The ground quakes that had started shaking loose roof tiles in the town of Tigrit had, by the time Remus and Andrea arrived at Duke Balwan's summons, grown large enough to crack the foundations of buildings that had stood, by the townsfolk's own account, since before anyone's grandparents had been born. Remus walked the main street on their first afternoon and counted, without meaning to, the damage itself, the way he'd once have walked a job site after a structural failure: a bakery's ovens shaken clean off their footings, a well's stone collar split top to bottom in a single clean line, a row of shopfronts along the square all leaning very slightly toward the same direction, as though something enormous and patient had been pressing against the whole town from underneath for longer than anyone had noticed. The townsfolk themselves had stopped sleeping indoors two weeks earlier, whole families camped in the square under canvas rigged between wagons, flinching at every low, distant groan the ground gave off even in the quiet hours.
Duke Balwan himself received them in a hall considerably plainer than anything Newtown had shown Remus, a big, weathered man who looked like he'd rather be out walking his own borders than sitting behind a desk explaining a crisis he didn't understand, his advisor hovering at his shoulder with a nervous energy that suggested the man had opinions he wasn't entirely comfortable stating in front of his Duke.
"My advisor believes it's ancient spirits," Duke Balwan said, with the flat, weary tone of a man repeating a theory he found personally ridiculous. "I've seen nothing in my own family's records to support that, but I'll admit I have no better answer of my own to offer instead."
"Spirits, or something older still sleeping in the ground," the advisor said, quiet, glancing at Andrea with an odd, searching look that Remus noted and set aside without commenting on it.
Andrea said nothing to that, though Remus caught, out of the corner of his eye, something pass briefly behind her expression, recognition, maybe, or the particular discomfort of a woman being looked at by someone who suspected more about her than they were saying out loud.
"We'll find out what's actually down there," Remus said, "before we start deciding what to call it."
The epicenter, once they'd walked the widening ring of cracked foundations outward to its source, turned out to be an ancient golden seal set flush into open ground, cracked now along one edge, black oil welling slow and thick through the fracture and pooling in the churned earth around it.
"Whatever's shaking this town," Remus said, crouching to study the seal's edge, "it's connected to this. I'd hoped it wouldn't be."
"The pattern on that seal matches something I've read," Andrea said, tracing the swirling engraving with one finger, careful not to touch the oil itself.
"Read where?"
"I'd rather not say too much about where I'm from," Andrea said, and something in her voice closed the subject with a firmness that told Remus, better than any answer would have, exactly how much further down that particular thread actually went.
They descended together past the seal into a tunnel that had clearly been sealed with purpose rather than collapsed by accident, the light crystals in Remus's pack dying out entirely a hundred feet in for reasons neither of them could explain, no amount of shaking or muttered coaxing bringing them back to life.
"There's light ahead," Andrea said, and was already moving toward it before Remus could get a full sentence of caution out.
The light wasn't sunlight. The moment they crossed into the wider cavern beyond, it vanished entirely, replaced by a sudden, total glow that seemed to come from the cavern's own walls, and Remus found himself, Andrea's back pressed against his own, surrounded on every side by shapes he'd taken, for one disorienting half-second, for trees that had somehow grown roots straight down into solid rock.
They weren't trees. Ten meters tall, bark-skinned, eyes opening slow and deliberate along trunks that shifted their weight with a low, grinding groan of wood bending against itself, the shapes closed the circle around them without hurry and without any real malice either, patient in the settled way of beings who had clearly done this exact maneuver a great many times before and never once needed to rush it.
Why have you broken the peace, surface-dweller?
The words arrived less as sound than as pressure, felt through the soles of Remus's boots as much as heard through his ears, layered somehow as though a dozen throats spoke the same sentence a half-beat out of time with each other.
"We came looking for the cause of the ground quakes," Remus said, keeping his voice level, refusing to let the strangeness of the question's arrival show in how he answered it.
We cause the shaking. We closed our breach because the old agreement between your kind and ours has been broken.
"Every soul who remembered that agreement has been dead a very long time," Andrea said, not moving from where she stood at his back. "Humans don't live as long as Rootwardens do."
