"Now that peoples' desire for my time is cooled a little," Lilli says over a morning's breakfast, "there's a thing I would like to show you, if your own engagements aren't pressing."
"I could perhaps spare a morning of being fed to bursting on cake and gossip," Pepperidge allows dryly. "What did you have in mind?"
"I know it would be more convenient, for your studies," Lilli says cautiously, "to have things put to you in a more...orderly fashion. I thought I might share with you how the Fist o' Ribs came to be, and what our shared purpose is, as a people. No doubt the elders will tell you, in fragments...."
Pepperidge breathes the smell of brewing leaves. "You have stood before my student wolfpack," she suggests, "and have some ken of the ways in which you'd have your peoples' words presented to their like. For your dignity, and accuracy's sake."
Lilli bites her lip, spreads apologetic hands, and peers up through her lashes.
The Professor smiles at her. "You see?" she says. "For all your protests of helplessness, you understood the university."
"I did not expect that to be such a responsibility, outside it," Lilli says, half resigned, half preening.
"Be thankful they'd no idea either, or the Dean would have formed a committee to discuss it to death."
"Oh, but I quite enjoyed faculty meetings!"
"Only to be disruptive and pretend you'd no idea. And to flirt."
"Every last question was an absolute necessity to my understanding," Lilli swears solemnly, then scoots around the table to plant a butterfly kiss on the Professor's cheekbone. "As to flirting, well...you may have me there."
"I swear it felt as though half of everything you did there was to flirt," Pepperidge murmurs, agreeably capturing her with an arm around her waist. "Gods, the distraction."
Lilli looks at her, hesitating. "And yet you did nothing," she says slowly.
The Professor regards her seriously, brushes fingers across her cheek. "Nor you," says gently. "You told me you scoured our stories for clues whether you ought — well, I know that our stories about elves are full of wild lies, some we told ourselves, some that your folk told to us for fun. I'm not so sturdy that I'd gladly shatter my fool heart as a moment's diversion for one of the beautiful, terrible Fair Folk."
"I'd not hurt you," Lilli whispers.
"Knowing you better, I know that to be true." Pepperidge shows her a small, wry smile. "But you have no idea the fright you brought to the dull life I'd carefully made, bumblebee."
"Fright? Of me?" The elf cups her face in trembling hands.
"Elves are creatures of glamour and grand passion. Everyone knows that." She smiles, unreserved, into Lilli's eyes. "Elves don't stay. Not for the likes of me."
"No?" Lilli cannot stop the shake in her fingers, as she runs them through the scholar's close-cropped hair. "Then I must hope, as hard as ever an elf has, that you don't tire of travelling with me." She finds herself, without quite meaning to, tucked under Pepperidge's chin, nestled against her heartbeat.
"Lilliana." Pepperidge's hand sweeps her spine, slow and warming. "Where else would I be, but beside you?"
It feels too terrible to even contemplate. Lilli breathes the scent of skin, attempts to scold calm into her limbs. "I," she says — then mistrusts whatever she was about to say. "I must show you the family history," she says instead. "That we make more sense to you than seventeen aunts' tall tales that call each other liars."
"It's the way of aunts," Pepperidge agrees, and lets her slip from warm arms, retreat behind tea and chatter; watching her with eyes that judge her not at all, but feel uncomfortably as if they can read everything within her.
She has composed herself somewhat by the time they stroll to the self-same meeting hall in which they were first greeted. Lilli leads them around it, to a smaller, sturdier structure that squats defensively against its wall; the door is heavy, metal-bound, held fast by a bar.
By a stern and forbidding bar on the outside, Pepperidge notices, where it cannot serve to keep anyone out, but holds her tongue; the elf has fallen uncharacteristically quiet as they near, brows drawn together in a wary frown.
"I do not think," Lilli says, contemplating the door, "that any human has been invited in here since its construction. I cannot confidently name any outsider of our own folk. But I do not say this to draw attention to our differences, or to say we do you an honour; your people think of elves as magical folk, and so perhaps we are. Only, where that's true, it explains why an elf thinks of magic foremost the way you'd think of a lit stove, or a flask of poison, in a room filled with children unsupervised: a thing, perhaps, that ideally wouldn't be."
"Are you to show me magic, then?"
A shoulder twitch, barely readable as a shrug. "Remnants only. We're not what we were. But it always put me in a mind — " Lilli hesitates. "I'm sorry, Amaranth; I cannot tell you why it turns my mood so grim, but it always has, and always will. I'll show you, and then I'll talk more about it when we're away afterward."
