Pepperidge wakes in the morning, still wan but perfectly healthy. The elves are quiet and tired from a watchful night.
"I'm afraid we'll be making time for home as quick as we can," Taelin explains. "I know Lilli wanted you to see the Old Glen, Professor, but the elders need to hear that we saw the ghost."
"It's an omen," Pepperidge says. "I understand. I'm sorry, Lilli."
Lilli, spending her morning immovably attached to the Professor, waves it away. "I was terribly worried you'd come to harm, Amaranth. I'd much sooner have you somewhere the spirits are rightfully quiet."
"I'm fine, bumblebee." She cups the elf's cheek, smiling.
Nonetheless, Lilli does not breathe easy until there are miles behind them, the Old Glen receding into the landscape. Perhaps all is fine, nonetheless; Pepperidge seems entirely unharmed, nothing amiss that sleep does not remedy.
Slowly, slowly, even Taelin relaxes. And Lilli's spirits rebound, excitement rising the closer they draw to the croft of the Fist o' Ribs, her home and birthplace.
"There is so much here I want to show you!" Lilli says joyfully. "So many people to meet!"
There are several already winding down between the lodges, strolling or hurrying or outright bounding down to meet them, calling a variety of greetings.
"Look, it's my friend Tirina!" Lilli waves. "You must talk to her, Amaranth — we have known each other since we were born. She can tell you so much about everything — "
The other slender elf leaps down the last few turns of the path, hip-length braid whipping behind her, and flings herself into a laughing embrace with Lilli. "Oh, poet, you've been gone such a while!" she exclaims, and slips a hand behind Lilli's head. "I missed you!" and she leans in to press their mouths together.
Lilli squeaks with surprise, leaning back as best she can, and casts an alarmed glance at Pepperidge. The other elf, faltering, follows the flick of her eyes, and twists to see behind her.
"Madam elf," Pepperidge says stolidly.
"Oh." Tirina's face falls and falls into terrible dismay. "No." She turns back to face Lilli. "No, no. Lilli, that is not even an elf." She seems unsure what to do with her hands for a second, then places them on Lilli's shoulders and shoves her back, hard.
"Tirina — " Lilli says helplessly, stumbling.
"No!" She spins to face Pepperidge. "This was all very well while she was far away," the elf adds sharply. "But she returns now to where she belongs — all the places."
The Professor seems to be ruminating, almost peacefully, her reply. It is barely perceptible that she has to unclench her jaw to speak. "I think," she says slowly, "that nobody who cares about Lilli's feelings would brag about the beds she shares — " and then she tucks her thumbs in her belt, raises her chin a hair, and very pointedly doesn't.
Tirina stares, progressively reddening, then breaks and dashes away, bounding uphill past the wellwishers heading down. Dismayed, Lilli hardly knows which way to look.
"Amaranth," she stammers, "I swear to you that is not the way things were — "
"Hush," Pepperidge says, steely, and casts a glare around them all — Lilli, Taelin, and his rangers. "Sometimes, I swear, every one of you mistakes me for a child. I am not an elf. She meant to make me jealous, and — " she blows out an annoyed breath — "she succeeded. To my shame, gentles — I believe I just broke an untried heart. I would have hoped to be older and wiser than any need to do such a thing." She shakes her head. "Captain Taelin, you've said yourself, my people often enough hate yours. Do you think I'm surprised or unprepared to meet the same, the lone human among your folk?"
"No," Taelin says softly. "But I promise, Professor, there will be better welcomes."
"Amaranth," Lilli says desperately, "I swear. I promised her nothing. I knew not how she waited for me — "
"Lilli." The Professor rubs her forehead, then reaches out to touch the elf's arm. "Please. I am not a child in the first flush of love. I trust you when you say this is true. Don't fret."
Lilli bites her lip, sighs, and takes Pepperidge's hand tightly in her own for a moment.
"Your friend will forgive you," Pepperidge adds. "If she was ever truly your friend. And you must forgive her, Lilli, for you'll be in the world a great deal longer than I, and I'm a foolish thing to be lonely over."
Lilli chokes over her reply, and it is too late, as family swarms them, and the opportunity drowns in a whirl of greetings and gossip and the celebrations of homecoming.
The Ecclesiarch is old, old enough for his body to pull in on itself, leaving his limbs crooked, his eyes sunken, a starving raptor of a man. He sits alone upon a high dais, the food and talk and life of the croft spread out below him. Lilli is expecting it, so is merely apprehensive, not surprised, when he gestures over his seneschal, and word trickles from mouth to ear across the room, and eventually someone taps her arm and passes word that she is to approach him.
He is also, famously, not a man with patience or words to spare. She climbs the steps to face him, and waits quietly; he stares at her hard, and finally says, gravelly, "Explain 'university' to me."
Lilli hesitates. This, too, she expected; but she dreads the question. Like Pepperidge's grasp of honour, she feels she has points of reference, but still, what exactly it is remains a murky mystery. "I believe it's mainly to do with books," she ventures.
Elves know books. They've never really caught on, but they know them.
"So this Pepperidge, she is a craft-scholar, of bookbinding?"
"No..." or at least, Lilli is fairly certain that's a different thing. "More a scholar of the contents."
The Ecclesiarch scowls. "I do not see how there can be scholars of the *contents *of books. That's simply thoughts. How can you be a scholar of thinking?"
"Well, if you or I had an interest in, say...the ice to the far north," Lilli says slowly, "we could ask my ancestor-aunt Anara. Or go to see for ourselves, you see? But a human scholar might simply not have time."
He considers. "Ah. They die."
"But if the ones who do go, or dwell there already, write in a book — why, the book can have as long as an elf to travel. Longer. You see?"
Again, he thinks for a moment, then shrugs dismissively. "Thought in solitude doesn't beget wisdom. Conversation does."
Lilli wrings her hands in vexation. She is explaining wrong, and unless she succeeds, he will never open an ear to the Professor, who is so much better at teaching. "Oh, but — " and she glimpses the thing, suddenly. "Oh, but you see, if they don't live long enough to reach wisdom themselves, they would still like to as a people, you see? And so they read a book, and can reply with another. The first scholar may be long gone to the grave, even the second, but taken as remark and reply, they form a conversation to the onlooker — the future scholar who reads both! Like a chain of signal fires, no single messenger reaching the destination, but the signal, you see? As a people, they reach eventual wisdom!"
The Ecclesiarch considers, opens his mouth to speak, reconsiders. Pressing a hand to his head, he mutters to himself a few times.
"So," he ventures eventually, "university — "
"Oh, Professor Pepperidge is a curator!" Lilli decides brightly. "When a young human newly takes up scholarship, hers is the knowledge of what conversations have been had, which are ongoing, and to which might they have a thing to add."
He stares, hand still rumpling his hair, all the way down the hall to where Pepperidge sits with Taelin's rangers. His face wavers between consternation and something approaching respect.
"I see," he says finally.
Lilli beams proudly. "I thought it might advance the state of her people's wisdom if she spoke to some of the elders here," she ventures.
He blinks down the hall. "Give me no cause to regret it," he warns after a moment.
"Never," she promises easily.
"University," the elder mumbles to himself, then takes his hand from his head and waves it in dismissal. "Send your cousin Taelin to me."
She sketches a bow to him, and scampers gleefully away to tell the Professor of the honour she's been granted.
