Returned to the Quickening, Railing sat huddled with Mirai, Skint, Woostra, and Farshaun Req at the bow of the airship while he first related the history of his family in the time of Grianne Ohmsford—including the revolt of the rebel Druids at Paranor—and then read the final entry in Grianne Ohmsford’s journal aloud. No one interrupted while he did this, and for a few long moments afterward the silence continued. The day was winding down, the sun drifting west toward the horizon and the light beginning to wane. It had taken him and Mirai longer than they had realized to travel to Patch Run, retrieve the journal, and return to the vessel. Railing could feel time slipping away, its passage swift and unstoppable, running through his fingers like grains of sand.
“Let me get this straight,” Skint said finally. “Your great-aunt, once the Ilse Witch, then Ard Rhys, simply walked away from the Druids in order to exchange places with this girl, this Cinnaminson? She gave up everything to become a slave to an ancient magical creature that took the form of a giant tree and made young girls into spirits, invisible creatures that live in the air?”
“She felt she owed it to her brother’s son, because the tree took Cinnaminson as part of its payment for giving Penderrin Ohmsford its branch as a talisman that would allow him to pass through the Forbidding and back again.” Railing felt a surge of irritation at the way the Gnome was putting things, but he managed to stay calm as he spoke. “The girl he loved had been taken from him, and Grianne Ohmsford believed she should be returned. To do that, she had to change places with her.”
“But don’t you see?” Mirai added quickly. “It’s more than that. She was unhappy, and she knew she would never be happy as long as she was connected to the Druids. She could not continue as Ard Rhys. She was hated and distrusted in too many quarters. People would not forgive her. Haven’t you heard the stories of her time as the Ilse Witch? Too many knew them and could not forget or forgive. And once you’ve become as marked as she was, no matter how much good you do or how many people you help later on, you never entirely escape what you were. We are the sum of our lives and not simply pieces of them. We are the whole of our time in this world. Grianne Ohmsford couldn’t live with what that meant. She was looking for a way out.”
“So she found it as an aeriad in service to the tanequil,” Woostra said slowly. He gave Skint a look. “She wasn’t a slave, Skint. Not from the sound of her words in that final entry. Not from the little we have written down in our histories of the tanequil and the aeriads that are bound to it. The symbiosis might not be entirely clear to us, but there was never a suggestion that the voices speaking to Penderrin were troubled or miserable, or that slavery was involved.”