It takes them both to shift the bar from its place, settled as it has from years of immobility. Lilli opens the door cautiously, as though a wild animal might spring out; but inside there is only the dark of a windowless room, perhaps large enough to stable a single horse. In the shadowed back of the space, in line with the door, a pedestal rises from the floor, and atop it —
"Behold the duty and the great treasure of the Fist o' Ribs," Lilli says solemnly. "The helm of the Ecclesiarch."
Pepperidge steps slowly in, gazing upon it.
The Ecclesiarch's helm is huge. Less helmet than a dark halo of black briar and bleached bone, woven around the largest antlers she has ever seen. She doubts, looking at it, that any one person could lift it.
"Lilli?" she says uncertainly, staring at it. It has a brooding air about it — not quite malevolence, but like an ancient rage, burnt down to orange glows beneath its own ashes, waiting to rear up like a bloody phoenix. "Lilli, is there something...."
The elf gives it a long, sombre look. "Enough," she decides. "We have seen it, and I can tell you its stories just as well outside in the sun."
She goes to take the Professor's shoulder, and gasps as freezing air snakes around her ankles. Glancing down, she finds opaque mist spreading across the floor, pooled around Pepperidge's feet.
"I feel...I feel strangely that there's a thing missing that should be here," Pepperidge says quietly. "Please, Lilli, tell me that."
"The helm was made to hold a thing," Lilli babbles, skipping nervously around the mist's edge. "It's long lost — come away, Amaranth, come away!"
"I cannot, Lilli," the Professor says, glancing wryly down. "You recall the Old Glen? I told you there was a figure, something in the mist."
"You said it spoke, but you heard no words." Lilli is loathe to touch the fog, but cannot quite reach to grasp the Professor without doing so. "Please, Amaranth, I mistrust this! Come away, we will tell the elders that the helm produces mist, they can omen this to surfeit!"
"Lilli." Pepperidge, taking not a step, begins to rummage in her belt pouch. "The helm produces nothing, and you know it. I heard no words, but I understood nonetheless. I was entrusted a secret, to carry to where it belongs." She gingerly fetches out something, wrapped in cloth. "I knew not where to take it, but — do you know this?"
The wrapping falls away, and Lilli cries out.
Mist boils from it, but not sufficient to obscure it. A fist-sized knot of wood, uncut, unshaped, but nonetheless in the unmistakeable form of an elven heart.
"No, no, no! Touch it not!"
Pepperidge stands, looking down at the thing in her hands, slowly wrapped in rising mist. She looks up, not to Lilli, but to the helm, which rustles as if in reply. Steps cautious, she starts forward.
"No, no," Lilli whispers in dread. Every nerve screaming to flee, she inches after the Professor.
Standing before the helm, Pepperidge takes a deep breath, and slowly sinks to one knee. Arms held at full stretch before her, she leans forward, pushing her hands and their burden gently into the helm's thorny coils.
In the ancient helmet's depths, there is a muffled noise; a long wooden creak, ending in a hollow tock very like a heartbeat. Lilli keens, trembling at Pepperidge's small gasp, but the Professor simply swallows and leans slowly back, withdrawing empty hands.
In a single swift step, Lilli is there. She scoops Pepperidge into her arms, pivots, and bolts like a startled squirrel.
The elf's howling flight takes them unerringly to the Ecclesiarch — or, perhaps, he is summoned by the howling. Either way, Lilli is unable to speak, sobbing and trembling, so it falls to Pepperidge to square her shoulders and say, "Sir, I was bound to secretly carry a thing, I know not what or why, by your family ghost when we met it at the Old Glen. Has your helm been missing a thing, a thing of wood, in the likeness of — "
"The Heart," the Ecclesiarch says, in a voice that's dark and overwhelming, and in the fullness of his glamour he is like a furnace, like a yawning grave, like darkness, and she fears him like no person she has ever met.
He does not doubt her. He hears her and knows it to be true. And she is certain that if she had somehow come to him and spoken the same words and lied, he would have struck her dead.
"Sir," she says, and firms her jaw, wraps a tight arm around Lilli's shaking shoulders to shield her from whatever bizarre wrath might be heaped upon them.
And he is gone.
She reels at the sudden lack of glamour pressing down on her. Elves stream past them, heading for the meeting-hall, the treasure-room, the helm; the Ecclesiarch a pillar of striding terror at their head.
