[IC] blackbird claw, raven wing [ closed for El Taco Taco && Nemaisare ]

[El Taco Taco]

Her blade snapped up at the sound of a crash. Her eyes sharpened, pulse erupting in her chest, as she searched for danger. And yet, there was none. No beasts, no soldiers, no glass-eyed men—just the manthing, looking dazed. He had fallen, she realised. Samaire did not relax, per se, but she sheathed her blade and returned her attention to packing her equipment. She retrieved her pack from its suspension, rolling her bedroll tightly, folding her blanket into a tiny square.

Boots were pulled onto cold feet, laced swiftly by numb fingers. Samaire gloved her hands, buckling armor with the ease of familiarity. Her nerves were alight, heartbeat fluttering in her chest, but the armor was steadying. With armor, with her sword, she could survive whatever monsters crept in the woods.

Tucking her dagger into a sheath in the small of her back, Samaire strapped her sword about her hips. It was warm, a touch of comfort in the night. Swinging her back onto her aching shoulders, she looked to the manthing. It almost looked human, like a child run ragged by play. For a moment, she could see Uriah again, exhausted after a day in the forge. It was as if the manthing had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart until it burst in a spray of meat and blood. She swallowed, eyeing his proffered wrists.

They didn’t have time for her to drag him, but there was something in his eyes. Or rather, there was a lack of something in his eyes. There was no humanity there. He looked almost like a cat Gildas had kept—it had seemed a sweet thing, affectionate and curious, but it had once clawed their Aunt Elora so badly she had needed stitches.
Samaire moved instead to the tree. Unknotting the chain was not as easy as tying it had been. Several minutes later, it went slack, and she wrapped it tight around her arm once more, jerking her head west—away from the doe.

“Go.”

[Nemaisare]

He waited.

She stared.

He watched.

She went to the tree.

Behind her, as her clumsy-numbed fingers worked at the chain, he paced. It likely did not ease her attempts, having the chain pulled back and forth, back and forth. She was not letting him go. A singsong croon worked its way up from his throat, rising and falling impatiently, rolling across the ground in a reverberating rumble that gave vent to his displeasure.

But there was no time now, to force his desire on her. He didn’t know how to remove the shackles. He didn’t know how to show her any other way that this was all he wanted. It was not, just then, the only thing he wanted. So, when the links slackened and she turned to him, chain once again curled about her arms, he looked at her for a second longer, eyes heavy lidded, sharply focused, breathing fast, muscles bunched. Chained was not what he wanted. But leaving… Leaving was.

He needed no second urging, but rushed forward, stumbling as the shackles hobbled him, thrashing into a roll. He tried again to run. Eager to place whatever distance he could between the dead thing and its hunger. But when he tripped again not long after, he wailed, sounding very like the young boy he appeared to be, picked himself up and ran on his two feet. There was a stilted, jilting method to his running, as though he did not know how to push himself forward when he was standing even a little upright. Headlong flight, however, did not require grace. He did not care to keep his dignity.

So, ignoring every pain still biting into him, he tucked his wrists in close, leaned forward and went. Overtaking Samaire in a few moments.

He ran until his lungs were fire. Until his feet were stumbling stone. Until his breath wheezed. Nothing could have stopped him but catching that chain around a tree. He ran until water rushed about his knees in a heady momentum that left him dizzy when he finally stopped, swaying, confused, lost. A river. A wide river, movement, motion, magic at the edges.

Chest heaving, he lifted his nose to the wind and snuffed desperately at the air, panting, until he found that gentle promise of life and living. It was there. The dead thing did not reach here. Safe. He collapsed, snorting as water splashed up his nose. His throat hurt. His feet hurt. His chest hurt. Everything hurt. But the river’s banks were clean, soft mud, and he let himself sink into it, the water easing his aches, though it promised to add to them if he stayed in it too long. He didn’t want to move. He wasn’t sure he could, now he’d stopped.

[El Taco Taco]

They ran for what felt like hours. Samaire knew they hadn’t, but every exhausted step felt like an age. They stumbled through the woods, leaving broken branches and muddied footprints. Her lungs burned red hot. She couldn’t help but twist to glance over her shoulder, watching for shadows that didn’t belong. All she saw were woods.

The chain bounced and clanked, snagging in bushes before being ripped free by their panicked run. Trees and thorns blurred past, the straps of her pack bruising her shoulders. Jumping over fallen logs, she tried to keep pace with the manthing. It ran like it didn’t quite know how to use its legs, but it was faster than any man she knew.

