Chapter 43: Morrigan's Price

"If you came to bargain for leaves, leave your cup hand where I can see it."

Morrigan stood at the forest edge with a skinning knife in one hand, a bundle of emberleaf at her belt, and a dead hare hanging from a cord over her shoulder. She was older than Lina expected and younger than the stories made her: perhaps thirty-six, perhaps forty, hard to pin down because her face had weather in it. She was tall, scarred along one forearm, with amber eyes, dark hair cut roughly at her jaw, and a green-brown cloak that looked less worn than inhabited.

Tamsin stopped half a step beside Lina. "That is a very specific greeting."

Morrigan looked at her. "Most thieves hide the stealing hand. Alchemists hide the useful one."

Lina lifted both hands. "No cup. No knife."

"You brought a server with a temper."

"Partner," Tamsin said. "The temper is included, but not the job title."

Morrigan's mouth twitched. "Good correction."

They stood where farmland ended and the first true trees began. Behind Lina lay the road to Valmora, wheel ruts, hayfields, and the inn whose repaired roof still smelled of new pitch. Ahead, the forest looked ordinary until Lina tried to count the spaces between trunks. Then the distances refused to sit still.

Sama had offered to come and then refused herself. "If Morrigan sees me first, she will talk to my secrets instead of your need," she had said. Isolde had given Lina a cooling packet. Vex had written three additional refusal lines on the intake card, because Vex believed any journey without paperwork was flirting with catastrophe.

Lina held out Hessa's charcoal-marked bark. "Your invitation?"

Morrigan took it and sniffed. "Hessa has sense. Bray has fear. You have appetite and a ledger trying to impersonate a conscience."

Tamsin gave a low sound of appreciation. "I may like her against my will."

"Do not spend liking too soon," Morrigan said. "It spoils faster than meat."

Lina glanced at the hare because her nerves wanted somewhere ordinary to go. "Are you going to skin that while we talk?"

"Yes."

"Should I find that threatening?"

"You should find it honest. I kill what I eat, and I do not pretend the knife is a philosophical instrument."

Tamsin murmured, "That answer has less lace than most threats. I respect it."

Lina kept her voice practical. "Emberleaf is arriving late, active, and changed. North road customers are dreaming of the clearing. Some wake with sap. My brew uses emberleaf, but not enough to explain this. I need to know the harvest terms before someone takes the wrong sprig and blames me when the forest answers."

Morrigan's eyes stayed on Lina through the whole speech. That was useful and uncomfortable. Perric watched for weakness. Thessia watched for hidden columns. Morrigan watched like a hunter deciding whether the movement in the brush was prey, danger, or a person worth warning.

"The forest began answering before your brew," Morrigan said. "Your cup taught villagers to admit when they heard it."

"Then the cup is not the cause."

"Do not reach for innocence because guilt is heavy. You are not the root. You are a bell."

Tamsin folded her arms, unimpressed in a way that usually improved Lina. "Bells can be useful. They can also summon a room before breakfast."

Morrigan nodded once. "Your partner understands annoyance."

"Deeply," Tamsin said.

Lina looked past Morrigan at the emberleaf hanging from her belt. The leaves were vivid, red-edged, alive with warmth. Her fingers wanted to touch them. She kept her hands down.

Morrigan saw. "Good. Wanting is not harvesting."

"What is your price?"

"Three rules and one payment." Morrigan pointed the knife toward the trees, not at Lina. "Rule one: no cutting emberleaf from a ring. Rings are listening places. You take from banks, paths, and broken sun patches only. Rule two: the first sprig of every harvest stays where it grew. People who cannot leave the first good thing alone should not be trusted with the second. Rule three: if a harvester becomes aroused, confused, or hears their name, the harvest ends. No finishing the bundle because the cart came empty."

Lina repeated each rule aloud. Tamsin wrote them.

"Payment?" Lina asked.

Morrigan slid the dead hare from her shoulder and set it on a flat stone. "Not coin first. Coin later, because I am a guardian, not a saint. First payment is a story."

