To Protect
Jo found herself torn between utter contentment and agony.
Physically, at least, she was content. High Luana was possibly the most comfortable place she had ever been. Her every need was accounted for. Better than accounted for, actually; the elves had a keen knack for predicting what her needs would be before she even knew them herself. And, if they were wrong, all she had to do was ask. It seemed like no request was too much, and it was hard not to have a sort of competition evolve to see if she could conceive something to ask of them that would be too difficult for them to procure.
But if it was a competition, Jo was losing.
Yes, High Luana was comfortable from a physical standpoint. And if she turned off her brain she could find herself content to reside in such a location for an extended period of time. The problem was when she was thinking.
Because when she was thinking, she found herself obsessing. If she wasn’t obsessing about the plan to vanquish Pan, then she was obsessing about what it meant for her continued existence. And if she wasn’t obsessing aboutthat, she was obsessing about Snow’s safety.
There was an agonizing sort of quiet that came out of Aristonia. For a kingdom that took up nearly a quarter of the world, news was slim, and it was the lack of information that led her mind to wander down every dark path, every sinister avenue of Pan’s creation. Surely, after the incident at the Sapphire Bridge, it was safe to assume that Pan knew Jo was in High Luana, now? Yet, if she knew, she had made no moves since Jo’s arrival. It was unnerving to think about, if Jo let her mind wander too far.
So Jo made every attempt to keep herself occupied.
In the mornings, she would go down to the shooting range with Takako—the woman was nothing if not determined to practice with every bow ever conceived. After she had worked through every specimen the elves could dredge up from their armory, she began to practice shooting in different positions, left-handed, right-handed, perched, crouched, from behind corners, and even hanging upside-down. She had yet to figure out how to simulate a snipers’ vantage, though she pestered the elves daily to somehow devise one. Just watching the girl shoot until her fingertips bled and her arm guard was torn through filled Jo with both comfort and pride. If their plan failed, it would certainly not be because of Takako.
In the afternoon of the second and third day, Jo, Wayne, and Takako all went down to the main city of High Luana. Of course, they weren’t permitted to go alone. A company of no less than four Elvish knights accompanied them through the city. Jo found it to be a little excessive, borderline paranoid, but she had to pick her battles, and so far she had won all of the important ones when it came to the elves.
The city was a sort of variant on Myrth. There were similar blue tiles on all of the rooftops—which led Jo to believe they were a synthesized material, rather than a naturally occurring one.
She dared to ask the elves that accompanied them about it. On the first day she was met with no success, but a new member of their crew on the second day seemed charmed by her interest in Elvish society and architecture. He ended up taking it upon himself to be their personal tour guide, and another day passed full of distractions to keep Jo’s mind from dark places.
However, four days after their breakfast with the King, Takako announced that she was not going to the shooting range. She did not want to over-strain her body, and risk damaging it in some way in advance of their confrontation with Pan. It was a respectable decision, but after a particularly hard night—one during which every question Jo tried to ignore by day had returned to her mind with a fierce kind of insistence—it was not what she wanted to hear.
That was how Jo found herself, for the first time, in what had become Samson’s new crafting room.
The room was positively massive. Jo suspected that Samson had never worked in a room quite so large before, judging from the fact that his tools only radiated in a small circle outward from his general work area, and there was still much open table space waiting to be cluttered. In fact, the crafter himself looked small in the room, his orange hair straining away from the braids he usually kept woven tight to his scalp, wafting like little flames atop his head.
He looked small, but Jo had never seen his shoulders quite so straight. She had never seen him stand so tall. Samson moved with deft confidence from table to table, material to material. Every now and then, he would walk over to the corner of the room, lift up a silver bell, and ring it. An elf would promptly come to attend him. They would flutter away on light feet, and returned with whatever it was Samson had requested. The crafting continued in an unbroken dance of magic and wood.
“Why does he have three bows?” Jo asked Eslar. They were sitting on the edge of the room, far away enough from Samson not to disturb him. The other man didn’t so much as look up when Jo spoke.
“He’s testing different design elements,” Eslar answered. “He wants to be absolutely sure in his approach to the bow before he works on the branch from the Life Tree. There’s no going back if he gets it wrong.”
“Whatisthe Life Tree, exactly?” Jo couldn’t help but ask.
“Do you remember what I told you, back in the Society?” Eslar said without so much as looking up from his book.
“You told me a lot back in the Society.”
“In my room,” he clarified.
Jo thought back to that day. She had been coming off the grief of Nico’s death and looking for any possible way to destroy the Society. While she had succeeded in that mission, it wasn’t entirely because of the information Eslar had given her, and as a result she found herself struggling to recall the details.
“Regarding the pillars.” Eslar helped her along.
“Oh,” Jo said, the interaction coming back to her with clarity. She was reminded of the pillar the Society had rested on, the one she had destroyed. “Yes . . . yes, you said the elves fed magic into the pillars through rituals. Pillars . . . pillars of the earth?”
“Not quite, but you have the fundamental idea.”
“So how does the Life Tree factor into this?”
“In this world, this Age of Magic, the Life Tree does not die. It only grows here, on High Luana, and is said to have been planted by the goddess herself. Every century, at Springtide, the elves cut a bough from the tree and offer it, not to a pillar, but upon an altar. They say this ritual is the reason why all elves may live their near-eternal lifespans. So that much seems to have remained the same.”
“If we take this year’s cutting, what happens to the elves?” Jo didn’t feel the least bit guilty for their actions. After all, if they didn’t stop Pan, it didn’t matter how long the elves would live if the world was purged into oblivion.
“That was a matter of discussion.” Eslar finally looked up from his book. “But the consensus seemed to be that we had not missed a ritual yet; perhaps it would be a good experiment. At worst, I imagine some of the older elves will die. But most, who are young, should have no trouble weathering another century. I do imagine though, that many will be praying to the goddess to help see us through this time.”