Samaire had been watching the world behind her when they reached a river. Slipping in the mud, a shock rippled through her limbs. She sat sprawled on the bank, her bones and muscles aching. The manthing had collapsed in the water, breathing desperately. Samaire wanted to get to her feet, to run again, but she could not lift herself from the mud. Instead, she leaned back on her hands, chain still wound about her arm.

For many moments, they simply breathed, recovering from their desperate sprint. Samaire stared up at a gap in the trees, at stars spilled across the heavens. Thank Spirits, there were stars. Her cracked lips split into a grin and suddenly she found herself laughing. It was a frantic sound, half relief, half terror. She laughed, even as her ribs and lungs protested, tears prickling behind her eyes. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop the relief flooding her veins. She was alive, gloriously alive, and she laughed until her elbows gave out and she collapsed on top of her pack. Something pressed into her spine uncomfortably. Samaire deflated, her laughter fading into ragged breaths.

“Spirits,” she murmured, soaked in mud and too tired to move. “Spirits.”

[Nemaisare]

Breath loud and heartbeat deafening, Matiir still jerked halfway to his knees when the human started laughing. A sound too wild for him to understand. Noise was meant to draw in or chase away, she just sounded like it hurt...

The movement made every muscle twinge and pull as he twisted his head around to stare at her, and he grimaced, huffing out the breath that had hitched in his throat with renewed fear as he realised there was no greater danger to continue running from. But the growing ache told him that the river was no kind sanctuary just then. Cold water wearing at his bones. He didn’t want to move, lying in the shallows, chin brushing the rippled surface, wet grass and cool damp reaching his nose from the bank behind him, the water numbed his wrists and he almost forgot about the shackles still tying him to the woman resting on top of that grass and mud.

Shaking his head with a snort as her laughter faded, he yawned widely, snorting again to keep his nose clear of old scents. If something else came near, he wanted to know before it reached them. But he also wanted to sleep, and hide, and hunt. And he wanted to do all that, somewhere she wasn’t.

A steady look towards the human lying, quietly now, body dappled by faint shadows upon darker shadows, the moon barely present in the sky. He turned away again, and bent his head to lap at the water, though his tongue was less suited now to the chore, and raised his gaze to the opposite shore as he drank, watching and listening. There was nothing nearby, not that he could tell. The forest was quiet, but a bird was calling, and a fish jumped. Wind whispered. This part of the forest was still alive. No hunter hungry for more than meat. Good. He didn’t want to run anymore.

When his throat was eased, and his stomach started to rebel at the too cool water, he forced himself onto his hands and knees to crawl back up the bank he’d slid down, longer legs a boon in that all he had to do was stand instead of jump to reach the top, though it still took too much effort. He left long scratches behind him in the mud, and was quite well covered on his arms and lower half when he came up beside Samaire and shook himself off. With no fur to hold the water, he accomplished very little, though his loose hair did spray more than a few drops about him. So he elected to roll in the grass instead. Not all of it had been watered by the storm, and the crushed stalks stole the human scent from him as he went. They also got rid of some of the mud, but he continued past the point of drying off and enjoyed the luxury that partial freedom had afforded him.

Pushing away from a tree and curving his spine back as he rubbed his head against the ground, he only stopped when his forehead came up against the chain that followed him. He gave it a hard stare before rolling onto his elbows, back twisted and legs stretched out behind him, grass caught in his increasingly tangled hair. His only defense against it seemed to be ignoring its existence, so he did. Turning his head to attend to a scratch on his shoulder.

[El Taco Taco]

She might have slept in the mud, had the manthing not stirred. She’d known exhaustion all her life; she had been training for as long as she could remember, a practice sword thrust into her hand the moment she’d mastered walking, padded armor strapped around her limbs. There had been no rest under Uncle Jonas’ black eyes, only endless drills and lessons. Tiredness lived in her bones, and she knew how to let it strengthen her.

This was more than simple fatigue. This was nearly six hundred nights of failure on her shoulders, of an empty name and vengeance with no direction. It was having lost even the shadow of a home, with familiar faces closed and backs turned. It was Pylos’ little, broken body, slumped like a sparrow with its meat sucked clean, his eyes staring accusingly in his severed head. It was Uriah, his skin melted off his bone, her father’s spine scattered along the floor. It was Gildas, his golden head in mother’s arms. It was that wail that split the heavens, seared to the bone, and Go. Don’t come back until they have paid for everything they did to us.

She did not even know who they were.

