Maggie was a good sport in answering our barrage of questions. When it came o contacts, she said she knew several people Mika, Ellen, and I could learn from and that she was friends with a [Dean] in charge of a minor school on one of the Hymeri Academic Councils.

  The news that she had contacts up in Hymeri set Nora smiling like they dosed her drink with Remathric root. I didn’t know much about Hymeri, but I knew it was a republic. Run by councils of lesser and greater magic universities rather than a peerage. Hymeri was famous for the quality of its schools, so Nora’s excitement made sense. In fact, when I looked around the table, both Mika and Elen looked just as excited.

  Eventually, we ran out of questions and Nora asked Maggie if she could give us a little space to talk in private. She did so and made her way to a cluster of stewards who’d yet to be called on by Ruth. I saw her get elbowed playfully in the ribs by a small olive-skinned man, then laugh at something he said.

  “I like her!” Nora said immediately after she was out of earshot.

  “I do too.” I replied.

  “I get why Nora would like her.” Ellen said with a fond smile for Nora. “But why do you?”

  “She got first pick in the Rite of Choice, so we know the Guild likes her. She was honest about what she gets out of us, and she was a member of the vanguard while still a combatant.”

  “The first two I get, but why does being in the vanguard matter?” Nora asked.

  “Battles are nerve-wracking for me. You’re always a single mistake away from death. It’s bad enough when you’re a couple ranks deep waiting for your fellows to soften up the enemy for you. But up front, in the vanguard. You’re the first there, the first in the shit, and if things go bad, the first to die. It takes courage to be up front, and I respect the Hells out of the people with the courage to do that.”

  “Never really thought of it like that.” Nora said.

  We went around in circles, talking about the various aspects of Maggie that made her an appealing choice. No one saying anything truly negative about her. During the conversation, my gaze drifted to the cluster of stewards. Most of them were young, but there were a few among them who stood out because they were visibly aging.

  “How come we haven’t discussed taking on an older steward?” I asked.

  Mika and Nora had been sharing gossip about Maggie’s Raiders when I interjected, but it was Ellen who responded.

  “Because if they’re any good at their job, they’ve already got their flagship.” Her tone was a little dismissive, but I paid it no mind.

  “Why is not being their flagship bad?” I had an inclination, but wasn’t familiar enough with the Guild to know for sure.

  “Think of a flagship party like a steward’s brand.” Mika said before Ellen could respond. “Stewards want their flagship to be as impressive as possible. It makes them look good and apparently gives them more power within the Guild. Any party after that is like a side gig. Projects they can pick up and drop whenever they want.”

  “I see. In that case, I vote Maggie should be our steward.” I said.

  What Mika said made sense. If a steward’s reputation relied entirely on their flagship, then why not treat their other parties like experiments? Why not take on a new party and try to highly specialize them or train them in some new dangerous mana technique?

  My declaration took everyone by surprise, but after a quick whisper session between the three, Mika spoke.

  “I second that.”

  “Same here.” Ellen added on.

  “Great! I’ll wave her over.”

  The man who she’d been talking to made a gesture like ‘who me?’ and Maggie elbowed him back. She shuffled through the other stewards who clogged the floor, making their pitches or trying to find someone to offer their services to. When she got back to our table and sat down, she was smiling. From the way her leg bounced beneath the table, either incredibly nervous or excited about our answer.

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  No one spoke for a long moment. Tension built within the silence as we all waited for Nora, who’d done most of the talking so far, to speak. Slowly, all our heads turned in her direction and I caught sight of her trying to suppress a mischievous smile.

  “Welcome aboard! You’re now the official steward of…” Nora trailed off and looked to the rest of us, searching for a party name in our eyes. “Never mind, you’re now the official steward of us!”

  Nora threw her arms wide like one of the [Travelling Merchants] who set up in the village square.

  “We’re going to stick around after the program for dinner. Want to join us?” Mika asked.

  “I’d love to, but I’ve got a mountain of paperwork to do if I want to be recognized as your official steward. How about we meet here tomorrow morning for breakfast, an hour after sunrise?” Maggie’s smirk transformed into a wide smile, her perfect teeth on full display.

  “I’d like that.” I said.

  I’d only been away from home for a week, but already, I missed communal meals. Eating at the inn was nice, but it just wasn’t the same as being surrounded by people you liked while you ate. A swift round of agreement from everyone else followed my answer.

  “Perfect, I’ll have some papers for y’all to sign tomorrow.”

  Maggie rose from the table, and power walked over to the reception desk. She leaned over and grabbed a stack of papers before she left out the door into the training yard. Through a window, I could see her sprint across the yard into the keep.

  The next couple of hours passed in a pleasant haze of cheap ale, cider, and conversation. Nora spent the better portion of the afternoon asking me questions about what life was like back in the forest. I mainly talked about what it was like for the everyday believer, but briefly mentioned some differences for life within the Orders.

