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“What would change with the forest?”

“The wood nearest you would respond to you more strongly. Warmth, flowers, things growing in your room. Reivaka can help you learn to quiet it. The roads remain under her care. Your moods won’t change the route a wagon takes.”

She rests her hand against the root beside her.

“What happens during the rite?”

“We each give our name and ask the roots to join us. Tauremak has to feel our bodies while the connection forms. It may hurt, or feel pleasurable. Before it completes, either of us can stop it. Afterward I close its access to our private touch.”

“And if I want to sleep with you without doing this?”

“Then we go back to my room.”

One corner of her mouth lifts. “You have thought about that.”

“Frequently.”

She gets off the root and stands between my knees.

“I want the bond,” she says. “I want to learn how to live here with you. I’m frightened about the centuries. I expect I’ll have questions tomorrow that I haven’t thought of yet.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Yes.” She touches my cheek. “You will.”

I turn my mouth against her palm.

“Tell me how we begin.”

I guide her hand back to the root she was sitting on, part of the oldest tree. I put mine beside it, my claws withdrawn, and give the name the grove knows.

“I am Daurek. I choose to be joined to Vaidemara.”

“I’m Vaidemara of Tesseny,” she says. “Vai. I choose to be joined to Daurek.”

Warmth gathers beneath our palms. It reaches into my wrist, unfamiliar after so many years of feeling the forest everywhere except inside this part of me.

Vai looks up.

“It’s starting.”

“Yes. Tell me to stop, and I stop it. Or give the two knocks.”

A fine root of warmth passes from my chest to hers, pauses against the boundary of her body, and waits. Vai’s breath breaks. Her hand closes around mine.

“I feel it.”

She shuts her eyes for one breath, then opens them.

“Grow.”

The root crosses.

It hurts. A thin bright line pulled from my chest to hers and held there. Her knee jolts against mine. A sound comes out of her, small and surprised, and stops.

Then the line warms, and the hurt goes out of it, and what comes up the root is her. Wonder comes first, and under it an eagerness so plain that my own rises to meet it before I have decided anything. Her heart is going hard. I feel it in my own chest, a second beat beside mine, out of step with it.

A bud opens at my wrist against her knuckles.