It is Lilli's own sway, dragged in the same direction by whatever force pushes and pulls her fellows like minnows in a wave, that steadies her. "No," she says firmly, and tightens her arm around the elf. "Absolutely not. Whatever happens needs us not, to happen any further; you look near to fainting, Lilli, and you need to sit."
Lilli looks at her as if startled awake from uneasy sleep, follows her to the nearest convenient stone to perch on, and gladly acquiesces to being tucked under the Professor's chin. Gradually her shivers lessen.
"You carried it here from the Old Glen?" she says finally.
"I did."
"There have been three of our own who have borne the Heart," Lilli tells her softly. "The first we remember ever after as Jahac Heart-Bearer. The Heart struck him with the Second Sight for the rest of his days. The second was the orphan Edigan, who took it up when Jahac was slain, and forever after he can shed his skin like a selkie and become an otter. Arzeo of my own line fled the first burning of Hightop with the Heart to protect it, and none can say what it may have done to him; neither he nor it had been seen since." Lilli gingerly threads her arms around Pepperidge's waist. "Oh, wolf, I am so very sorry I pressed you to take this journey with me!"
Pepperidge laughs a little in surprise. "Bumblebee," she says, stroking Lilli's back, "how could I say the same? I've come to no harm, see? Fret not."
"Still." Lilli hesitates, tightens her embrace. "The Heart is no trinket, not a magic bauble from a child's story. It's a thing of strangeness, old beyond reckoning, older than elves. Powerful, but not a thing of use, you see, Amaranth? A thing that simply is. The thought of danger to you from it chills me."
"I am clearly not vanished forever," Pepperidge says. "Lilli — " and she tilts the elf's face up with a soft touch beneath her chin. "See?"
Lilli looks at her, long and serious, as if having to gather sufficient evidence to believe it, then softly kisses her.
Eventually someone springs, elven-heeled, along the path to say that the Ecclesiarch would have words, and Pepperidge, expecting it, simply nods.
"At once," she says, gently loosing Lilli from against her chest.
Lilli heaves the deepest, unhappiest of sighs, and trails alongside her, clutching the Professor's hand tight.
The Ecclesiarch is seated within the meeting hall; he is shadowed beneath the knotted mass of his helm, his eyes two wet glitters in the dark. He looks less a person than a fey pedestal for it; and Pepperidge wonders, from Lilli's fear of the Heart, if that might not be somewhat true.
"The Heart has been our charge for such a time as to be meaningless to you. Its loss in Hightop's burning ripped out the family's heart with it," he says, deep, voice like grinding stone. "We retreated here to nurse our shame, our failure. We kept safe the relics our ancestors made to safely contain the Heart, guarded them for its rediscovery. It has become custom for our children to join the rangers, roam far afield, that word of it might find them wherever it arise." He breathes deep.
"What you tell me, sir," Pepperidge suggests gently, "is that the Heart is a greater thing than I. Greater than you, or your family — a force within elven history itself. And that as the agent of its return, you must now consider my fate within your disposal."
It takes a moment for the Professor to identify the series of soft, wet clicks in the back of the Ecclesiarch's throat. The old man is suppressing soundless laughter.
"You take that calmly, book-scholar," he says.
"To the eye, perhaps," she says dryly. "I chose to follow your kinswoman, sir. Should I complain, on arrival, that I am here?"
"Did you? Strange, then, that she says she led you."
Pepperidge smiles. "Come now, sir. You find it not at all strange; Lilli is young."
He pauses, then leans forward slightly, the helm rustling atop him. "Scholar, your life so far is an eyeblink to me."
"So it is. And yet, among my own, I am a teacher to the young, old and wise enough in their eyes that I verge on an elder myself — even if not in the eyes of my elders, or myself. Old enough for some to wonder, none too secretly, if I am to be a strange old maid, without spouse or child, driving myself to a lonely madwoman's grave. It is a mistake, sir, to compare the mere years of elf and human, as if they weigh the same."
His eyes stare from the helm's shade. Finally he emits the low rattle of a laugh again, and sits back.
"The Heart's return is the apocatastasis of my family's condition," he says, and steeples his fingers before him. "It fills the void within us. But this is a time, in my peoples' politics, for careful tread. The Heart is a terrible charge, and with great responsibility comes power — I would not have us accused of holding that power close, for secret purpose. We ride for Hightop, and I will present the Heart's return to the Fürsten, that they see me do so as their servant.
"I would have you there."
Pepperidge looks long and solemnly at him. Hightop, seat of the capital of the Eastern Range, second only for the elves to their first city in the West. She knows of no other human ever invited there.
"I am at your disposal, sir," she says softly.