The chain rustled. Samaire turned numbly to one side, pushing herself up on shaking limbs. The manthing drew even with her and shook like a dog, spattering her face with mud, to match the filth caking her arms and back. She needed to clean her things before it dried. The thought felt distant, like it wasn’t hers, simply echoing across a valley from someone else.

The manthing found soft grass and tumbled into it, chain clinking heavily as it cleaned itself. Samaire watched it, still sat in the mud. It eventually stilled, tending to one of many cuts, and Samaire finally found the will to rise to her feet.

It was a long night of cleaning, the man-thing tied off to a tree and left alone. By the time Samaire collapsed to her bed roll, the sky was beginning to blush with sunlight. She slept without dreaming.

--

They settled into a rhythm, of sorts. He tested her limits. She pulled his chain. Sometimes running, sometimes dragging, they journeyed west. The woods changed in form, from dense thickets of sharp brambles to wide bowers and soft paths as the days passed. Samaire kept them moving from dusk to dawn, pushing for ever more distance between them and the Zarnofskys.

They found three more slaughtered doe, but the shadows weren’t quite so heavy and the stars never truly disappeared anymore. Samaire tracked, and hunted, snaring rabbits and fish for silent meals. Sometimes she tossed the man-thing a share. It was useless to her starved, after all.

Nine days west and they finally broke through the storm. Samaire awoke to find the sky clear between the trees and the earth dry. The woods had changed again, with trees towering to impossible heights. Sunlight scattered like topaz, glittering and wondrous. The soil was black and rich and even the wind seemed to whisper this place is more than bark and flowers. They walked along gentle paths, life teeming in green and gold and fluttering heartbeats.

They stopped for camp early that night, before the sun had even sunk below the earth, if only to indulge the peace.

[Nemaisare]

Matiir went where she dragged him. Sometimes he led, still young enough to be distracted by curiousity when he had the energy for it, but she was the one who had a goal. A direction. He wanted nothing more than to shake her hands loose from her end of the chain. To win free of the binding that tripped him when he ran and made him follow a human for no reason other than that it hurt to go another way, he would have done a great deal. Yet still, no matter the opportunities she gave him, and they were admittedly few, he never attacked. He caught meaning in her words sometimes. And that meant she was not prey, not hunter, not competition to drive off…

He could not understand how this was so, as everything else about her told him that she would be soft if he bit her, and bleed when he scratched. But he put no effort into struggling to find an explanation, trusting ingrained instinct over confusion. He was glad enough she’d taken him away from that place where the air was dying before it did, and that she never forced him close to the kills made by hunger alone.

Still, he snarled when she came too close. He watched her whenever she held a blade, and never once spoke an intelligible word. Though his vocabulary of sounds was impressively varied in its own right. He dropped to his side more readily once she’d chosen a campsite every day. This time was no exception. He flopped onto his elbows and belly as soon as she started tying the chain around a tree.

The distance they’d set between them and whatever wish or curse was being played out around the Zarnofskys and the limited rations were taking their toll. He was tired. Not dangerously so, she fed him more than he’d have caught on his own in this shape, enough to let him keep up with her determined strides. And he was used to travel, though usually at his own pace and discretion. Even the worst of his aches and pains and abrasions from that first night had faded. But his body now wasn’t suited to the movement he asked of it: his knees and back ached, the tops of his toes were worn raw from being dragged so often, his neck was stiff. And the chain hobbled him, every step catching at the sores he’d already caused by pacing in that cell.

Panting, he watched the woman go about her routine once she’d secured him, but that soon grew boring. So, he heaved himself up and stretched, grumbling, before shaking out and raising his nose to scent the air idly. He was comfortable here, more than he had been in a long while. The smells were familiar, the trees were welcoming giants, the air wild. He let out a low, distance eating groan, stuttering near the end to turn it into a series of similarly loud grunts, and then stood listening.

There was only brief silence in response as birds quieted to listen and then started up again.

He tried again, letting the sound grate from his throat in a huff until he ran out of breath. Silence, again, and the distant creak of a tree in the wind. His head tilted, and the youth shuffled his knees forward until he was sitting, crouched, looking more like a frog-legged gremlin than a boy, staring intently through the dappled light. Something was there. He yawned at the unknown watcher, tongue curling up and lips drawing back from teeth that shut with a click before snorting and shaking the itch from his scalp.

