Cedar had signaled to Ash that he would take the first shift. It was a breach of protocol, no doubt, to set guards within a warlord’s residence, if you could describe a tree village that way, but Ash was taking no chances. He would take second shift, and let Curlew and Tern have an uninterrupted rest. Tern needed it, he thought. The young one had been quiet ever since he had come down out of the trees—ashamed of his fear, no doubt, and worried about Curlew to boot. He’d be better for a good night’s sleep. He should find a time tomorrow to talk to Tern, reassure him that everyone met something they couldn’t handle, sooner or later. There was no shame in reaching your limit.
At midnight, Ash slid out of his sleeping pocket, feeling his way to the stair. The moon had set and the starlight came only faintly through the leaves. Ember was a slightly darker shape, breathing evenly. Dancing with butterflies! he thought. I would have liked to have seen that.
Quiet voices drifted up as he negotiated the staircase. Cedar and someone else. Elgir?
They were sitting to one side of the tree, on an old log. Curlew and Tern were asleep, Curlew buttressed on either side by the dogs. Holdfast raised her head as he went by and he signaled her to stay where she was.
The two men looked up as he walked toward them and nodded with almost identical motions. Something worried him about that. Were they so alike, these two? He waved them to go on talking, and sat down at Cedar’s feet, his back against the cool wood. He’d clearly come into the middle of a conversation.
“Are all your people shapechangers, my lord?” Cedar asked.
“Many,” Elgir said readily.
A dark shape moved in the shade of the trees and Ash sprang to his feet, but Elgir said, “It’s all right.” The shape came forward—the huge bull elk from the day before. Elgir rose and flung an arm over its shoulder. “This is my brother, Durst,” he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “He’s one of those who only change once, and then stay that way. He prefers it.”
The elk lowered its head until it could butt Elgir in the shoulder affectionately. Ash kept silent. These were matters beyond him. He wished his mother were there. She was the one who understood strangeness. She and Grammer Martine.
“Greetings, Durst,” Cedar said. “What about you, my lord? Do you change?”
Elgir hesitated. “I change rarely… My duties do not permit me more.”
There was definite regret in his voice.
“But why are there so many here, when they are the stuff of legend in the rest of the Domains?” Cedar asked.
“That story goes back a long way. You may have noticed, there are no altars here.”
Ash had noticed. His father had brought them up to honor the local gods. At home, the family went to the altar every dawn for the morning prayers. Except his mother, Elva. He had always thought it odd that the gods’ own prophet would care so little about the forms of worship, but Elva just shrugged. “If they want me to know something, they’ll tell me,” she’d say. “And this way breakfast is ready when you get back.”
He’d missed the morning ritual on this trip, and he’d looked for an altar as they came through Elgir’s lands, but had seen none.
“Yes,” Cedar said, “I’d wondered about that.”
“The black rocks fell from the sky a long time ago, long before Acton’s people came over the mountains. The largest was at Obsidian Lake, in your domain.”
Obsidian Lake was in the Last Domain, not in the Western Mountains where they were from, but better to let Elgir believe that he and Cedar were Arvid’s men. Less complicated that way.
“Other rocks fell south, but none here. I don’t know why. Just chance, perhaps. The black rocks…” Elgir hesitated. “It is hard to say whether the rocks gave the local gods power, or whether they simply attracted the gods and, coming together, they found they had more power than when they acted separately. In any case, the rocks changed things. Humans turned away from the Powers, who were so vast, so far removed from them, to worship the local gods, who knew their lands.”
“Gods of field and stream…” Cedar murmured. It was the beginning of the morning prayer.
“Exactly,” Elgir said.
A slight breeze lifted Ash’s hair, but didn’t seem to rustle the leaves around them. An owl hooted; small animals scurried in the undergrowth. A normal night, and Elgir was welcoming, yet he felt ill at ease here. He had liked it better on the high platforms of the cedars. At least there he could see the mountains. He shifted so he could see beyond the treetops. The stars were bright and high, with no clouds to mar them. His own local gods seemed very far away.
“But what does that have to do with shapechangers?”
“The local gods are uncomfortable with beings which are two things at once. Maintaining the divide between life and death is their main task, and I think all divisions are—sacred is the wrong word. Reassuring to them, may be? They suppress that kind of power around them. So wherever there is an altar, shapechangers do not change. They yearn. They dream. But they never discover their true kind.”
Elgir sat back down again and his brother began to graze.
“This is the only settled place in the Domains where the world is as it was before the black rocks fell, and shapechangers can transform. And so it is my task, the task of the warlords of this domain, to find them and bring them here. It is my main duty… I scry for the young ones and talk to them in their dreams. Come north, I say. Come to where you will be happy. My predecessor four generations ago began it. He was a bear, they say.” He seemed to think it was all very normal. Ash felt as if he were in a dream—the night, the distant stars, the man with his brother elk…
“It comes down in the blood,” Elgir continued. “So most children born here now have some of the ability. Some are mostly human, others mostly not. All have a place.”