Rootwardens. Remus filed the word away the moment it left her mouth, some old text she'd never fully explain the source of clearly having taught her a name for this that neither Duke Balwan nor his advisor had ever known to use.
"What was the agreement?" Remus asked.
Surface air poisons our kind slowly, the way deep water poisons yours. We stayed below. Your people stayed above and left our roots undisturbed. That was the whole of the balance, and it held for longer than your kingdom has had a name.
"Would you accept us sealing this breach permanently and telling no one else how to find it?" Remus asked.
If you leave, and ensure nothing else disturbs us again, the shaking will stop.
Andrea's voice dropped low enough that only Remus could hear it, close against his ear. "They're weak against fire," she murmured. "We could take this oil for ourselves, and never have to depend on Duke Corvath and his coal ever again. Don't you want to be free of him?"
Remus turned the offer over for exactly as long as it deserved, which wasn't very long at all. "I've watched this exact story play out before," he said, quiet, "in a version of it that didn't have talking trees in it, just people who happened to be standing on something someone else wanted. I'm not willing to burn down an entire people to solve my own energy problem. Some things matter more than my immediate interests."
"Like what?" Andrea asked, and there was genuine curiosity in it, not challenge, the tone of a woman collecting data on a species she still hadn't fully worked out the rules for.
"Like the actual cost of what you're suggesting," Remus said. "Which is a lot of lives, however strange they look to us, spent so I don't have to have an uncomfortable conversation with one duke."
They sealed the breach together afterward, stone and reinforced timber walled across the tunnel's mouth under Remus's own direction, and left the Rootwardens exactly as undisturbed as they'd found them.
"No ancient spirits," Andrea told Duke Balwan's advisor, once they'd returned to Dauru to report. "Just some very old neighbors who prefer to be left that way."
"How can I possibly repay you both?" Duke Balwan asked.
"There's no need," Remus said. "One more thing, though, before we head back to the Midlands."
"Take this letter to my daughter, if you would," the Duke said, holding it out. "She's in the Midlands somewhere. Tell her I miss her."
"How will I find her?" Remus asked.
"She'll find you," Duke Balwan said, with the tired certainty of a man who'd clearly stopped being surprised by his own daughter's methods a long time ago.
On the train ride back toward Autumnshade, Remus turned the letter over once in his hands, resisting, with real effort, the pull of the very curiosity Andrea kept openly voicing beside him.
"Aren't you even a little tempted to look?" she asked, for the third time in an hour.
"I am," Remus admitted. "I'm not going to."
"You have a great many rules you insist on following," Andrea said, not quite disapproving, more genuinely curious than anything. "Where I'm from, we're taught to take what we want and satisfy our own desires as a matter of course. Nothing more complicated than that."
"And where exactly is that, Lilith?" Remus said, quiet, watching her carefully rather than looking away.
The reaction was immediate and total. Black horns curled up out of both sides of her head before she could stop them, and she bit off a short, sharp incantation that folded them away again just as fast, her whole posture gone rigid.
"You shouldn't say that name out loud," she said, low.
"I've known what you are since the night you told me yourself," Remus said, "and I've never once used it against you. But I think it's time you told me something true about your brother, since you've never once mentioned him again since the day you first told me he existed."
Something in her expression shuttered fully closed at that, the particular, practiced blankness of someone who'd been asked this question before and had a well-worn answer ready for it. "He still wants what he's always wanted," she said, finally. "Whoever rules the Southlands, controlled from somewhere he can reach them. I haven't sent him a single useful report since the harvest, Remus. Draw your own conclusions about what that means, because I don't fully trust my own yet."
"That's not nothing," Remus said.
"No," she agreed. "It isn't. It also isn't an answer, and I'd rather not pretend it is one just because you asked nicely."
She didn't offer anything further, and Remus didn't push, filing the exchange away with the same careful patience he gave every thread he couldn't yet pull all the way through, and the train carried them the rest of the way back to Autumnshade in a silence that felt, for the first time in a while, less comfortable than it usually did between them.
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