[El Taco Taco]

The fire crackled merrily, its smoke curling upward into greenery cast gold by the setting sun. Samaire sat, legs outstretched, leaning back on the palms of her hands. The branches rustled as rodents and birds bounded between them. The air was cleaner, somehow, easing the knife of exhaustion buried between her ribs and into her lungs. Even the soil seemed richer than any other she’d known, as plush as velvet between her ungloved fingers. She should have been patrolling, should have been hunting, but the grass was soft and cool, and it felt so good to lay back, armor neatly stacked beside her, and deepen her breaths.

Dimly, she was aware that something was strange, that she was so willing to lie without a blade in hand. The sunlight was like a kiss from the laughing dawn, from a radiant noon that burned away everything but devotion, from faces starting to blur at the edges. Samaire closed her eyes to try and recall Uriah’s nose and her auntie Amaya’s smile, her breathing lengthening.


It was evening when she woke. Moonlight spilled across her face, and she jolted upwards, panicked. The fire was gone. Her armor, still there, her blade—for a long, terrible moment, she thought it was gone. It glimmered next to her pack and Samaire scrambled towards it, shaking hands grasping the gold and emerald hilt. A strangled sob tore from her throat as she pulled it tight to her chest, embracing the weapon—the only thing truly left of the Cathan.

She rose to her feet, looking around the glittering cove they had camped in. Pale lights drifted along lazy breezes, thousands of them bobbing in a wide circle around them. Samaire made a small sound of wonder, looking upwards, to a moon full enough to burst. Something shifted in the air and she turned, meeting a pair of glowing eyes.

[Nemaisare]

He waited, staring between the trees, listening with a ready focus, eager for any hint of a reply. But none came. And he was startled into a distracted flinch when the woman in charge of his chain lay back. He’d forgotten her, for a moment. When he turned back, the play of light and shadow had changed. Ripples across a surface now, eyes blinking. The trees were whispering.

Shaking himself out of his hopeful daze, the youth stretched out of his squat until he was standing upright. His head tilted; the shadows shifted in their turn. He huffed; a breeze returned the favour, curling across his skin and running gentle fingers through his hair as he lidded his eyes and purred.

When he looked again, the air was empty, dancing light once more. Matiir sneezed, licking his lips and yawning at the vanished watcher before dropping back to his knees and finding a comfortable place to curl up in the roots of the tree where he was chained. He was tired, and here was safe. Sleep came quickly, and he didn’t stir when the lights drifted near on an invisible current, nor when the fire extinguished itself with a hiss of smoke and shifting branches.

High amongst the leaves of the tree Matiir was curled under, eyes blinked open, borrowing the flame’s vibrant light as the tall figure leaned down to look upon her visitors. The bark paled and shifted, stretching as she moved, until a slender body pulled free to crouch over the chained youth. Clothed in the wisps of moonlight that reached through the branches around them like skeins of silk, the nymph was dark, rippled wood, too thin to be human, too tall, too stretched. Her fingers were twigs as she bent them beneath the chain and pulled it away from the trunk as though it was a living snake, with gentle care, but no concern for knots or connected links.

And free it came, curling around her hands just as she imagined it should, so that when the rasp of leather and desperate breaths that heralded Samaire’s awakening reached her, the chain had been sliding up her arm. Distracted, however, it crumpled back into limply hanging between her fingers as she turned to stare at the human come into her grove. Sal shuor… Ivenna?

The voice came from all directions, creaking faintly, in what was, for a tree nymph, a youthful manner. She’d made herself no mouth, not knowing its importance amongst other creatures. And had started with an admonishment about the fire, before thinking to ask if she was understood.

[El Taco Taco]

The edge of her blade had shifted to the ready on pure instinct; feet spread shoulder length apart, weight moving to the top of her toes, eyes sharp as she readied for combat. But the glowing eyes were built from gnarled bark, a tree brought to life by hope and wishes. Samaire’s blade lowered, her lips parting, eyes widening in wonder. It had to be a nymph; its features were different than those of the Cathan woods, but the trees back home had been aspen and ash.

It held her manthing’s chain. Samaire’s mouth snapped shut, her fingers tightening about her lowered sword. She refrained from raising the weapon; for the moment.

Sal shuor…Ivenna?

The voice echoed throughout the grove, accompanied by the scent of fresh earth, the familiar tang of feral magic. Samaire swallowed.

“<We need warm>,” Samaire’s tongue formed the words clumsily after a long moment of recall. It had been so many years since she had spoken with the wilds. “<Mean harm none. We leave if want you>.”

[Nemaisare]

The nymph’s head tilted slowly, eyes flickering as the lights spun like stars around them. Pinpricks of light that settled, gentle and silent like snow, on leaf and branch and bark until the whole clearing glowed.