Lina blinked, too late to hide that the sentence had landed. "A story?"

"A true one. Bring the forest a story of someone who stopped touching when pleasure wanted them to continue and was glad later that they stopped."

Tamsin's expression changed. "Why that story?"

"Because the forest is full of old hungers pretending every open body is permission. It learns slowly. Stories are how people teach each other without surviving the same wound twice." Morrigan wiped the knife on a cloth. "If your inn is becoming a school for consent, bring the lesson north."

Lina looked at the trees. "You speak as if the forest can be taught."

"Everything alive can be taught. Some things require blood, some require repetition, and some require being denied what they want without being hated for wanting it."

"That sounds like half my rooms."

"Then your rooms are less foolish than most villages."

Tamsin's pen moved. "Forest can learn refusal without hatred. I dislike how useful that is."

Lina felt that land harder than coin would have. "And if I do?"

"You may harvest two baskets of emberleaf under my mark. Not more, not deep wood, and not rings. You return one cup of the first safe forest batch unopened. The forest will smell what you made of its attention."

Tamsin wrote slower. "Unopened?"

"Yes. Offering, not sale."

"No one drinks it?"

"Not unless the trees become very strange and grow thumbs."

Lina laughed before she could stop herself. Morrigan's mouth twitched again, which was apparently her version of applause.

Wind moved through the trees. Lina felt it under her skirt, cool on her calves, then warmer across the backs of her knees. She stiffened. Tamsin noticed at once.

"Effect?" Tamsin asked.

"Skin warmth. Knees. Thighs. Not between my legs yet." Lina said it plainly because the forest did not get to make her coy. "It feels like standing near a person who is deciding whether to speak."

Morrigan's gaze sharpened. "Do you consent to the forest noticing your skin while you stand at its edge?"

The question startled Lina more than the touch.

"I consent to being noticed," she said. "No touching under clothing, no arousal escalation, and no dreams tonight if it can hear that far."

The wind stopped moving under her skirt.

Tamsin went very still. "It understood."

"It heard," Morrigan said. "Understanding is a longer road."

Lina made herself swallow before she spoke. The forest had stopped. Not sulked and not punished. Stopped. That did more to frighten her than if vines had grabbed her ankles.

Morrigan picked up the hare. "Come back tomorrow with the story. Bring no crowd. Bring no Seraphine seal. If the elegant woman in wine-red asks after my woods, tell her the forest already has enough collectors."

Lina's heart kicked. "You know about Mirelle?"

"I know when a court hand points at trees and calls them capacity."

Tamsin tucked the card away. "I definitely like her against my will."

Morrigan stepped back into the first line of trees. "Keep the will. You will need it."

Then she was gone, not vanished, not magically dissolved, just suddenly difficult to separate from the green-brown shapes behind her.

Lina stood at the edge until Tamsin touched her elbow.

"We have a story," Tamsin said softly.

"Rev stopping before climax."

"And you closing the drawer on Perric."

Lina held her gaze for the answer beneath the answer. "That was not sexual touching."

"No. But pleasure wanted you to continue. You stopped. You were glad later."

The forest leaves whispered as if listening.

Lina wrote both stories down before memory could make either prettier.

On the walk back, Tamsin did not speak for several minutes. That was unusual enough that Lina let the silence stand until it began to bruise.

"Say it," Lina said.

Tamsin kept her eyes on the road. "I am thinking that we built rules because people are careless, greedy, afraid, ashamed, and horny. I did not expect to use the same rules on a forest."

"Neither did I."

"But I like that it stopped when you named terms."

"So did I."

Tamsin looked at her then. "Do not like it too much. Obedient danger is still danger."

Lina took that sentence home and put it in the restricted ledger before dinner.

Under it, she added Morrigan's price in a separate hand: story first, cup later, coin last. Tamsin read the order twice and nodded.

"That order will save you from trying to buy your way through a living thing," she said.

"I was not planning to."

"You plan with your face before your morals catch up."

Lina left that accusation standing because it had excellent foundations.