the mist coming down the valley in the evening, and the low places filling before the high ones, and a thing that arrived every night without being asked and was gone in the morning by nothing anyone could point to, and had been doing that since before anybody's grandmother.
He sang four verses.
Then he stopped, because that was where Naeva had stopped, and he had nothing else.
He stood there in the silence with his ears burning and thought, distantly, that he was going to have to say something, and that he had no idea what.
Somebody on the branches sang the fifth verse.
One voice, and then eleven, and then most of the terrace, quietly, not performing it, the way a room finishes something everybody has known since they were small.
It went on for a long time. It was longer than the other four put together.
Sito stood in the middle of it and did not understand almost any of it.
When it ended, King Sylvaen was looking at him with an expression Sito could not read at all, and then the King looked, very deliberately, at his daughter.
Naeva was studying the floor with enormous concentration.
"Well," said Sylvaen. "That is the first time I have heard that sung by a human, and I have been alive a considerable while."
"I'm sorry, Your Majesty — I don't know the end of it."
"No," the King agreed. "You do not."
---
She was on the branch at dusk, which was the last time they would be able to get up there, and she had her back against the trunk and her knees pulled up and she did not say anything for the first ten minutes.
Then she said: "You did it wrong."
"I did not do it wrong."
"You did the third verse too fast."
"Naeva, your entire court joined in."
"Yes, because you did the third verse too fast and they were trying to slow you down." She scowled out at the valley. "Anyway. It does not matter."
They sat.
The mist was coming down the way it did every evening, filling the low places first and then the high ones, and Sito found that he could not look at it now without hearing the tune, which he suspected was the entire point of the song and had been for a very long time.
"So when do I get the last verse?"
"When you can read it."
"That's going to be years."
"Yes," said Naeva.
She reached into the bag beside her and put something on the wood between them.
It was a crystal, about the size of a walnut, dull and grey-green and set in a plain loop of wire.
Sito looked at it.
"Is that—"
"It is a late name-day present," said Naeva, extremely fast. "Because you did not tell me it was your name-day, which was rude, and so now it is late, and that is your fault and not mine."
He picked it up.
He had seen four of these in the last two months. He had watched Marcus hold one in a council chamber and change the mood of a kingdom with what came out of it.
He knew roughly what the council's had cost, because Reginald Stillwater had said the figure at a table in Epiria once and the number had been large enough that Sito had remembered it.
"Naeva, this is a council thing. You can't just have one."
"I do not have one. I have two. And I have given you one, so now I have one, which is the correct number." She was still looking out at the valley. "It is keyed to mine and to nothing else. It is not on any list anywhere. The man who made it does not write things down unless somebody makes him."
"Does your mother know?"
"No."
"Does anyone?"
"Ilsenne knows." She waved a hand vaguely downward. "She has kept every secret I have ever had and she is not going to start with this one. You will need someone as well. You cannot sit in a room in a stone castle talking out loud in Vradian and expect nobody to notice, so think about who it is and be sure about them before you use it."
Sito thought immediately of Aunt Lia, and did not say so.
"Most nights," said Naeva, to the valley. "Not every. I am not saying every. That would be stupid. Sometimes I will be busy."
"Sometimes you'll be busy."
"Yes."
"Okay."
"So it will be most nights," said Naeva, "and if you do not answer I will assume you are dead."
He did not ask what it cost her, because he did not think to.
He was eight, and he had been a man once, and neither of those had ever given him any practice at receiving something.
He turned it over in his hands and said thank you about four times in a row, badly, and then asked her how the keying worked.
Naeva answered it, and told him he was holding it wrong, and moved his thumb.
Later — years later, in a place with no walls and no fire and nobody to explain it to — he would work out what it must have cost, and would sit with that for a long time.
That evening he just put it in his pocket.
---
They left at dawn.
There was nothing much to it. The elves did not line the bridges or make speeches; Thelvarion simply went about its morning while the party walked south out of it, which Sito eventually decided he preferred.
Ithriel was not there. She had said her thing and considered the matter closed.
Thaen took them back down to the stones himself, and shook Marcus's hand at the treeline in a way that made Osric raise an eyebrow, because Thaen did not shake hands.
Naeva came to the bottom of the great trunk and no further, because a princess of Vradia did not walk out of her city to see off a foreign prince, and both of them knew it.
"Most nights," she said.
"Most nights."
"And do not tell anybody."
"I'm not going to tell anybody."
Sito stuck out his hand, because it was the only thing he could think of to do.
Naeva looked at it, hesitated, and decided it was another one of the strange things humans did, but the moment their hands touched her face turned red.
When he went to end the handshake she used her other hand to help hold his in place and looked at him with watered eyes.
"Don't forget me."
Sito made eye contact and stayed silent while he studied her.
"Never."
Then he got on a horse and rode south out of the Mist Forest, and did not look back nearly as many times as he wanted to.
---
Queen Lirien came into her daughter's room four days later.
She had come to say something about a tutor, and she said it, and Naeva said "yes mother" in the voice she used for tutors, and Lirien turned to go and stopped.
The shelf by the window was empty.
There had been eight carved animals on that shelf. A mirecat, a spinewren, a bough-drake, a lantern-toad, a sannath-moth, a silt-heron, a rill-otter, and a thing that was supposed to be a fenback and had been made by somebody who had never seen open country.
Eight of them. One for every name-day Naeva had ever had.
Lirien's own father had carved the first one before the child was born, because he had decided in advance that he was going to do this, and he had done it every year since.
He was not good at it. He had never been good at it.
He had held a spear for most of his life and had taken up a knife and a block of sannath at an age when most elves take up sitting down, and every animal on that shelf was slightly wrong in a way that had become, over eight years, the entire point of them.
He was still alive.
He would make a ninth this year, and it would sit on the shelf all by itself.
Lirien looked at the empty shelf for a long moment.
Then she looked at her daughter, who was sitting on the bed with her chin up and her jaw set, daring her.
The Queen of Vradia was not a stupid woman. She had watched a human boy sing her own song on her own terrace with her own daughter studying the floorboards, and she had spent two months noticing which mornings Naeva went to the eastern terraces and which she did not.
She sat down on the end of the bed.
"Naevaelin."
"I am not sorry."
"I did not ask you to be sorry." Lirien folded her hands. "I am going to tell you something, and I would have told you sooner if I had thought it mattered, and I have been wrong about that for eight weeks."
Naeva's chin came down half an inch.
"The boy is betrothed," said the Queen. "He has been since he was very small. To the daughter of one of his father's dukes — Farrar, the one his father actually likes. It was arranged before either child could speak and it will not be unarranged, because it is the whole basis of that duke's loyalty, and Xerxes Meridius does not undo things."
The room was very quiet.
"Did he know?" said Naeva. "When he was here. Did he know."
"I expect he has known his whole life. Human nobles are told these things early, so that they stop imagining otherwise." Lirien watched her daughter's face carefully. "He may also not have thought of it once in two months. Children of that kind often don't. It is a fact about their lives, like the weather, and nobody thinks about the weather until it rains."
Naeva sat there.
She thought about a boy who had climbed onto her branch uninvited and refused to leave.
She thought about a whole terrace of her own people finishing a song he did not have the end of.
She thought about the shelf.
"May I go to bed," she said.
"Naeva—"
"I would like to go to bed, mother."
Lirien stood, and put her hand briefly on the top of her daughter's head, and went out.
Naeva waited until the sound of her had gone down two flights.
Then she got the crystal out from under the mattress and sat looking at it in the dark for a long time, turning it over, dull and grey-green and unremarkable and keyed to nothing else in the world.