Chapter 2012: The Vale’s Oldest Resident

The cold struck Eira the moment they stepped back out onto the street, sharp enough to sting her cheeks after the warmth of Thoralle’s shop.

"Shoes next, then?" Eira asked as Harrod opened the carriage door. "If the dress is to be black, trimmed in crimson and gold, then I suppose we should visit a cobbler for something to match."

"There’s no point," Ollie said, offering his hand to help Jocelynn up into the carriage. "She’ll be barefoot for the trial."

"Barefoot?" Eira repeated, looking at the frost still clinging to the shadowed edges of the street. "In winter?"

"The seed needs to feel the earth," Ollie said with a shrug, as though that explained everything. "Shoes would only get in the way. At least we don’t have to be naked for this and planted in the earth up to our necks," he added with a wry smile. "I’m told the old ways were quite a bit, um, closer to nature."

"Naked?" Jocelynn said, blinking in surprise and pausing halfway into the carriage. "And planted in the earth like trees?"

"Ask your sister about it," Ollie suggested. "She’s the one who knows all the old traditions. I was just grateful she didn’t want to follow them," he said, shuddering briefly at the image of having to face his trial in the nude, surrounded by the remainder of Ashlynn’s coven, all of whom were women.

It wouldn’t be quite as lonely once Hauke joined the coven, but even then, Frost Walkers were covered by long, white fur... The young Frost Walker lord had a very different notion of modesty.

"If we’re not going for shoes, then where are we going?" Jocelynn asked once they were all settled inside the relative warmth of the carriage.

Ollie leaned back against the jade-green cushions with a small, mysterious smile.

"We’re going to meet the oldest living thing in the Vale of Mists," Ollie said lightly before his demeanor grew more serious. "You saw it when Ashlynn called upon its aid to destroy the Lothian throne," he explained. "But you should step beneath its boughs at least once before you face your own trial."

"If you can gain its approval, that’s a good thing," Ollie said. "The same way a squire visits local knights to pay his respects before standing his vigil, it’s good to visit the Ancient Oak and receive its blessing. If it doesn’t approve of you, that doesn’t mean you’ll fail your trial. Virve is already the Oak Witch. The Ancient Oak doesn’t decide what happens to you..."

"But if I receive its approval and a blessing," Jocelynn said, nodding in understanding. "It could help to improve my chances."

"Given what Ashlynn has said about the difficulty of the trial you’ll face," Ollie said. "I don’t think any extra bit of preparation is wasted effort."

The trio rode in silence as the carriage left Vale City behind, and the road climbed steadily into the hills. Outside the window, the forest had been stripped down to its bones by the winter. Bare oaks and birches stood grey and silent among the dark green of the cedars and hemlocks, and old snow lingered in the hollows where the sun never reached. Frost had turned every blade of grass along the roadside stiff and white.

Just beyond the trees, a stream rushed down from the mountains on its way to join the River Luath. Half the stream’s surface flowed beneath a thin layer of ice. The road the carriage followed wasn’t well traveled, particularly in winter, and the carriage crunched through more ice and frost the further from the city it went.

When the road grew too steep for the horses, Harrod drew the carriage to a halt at the foot of a tall, grassy hill, and the three of them climbed the rest of the way on foot. Frozen grass crunched beneath Eira’s boots and her breath fogged in front of her face. She kept her eyes on the path, picking her way carefully around patches of ice, and so she didn’t look up until Ollie stopped walking.

When she did, she forgot to breathe.

The tree stood alone at the crest of the hill, and it was enormous.

Eira had grown up among forests. She had seen great oaks in the hunting grounds of Dunn that were said to have been planted before humans ever lived in the Verdant Hills. But every one of those mighty trees could have stood beneath this tree’s branches with room to spare.

Its trunk was as broad as a cottage, bark that was rough, gnarled, and furrowed so deeply that Eira could have laid her whole hand flat inside a single crease. Roots as thick as a man’s body twisted up out of the frozen ground around it, arching high enough that Harrod could have hidden behind one without stooping.

And above it all, the boughs of the Ancient Oak spread out so wide and so high that the tree seemed to hold up the sky itself, its crown rising more than a hundred feet over the bare forest below.

Every other tree in the valley had surrendered to winter, yet this one hadn’t.

Its leaves still clung to its branches, thousands upon thousands of them in shades of burnished copper and deep crimson and dull, glowing gold, like the last coals of a great fire refusing to go out. The mist that drifted down from the mountains gathered in its boughs like a cloak around an old man’s shoulders.

Beneath its canopy, the frost simply stopped. More than that, in a wide ring around the trunk, the grass was still green.

The air that drifted down the hill smelled of rich, dark earth and fresh-cut grass and, impossibly, of flowers.

"This is the Ancient Oak," Ollie said quietly, and Eira noticed that he and Jocelynn had both bowed their heads, and Eira quickly followed suit.

She hadn’t been present in the Great Hall of Lothian Manor when the Ancient Oak manifested there, but seeing it now, standing in its presence, she could understand why so many of the lords and ladies who had been there spoke of it with extraordinary reverence. Lady Tosha in particular seemed to have taken it as a sort of patron spirit, giving it the same sort of veneration that most people reserved for the thirteen sacred constellations.

Now, standing here, that reverence didn’t feel exaggerated at all.

Overhead, though there was no wind, the great tree began to stir as the Ancient Oak took notice of the visitors beneath its boughs...