She wakes late, and stumbles from bed hissing and cursing, every movement discovering a new part of her in agony. Dressing is a special hell; hobbling down the sweep of the stairs takes an age.
Lilli is nowhere about; no doubt elven business has happened in the fullness of elven time, and she is occupied.
Pepperidge manages to source a hasty breakfast, grits her teeth, and sets out of the house. The Ecclesiarch's permission to interview the croft's elders is precious, and who knows how fleeting it might prove; she painfully ascends the winding hillside paths between the elven homes.
Several elves, about business of their own, nod solemnly to her in passing, seemingly ignoring her difficulties. Some quirk of hospitality, she supposes, a politeness about her human frailty.
It was one thing, she admits dourly to herself, to know that she and Lilli were of very different kinds when Lilli was struggling alone in a foreign land and she herself was living in comfort. The memory of Princess leaping away like a salmon, when the Professor was near falling down, is far more sore than a jealous youth's attempted malice.
She is not certain, yet, of directions about the croft's structures, but Lilli's scattered anecdotes regarding the place, and gleeful exposition of those folks whose opinions she should seek, tell her that a place to start will be the forge; high on the rocky ridge, for its chimney to catch the prevailing wind that the rest of the croft is built in shelter from.
All the way uphill. Of course.
She toils, teeth clenched in determination, until she reaches the stout building — tall chimney, walls more of drystone construction than timber, it can be none other. She means to pause, recover her dignity out of the occupants' sight, perhaps seat herself upon a rock or a stump until her breathing calms; but outside the door is a neat herb garden, a fallen tree's bulk tool-smoothed to serve as both seat and table, a pot of tea and plated morsels bespeaking visitors; alongside an elder woman, Captain Taelin is clearly deep in some kind of discussion.
Well. Perhaps another time; she draws a slow, deep breath, steeling herself for the fruitless descent.
"Ah!" Taelin calls out cheerily. "The very person I'd seek next, and another to sample your very fine baking, before I devour every crumb and sleep like a fatted bear! Might I beg a quiet minute with yonder Professor, before I take my leave?"
His host — wide in the shoulder, a tool-wielder's hands, greying at the temples — flashes Pepperidge a glittering smile, murmurs something about replenishing the pot of tea, and retreats to allow a tactful chat.
"I believe this to be a coincidence," Pepperidge tells him, "as much as I would a student happening to be in my classroom early, happening to have a moment for words with me."
"I do live here," Taelin says, gesturing expansively at the croft spread out below, his own smile calling him a liar.
"So you do." She suppresses an urge to plant hands on hips and give him a professionally withering stare.
"Do sit!" He pats the wood on which he's perched, although she doesn't take the invitation. "No word of a lie, Professor, I did hope to see you today."
With a cooled head, she expected as much. Taking his rangers on a timewasting snipe-hunt, while a search was on, for the sake of her pride; hardly her finest hour, or best impression she might have made here. She hardly knows how to broach the subject of the apologies she owes; cannot even fathom what ones, in elven reckoning, they might be. "Indeed," she says mildly, gently probing the soreness around the joint at the base of one thumb, that she might have something to do with her hands.
"You're a difficult one," Taelin says cheerily. "Neither of our peoples reckon well with the difference in our ageing, Professor. It is all very well to think: well, if a person goes through Infanthood, Youth, Experience, Wisdom and Senescence, then we shall simply say that each is a fifth of a lifespan and there is a simple arithmetic conversion factor to the years of elf and human; but it is of course not true in any particular, not in its reckoning of humans, nor of elves, and most especially not in the difference." He thoughtfully eats a small cake, licking his fingers.
"True," Pepperidge says warily.
"It's hard, though, isn't it? To look into a face and speak with a person and have all the signs of who they are and how they stand in relation to you and their folk tell you a thing, and the thing be wrong, because their own signs are in another language." He puts his head on one side and looks at her, long and calm and thoughtful. "My rangers, they treat you as they treat the poet, mostly; respected, but not much removed from them, not due much formality, much deference, you see?"
"Nor am I."
"Well." He keeps gazing. "Well, Professor, we may not have universities, but we do have teachers and scholars and all, in our own ways. And if you were of our own people...perhaps not a great much, but a little, if occasion called for you to stand on it. But most of my kin read you in our own tongue of years, and understand you in it to be, perhaps...a little sister to one of my rangers, say."
It seems safest to simply nod and gesture enquiringly whether his plate of pastries are to be shared. He beams and shoves it closer to her.
