“Oh, Cat, must you return to that dreadful, cold place?”

Catharina swept her gaze across the tiny room she had called home for nearly ten years. She never really owned much while there, but to see it all packed into the small black travel case, with room left to spare, felt oddly wrong. After so long in the Dominion she was to return home with just the clothes on her back and the instruments of her work. The household had taken everything else—her books, collected feathers and insects, notes, scrolls, maps, and trophies.

She had owned nothing and was to keep only what her hands had toiled to make, her tools. And they barely rattled at the bottom of her case when she clicked the lid shut.

“Are you listening to me, Cat?”

“Yes, Yriea, I can hear you,” she replied without turning around.

“Then answer me!”

She heard Yriea stamp her foot in annoyance, a childish habit she refused to let go of. It made Catharina smile even as she bent and picked up her singular piece of luggage. Upon her arrival, long ago, the aelir had taken away her childhood belongings and had them burned. Then they’d given her two loose dark green dresses, as befitting her low station in the household. Uniform and servant’s garb, all in one piece of soft, unadorned fabric, had been all she’d known since.

She’d grown to be grateful for this as the seasons rolled by and she was quickly taught the value of each belonging and what it took to earn more. Luxuries were a rare thing for the aelir. Unearned luxuries were unheard of.

In the end, all she owned was her toil and the lessons of this place. It was hard to understand how she felt about this final piece of teaching.

“Duty calls, Yriea,” she finally said, drawing herself away from the bubbling conflict of wishing to go away yet still wanting to remain of the household, choosing to latch on to the one constant she’d always known. “My duty is to my people.”

Yriea scoffed.

“You are the seventh, Cat. There are six before you to answer any duty your people might ever demand.” She sneered in the gloom, white teeth gleaming. Fierce amber eyes followed Catharina about the room as she arranged the sparse furniture and erased any sign of there ever having been a human living there.

They were in the deepest hollow in the household of Protector Calhad, Yriea’s father. Catharina’s room sat in the very root of the great Olden tree, at the bottom of a twisting staircase lit gently by garlands of white-leaves. It was an oddly comfortable place, sunless and cool in Summer’s heat, warm against Winter’s chill, and always haunted by the many sounds of the great tree as it grew. It had been home for a long, long time.

It was time to leave it behind.

She sighed, turned on her heels and walked out without looking back as she climbed the stairs. Even those held memories that niggled at her resolve. During her first season in the Dominion she’d fallen down the uneven steps more times than she cared to remember. Some of those falls had left scars. One, a dull ache in her knee, bothered her even now as she ascended with her depressing burden.

Yriea followed two steps behind, quietly fuming. Catharina expected at least another outburst before she reached daylight.

“Duty to a people that will never know you exist, serving a family that only needs you for a skill you never wanted to learn.” Sure enough, here it was. Yriea worked herself up to a proper storm of indignant fury. “You could stay, Cat. Become aelir’rei. Be my sister in all but blood. Father has offered it so many times already. Even Mother approves.”

True. Protector Calhad had offered to adopt and name her aelir’rei of his household. Treasured daughter. If there was any higher honour an aelir lord could bestow on a human, Catharina was not aware of it.

She shook her head.

“Duty calls.”

It was true, more than Yriea could know. Duty had sent her away from Aztroa Magnor as a child, guided her steps on the long journey to the Amaranth port, and kept her watching the horizon when crossing the Divide. It had ultimately led her into the Dominion’s wild lands, with her letter in hand to beseech any aelir lord who would listen to take her on as a ward.

“A pox on your duty and your thick, flat-eared head.”

Protector Calhad ruled, in as much as anyone ruled in the Dominion, over a swathe of land the size of half of Vas. He’d been amiable to her parents’ requests for schooling her, and kinder to her than probably wise, at least as far as other Protectors had said when seeing her.

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His not being here to see Catharina off and to dull Yriea’s badgering felt like a sort of mean-spirited jest on his part.

“Will you be pestering me to the harbour?” Catharina cut off another complaint from the aelir’rei. She recognized the signs of it building up, like pressure in a kettle.

“And onto the ship, yes. I’m determined to have you see reason even if I may need Isadora’s own patience to not simply throttle you. Had the Goddess granted me strength of arm instead of beauty, I would drag you by your feet to the baptism and dunk you in myself until you agreed to stay. You flat-eared mule!”

“Temper, temper, lady aelir’rei.”

She took a quicker step before Yriea could kick her feet out from under her, and was rewarded by an undignified cuss just as they emerged into blinding, mid-morning sunlight.

