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An Accountant and Too Few Fir Trees
The world was a pall of white, snow blanketing the earth and hanging thickly from branches bent under its weight. A second shroud of white hung in dense clouds above, though the sun broke through to set the frosty scape aglitter. Otherworldly in its beauty, the picturesque wonderland stretched for as far as one could see in every direction, and, gods, was itfucking cold.
Kol was only half made for traipsing through frozen forests, and he wasn’t even really sure about thefrozenpart. He pulled his coat tighter around hunched shoulders, which helped, and he grimaced harder, which didn’t help, but he had convinced himself long ago that indulging in feeling bad made one feel better, so he did it anyway. But Kol still shivered, his feet went numb in his boots, and his back ached in a way that definitely wasn’t supposed to happen untilafterturning thirty, and because he wasn’t feelingat onewith the world around himat all, he silently cursed his half-elven ancestry for failing him so spectacularly yet again.
The human half of Kol was no better—in fact, it was probably much worse—and as he tugged his skullcap down over ears that were pointed both too much and not enough, he let his irritation shift from the magical to the mundane. He’d inherited a human constitution and fortitude, both of which were significantly weaker than an elf’s, yet all the responsibilities that came with protecting the charmed way of life. The worst of both worlds, and into neither did he fit.
You are simply different, he could hear his mother’s voice in his mind over the whipping winds. He wasn’t meant for toiling directly with the earth alongside those that were full-blooded—twelve broken bones in a hydra incident, a nearly fatal bout of cockatrice pox, and a manager who had a mental breakdown trying to keep him alive proved that—but he was an exceptional counter. At least coordinating expeditions to enchanted locations and turning scribbled elven field notes into legible reports were much easier expectations to live up to, and they could be done from the relative comfort and safety of an indoor seat behind a computer screen. Usually.
Beneath Kol, a fehszar lumbered along, bothered by neither the temperature nor the crossed blood of its rider. The charmed creature’s lanky legs and coarse fur were made for harsh winters, and it took him toward Everroot Grove on instinct—a good thing since only creatures who were born there could find the way. Even if Kol had any idea where he was headed, he couldn’t see past her antlers which was just as well surrounded by nothing but white.
Enchanted trees liked liminal spaces, human-made borders included, so though it often moved, Everroot Grove usually hovered at the farthest northern tip of the region he managed for the Elven Perennial Agency. He hadn’t cared to which sector he would be assigned once he was relegated to an office job, but if he knew he’d be thrust so unceremoniously into the field again, he might have fought a little harder for something tropical.
The fehszar trekked on, and Kol squeezed himself in tighter, damning the job left undone that had landed him up to his ears in snow. Usually, he was as meticulous as the administrative gnomes he worked alongside, double-checking well before winter took a firm grasp on the earth to be sure there were no anomalies in the ensorcelled thickets and spectral coppices of the EPA’s Northeastern Planar Region, but Kol had been…off.
One would think removing extracurricular distraction would be advantageous to one’s career, but the past three and a half seasons had instead been an especially painful slog, and as a result, Kol’s work was sloppy. Really, he should have been grateful this was his first critical mistake, but an entire grove going unaccounted for was theoretically calamitous—he didn’t exactly know since no one had ever screwed up so badly. Not that it washisscrewup, but when the groundwork was left to a bunch of lazy, aimless, lackadaisical—
Kol grunted, and the fehszar snorted in response. He could hear his mother’s voice in the back of his mind again, suggesting his thoughts about his cousins were unkind. She wouldn’t use that word,kind, more likelyappropriateorbefitting, but after twenty-eight years of translating elvish colloquialisms, he knew what she would actually mean. It wasn’t the responsibility of the sylvidai elves in the field to make sure everything was accounted for anyway, it was his, but with the seasonal numbers due in just over a fortnight and absolutely nothing turned in on Everroot Grove, they were lucky all he could do was have unkind thoughts.
If only he were back in his apartment in Bexley, he’d be…well, he’d be stuffed into his closet-turned-office with a cup of lukewarm coffee and a tactus pothos he had to jolt back alive with a spell every three and a half days because it didn’t have a window. But at least he’d be warmer.
The next breath Kol took was deep and biting, but with it came the crispness of pine and the tickle of Magic. He craned his neck over one of the fehszar’s massive antlers to see hazy mountain peaks in the distance and thick spruces filling the valley ahead. Finally, he was getting close.