  It visibly disappointed Nora that aside from the surrounding trees, life in Twin Oaks was pretty similar to life in Woodsedge. She was, however, intrigued that everyone spent a good portion of their time practicing some kind of art. Whether that was music, painting, sculpting, carving poetry. By Cult law, everyone did something that brought art into the world.

  “So, if everyone does some kind of art, what do you do?” she asked.

  “I had a hard time choosing what to do at first, but eventually one of the Helena’s uncles taught me how to stone carve.”

  “Hey Mika!” Nora called, interrupting some back and forth between Ellen and him. “Did you know Bran can stone carve?”

  “I didn’t know you were a carver.” Mika said, his banter with Ellen momentarily forgotten.

  Ellen looked mildly annoyed to be interrupted, but Mika lit up when Nora mentioned stone carving and the sight of him like that had put a smile on her face.

  “Yeah! Maybe you two can work on something together?”

  I didn’t want to force myself into a project, so I answered the unspoken question I could see in his eyes.

  “Art’s pretty important back home and Helena’s uncle is a pretty talented [Mason]. He taught me to carve when I was fourteen.”

  “You’ll have to show me some of your work sometime.”

  “I’ve got a letter I haven’t sent back home yet. I’m pretty proud of the lettering.”

  Mika looked at me confused and Ellen, who tuned back into the conversation, leaned over Nora.

  “We’re talking about stone carving, right? Not just general calligraphy?” She asked.

  “We are. I’ve got a tablet at the Widow’s Mark I’m going to send home. I’m pretty proud of the lettering work.”

  The tablet I was talking about was the second I’d carved. It was just a recap of the first two days of the youth program, but I’d tried to add some flourish and I thought they’d turned out pretty good.

  “Wait. You’re staying at the Widow’s Mark? Never mind. That’s not important. Are you telling me you’re carving your letters home into stone?” Ellen asked both questions as if they were the silliest things she’d ever heard.

  “We don’t produce a lot of paper back home, and I don’t have any way to reliably store vellum, so I asked Dale, the [Mason] who taught me how to carve, if I could take a block of soapstone.”

  “I mean, I guess that makes sense. But why not just buy paper here in town if it’s so rare in the forest? Hold on, why is paper rare in the forest?” Mika asked, also incredulous.

  Nora answered before I could.

  “The Grace Mother is a nature goddess, and if Torevskies’ History of the Emerald Ocean is right, she’s also a spirit tree. It makes sense she wouldn’t want many trees to be cut down for paper in her home.”

  “I didn’t know the Grace Mother’s origin was widely known.”

  I knew trusted outsiders had spilled the secrets of the Cult before and I wonder which of the reviled had done so in this case.

  “It isn’t, not really.” Nora said. “But when I found out you were from some forest, I went to the library to do some research on it.”

  “Can’t imagine you found out a whole lot.” Ellen said. She gave me a look and shrugged. “No offense, but you guys have a reputation for being pretty isolationist.”

  “None taken.”

  “I didn’t really find anything, but there was a treatise on the Emerald Ocean from a couple centuries ago, and it lists the Grace Mother as a powerful nature spirit rather than a goddess, which is weird.” Nora continued.

  “Oh, so it was a pre-ascension book then.” I said, to which the three of them looked at me.

  “Are you saying the Grace Mother wasn’t always a goddess?” Nora asked.

  “I am. Her and thirteen other spirits found something in the heart of the Emerald Ocean, which allowed them to ascend.”

  Ylena’s ascension, while not widely known, wasn’t a secret to either Cult members or outsiders. She’s been locally famous before her ascension when she started to favor a more insular approach to rulership. Mom had always told me growing up that some out-of-date scholarly circles still knew her as a spirit.

  “Questions.” Nora said. Her eyes focused on me like I was an unexpected pile of gold.

  “Go ahead.” I had no problem answering so long as they weren’t Cult secrets.

  “First, you can ascend?”

  “You can. I’m not sure what the process is but I know of several Demi-Divinities who are preparing for their own ascensions. So, it’s possible.” I couldn’t give specifics of who was about to ascend, but that fact that one of Ylena’s daughters was close was already well known within the forest.

  “Second, and I don’t want to be rude, but. Doesn’t the knowledge that she wasn’t always a goddess, I don’t know, cheapen your faith?”

  “It does not. The Cult of Weeping Grace has existed in some form or another long before she ascended. My faith has never relied on her divinity.”

  “Didn’t realize people had been living in the Emerald Ocean for that long.” Mika said, cutting off Nora’s next question.

  “Twin Oak, my home village, has existed for at least six hundred years, maybe more.”

  “And always under the protection of the Grace Mother?”

  “Pretty much. There were a couple decades where the founders tried to rough it on their own without her protection, but.” I shrugged.

  “Damn.” Mika said and lent back. Pensive all of a sudden.

  “Enough about me. Mika, what do you usually sculpt?”

  Eventually, that led back to the conversation we’d been having before. The hours flew by and too soon our dinner finished, and it was time to return to our beds for the night. But not before we all reaffirmed we’d meet each other an hour after sunrise for breakfast.