“I will miss the view,” she said as she walked onto the balcony overlooking the vast expanse of ever-forest.

This late in Summer the canopies were all shedding the deep, verdant green and claiming the colourful dresses of Fall. Ruby-red and topaz-yellow mixed and stretched away to a blue-mountain horizon, unbroken but for other Olden trees where Calhad vassals and lower family rungs resided. The sweet scent of late Summer blooms hung in the air, wafted about by kind zephyrs.

Gondolas, animated by aelir illum ingenuity, moved above the treeline on a network of drooping vines stretching among the Olden. The household was spread far across the forest, scattered among the trees but always moving, growing, expanding. She’d learned to see the hive-like activity in the trees, all the aelir sworn to the house and all their elend and vanadal servants attending.

Once, the height of this balcony used to make her dizzy. Now, it was a joy to look below and make out every ant-like person coming and going. The aelir’sar of Household Sanar was boarding his gondola some thirty meters beneath her vantage point, heading back with his wounded dignity without being received by Protector Calhad. That would be a whole mess come the following season, but she wouldn’t be here to witness the games and the subtle machinations of the aelir high-born.

But she wouldn’t miss that. Oh no, enough of it waited back in Aztroa. What she would miss instead was the tranquillity of Nen’s heartlands. From her distant childhood she remembered Vas’ angry, wailing winds and the sweeping storms that made the mountains scream. Here, the wind only ever whispered and storms were always tamed by Isadora’s favour.

Yriea joined her on the balcony and took hold of her hand. Catharina finally looked at the young aelir. Golden skin and amber eyes, her father’s high cheekbones, and her mother’s thin lips atop a willowy frame that made her tower over both her parents. For this day, she wore the earrings of mourning, five silver bands on each sharp-pointed ear.

Among her people, she was indeed touched by Isadora’s hand. On Vas, she would’ve been the storybook depiction of the monstrous aelir of dark faer stories, the leering monster invoked to scare children into behaving in the long and dark night. And now, she wore an expression like a tempest that gave Catharina a shudder of distant childhood terror. Those amber eyes bore into hers even as she tried to avoid them, and Yriea’s lips quirked into the saddest smile Catharina had ever seen on her.

“Stay. Please.”

Everything about the aelir’rei was Summer-warm, from the touch of her skin to the gentleness of her voice. It had been so hard across the seasons to separate this real Yriea from the monsters of humanity’s stories, the butchers of history and devourers of corpses.

“This is your home, not that mountain wasteland waiting on Vas. I’ve seen paintings of that place. It will ruin you.”

“I…” Catharina found words difficult, now that the time for farewells had come, especially under that piercing, hopeful gaze.

“Please,” Yriea repeated, voice a low whisper.

That broke the spell. Catharina pulled her hand away and smirked. “That was good. Bones of my sisters, that was so good. You almost had me entranced.”

Yriea clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Pushed too hard, didn’t I? It’s unfair that you know me as well as you do.” She stamped her foot. “I even did the big eyes and the pout and everything. Wasted effort for a flat-eared savage.”

Catharina sighed and rushed to the much taller aelir’rei. She pulled her into the tightest embrace she could muster and only stopped squeezing when there was no more air for Yriea to gasp. “I will miss you, heart-sister. More than you’ll know or I could say.”

The hug was returned less viciously and, for once, there were no more words to trade with. Yriea allowed Catharina her soft moment and said nothing about the tear stains left behind on her bosom.

“Father sends his apology for not seeing you off. The Council is convening early. Large daemon infestation on Beril’s border. The elend demand our aid.” There was a lie somewhere, but Catharina did not challenge it. Protector Calhad had his reasons not to see her off and that was that. She wouldn’t begrudge him, not after so long enjoying his generous hospitality.

And anyway, she had said her farewells and expressed her gratitude to the Protector when she’d been called about the ship’s coming. The aelir’matar was also there, but she needed no expression of appreciation or words of departure. Master and student had grown far beyond the need for such things, soul-bound as they were and would always remain.

Still, part of her wished she could see them one final time before her departure. Instead, she only had Yriea to accompany her to Diolo’s harbour, an eight-day trip in fair weather. There was a tinge of cruelty in this and she was certain Yriea had not given up her claim on her just yet. She was gracious in most things, except in not getting what her heart demanded.

They took the fast way down the Olden, sliding down its branches and swinging on vines across the canopy, the earth below rushing up to greet them. Household minders had seen this too often across the seasons to try and put a stop to it anymore. All had learned to mind the open areas of the Olden lest they find themselves on a collision course with one of the two bothers of the household and their endless competitions.