The two elves at the gate did not move when Arthur landed.
They were tall — a full head above an adult human, which put them roughly at Thomas's height but built differently, leaner in the way of people shaped by decades of climbing and running through forest rather than lifting and carrying. Their ears came to a point. Their eyes were a pale grey-green that caught the filtered forest light and held it.
They were looking at him the way you looked at something you had been given a description of and were now comparing against the description.
Whatever the description had said, it had apparently not been accurate.
The one on the left — older, the lines of his face suggesting several centuries of expression rather than several decades — let his gaze move over the group. Arthur. Clara, who had landed beside him with Kiiro on her shoulder and was doing a very poor job of pretending she was not staring. Lyra, who had landed on Arthur's other side and was doing an excellent job of looking completely composed while her eyes were absorbing everything at a rate that suggested the journal was going to be full by nightfall. Saya, slightly behind, with the patient amber eyes and the tail and the wings that had not yet fully folded.
Shadow at Arthur's feet. Tsuki beside Lyra, the twin tails drifting.
The elder elf's gaze stopped on Tsuki for a long moment.
Then it came back to Arthur.
'You are the one who sent the message,' he said.
'Yes,' Arthur said.
'You are just seven years old.'
'Yes.'
The elf looked at him with the specific expression of someone who had been doing this job for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by most things and had just encountered one of the remaining exceptions. He said nothing for a moment.
'Our reader saw your message before it arrived,' he said. 'The mana signature on the messenger's path.' He paused. 'She had questions about the signature.'
'What kind of questions,' Arthur said.
'The kind she intends to ask you herself.' He stepped back from the gate. 'Come in.'
◆ ◆ ◆
The inside of the city was not what Arthur had expected.
He had expected impressive. He had seen it from above — the vine bridges, the carved ironwood structures, the central tree that rose above the canopy like a small mountain. Impressive was accounted for.
What he had not accounted for was that impressive, from the inside, was simply the air here.
The city had been growing for a long time. Long enough that the line between what had been built and what had grown had blurred into something that was neither and both. The roots of the ironwoods formed archways that nobody had carved — they had been guided, over decades or centuries, into shapes that served purposes. The vine bridges moved underfoot with a living give that was different from rope or wood, responding to weight with the specific flex of something that was still alive and healthy. The light came down through the canopy in shafts that the buildings had been positioned to catch, warming the walkways and the market stalls and the elves moving through them with the unhurried quality of people who had nowhere urgent to be.
The central tree was worse up close.
Arthur looked up at it as they passed through the main walkway and the scale of it resolved in a way that altitude had not prepared him for. The bark was the color of old bronze, the texture of something that had been accumulating age longer than the concept of a human kingdom had existed. The lower branches — lower being relative, the lowest were forty feet up — were wide enough to build a house on, and several people had.
Clara had stopped walking and was looking straight up with her mouth slightly open.
'Clara,' Arthur said.
'One moment,' she said. She was still looking up. 'I need one moment.'
'We're going to block the walkway.'
'One moment,' she said again.
Lyra was not blocking the walkway because Lyra was already moving — not toward the central tree, not toward the elder who was leading them, but sideways, toward a building set back from the main path that had a specific quality Arthur recognized. It was the quality of somewhere that held a great many books in a concentrated area and that Lyra's instincts had apparently detected through some mechanism he had never fully understood.
'Lyra,' he said.
She looked back at him. Her expression was perfectly innocent.
'Stay with the group,' he said.
'Of course,' she said, and fell back into step beside him, and did not look at the building again for approximately forty seconds.
◆ ◆ ◆
The elder led them to a structure near the central tree — not inside the tree itself, that was for later if they were admitted further, but a building grown against its base, the walls formed from root systems that had been guided over what Arthur estimated was at least a century to produce a space with rooms in it. The interior was warm and smelled of something between wood and rain.
A woman was waiting inside.
She was old. Not old in the way of the elder who had admitted them — his centuries wore lightly, the way deep competence wore lightly. This woman's age was something else. Her hair was white and long. Her eyes were the pale green of very deep water.
She looked at Arthur when he came through the door and did not look away.
He felt it immediately — the diagnostic working, careful and thorough, reading his mana signature the way the grandmother had but with considerably more precision. Whatever the grandmother had seen as a limitless abyss, this woman was attempting to actually map.
He let her look. He ran a counter-diagnostic, reading her in return, and what he found was substantial. Not his level — nothing he had encountered was his level — but several centuries of accumulated magical development, dense and organized in the specific way of someone who had been refining the same instrument for a very long time.
Her eyes moved to Tsuki.
They stayed there for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted in the way of someone recognizing something they had read about and not expected to see with their own eyes.
Then she looked at Lyra.
'Sit,' she said. 'All of you. I have been waiting to meet this group since the messenger's scent reached us three days ago.'
They sat. Arthur watched her.
'Your mana signature,' she said to him, 'is not the signature of a child.'
'No,' he said.
'It is not the signature of anything I have a reference for.' She looked at him steadily. 'I have three hundred and forty years of references.'
'I see,' Arthur said.
She looked at him. A slight adjustment in her expression — not quite amusement, but the thing adjacent to it in someone who had stopped laughing at things a long time ago.
'You ran a counter-diagnostic,' she said.
'Oh yes, sorry about that.'
'And.'
'You are very strong and your mana is significantly developed,' he said. 'Well-organized. Three centuries of consistent refinement rather than accumulation.' He paused. 'You have a structural gap in the seventh mana band that you have been compensating for since early in your development. It has not limited you but it is there.'
The room was quiet.
Clara was looking at Arthur with the expression of someone watching their sibling do something that was either very impressive or about to cause a significant problem and being unsure which.