This human spoke as she had not known them to speak before. Trees held long memories, but few visited this place since they’d reclaimed it. Well, few of this fearful one’s kind. And never with her language. It was pleasantly surprising, as she had expected she might have to feed the earth with this one too, for making use of such chains. But she’d been so diligent in only using dead wood. And she was only one. Not so dangerous, on their own, she had learned.

Perhaps she might reason instead.

<Whyyyy… would I want when I can wish? Why would I have this tired soul leave me?> She’d seen that the human kept the other chained. And she did not approve, but it was not for her, yet, to interfere. Matiir had not asked for her help. <So far from home, child of risen stone.> The rustling voice grew soft as she leaned down to run a finger down Matiir’s spine, making him stretch groggily and lift his head with a wide yawn. <What binds you to this human?>

Matiir only blinked at her, settling his head back down when he saw that his chains were still in place and no one was wanting him to move. He had no answer yet beside the obvious one. The nymph’s fingers curled tighter about the chain at his silence, and she turned again to Samaire. <What binds you to him?> There was surely an explanation. Somewhere.

[El Taco Taco]

It was as if a thousand fireflies had found home in the bower, drifting in the warm evening breeze, dusting every branch, every blade of grass, bathing the world in pale gold. It was such dear magic, such a wonder, and Samaire's heart ached at the sight. The world was soft, as if it were a kind place, a good one, and it was a lie but spirits, it was one she wanted desperately to believe in.

The nymph's voice echoed in the deepest parts of Samaire's bones, calling to traces of old blood.

"<The Cathan took spirits as lovers once>," the river told her, black eyes gleaming, pale blue fingers weaving braids through Samaire's hair.

"<But spirits don't have bodies>," Samaire puzzled, twisting to look up at her friend.

"<They did, once, when your kind wished without restraint. There's old magic in your veins, child.>"


The nymph trailed fingers down the manthing's skin, her earthen eyes turning on Samaire. It coveted her man thing, loathed the metal chaining it, and Samaire's heart felt as though someone had clenched it in a fist.

"<I need>," Samaire's voice was thick with desperation, "<Home--home burned, Glass Eyes kill, I-->"

A frustrated noise tore from her throat, green eyes stinging. She couldn't find the words, couldn't do justice to the nightmare, couldn't make the nymph see why she needed the manthing. Samaire tried to blink away the tears, tried to be strong, to be a Cathan.

But if she'd been a true Cathan, she'd have died and Gildas would have lived.

"<Glass eyes killed everyone>," she choked on a sob. The river of grief had carved oxbows ever wider, curving until it burst into a flood, screaming down its old path. Samaire was a child playing at a First, useless tears and shoulders shaking, "<Mother, father, brothers Glass Eyes killed--find can't, I--I can't find, kill I have--it, he, stronger, can kill, strength I need, own don't have enough.>"

[Nemaisare]

The response, complicated and confused as it was, emerged heartfelt, and this the nymph could not ignore. Death held no great horror for her, but complete death, whole and hollow where not even the rotting log might nourish new growth was more staggering. A concern to catch her attention. Youth, however, meant she had her own whims, and the nymph settled, rooted down, beside the young man where he’d uncurled and now lay watching the woman weep with indifferent eyes.

To her, tears were as leaves. Simply replenished, and sometimes better shed. But she’d understood enough of the broken message to realize that the chain she held linked the human to hope. <She mourns her family, mountain cat.> Did he care? His response affected hers. Because, in truth, she did not.

Matiir, however, raised his head again at the words, eyebrows drawing together in a confusion he did not realize he gave away. Family, familiar loss… She’d lost… Was lost?

Snorting, the youth shook himself loosely, licking his lips before glancing up at the walking tree and chirping. A strange, back of the throat mutter that emerged low and ended high. Red eyes lit by the wishlights until they glowed as well, wide and round and bright, reflecting the moon. A quiet whumpf of growled air escaped him in a language as simple as its message was complex, and the wind rose to hear it. But the nymph nodded despite her opinion, and turned back to Samaire, one hand idly tracing soothing lines along the scar seamed skin of Matiir’s back.

<He would know if you look for another. A gift, human, you should not be given. But what use is fettered strength?>

[El Taco Taco]

Samaire couldn't stop crying. Shame burned along every nerve ending, eyes stinging no matter how fiercely she wiped them. Cheeks reddening with humiliation and tears alike, she knew she cut a pathetic figure. She was no First, no true avenger, a failure of Cathan. Her whole life, her uncle had tipped her chin up, had shown her how to keep her pain locked deep inside. Never let them see you falter, he'd told her. Samaire had thought she had learned the lesson well.

