“He was probably enjoying the first new male company we’ve had in a while,” Saleria pointed out. She felt a little envious; there used to be a time when, at the end of her daily duties as a deacon, even a prelate, she had been free to go off and have a drink at the end of the day. Just the one, and sipped slowly, but a drink with her friends. But that had been in a city halfway down the continent. Here, she didn’t have the time or the energy.
Although I might, once we get going on sharing patrolling and energy-gathering duties. That would cut down on a lot of her work. Well, some of it. Aradin would no doubt want to stop and examine a lot of the plants during his patrols, and . . . she winced. That means I’ll still have a lot of work to do. I have to remember this is a long-term solution to the Grove’s many problems, and not a quick one.
Gentle Kata, Fierce Jinga, she thought in a brief prayer as she settled at the table to await her breakfast, grant me the patience and the strength for the task of salvaging the mess that is the Grove, restoring it back into the glorious, safe, holy garden it rightfully should be.
She didn’t hear any reply, but as the Keeper of the Grove, Saleria knew her prayers were at least heard.
* * *
Aradin Teral arrived at the front door just as she finished her breakfast. Nannan made him wait in the front hall while Saleria dressed for the day, still not entirely happy with his presence in her otherwise neatly ordered world. Saleria wished the older woman would be more polite, but that would take time, she knew. The two clergy shared a mutual moment of eye-rolling before setting out for the morning’s wall-clearing. Or as Aradin put it wryly, “I need to learn how to take over everything you do each day, for the time you’re at the Convocation.”
His words reminded her of the bag she had packed. Into it she had tucked a money belt, two changes of formal priestly gowns, two changes of Keeper-style pants and short-robes, dried meat, cheeses, and stasis-preserved fruit and bread, a stout cloak in case the weather turned bad, and a preliminary list of concerns she wanted to address to Kata and Jinga. It was a list she kept amending in her spare moments.
As the day progressed, she showed Aradin how she patrolled and cleared the paths, gathered energies from the locus trees, consulted with Daranen over the prayers to be said . . . and how she prayed in the heart of the Bower, kneeling on the mossy ground, glowing staff balanced in her hands. The rest of her tasks she felt he could handle, as any competent mage who could fight and cast would be able to manage that part. And he did manage, for most of it.
But prayer? To a God and Goddess he did not worship? That was where she wasn’t sure he could do a proper job. How could a foreign priest with a foreign set of Patron Deities properly pray to, and connect with, the Katani God and Goddess?
But he was respectful while she prayed on the second day, and did not set up his alchemical tables or try to figure out the Bower structure. Instead, Aradin shadowed her every movement while they were in the Grove, asking an occasional question but mostly observing, copying, and attempting to get everything just right. He did a good job of it, too; by the end of the third day, Saleria felt he could have made a great apprentice, if it weren’t for that ongoing worry about his ability to shape Katani prayers.
The ongoing worry of the Netherdemon visions was another concern. Each evening, they retreated to her study and used the whitewashed walls to project and view the images Guardian Kerric had captured. No concrete starting-point could be seen, but they took notes on everything they saw, of the types of demons, of the heroes who fought against them . . . and of the heavily robed and hooded humans who interacted with them, seemingly directing them.
It was a disturbing revelation, that people would actually consort with creatures from the Netherhells so willingly . . . and more disturbing that the demons would obey. But there wasn’t much more either could contribute to what they saw, so far. As it was, Saleria herself believed that her own contributions as a Guardian would be slim until she could get the Grove under far better control, rather than merely maintaining the status quo.
On the morning of the fourth day, Aradin took off in one direction, Saleria the other, and they met at the far side of the Grove enclosure in half the time it took her to make her morning rounds. Taking the neglected back path to the Bower took away some of that spare time, but enough was left over that when they arrived—after rousting a nest of nasty root-snakes and a pathetic beehive-like thing which had tried to sting them with soft petals—Aradin started examining the natural wickerwork of the Bower dome.
Saleria pointed out the waxy nodes and mentioned that they had glowed in different pastel hues. Kneeling across from her, Aradin knew within moments what they were supposed to be. He had seen similar effects in his Hortimancy classes. They weren’t lanterns; the glow was merely a provident side effect of their intended effect: monitoring the flow and use of different kinds of magic.