Kol was not as keenly skilled as his full-blooded, elven kin, neither the sylvidai of the deep forests nor his mother’s more meticulous and bureaucratic elucidai tribe, but Magic was far from lost on him. It may have taken him twice as long to learn how to hasten a plant’s growth, but once he could see the structure of the spells in his mind, the hard-won shapes carved themselves into his brain permanently. Elves weren’t supposed to need to be taught to communicate with animals—they could do that before communicating with one another—so it was thought for twelve years that Kol never would pick up the skill, but he set himself to studying the unspoken language of head tilts and chuffs, and eventually, he found he could speak without talking to most creatures, mind abuzz with their silent dialect.
And then there was precision. Even the laziest sylvidai rarely spilled a cup of tea or missed their target when they truly took aim, so for most of his childhood, Kol was known as clumsy and helpless until he finally learned to see the strands. All creatures descended from fae were meant to see them when they focused hard enough, thin threads of magic woven betwixt the planes of existence, and if followed, one could emulate perfection. They weren’t as sharp for Kol nor as abundant, but after years of intensive study, they appeared when needed.
Counting took precision too, but it was mostly human precision, he thought, because he never had trouble with keeping track of things or making sense of a mess. Unlike every magical pursuit which took him twice the work for half the result, accounting and reports came to him as naturally as waking up, and so the EPA put him to work in the way that suited him and the association as a whole best.
The length of the fehszar’s legs made quick work of the snow drifts as they descended into the forest, and when the trees’ variety was lost, Kol knew they had found Everroot Grove. Alcyon spruces sprung up in every direction, the gentle grey-green of their needles shadowed beneath a fleecy blanket of snow on each limb, but the trees were unmistakable in how distinguished they stood.
It was stronger there, the Magic, sweeping in on the next breeze like an unexpected invitation, and another voice followed, one that wasn’t his mothers, and it wasn’t the fehszar’s, and it wasn’t even his own.
Home.
Another freezing gust blew in right behind, and the strange spark in Kol’s chest was replaced by the reminder that frostbite wasa thing. Home was the muffled sounds of a city, the blue light of a television, last night’s cold pizza for breakfast, not whatever this frigid netherhole was, so he had most definitely heard wrong.
The fehszar knelt so he could dismount because even with Kol’s height, fehszar were the tallest things on four legs in these forests. His boots crunched into the untrodden snow, gaze drifting over the orchard before him, and in that moment, he didn’t believe the work was possible. Not for the number—no, even things that multiplied or disappeared or illusioned themselves were countable—but for the trees’ sheer presence. For how many thousands of years had they grown? How many creatures had been born in their boughs? How much magic had been harbored safely within Everroot Grove?
There was a nudge at his elbow, and the fehszar’s massive snout covered him with a hot swirling breath. “Right, I know, you’ve got a vacation to get started too.”
She cocked her head, antlers that could scoop him up and catapult him right over the mountains tilting along with her, and she told him silently that a little break from her herd was vacation enough.
Kol pulled out his thaumatix from the inner pocket of his coat. “Sorry to intrude on your alone time, I know how important that can be.” Kol knew better than most, actually. Perhaps too well. Maybe he would see Benny and Poffin when he got back to Bexley, but not if they insisted on going to that gnome bar where the ceilings maxed out at five foot three.
Biting off one of his gloves, the frigid air numbed his fingertips as he tapped around on the screen and got to work: count, photograph, catalog, repeat. The fehszar followed behind, giving him someone to mumble to when the rare mood struck, and after a few hours, he found one of the cabins set up by the EPA. It was a single room with a small fireplace and fluffy bedding, and it smelled of dried lavender and seejia buds that hung from the ceiling—the work of sylvidai elves, no doubt, who of course found the time to come out and refresh the cabin but not record the alcyon spruce numbers. Runes were carved into the wall over the hearth and the sink, a good replacement for plumbing and kindling. At least he’d be able to brush his teeth and wouldn’t freeze to death for the few days it would take to finish the work.
More counting and walking and cataloging took him through the day and into the night until he retired to the cabin and fell into a dreamless sleep. The next day, he covered a surprising amount of the grove with the help of his fehszar escort, and time ticked by rapidly. Kol had been behind a screen for so long, he’d forgotten what it was like to walk amongst the ancient and enchanted, but nestled into the trees, the cold was less biting, the whiteness less blinding, and something comforting and friendly fluttered just at the edges of his vision as he worked.
That is, until he had to walk along the barrier at the grove’s outer edge. Meant to keep humans away, the unseen boundary both urged him to leave and attempted to tug him deeper in as if it didn’t know quite what to make of a half-elf. He could fight it because he knew, though it made things no less unpleasant.
But he would escape that bitter, disjointed feeling soon enough. He only had another acre or so, and as soon as he figured out why there was a splintered stump between the next two spruces, he could move on and…
“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.”
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