Whispering Wood

Valentina Serlast spends the whole two hours of her brother’s coronation on the stage, hating the crowd and very nearly hating Darien. She had not meant to come. She lives alone in the country house she shared with their mother, and it took their aunt Mirti, the hunti prime, turning up at the door and telling her to pack. When the acolyte asks the new king who will draw his three coronation blessings, Zoe, his wife and the coru prime but not queen, draws Steadfastness, and Corene, his sweela daughter by Queen Alys, draws Vision. Then Darien names his sister. Val freezes until a kindly stranger helps her up, and draws Time. In the crowd she glimpses a man with red hair and a grin wide enough to carry across a city, looking straight at her. When she looks again he is gone.

Corene announces that they will be friends. At Darien’s luncheon for family and primes the talk turns to a border skirmish with Soeche-Tas and to smugglers slipping goods through the mountains. Afterwards Darien asks his sister to stay. She accuses him of leaving her alone to nurse their mother; he admits their mother’s death hit him harder than anything since their father’s. She stays, for a while.

Corene, with her guard Foley at the wheel, drags Val southside to Geoffrey’s restaurant to try sirix, the liquor smuggled in from Soeche-Tas. Geoffrey draws random blessings for them, and Val’s third coin carries, etched into the tin, the initials V and S; turned upside down they read S and A: Sebastian Ardelay. “It’s a ghost coin,” she tells Corene. Now she suspects who is carrying the sirix.

In chapter 5 she waits in the little park her father and Taro built in a neighbourhood that had nothing like it, where five benches painted in the element colours stand round a knee-high cauldron of blessing coins. Sebastian arrives, dark red hair uncombed to his shoulders, and their reunion is brief, unsatisfying and half spent arguing. Val pulls Loyalty, the one blessing they share; “Always and forever,” he says, and promises to take her out in his smoker car.

Chapter 6 drops into the past and the present tense at once: Val is eight. In the formal parlor of her father’s house — the house of the hunti prime, whose entry hall is a small forest of living trees — she waits for her cousins. With them comes Sebastian, seven, red hair unkempt and eyes wary, his mother dead and his father unreliable, taken in by Val’s aunt Jenty. They trade birth blessings: his are luck, innovation and loyalty, hers determination, certainty and loyalty. Then Val makes the offer the book will hand back to her at its saddest moment:

“I’ll hug you if you want.”

He does. When her cousin Morgan bullies the newcomer, Val stands up for him and promises to take care of him always.

Back in the present, Val joins Zoe to host a Soechin delegation, jewelled, obsessed with youth and in the market for Welchin brides. When Zoe’s anger begins to rise toward the coru power over blood, Val touches her arm and improvises: an office in the slums to vet women who are willing. At dinner Mirti explains that the next hunti prime is named when the challinbar trees around the estate’s heart tree whisper a name; the talk is of Natalie, Queen Romelle’s oldest daughter, though it is not settled until chapter 14. Val, shaken, wonders why her father took her on all those forest hikes.

Sebastian keeps his promise: a day in a doorless, roofless elaymotive and seafood at a disreputable place on the docks, until Jodar, a criminal with whom Sebastian has unfinished business, sits down at their table. Sebastian introduces Val as Tina Corro, her mother’s surname, and begs her to leave before Jodar comes back. Instead she stages a furious public quarrel, water in his face and screaming, until soldiers come. One of them, Yori of the royal guard, recognizes the king’s sister and sees her back to the palace.

A night at the theater brings Josetta, Rafe and Queen Seterre into the story, and a breakfast row with Darien about Sebastian’s boyhood pranks, black frogs in his bed among them, ends with Val announcing that she is not going to marry Sebastian. At fourteen, in a summer at the estate, Val leads Sebastian through the forest to the challinbar grove and lays her hands on the heart tree while he teases her for being practically a tree herself. Over challin fruit she says she will marry a country man who lives near a forest, lists the faults of men of every element, and advises him to marry a torz woman. He will never marry anyone, he says.

A Coziquela ship docks with a story of engine trouble, and Princess Melissande, the queen of Cozique’s daughter and a face from Jeweled Fire, arrives in a whirl of laughter, colour and ceremony. At Leah’s boutique, where goods from across the world are grouped by element, Val buys a torz clay sculpture of cupped hands that recalls her mother’s gardening hands, and little Mally, the torz heir, reads her by touch. At a palace dinner comes word that the Dhonshon crown prince has a son and every other direct heir is conveniently dead.

On a balcony Val remembers her father, the old hunti prime, who died on Quinnatorz changeday, just as Quinnahunti ended, and the crooked challinbar box, glazed black and lined red, that Sebastian sent her that first year. He has sent her a gift on the last day of Quinnahunti every year since. Mirti takes Natalie, with Val in tow, on a hunti tour of Chialto that takes in a university medical building, where the prime reassembles a shattered skeleton by touch.

At Leah’s shop Val and Corene overhear Jodar’s voice, and Corene drags out of Val who her red-haired friend is. On the last day of Quinnahunti she comes back to her room to find a packet in black velvet: a dark challinbar pendant with her initials, VS, picked out in garnets. Upside down they read SA. He has not forgotten.

Val is nineteen. Three years after her father’s death, her mother is moving them both a hundred miles away, near her sister Jenty. Sebastian, arriving with Jenty, suggests Val take a piece of the heart grove with her, and together they haul a great broken challinbar branch through the forest.

