Clovenfast was much larger than Janner first thought. The fort where they had escaped the toothy cows was one of several outposts scattered along the edge of the Blackwood, and from the rear of each walled fort, a road led to the city proper.
And a city it was, though not built by cloven; it was an ancient ruin of stone structures. Ornate archways and columns towered among the trees. The cobbled road was bordered by stone walls that had tumbled down and were green with winter moss and budding vines. The nearer they drew to the center of the city, the more structures stood unbroken in the shade of mighty trees. Roots pressed between flagstones and wrapped around foundations, as if they were engaged in a thousand-year dance with the ruins.
But ruins was the wrong word, Janner decided. The city was far from ruined, and the way it melded with the forest made Janner think it must be more lovely than it had been when it was new.
Once they moved out of the wild and into the city, they saw more cloven who could walk upright and speak. Janner even saw children: young cloven playing, riding on the shoulders of their elders, sitting on steps, and laughing with one another. Many were deformed Green and Grey Fangs, and a few had milky eyes like the bats Kalmar had described to Janner.
Elder Cadwick waved, greeting a cloven who carried a basket of pomply pears in two of its five arms.
“Do you have children?” Janner asked.
“None of us have children, lad,” said Cadwick. “Not anymore.”
“But what about all the young ones?” Kalmar asked.
“We find them in the forest. We bring them here. Someone has to care for them, just as someone cared for me when I was abandoned in the Blackwood many years ago.”
“So did you all come from Throg?” Janner asked.
“Yes. And before we were thrust from the Deeps of Throg, we were human.”
“Do you remember anything? From before?” Janner asked.
Cadwick lowered his eyes and his voice grew quiet. “I remember a few things. I was a blacksmith. I lived in a cottage. I remember fields of white flowers and a scent on the wind that stirs my heart. Now and then I remember faces—faces full of joy, but I know not who they were…nor who I was.” He sighed as he ducked under a low branch. “We have learned that it is best not to remember too much. This,” he waved a hand around him, “is what we have now. This is who we are.”
“But our father—Esben—remembered, didn’t he?” Kalmar asked.
“Yes, and it nearly drove him mad. Like many of us, he wandered the forest for years until he found a home in Clovenfast. Once he settled in the den, he hardly spoke to anyone. He spent his time making the pictures on the walls. Then one night he emerged from the den with a terrible roar and left the Blackwood. The pleaders could not stop him.”
“Who are the pleaders?” Janner asked.
“Cloven at the borders, stationed there to keep our people out of the Green Hollows. It does little good to try to stop them with force, so they plead. They try to help the roving cloven find their way home, back to Clovenfast. It usually works.”
“Why do you try to keep them out of the Hollows?”
“Because we know that if too many leave the forest, they may harm the humans who live beyond it, and soon humans would enter the Blackwood and do harm to the cloven. We have found peace here, and we would like to keep it that way. Gnag has caused us enough pain. We have no desire for the humans to add to it. The queen is trying to protect us.”
“Queen?” Janner and Kalmar said at the same time, just as the road led around the corner of a stout stone building with another horselike cloven peering down from the rooftop.
Before them stood a magnificent old building covered in floral ivy, at the center of which was an archway that led into a courtyard. The trees had been cleared away, and the area lay in the bright sun like a stone island draped in purple flowers.
“Yes, the queen. I sent word as soon as you arrived, and she has agreed to grant you an audience. Greetings, Halibart.” Cadwick nodded at one of two guards on either side of the entrance. “Jaffann,” he said to the other. The two sentries were as tall as Cadwick. Like his, their faces were catlike, and each of them held a sword.
“Elder Cadwick,” Halibart purred. “Her highness is expecting you.”
Janner felt the guards’ eyes on him as he passed into the courtyard. As soon as they were within the walls of the palace, the fragrance of the flowers washed over them and Janner was dizzy with delight. The ground burst with blooms and plants of many kinds, some of which already bore fruits and vegetables despite the winter cold. Little stone paths wound through the foliage, under arbors draped with clusters of flowers that hung like grapes.
“My queen,” said Cadwick with reverence. “I present Janner and Kalmar, sons of the cloven Esben.”
Janner saw no one at first. Then at the far corner of the garden he saw movement in the boughs of a tree with white flowers. He braced himself to encounter someone huge, someone tall enough to brush the upper branches of the tree. The branches seemed to rotate, and then they moved closer. Janner and Kal watched with awe as the budded boughs rustled toward them with a hiss of leaves that stirred the air and heightened the fragrance.
The tree itself was the Cloven Queen. Her skin was smooth gray bark, her trunk was sloped and graceful, and her large green eyes were set in the tree like jewels. Her mouth was a smiling seam in the bark, and she had no arms other than the many swooping branches held over her head as if she were praising the sunlight. Her feet were roots that snaked gently across the ground, caressing plant and earth and stone as she approached. When she stopped several feet away, her root-feet settled across the ground like the sweep of a gown and blended with the grass as if she had been planted there for a century. Her flowering boughs shaded the boys, and she looked down at them with such kindness that Janner had to resist the urge to embrace her.