Cedar was fascinated, Ash could see in his face.
“Do your children have the—ability?” Cedar asked.
“I have none, yet. There was a prophecy that I should choose an heir, rather than beget one. I have looked a long time. I was beginning to think he would never come and I should have to go out into the world to find him.”
He looked straight at Cedar. The hairs on Ash’s neck rose in alarm. Cedar? No, no, not Cedar!
“Me?” Cedar said. He was astonished—and flattered. Ash got up and stood in front of Elgir, planting his feet firmly.
“You’re inviting my brother to be your heir?” he demanded.
“He has the power,” Elgir said. “I could teach him the enchantments which keep this place safe.”
Cedar’s eyes lit up at the thought of learning spells. “I’m not a shapechanger,” he said slowly.
“Are you not?” Elgir asked, smiling. “That power is in you, too, in all of your blood, I suspect.” He flicked a glance at Ash, then focused back on Cedar. “Your mother gave you more than Sight, son.”
“He’s no son of yours,” Ash stated.
Cedar ignored him. “What would I be?” he asked. “What animal?”
Elgir smiled. “I cannot know that until you change. But you know in your heart which form calls to you.”
Cedar looked down at the ground, flushing. Oh gods! Ash was dismayed. Don’t do it, brer. Deny him. But he didn’t say it out loud. Cedar’s choice.
Cedar looked at him and then up at the tree above, and his own expression changed, the excitement dying out, replaced by resignation.
“I must go with Ember,” he said. “She needs me.”
Ash felt relief sweep through him, followed by a kind of sadness. That was a sacrifice Cedar was making.
“Yes, of course!” Elgir said. “But afterward… your home is here, and your inheritance, if you wish to claim it.”
Cedar looked into his eyes. They were alike, Ash could see. Creatures of ideas and thought. Cedar could be the son of Elgir’s heart and mind, if not of his body. A warlord’s son.
“Why don’t you have children?” Ash demanded suddenly. “Is there a curse or something else Cedar should know?”
Elgir paused, still looking at Cedar. “Yes. Yes, it is true. No lord of this domain has ever had children of his body. Each one must find his successor, and train him, knowing that there will be no children.”
“And when were you going to tell him that? When it was too late?”
Elgir looked at the ground. “It won’t matter to Cedar,” he said gently, as if he broke bad news. “For people like us, it never matters. We are seduced by the enchantments so deeply that nothing else compares.”
Cedar was nodding, slowly. Ash took his arm. “Be careful,” he said. “He is asking you to give up everything you know, every one you know, as well as the possibility of a family. Of—of love.” They were brothers, and never spoke much about feelings, but he had to make the case as persuasively as he could. “Don’t you want a family of your own? To live with people you care about?”
Cedar’s eyes held tears, but they were calm.
“Not the way you do,” he said. “Now I know I can learn—all this—” his arm made a wide gesture, taking in the tree towers, the water meadows with their grazing animals, the high ridge crowned with trees, “how can I turn my back on it?”
Elgir nodded. “You will come back, and I will welcome you,” he said simply. Cedar put out his hand and they clasped forearms, a gesture of equals.
“Dragon’s fart!” Ash said. He turned away so he wouldn’t hit Elgir and stared up at the treeroom where Ember slept. Would she be happy about this, or sad? Pleased that her cousin would have the same rank? That the two domains would be tied closer together? That was the way Ember thought, he’d come to realize. As rulers did, or should. He called her “princess” half in affection and half teasingly, but it was true. Could Cedar become a—a prince? And what else would he become? Ash remembered the naked half-men of the Deep and his own distaste. He didn’t feel like that about Durst. True shapechanging was… purer, somehow. Not a rejection of humanity, but an expansion of who the person was. Or it could be, if they didn’t choose to stay an animal, as Durst had.
“Whatever you turn into,” he said to Cedar, his voice rough with tears held back, “promise me you’ll become human again.”
Cedar put an arm around his shoulders and squeezed. “I promise,” he said. The elk called Durst snorted and coughed, and Elgir laughed in response.
“Durst says don’t worry, Cedar’s like me, too stupid to understand that animal life is best.”
That was cold comfort to Ash, but it was comfort of a sort.
“Sleep,” he said to Cedar. “It’s my watch.”
His younger brother might be a warlord’s heir, but he still obeyed orders. Cedar said goodnight to Elgir and slid into his sleeping pocket. Ash looked at Elgir, who was standing next to Durst.
“If you don’t look after him…” he said.
“I swear to you and your family,” Elgir said, formal and solemn, “I will care for him as my own son. As my right arm.”
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. He had lost his brother.