No response, no movement, no eyes to see or read. A green shape, a muted glow in the wood. It was real, however. The spirits were real. She was speaking to one. Fear, and wonder, and a sense of… very great urgency.

"Can you help them? Will you?"

Nothing at all. The creature was motionless, as if carved. Only a slight shimmer of the green aura suggested it was a living thing. But fire glowed and shimmered and was not alive.

She might be wrong. She might not understand any of this properly.

And that last thought, in fact, was nearest to the truth.

Why should she have understood what was happening? How could she do so? The spruaugh stayed another moment and then withdrew, leaving darkness behind it again, deeper for the lost light.

Kendra sensed immediately that this was all she was going to see, all that would happen. The space among the trees felt… emptied out. Fear had gone, she realized, replaced by wonder, a kind of awe. The world, she thought, was never going to seem the same again. Going back, she wouldn't be returning to the same stream or moonlight or the city she had left.

There were green shimmering creatures in the woods beside Esferth, whatever the clerics might say. And people had always known this was so. Why else the centuries-long fear of this forest? The stories told to frighten children, or around night fires? She stayed where she was another moment, a pause before returning, breathing in the darkness, alone, as she had been last night, but not quite the same.

And so a difficult truth about human courage was played out among those trees. A truth we resist for what it suggests about our lives. But sometimes the most gallant actions, those requiring a summoning of all our will, access to bravery beyond easy understanding or description… have no consequence that matters. They leave no ripples upon the surface of succeeding events, cause nothing, achieve nothing. Are trivial, marginal. This can be hard to accept.

Aeldred's younger daughter did something almost unspeakably brave, going alone at night into the blackness of a wood believed to be haunted, intending to confront the spirit world—which was the most appalling heresy according to every tenet she had ever learned. And she did do that and spoke a message, the warning she'd come to give—and it signified nothing at all, in the wheel and turn of that night.

The faerie had gone already, long before.

She had, in fact, been tracking Aeldred's fyrd all the previous night and through this day and into evening from within the wood. Almost all of the spruaugh in the forest were south as well by now, and this one, hearing (and, yes, understanding) Kendra's words, set itself to quickly go that way also, but pursuing its own desires: such desires as those creatures still possessed, which had nothing to do with guarding three mortal men in a forest that had once been named a godwood, in the days when men dissembled less about such things.

A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done… something. That can ripple, might do so, though in a different way.

Mostly, walking as quickly now as she dared in the root-and-branch darkness, what Kendra felt was relief. A rush of it, like blood to the head when you stand up too quickly. She had no idea what that green spirit had been, but it had come to her. Spirit world, half-world. She had seen it, a glowing in the night. Everything altered with that.

She came to the edge of the trees, saw moonlight through the last screening leaves, then unmediated, with stars, as she came out. The stream, the summer grass, her brother on the far bank. And what she felt, emerging, was near to joy.

The world had changed, in ways she couldn't sort through, but it was still, in the main, the place she'd always known. The water, as she waded through, was cool, pleasantly so on a summer night. She could hear music and laughter to her left, north of the city. She could see the walls in the distance, torches for the guards on the ramparts.

She could see her brother, solid and familiar and reassuring. She stopped in front of him. He seemed taller, Kendra thought: somewhere over the summer Gareth had grown. Or was that a sense that came from what she knew about Athelbert? Gareth touched her shoulder.

"I'm me," she said. "Not spirit-claimed. Shall I kick you to prove it?"

He shook his head. "I'd think Judit's soul had claimed you. Do you want to go to the tents? Be with people?"

He hadn't probed or pressed her at all. She shook her head. "My clothing and boots are wet. I want to change. Then I think I need to go to chapel, if that's all right? You can go over to the—"

"I'll stay with you."

The guard said nothing (what was he going to say?) when they called to come back in so soon after going out. Kendra went to her rooms, woke her women, had two of them help her change (they raised eyebrows but said nothing either—and what were they going to say?). Then she went back out to where Gareth had waited (again) and they went to chapel together.

The streets were busy for so late an hour, but Esferth was crowded and jubilant. They could hear the noise from the taverns as they went. Walked past the one where she'd stood across the street last night when Alun ab Owyn had come out with his dog, and she'd called the Erling over to her.

Gareth broke their silence. "Is he all right?"

"Who?"

"Athelbert. Of course."

She blinked. Had made an error there. She managed a shrug. "I think he'll be all right. After all, Judit is nowhere near him."

Gareth stopped for a second, then burst out laughing. He dropped an arm around her shoulder and they continued that way, turning right at the next junction of streets towards the chapel.

"Where is Judit, do you think?" she asked.

"I imagine at the tents."

He was probably right, Kendra thought: there was cause for wine and celebration with the Erlings slaughtered and driven away.

In the event, however, they were wrong. Entering the royal chapel they saw their sister beside the queen, at prayer. Kendra stopped for a moment in the side aisle, surprised. She found herself gazing at two profiles, candlelight upon them. The queen's face round, fleshy, though still smooth, hints of a nearly lost beauty; Judit in the bright flush of red-haired, fair-skinned glory, on the cusp of her journey north to Rheden and marriage.

Kendra knew she had been avoiding the thought of that. So much would change. Their mother would leave for Retherly, and once Judit was married it would be her turn next. There might be green spirits in the wood, but the way of the world was not going to change for an Anglcyn princess because of them.

Aeldred's two younger children went over and knelt beside their mother and sister, looking towards the sun disk and the altar and the cleric standing there, leading the prayers. After a moment they added their voices to the incantations and responses. Some things at least still seemed clear enough, and needful: in the nighttime you prayed for light.