"And then you become passionate, and out come your teacher habits, and suddenly they read you as an elder."
She pauses, holding a bird-shaped confection, an airy laminate of paper-thin pastry sheets. "And so — ?"
"And so, effectively, yesterday they took you out as a guest of our people, and then midway through you became enraged and they began to act as if you'd commandeered them. Oh, no," he adds reassuringly, as she starts to carefully put the pastry down, "do eat that, Professor wolf, it's good! I have more practise at speaking between our people, and if I'd been there — but instead they took orders from you as though you're born to give them. And there's no fault there, to you or to them, but between the fools: Tiny walked on a turned ankle until his foot's the size of a centaur's left nut and he can't wear a boot today, Princess ran his heels bloody and is lying down feeling woe that he's not stout enough to march alongside a human, and Longeye — "
He pauses, contemplating the plate of pastries.
"Longeye jokes that she joined the rangers so they'd not make her join the family trade of poetry, and she spent half the night with a jug of mead and a lyre, fitting you into the Weave, the croft's choral history, you see? I'd never heard her do more than rhyming filth to trail tunes before," he adds, grinning. "She's good at that, but I'd not known she's that good. You impressed her."
"All I did was — "
"Ah, now, it's not about the what." He flickers serious again a moment. "You think of them as soldiers, as hardened and experienced, and it's not that you're wrong, but — the tongue of years, Professor, yes? You have to learn to think of them, also, as being more akin in their hearts to your own students. Young. Learning, still. Looking up for their certainties to their elders."
"Oh, not to me," she says, dismayed.
"Not for me to say!" Taelin tells her. "But with just a turn of the tone of your voice, you had them ready to storm to every hell's gate with you."
She gently puts her face into her palm, until the mortified warmth in it might subside.
"Which is all to say," he says merrily, "that if you're ever to steal them from me, please mind — none of them have the lick of sense to stop before they break, so I'd ask you to do the thinking for them next time."
She groans. "Captain," she says, "I'm so sorry."
"Don't fret!" he says. "I'm likewise sorry they hadn't the sense to stop you before you broke."
"I'm well enough," she says, and he laughs.
"Aye, and Longeye's been telling them the same, that you've the strength of heartwood and a body as tireless as the wind! Don't make me call you liar to your face, Professor; I've not the poet's pretty face to get away with saying so! For goodness' sake, you should be doing as my rangers are, and resting."
"But the Ecclesiarch allowed that I might speak to people — "
"And people will there be tomorrow."
"But permission might not."
Taelin holds up a finger. "I tell you a secret, here, Professor," he says affectionately. "As a task, Ecclesiarch is not so different from my own as ranger captain: it's mostly having a lick of sense for people, on their behalf. Our elders — some — would talk to you if he'd said never a word. Those who wouldn't still won't. And if he said tomorrow you've no longer his blessing, the ones who will, would regardless." He gestures around expansively. "Few things are as freeing to one's own opinion as being ordered to have someone else's!"
"But — "
"Professor." He holds up a hand. "Please! I'd not rob you of the mystique of the indestructible little scholar who marched a squad of rangers to tatters; just, as a friend, you see? I ask you to spend the day off your feet."
She looks wryly around at where they are.
"Well, still," he concedes. "You need not traipse all around the croft, not all one once. Sit here. Be plied with tea and pastries — no, really, this is the third pot and second plate, I needs must politely escape! Our dear smith has, at present, no children at home, no descendant-children at knee — she feels the house-emptiness, yes? You'll have no better company to fill your ears, I promise, and do her good in the listening."
Her pride has her standing, still. And really, she would rather not; she unbends sufficiently to lower herself, gingerly, to sit.
With timing so exquisitely convenient as to be entirely outside credibility, their host strides back out, with steaming teapot and another platter of tiny, gorgeous baked treats. Taelin widens his eyes at her in comical, solemn signal: see?
"Your pardon for the intrusion," Pepperdige says cordially, ignoring his gurning as best she can. "Amaranth Pepperidge; in a place of this size, you doubtless know all there is to know about me already. I'd be delighted to make your acquaintance."
The elven woman's mouth quirks at the corner; she shoots Taelin a distinct look of shared amusement. "Janlyn Lone-Bird-Calls-Across-The-Snowfall. Word indeed precedes you!" She sets down the pot and cup in one hand, and so freed, uses it to transfer the plate of cakes to the log, revealing beneath it yet another thing she carries. "I hear you're in need of a knife."
