Chapter 20: What the Pool Contains

Root showed Yara the center in her third week. Not the pool — not yet. The clearing, the archive hollow, the oldest trees. The spaces that required some demonstration of attention before they were offered. Yara spent an hour in the clearing without speaking. Mira sat at the edge of the archive hollow and worked on her current notation. 'It's waiting for something,' Yara said finally. 'Yes. It's deciding.' 'What does it decide based on?' 'I don't know exactly. I think it decides based on what the visitor is genuinely there for. What they actually want, not what they say they want.' 'What did you genuinely want when you first came?' Mira thought about it. 'To make an accurate map,' she said. 'Not a commercially useful map or a guild-approved map. An accurate one. I was frustrated that the nature of the commission meant the accuracy would be limited by what the guild wanted to show.' She looked at the clearing. 'That's what I was here for underneath the commission. The forest knew before I did.' 'I'm here because I want to understand something that doesn't want to be understood,' Yara said. 'Which sounds counterproductive when I say it aloud.' 'It doesn't want to be imposed on,' Mira said. 'That's different from not wanting to be understood. The forest showed me the pool because I was trying to understand it, not extract from it.' Root's attention shifted. The clearing's light changed in the specific way Mira had learned to recognize. 'Come with me,' she said to Yara.