“Bow, lads,” said Cadwick, who knelt between them.
Janner and Kal dropped to their knees so quickly that the queen laughed—a sound like running water over river stone—and her branches shivered. Out of the corner of his eye, Janner saw other flowers and plants tremble with her, and the garden seemed to lean her way as if a breeze blew toward her from every direction at once.
“Welcome,” she said in a voice so lovely that Janner’s heart skipped a beat. “I am Arundelle, Queen of Clovenfast. Is it true that you are the sons of Esben?”
“Yes ma’am,” Janner said in a trembling voice.
“Did he find you?”
“Yes,” Janner said.
“And how is he?” Arundelle asked.
Janner’s voice caught in his throat.
“He died, your highness,” Kalmar said.
A silence fell on the garden. Every leaf held still as if listening.
“That is a terrible loss,” she said quietly. “Such is the price of remembrance. I’m sorry, children. Some of us awaken to our true selves, and it leads us out of the forest and into pain. But it is a better pain than oblivion.”
Janner didn’t understand, but he didn’t say so.
“Kalmar, do you remember?”
“Remember what, your highness?”
“Your true self. Do you remember who you are?”
Kalmar glanced at Janner, then forced himself to look at Arundelle’s face. “Yes ma’am. Most of the time. But it’s getting harder.”
The leaves rustled again, and Arundelle said, “Rise, sons of Esben. I see that you are hungry. Come and eat.”
They followed the queen to a stone table deeper in the garden. Janner saw other cloven, small ones resembling foxes and cave blats, bustling from plant to plant, gathering vegetables that they piled on the table as the queen bowed over it, murmuring a prayer of thanksgiving. She smiled at the brothers and, with one of her branches, gestured for them to sit. One of the cloven resembling a cave blat filled two stone cups from a cistern by the wall and placed them before the boys.
“Go ahead,” the queen said. “My food is the sun, my drink is the earth.”
Janner bit into a long green vegetable and a sweet flavor burst into his mouth. Kalmar sniffed at a round blue fruit, took one nibble, then gobbled it up as the juice ran down his chin.
“You have questions. You may ask whatever you like.”
Janner had so many that he didn’t know where to begin.
“What happens if you get an itch?” Kalmar asked as he wiped his chin and peeled a speckled yellow vegetable.
“Kal!” Janner whispered.
“She said we could ask anything!” Kal said with a mouthful of berries.
But Queen Arundelle laughed again, sending motes of pollen drifting about in the sunlight. “I have plenty of birds to tend me, and bugs too.”
Janner tried to ignore Kal’s munching. “What do you know about our father?”
Arundelle gazed at Janner kindly. “I know he loved you. He spoke little when he first arrived. I tried to help him remember, but that is a healing that causes much pain. The untame are those who refuse to remember. Many of them hide in the wild and never speak again. But some allow me to lead them into the forests of memory, and some, like Cadwick, come to know their true names again and find some measure of peace. Esben was the same. I helped him find his name, and he told us of you—his children—and he told us of his wife. But he remembered only a little at a time, as do I. His name was familiar to me, but it was only much later that I remembered that he was my king.” She smiled at the look of shock on Janner’s face. “Yes, child. I am Annieran. I know who you are. Perhaps I should be the one bowing.”
“No! Please don’t.” Kalmar waved a hand and poked around his plate for more fruit. “I don’t like all the bowing.” Arundelle bowed anyway, casting a leafy shade over the stone table, until Kalmar answered with a bashful nod.
“So once someone remembers their true name, they’re cured?” Janner asked.
“I wish it were so. We all forget from time to time, and so we need one another to tell us our stories. Sometimes a story is the only way back from the darkness.”
“You forget too?” Kalmar asked, interested for the first time in something other than lunch.
“Yes. Even Elder Cadwick forgets. When he does, we send pleaders to find him in the reaches of the Blackwood.”
“And what about you?” Kalmar asked. “Who helped you to remember?”
The queen smiled again and stared into her own memory. “Few have asked me that, Kalmar. But I shall tell you because you need to know. I was cast out of the Deeps, thrown to the forest floor like a dead log. I knew nothing but a terrible thirst until at last my roots found earth, and in time I was able to stand. For many months I stood in the forest as the seasons changed, knowing little but sorrow and fear. I saw many cloven cast from the dungeon, but none spoke and none seemed able to see me. But then,” she paused, and a faraway look came into her eyes, “I saw my true love. He crept from the cave like a frightened child, and I could see that his sorrow was as heavy as mine. In those days, I knew neither how to speak nor even to move. So I watched him pass me by unaware, and I could not even cry out his name or reach for his hand as he passed. When he was gone, my broken heart at last gave me a voice for weeping. I remembered his name, and I wailed it into the Blackwood over and over and over, remembering with each cry who I was and what I had become.”
“What was his name?” Janner asked, already knowing the answer somehow.
“Artham Wingfeather.”