“Right. Back to the Grove,” Aradin and Teral ordered the mutation, putting rift-power behind their combined will. The serpent-azalea hesitated, fumbled a bit, then got itself lurching into movement the other way.
“Go on,” Saleria urged with voice and will, making it lurch-tumble a little faster. She swung their clasped hands a little. “I’m not going to be able to stay longer than a day . . . but at least I do mean a full day. Hopefully this won’t take that long to clean up. The Grove-escapees, I mean. I, um, won’t be able to stay long enough to help put Groveham back together. I have to head back for the Mandarite thing.”
She wrinkled her nose at the other signs of fighting and fire-damage.
Aradin squeezed her fingers. “I know what you meant. We have about an hour until sunset, locally, but we don’t need daylight to track magical energies. The first thing we need to do is walk the wall and repair it, since somehow I doubt that treeman used the door to your house.”
“He was certainly almost tall enough to just step over the wall. Or she, or whatever it was,” Saleria agreed. She shook it off, and squeezed his hand lightly. “Kata and Jinga gave me visions of you and the deacon over the last few days. You in that cell, Nannan bringing you your first real meal . . . Some of what Shanno suffered was funny, but this . . . This isn’t funny. I honestly don’t know what to do. About assigning penance, or punishment, or whatever. Restitution I guess is the best word.”
Glad he didn’t have to explain what had happened to him to keep him from stopping Shanno, Aradin gave her some of the ideas he’d been mulling over during his daylight incarcerations. “Fine everyone involved. Hit them in their income. Shanno, the captain of the guard he somehow blackmailed into helping imprison me, the other guards . . . take some of their wages and share it out to all the people whose homes were damaged. Make them labor by hand and by spell to restore what was ruined in these last few days.”
She mulled that over, then nodded. “That’s a good idea. It forces them to live with the ongoing troubles they have caused, days and months and years of consequences, because they didn’t take a few extra minutes to really think through in advance what would honestly happen if they made the wrong choices. I’ll have to consult with Prelate Lanneraun, and then with the Department of Temples, though. I may be the highest-ranked cleric here in Groveham, but I’m not Shanno’s superior, never mind the prelate’s.”
Aradin winced in memory, touching his stomach. At her concerned glance, he brushed off her worries. “Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just remembering how much Lanneraun made my stomach hurt with all the laughing I did.”
“Oh, Gods . . . he didn’t tell you the weasels in the wedding cake story, did he?” Saleria asked with a wince, instantly sympathetic when he nodded. She touched her own stomach. “I was sore for a full week after he told me that one—I’m sorry I forgot to warn you about that old man’s wicked sense of humor. And yes, I know they’re technically ferrets, but ‘weasels’ sounds better.”
“Yes, it does,” he agreed. “By the way, Teral says the serpent-bush is slowing down. He thinks it may need another command.”
“Or maybe it’s just getting tired because it’s an azalea bush with snake heads instead of flowers,” she countered. “But I guess we can give it a magical push to keep it moving—I will be so heartily glad when we get the Grove tamed and returned to normal. Or as close to it as we can. A year from now, five years, or fifty . . .”
“We’ll get it done,” he promised her.
FIFTEEN
With the wards on the wall unpowered, two chunks of the stone barrier had been damaged enough to let plenty of bush-beasts through. There were two other treemen wandering around, too; one had headed northeast into the hills away from Groveham, and the other southeast into farmland. Saleria paused at the house to have Daranen dig through the Keepers’ archives in the basement of her home to look for instructions on how to repair the wardings, and focused on that aspect of the work for several hours. She had to unward and unlock the main gates to allow all the scattered mutations to return safely to the Grove, but at least that way they wouldn’t undo all the repairs she had to make.
Aradin headed into the Bower to start reining in the ever-circling energies of the Grove with Teral’s help. Since all that power had to go somewhere, they used the excess magic to start identifying, tagging, and compelling anything within four days’ walk with the resonance-signatures of their two locus trees to return to the Grove, find a place to plant themselves, and rest. When Saleria joined them—laden with a basket of food picked up from Nannan, filled with good energy-boosting vegetables and stamina-boosting meats and cheeses—most of the bush-beast mutations were on their way back. Adding her locus-rift’s powers to the mix made the resulting combination of spells look like it was going to catch everything that had escaped over the last couple of days.