Chapter 1100: Afternoon Tea in the Forest
“She actually said that?” Wendy pressed her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. “Right then? At that moment?”
“Right then.” Leaf shook her head slowly. “Word for word. Brightly, too. With a smile. She meant every part of it.”
“And he —”
“Laughed.” Leaf paused. “Eventually. Once the initial — impact — had passed.”
Wendy dissolved completely. She laughed the way she rarely permitted herself to laugh — without management, without the measured warmth she wore as superintendent, the sound of a woman who had spent too many years rationing her own ease. “Oh, that poor man. He summoned everything he had.”
“He did.” A leaf drifted through the canopy above them and settled on the edge of the tea table. Leaf lifted it by instinct — a reflex of attention, the forest speaking back to the part of her that was always listening. “To be fair to Paper, I believe she understood him entirely. She simply answered with complete honesty.”
“Which is worse,” Wendy said, still laughing.
“Which is worse.”
A moment of companionable silence. Below, somewhere in the deeper green, two voices wound along a forest path — audible only as pitch and rhythm, the words dissolved into distance.
“Was it proper, do you think?” Leaf asked. “To listen.”
She had already shifted — the question was for form’s sake, spoken to someone who would decide with her. She stepped back into her own outline, green-shadow to woman, the translation seamless: bare feet, mossy hair, her face carrying the same unreadable patience the old trees practiced.
Wendy arranged her expression into something approximating dignity. “We were doing exactly what His Majesty asked. He told us to watch over both of them. Monitoring requires some degree of awareness of the conversation.”
“That’s a well-constructed argument.”
“And if he hadn’t asked you,” Wendy said, “would you have listened anyway?”
Leaf cleared her throat. ”…Yes.”
They looked at each other. The laughter returned, quieter this time, more honest.
Leaf raised one hand. From the earth beneath them, a vine uncoiled with the unhurried authority of something that had always intended to do this — it simply hadn’t been asked before. It gathered them both and lifted them, through the layered canopy, up through the levels of the forest the way a current carries something willing, until the treetops fell away below and the sky opened wide and pale on all sides.
The Misty Forest stretched outward without boundary — tree-crowns like a sea that had decided to stop moving, emerald and dark-green and the dusty silver of lichen on old bark. Beyond the forest’s eastern edge, meadows ran flat and gold toward the first gray shoulders of the Dragonspine Mountains.
The balcony arrived around them rather than being built — branches interlocking with the patience of things that had been growing toward each other for years, leaves weaving a floor that held weight without creaking. Leaf conjured two recliners, a low table between them. Two cups of tea appeared on the table: light gold in the afternoon light, steam rising in the windless air above the canopy.
Wendy leaned in and breathed. “You made this?”
“Morning dew, honey, sugarcane.” Leaf settled into her chair. “Fresh jasmine buds. It isn’t Chaos Drinks, but there’s no shortage of it.”
Wendy sipped and sat back. Below them, the forest sighed — not wind, but Leaf’s own distributed attention, a body that breathed in hectares. From up here the whole domain was visible as a single thing: continuous, ancient, rooted past the point of counting.
“You’ve become extraordinary,” Wendy said, setting her cup down. She wasn’t flattering — she said it the way she would report a measurement. “People say Anna is the genius of our generation. But what you’re doing — what you are now — I think you’re underestimated.”
“Anna builds things,” Leaf said. “I grow into them.”
“Someday you might spread across every forest on the continent. If you live that long.”
“It would take ten years just to fully merge with the Misty Forest,” Leaf said. “By the time I could leave here at all, I’ll be old.”
“Nobody ages the way we expected.” Wendy looked up at the sky — that flat pale blue, featureless, peaceful. “Agatha explained it to me. Magic power and the witch are interdependent — the stronger the ability, the longer the life supports it. The Transcendents would still be alive if the war hadn’t taken them.” She brought her eyes back to Leaf’s face. “You may outlive all of us.”
Leaf held the thought. Let it settle into her the way water settled into root systems — slowly, reaching deeper than expected. There was a word for what she felt at that image, but she didn’t produce it. The melancholy was faint and private, and the afternoon didn’t need it.
“Also,” Wendy said, with the light tone of someone switching to a topic they’ve been circling, “appearance and power are connected too. Pasha confirmed that Alice — the Queen of Starfall City — was remarkably beautiful.” She tilted her head and studied Leaf sidelong. “You look different than you used to. When you came down from the canopy earlier. Like something out of a very old story.”
“That is,” Leaf said, “not something I expected the sensible, caring Wendy I know to say.”
“That Wendy didn’t have time to think about it.” Wendy smiled into her cup. “She was too busy trying to keep everyone alive. Now I find I have thoughts.” She set the cup down. “Speaking of which — do you have a crush on someone?”
“You opened this topic, not me,” Leaf said. “And you deflected the question about yourself with extraordinary skill.”
“I’m older than you.”
“By a very small margin.”
“I have a forest,” Leaf said. “I am quite settled. But I know things about the message traffic through Honey’s animal network. I supply all her messengers.”
Wendy looked at her.
“I also,” Leaf added serenely, “review every article Honey writes, as superintendent.”
“So we’ve both been paying attention.”
“We have.”
The sun had angled west, painting the Dragonspine peaks in amber. The balcony held the warmth of stored afternoon — wood and leaf and the faintly sweet air of high canopy, the world below invisible and irrelevant.
“Are you leaving soon?” Leaf asked.
“I have to.” Wendy set down her cup and stretched — the gesture of someone who has been comfortable enough to forget, for an hour, what waits on the other side of comfort. “Anna needs escorting back. The Seagull doesn’t fly at night, so we take off before four.”
“You’ll miss the bonfire.”
Unlike the other visiting families, Paper had come by air rather than rail — a glider departure meant a glider return, on the glider’s schedule, not Paper’s. The bonfire gathering she’d half-organized with Snaketooth and whoever else had survived the visiting day with intact feelings was already proceeding without her future attendance as a confirmed thing.
“I know.” Wendy spread her hands. “We can’t spend more time than necessary on transit. Neverwinter needs the aircraft, and the route at night isn’t safe.” A pause. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
“I’ll tell her.” Leaf rose. The forest received her — not as dissolution but as expansion, her awareness flowing outward through root and branch, finding Paper where she stood on a lower path still laughing at something. She sent the message the way the forest always communicated: as a shift, a sense of time, a slight change in the light. Then she returned. “Done. She’ll meet you at the landing area.”
Wendy nodded and turned toward the balcony’s edge, waiting for the vine to take her down.
“By the way —”
Leaf said it before she could stop herself. Wendy turned back. The words she’d been holding all afternoon — I’m just a little — just a bit —
“Yes?” Wendy said, patient.
“Ah.” Leaf’s fists closed at her sides, then opened. “No. Nothing.”
Wendy did not accept this. She turned fully and looked at Leaf with the expression she reserved for witches who needed something they hadn’t learned to ask for — the gentlest form of stubbornness. “Speak. I’m here.”
Leaf opened her mouth.
Then she went still.
Her attention — the vast distributed net of it, threaded through every root and branch of the Misty Forest — caught something on the northern edge. A smell first. Then a sound. Then the heat signature: wrong, alien, spreading.
She looked past Wendy’s shoulder. Northward.
Several dark tendrils were rising through the canopy, curling up against the amber sky like something slow and deliberate unwinding.
Wendy turned to follow her gaze.
“Is the forest —” Wendy said.
“On fire,” Leaf said.