At the changeday ball, by a lake of floating candles, Yori quietly tells Val to warn anyone she cares about to stay away from the harbor the next night. Doubting that Darien would spare a smuggler he actively dislikes, Val asks Nelson to keep Sebastian safe, and avoids Sebastian herself. The next night Nelson comes to the palace looking for her. With Corene along and Foley driving, they race to Vernon Harbor in the middle of Darien’s raid, and Nelson locks the women in his office there. Under a white glare of sweela fire they get out in time to see Jodar dragging Melissande away. Foley goes for Jodar, and when another man grabs for the princess, Corene shoves her at Val.

In the aftermath Sebastian is there, rubbing his wrists where the ropes have been cut away; it was he who saved Corene from a man with a knife. Yori tells her captain he has been her informant, so smoothly that Corene wonders whether he has been spying for Darien all along; privately, Yori admits it is a lie. Darien interrogates his sister and his daughter, who tell him a story Val made up on the ride home: that Nelson sensed Melissande’s fear as they danced and had her followed.

Val is twenty-one, living near Jenty and being introduced to eligible torz men, since her mother and her aunt believe the best spouse is a torz spouse. Sebastian, rootless and charming, flirts with girls who are only playing. She meets a torz landowner, and six months later they are engaged.

At dawn Val searches the city and finds Sebastian asleep on the red sweela bench in her father’s park, wrapped in a tattered black cloak, a dagger in his hand. She falls sobbing into his arms; she was afraid he might die. What follows is the long scene Shinn names as a favourite. Val says she has always loved him. He protests that he is a criminal with no land, no name and no future. She tells him she broke off her engagement because she could not live a lie.

“Hunti means forever.” “Sweela means the fire that never goes out.”

At dinner before the king and four primes, Melissande, pale and bruised, confesses: one of her guards is Prince Kendol, the rebel son of Dhonsho, whom Cozique spirited out to sea. Dhonshon ships blocked her course to Soeche-Tas, so she made for Welce. “You potentially have brought a war to my borders,” Darien tells her. Her plan is to deliver Kendol to the Coziquela embassy in Soeche-Tas, but no ship will carry him and no road crosses the mountains.

Val and Sebastian are lovers now; he calls her Tina, and they argue about his trade. Sleepless one night, Val follows Yori to Darien’s study and hears that the harbor route is closed and that the king needs someone who routinely moves illegal goods across the border. She vouches for Sebastian and calls her brother cold. In chapter 26 the smuggler meets Darien and Zoe, explains that Jenty raised him, and takes the job of carrying the prince over the mountains.

Decoy parties leave Melissande’s hotel while Val waits with Sebastian at the edge of Chialto beside an elaymotive from Kayle’s factories, loaded with water, food and fuel. Kendol arrives wounded, ambushed a mile from the hotel, and Val jumps into the car and cleans his welts while Sebastian drives wildly out of the city. On the road the tawny-eyed prince trades his gold-embroidered royal shirt for plain clothes, and Val drives so Sebastian can sleep. At night they reach the footpath into the mountains; Sebastian and Kendol go on foot, and the lovers part.

Alone, Val fears the Dhonshons will find the footpath, so she turns south on the Central Highway to draw them away. At dawn she drapes Kendol’s stained, gold-embroidered shirt over her head like a hood, lets the pursuers see her, and races them south toward the hunti estate. She swerves into a lane between the trees, abandons the car, and runs into the challinbar grove, where the trees greet her, and climbs high into the heart tree. Below her the men’s voices fade, as if the forest had drawn in around her.

Val is twenty-five. Her mother dies, and the grief is physical. Taro catches her when she collapses; Darien and Zoe come; Saska stays. Then Sebastian arrives and says the words from the first flashback: “I’ll hug you if you want.”

On her second day in the tree, low on water, Val hears a voice.

“I will feed you, the tree whispered. I will feed the world.”

The heart tree fills her mouth with sweet syrup. When she climbs down and hikes out, six Dhonshons seize her at knifepoint at the forest’s edge — but twenty or thirty Welchin soldiers are waiting on the road, along with an old woman and a young girl in an open elaymotive. The old woman is Mirti, the girl Natalie. Mirti breaks the attackers’ bones, and then mends the bodies she has broken.

At the estate manor Val recovers and learns how she was found: the trees told Mirti and Natalie. Natalie cuts Val’s long dark curls short, and the woman in the mirror, all eyes and cheekbones, is someone Val almost recognizes. After a three-day drive back to Chialto with Mirti and Natalie, Darien is waiting in the courtyard with his arms crossed, and the brother she thought had abandoned her says, “I was more worried about you than I have ever been...”

Then come five glacial days with no word from the mountains. Val waits in her father’s park, pulls Intelligence, Luck and Love for Sebastian from the cauldron, and draws a blessing for a pair of strangers who are marrying tomorrow — and he is there, the words tumbling out in fragments. The coin she kept, Love, is the only one missing from the chain of blessing charms he wears: “The last one. The best one.”

Sebastian reports on the crossing but refuses to inform on his smuggler friends; Darien, who has never had a spy network in Soeche-Tas, wants to use him anyway. He offers Val work too: running a refuge for Welchin brides whose Soechin marriages go wrong, which could double as a listening post; she suits it, he says, because she has such a strong set of rules. At a family dinner the king hands Sebastian a box, and a small black frog leaps out of it, years-late payment for the frogs in his bed. “Welcome to royal service,” says Darien. A short epilogue, in the present tense of the flashbacks, finds Val at twenty-seven.