The breath leaves the Professor, even as the dry cataloguer's voice within says ah yes — the smith.... What's proffered — thrust at her, really — is sheathed in fine leather stained a burnished red, with unfamiliar, elaborate stitching. A handle fashioned from amber, pommelled with a carved deer's head; what she can glimpse of the blade holds shimmering sea-foam ripples of tone within the metal itself.
"Madam," Pepperidge croaks, looking upon — if perhaps not a king's ransom, then definitely a kindly-favoured prince's — "I think that is no knife." And indeed it isn't, sheathed as it is to ride at the back, in the spot the honour does.
The smith smiles again, something dancing in her expression that's not quite glamour — more, Pepperidge thinks after a second, the deep subtlety of a woman with power who's lived centuries to her own decades. "I forged this many years ago and miles to spare, for a young man who — well, in the way of the beautiful men of our youths: may he lie in a gutter somewhere and lick snakes. I'd have you take it and wear it, let me think of it fairer than remembering him when it comes to mind."
Pepperidge glances swiftly at Taelin, who has found something fascinating to watch in the play of birds in the air above them.
"You argue with a distant elder cousin of mine," he observes blandly, in the direction of the sky. "I know those who'd drink to your doomed bravery for the attempt! Quicker by far to simply accept, Professor."
"I'm sure I wouldn't dare risk the affront," Pepperidge tells him. "Although I might wonder, if it came to mind, who told your cousin I was short a blade."
Both elves laugh, and she hears it then, the kinship.
"Aye, I see it," the smith says to him. "Has anyone told you the story, scholar, of when your young Lilliana was knee-tall and just beginning to walk? Patters off when every back's turned a second, and they find her on a shelf in the kitchen, covered in spices, a piece of dried tjeng root in her fist —"
Pepperidge's breath hitches at even the thought; the long road here introduced her to trail soup, as made by rangers.
"Face red and bunched up like a shrivelled pumpkin, crying her eyes out from trying to chew on it."
"Oh no," Pepperidge says.
"Oh yes. Most children, they do a thing like that, they never need warning off the stuff again; Lilliana, they could not prise it from her hand, determined to keep gnawing even as it burned."
They look at her with identical airs of affectionate amusement.
"I am not sure the comparison flatters me, gentles," she drawls; what else can she do? And Taelin makes flamboyant excuses, pats her shoulder as he departs, and leaves her to the mercies of, supposedly, the elf submitting to her interview.
Eventually, Lilli arrives from her own business and stands at the garden's border, wide-eyed. The Professor is standing, amber-hilted honour belted around her waist, one foot resting on a rock, gesturing; deep in some conversation long run to diversion, as the smith points out features of the croft's vernacular architecture in the smithy itself.
Perhaps a minute or two pass before Pepperidge turns to pick up a cup of long-cold tea and sights her. "Heyo, poet!" she calls warmly. "Are you well?"
Lilli murmurs something inaudible and drifts over, hands tentatively hovering before they settle on the scholar's forearm, where her sleeve is rolled to the elbow.
The smith bites back a laugh. "Ah, no doubt I've taken enough of your time, Amaranth! Here, let me take that; I should take the tea things inside." She quirks a sly grin, stacks plates and cups and all into a crooked elbow, and bustles indoors.
Pepperidge looks, faintly quizzical, back at Lilli's earnest scrutiny. "Are you quite all right?" she asks.
"Yes," Lilli says, very serious. "I come here and see you standing, wearing your honour just so, in the very midst of my home, and — I am a poet, and words desert me, Amaranth." She leans against the other woman, hesitates, then earnestly rubs her face against her shoulder like a kitten. "I am a dry leaf on a branch, watching the roar of a forest fire, suddenly sure that my purpose is for you to devour me to ash. I am — I am stricken. You are the very shape of desire."
Pepperidge exhales, long and hot, face suddenly burning. "I am," she says ruefully, "a fool who'd have done better to stay off her feet today."
"Oh, well." Lilli chuckles against her sleeve. "Lady, I did my service in the rangers; I've known that fool a hundred times over. I've been that fool. Along with a thousand dirty drinking songs and the darning of socks, a ranger learns," and she wiggles her brows enticingly, "backrubs."
Pepperidge makes a throaty noise which makes her instantly glad for the lack of witnesses.
Later, deep in the night, pressed together on the edge of sleep, Lilli says, "I would build temples to you," soft and burningly earnest.
Pepperidge smooths a hand across the elf's hair. "It's sweet when you're silly," she says, but her own voice is husky and calls her flippancy a lie.
