Getting Stronger By Marrying And Investing In Abandoned Villainesses

They lifted it at two in the afternoon.

Asterion had spent three hours preparing the ground before anybody put a hand on the trunk, and Theo, who had expected some sort of ceremony, found instead that most of it was digging.

The roots came up in a ball the size of a cart wheel, wrapped in wet cloth and then in a woven mat and then in more wet cloth, and every layer went on with the same care a nurse used on Thall’s line. Four of them carried it. Asterion took the low corner with his ruined shoulder and would not be argued out of it, and by the second rest he was grey around the mouth and still would not be argued out of it.

Theo walked ahead and cleared the path.

That was the whole of his job and he did it seriously, moving deadfall, kicking loose stones off the track, testing the soft ground near the stream with his own weight before sixty-one people’s god crossed it.

The Spirit did not like being carried.

Theo could see it happening through the Genesis Eyes and could not do a single thing about it, and after the first hundred yards he stopped looking, because looking was worse.

[Estimated remaining: 41 days]

[Estimated remaining: 39 days]

[Estimated remaining: 37 days]

’Three days in a hundred yards.’

’That’s the price. He knew that was the price and he agreed to it anyway, in front of his people, on my say-so.’

Behind him, an elf near the back began to sing.

It was not a good voice, and the song had no shape Theo recognised, and after a few lines a second voice came in under it and then most of the column was doing it. Odette walked beside him with the rice sack on her hip and did not comment, and Uthed brought up the rear with his hand nowhere near his sword.

Theo kept clearing the path.

The slope above the lake was everything he had promised and he had not oversold it once.

The ground was black and wet under a foot of leaf litter, the old oaks up there had been standing before the checkpoint existed, and the water sat forty yards below through a screen of trunks so dense that a man on the lake road would never know there was a clearing above him.

They set the Spirit down in the middle of it, and Asterion sat down beside the hole with his good hand flat on the rim of it and did not get up for some time.

"Now what?"

"Now we wait."

The elf’s voice had gone thin.

"It takes or it does not. That is the whole of the ceremony, and everyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

It took four hours.

The elves stayed. All sixty-one, in a wet clearing, in silence, most of them sitting, the old woman propped against a root with a coat under her. Nobody ate. When Theo tried to hand a bowl to one of the children, the child’s mother took it and set it down on the ground beside her without looking away from the tree.

Theo went up to the house twice for blankets and came back both times.

At half past six the light started going, and the nine leaves had not moved, and the number in his eye had not moved either.

[Estimated remaining: 37 days]

Asterion had stopped talking around five.

It happened at seven and Theo missed the beginning of it because he was folding a blanket.

Odette said his name once, sharply, and he turned round.

The leaf litter around the base of the tree had gone dark in a ring about a yard wide, and the dark was moving outward, and where it passed the ground steamed slightly in the cold.

Then it stopped, and settled, and the ring was simply a ring of very black earth.

[Target: Forest Spirit]

[Rooting: SUCCESSFUL]

[Growth Environment: High Wood Affinity — Optimal]

[Estimated remaining: 37 days → 58 days]

[Note: Growth conditions have improved. This target may recover.]

Theo looked round for Asterion.

Asterion was already face-down in the leaves with both fists in the dirt and his shoulders going, and none of his people went near him, because they were all doing some version of the same thing.

Theo left them to it and walked out to the lip of the slope, where the trees opened up and the lake showed through in a flat grey strip.

He could see his own house from there. The porch, the western glass, the long ramp going down to the water. Somebody had put a lamp on in the front room and there was a chair at the rail with a blanket over the arm of it.

’She’s still out there.’

He raised his hand. After a moment the chair moved back from the rail, which was not a wave, and was as close as he was going to get.

Asterion found him there twenty minutes later, walking badly.

"When we came out of the aperture the forest spirit had two hundred and six."

The elf lowered himself onto a root with a good deal of care.

"We have watched that number fall every week for nine years. This afternoon is the first time in my life I have seen it go the other way."

Theo let that sit for a bit.

"Then I’ve got a question, and you can tell me to go to hell."

"You have earned better than that."

"What does it need to keep going up?"

Asterion looked at the tree, then at him, and something went across his face that Theo could not read at all.

"Ground."

Asterion rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand.

"Which you have given it. Time, which we now have. And something to take in."

He was still rubbing his jaw.

"It grows by what it is given. That is all it needs, and it has been starving for nine years... there has been nothing to give it but us, wretched low-lives."

Theo stood on the lip of the slope with the lake going dark below him and did not say the next part out loud, because it was too large for a wet clearing at seven in the evening.

’I’m not gonna say no to that...’

***

The armoured beast came down the lake road at nine that night with its headlights off for the last stretch, which told Theo everything about the mood before the door had even opened.

He met it on the gravel with his sleeves rolled and dirt to the elbow.

"Aide Lance."

"You exited the Tower thirty hours ago and I found out from a clerk."

Lance got out and shut the door with more care than the door needed.

"A clerk, Mr Theolyne. I thought we were friends?"

"I was going to call."

"You were not going to call."

"I was actually going to think about it."

Theo wiped his palms down his thighs and gave up on them.

Lance looked at him for a moment and then, against what was clearly his better judgement, laughed once.