The nymph watched her impassively, with all the indifference of nature. It was not the spirits of her childhood, bound by old blood and deep affection for their watered down kin. Suddenly, fiercely, Samaire wanted nothing more than to be in Cathan waters, held by the river spirits that knew her heart, that loved her as much as spirits could. It was a childish wish, but no less ardent.

The spirit of the woods spoke only truth, even as her wordless speech shamed Samaire. She'd hobbled an unwilling creature. It was a man-thing, yes, but looking at it now it was hard to call it an abomination. It had not truly fought her in the past few weeks. It shrunk away whenever she neared, snapped its teeth, but it could have escaped. There had been nights when she was too tired to be vigilant, fingers stumbling on the chain. It could have ran, and yet...

She forced herself to meet its eyes, vision blurred by tears, nose running. She sniffed, hiccupped, and looked away. There was an intelligence of sorts there. Not human, not quite, but not purely animal either. Samaire wiped her eyes again, took shaking breaths and fumbled for her words.

"<It's all I have. It leaves, I...>" She made a frustrated sound. It had been so long since she had spoken in spirit tongue. The words seemed just beyond her reach. "<Scared. Have nothing. Plan...where go, don't...no...no track?>"

"I don't know what to do," Samaire slipped back into common, frustrated by her own inability to properly speak the language. She had no way of knowing if the nymph could follow her words. "Or where to go. I don't have any clues. I don't know who sent the glass-eyed men. There was nothing tying them to any of our rivals, no motive for them to slaughter my family, no trace of anything. I have to find whoever is responsible--it's the only way I can reclaim any shreds of honour. My family will die out, but I can't let our last memory be one of shame." She paused, fingers loosening on her blade, lowered and only a breath away from falling to soft earth. The tears in her eyes sprang anew. Samaire rasped, "When I kill those monsters, then I get to join my family in the beyond. I just want to be with them again."

[Nemaisare]

Question asked, the nymph said nothing more, and spent no time trying to understand a human’s thoughts or emotions through expression. She’d never learned the art of human communication, had only learned the language of the spirits recently from the wind. Tears could not sway her. Anger could not reach her. Reason or blade or fire were how she knew humans best, so, she waited for words or that sword to lift. Either was expected, neither would go without consideration, though one would, admittedly, earn far more reaction than the other.

Patience, among spirits, was not a virtue, it was a simple trait that could be as troublesome for the humans that dealt with it as it was intuitive for nature. They could rush or they could wait, time was a human concept.

At the least, in this instance, it meant Samaire was free to recover her poise (inasmuch as she was able) without prompting or annoyance. Though the nymph’s stare never wavered, neither did her interest in the answer. So, when it finally came, as jumbled as might be expected of a human’s clumsy tongue, she listened. Beside her, Matiir lay still, head on his arm, eyes rolled upwards to watch the distress on the human who had kept him and fed him. He did not know enough to be glad of her tears. He would not have understood why he should be, besides, salt water was not for drinking, and every other human who made such noises only brought trouble for him.

When she finally spoke again, still in the language he understood, the youth raised his head and grumbled in the back of his throat. His understanding was instinct, not knowledge, so he could not piece together her scattered words as well as the nymph did, though she did not know the words that came next any more than he did. And together, they studied the human’s desperation as her voice lost all hesitation and became emotion. Enough, without known words, to resonate even with the nymph, whose head tilted slowly, before she nodded. Decision made.

<When you leave, little human, these chains will remain to rust.> She would be sure of it. <The wilds should not be bound. I will give you this one favour for your tale.> Even as she spoke, she was fading, back into the trees that shaped her being, but Samaire’s words had worried her, and Matiir’s distant recognition of trouble, even if he wasn’t sure which she meant, whether from before or after they’d met, it was enough to tell her things were moving where they shouldn’t. So, the wind and the leaves still shaped her words even after she was gone. <Family shares blood among his own, offer him the same and you will need no chains.>

But she would not be leaving with the metal ones she and Matiir had carried between them until now, even had she felt no obligation to obey the nymph’s order. As she’d sunk into the tree around which the chain had been wrapped, so too did the chain, disappearing beneath the bark. If Samaire wanted to bring the man-thing with her, she would either have to let him loose, or carve through the trunk.

Matiir, for whom nothing had changed, merely fell onto his side with a huff of disappointment. Trees were better company than humans.