Whispering Wood by Sharon Shinn

Author:Sharon Shinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, fantasy, Romance
Amazon: 1958880132
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2023-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

val is nineteen.

It is three years since her father has died, and she has become more serious than ever. She finds she has little in common with the girls her age, who seem shallow and frivolous, entirely focused on meeting and marrying someone young and attractive. She absolutely hates the quintiles that she and her mother spend in Chialto in a house that Darien has found for them in a fashionable neighborhood. He almost never has any time to spend with them, as he has become Vernon’s closest advisor and a fixture at the royal court, and there is no one else in Chialto she can even tolerate.

She spends most of her time in the city pining for a return to the hunti estate, where her mother has spent the past three years acting as Mirti’s agent and housekeeper. But now, suddenly, her mother has declared herself done. She has found a small property near her sister’s house and made plans to move herself and her daughter a hundred miles away.

Val is both agonized and relieved to leave behind the house where she grew up, the house where she was born. Despite Mirti’s generosity, her absolute sincerity when she asked them to stay, Val has begun to feel more and more like a guest in the place that once seemed like home. Part of her believes it will be good for both her mother and herself to make a clean break and start fresh in a new place, but part of her is paralyzed with apprehension at the monumental change this represents. Val hates change, even if it’s very small. She can hardly wrap her mind around this comprehensive disruption of her life.

But she dreads the move for another reason. She feels an actual physical pain at the idea of traveling so far from the challinbar grove that she will not be able to wander through its shade any time she chooses. She has the fanciful notion that, the farther she is from the sacred wood, the more soft and formless she will become, her bones turning brittle and dissolving inside the pliant sheath of skin.

The only person she mentions this to is Sebastian. He has most unexpectedly arrived with Aunt Jenty, who has come to help Merra Serlast organize the move. It has been at least six months since Val has seen him, and his presence almost breaks her out of her somber mood.

“I want to go, I do,” she tells him. “But I think maybe I’ll die if I’m so far from the challinbar grove. If I can’t walk out there any time I want and just put my hand against the trunk of the heart tree.”

“Take it with you.”

“You can’t move a tree.”

“No, but you can take a piece of it. I made you a box out of a stick of challinbar, remember? Find a big fallen branch and hire someone to build you a table or something.”

“I suppose I could do that. But it would have to be a pretty big branch.

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