Then they sat on the porch, because Theo did not want him in the house and could not say so.

Odette brought tea out and went back in without being asked, and Estea was at the far end of the boards with a blanket over her legs pretending to read, which Lance had the sense to treat as furniture.

"How was your experience?"

Theo leaned slightly back, thinking.

"Fifty-one entered but they were all reckless and died. I had to be very passive about a lot of things, and it wasn’t until I learnt from their lessons that I began to learn. I do have to say though, it was incredibly difficult for a Floor One."

Lance turned his cup around on the arm of the chair.

"There is a leaderboard on Floor One with a name on it that a great many people in my building are currently trying to attach to a face. The Sky’s Husband. It has been up for thirty hours and Skyline have already filed two separate requests for the entry records."

’That was quite fast...’

"And what did the branch tell them?"

"That trial records are sealed and that the Association does not comment."

Lance drank his tea.

"Which is true, and it will hold for about a week, and after that they will simply cross-reference who entered on the day and did not come out on a stretcher."

He wanted the debrief, and Theo gave it to him, and gave him a great deal.

The Inheritance. The hollow bodies and the Legatees and the way the count travelled up a street. Brandy of the Ash Company and what it had done to a man dead one day. The Bearers, the way they carried skills the ordinary ones did not, the fact that killing nine of them had loaded everything into the tenth.

Lance wrote none of it down and forgot none of it.

At one point Lance stopped him with two fingers raised off the cup.

"The city. Alderkeep. That’s rather interesting, my Trial had something to do with Sommerson Plains."

"I made the same observation, I see I wasn’t wrong? So how many kingdoms are in Floor One alone then?"

Lance shook his head slightly.

"It’s really impossible to know. There are few Climbers who just settle for Floor One, the point of being a Climber is always wanting to ascend. So people would rather go up than explore the boundaries of the Floor."

"I guess that makes sense... there are also Towerians who are like normal people like us..."

’And there are Climbers from other worlds, I wonder if he knows about that.’

Theo thought about it and mentioned nothing.

For a while Lance was silent. Then he looked at the water, and the tea went cold in his hand.

"Amazing... I’m glad I wasn’t wrong about you, Mr Theolyne. Perhaps if it’s you, Floor Fourteen..."

Theo glanced at him and let the silence run.

So he told him almost all of it.

He did not mention the Class. He did not mention the Warden, or the smith, or the fact that a man had sat down beside him on a wall and refused to be anything except present. He did not confirm if the title on the leaderboard belonged to him, and Lance had not asked directly.

And he did not mention the woods. That part turned out to require nothing from him at all.

Lance walked the perimeter before he left. He did it politely, in the way of a man stretching his legs after a long drive, and Theo went with him and did not hurry him.

They went down the lawn to the treeline. Lance stood at the edge of it with his hands in his pockets and looked into the dark for a good half minute, close enough that a stone would have reached the nearest lean-to if the lean-tos had still been there, which they were not, because Asterion’s people had taken them down at four in the afternoon and gone through the site afterwards with brushed branches.

"Your trees are very quiet."

"They usually are at night."

"Hm."

Lance turned back toward the house.

"You should put a light on this side. A property this size with one approach road is a gift to the wrong kind of person."

"I’ll think about it."

Behind them, four metres up and nine paces to the left of where Lance had been standing, something that was not a branch stayed exactly where it was until the car had gone.

At the car, Lance stopped with his hand on the door.

"One more thing, and it is not Association business, so you may tell me to mind myself."

"Go on."

"Gates are up."

Theo’s attention sharpened.

"Up how much?"

"Nationally, forty per cent on the same period last year. In this district, closer to sixty."

Lance’s face had gone tired in the specific way it went when he was telling the truth.

"Forecasting says it is a fluctuation. And the Stratham Agency, who are better at this than we are, have started to get really silent. Damn it, their uncooperativeness is so annoying."

"And nobody knows why."

"Nobody in my building knows why."

He got in.

"You live forty minutes past a checkpoint with three women who cannot run. Put a light on that treeline, Mr Theolyne."

The taillights went up the road and into the trees and Theo stood on his own gravel for a while afterwards.

Estea had not moved from the far end of the porch when he came back up.

"You’re sure he saw nothing."

"Not a thing. They took the whole camp down in the afternoon and I didn’t even notice them doing it."

"Good."

She closed the book she had not been reading.

"Then that is what they are for. Feed them properly."

Theo sat down on the boards beside the wheel of her chair.

"Did you hear what he said?"

"I heard."

"Do you know anything about that? Gates going up? Whether that means something on the inside?"

Estea did not answer immediately, and when she did her voice was flat.

"Aperture activity rises when there’s a mass failure in trials. Dungeons and Ancient Ruins can also break and leak into the world."

She glanced off toward the treeline where the elves were living now.

"However, being sent away from a Floor is not something I’m used to. Perhaps, a lot has changed since we were defeated, crippled and sent out of the Tower."

She hesitated, then spoke.

"Another thing is when the thing holding it shut isn’t doing its job."

"And what stops holding a door shut?"

"A Floor Master."

She turned her chair for the doorway.

"Only a Floor Master. And they do not stop."

"Which is why nobody at the Association is saying it out loud. Because there is no version of this where it means something small."