Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

He had been to the grove once before, seven years ago, on his first posting to a boundary-proximate station. His supervisor had pointed it out from the edge of the reeds and said: don't go in there at night, and if you go in the day, don't touch the pale ones. He had filed this under the long category of field advice that nobody would put in writing.

He was going in at night.

Aldera had found the connection in the quiet way the cat found everything: not by announcing it, but by being at the relevant place before anyone else and waiting. She had been sitting at the tree line when they arrived. The report she transmitted was twelve lines of precise observation and one line of conclusion. The conclusion: the fault line runs under the grove. The grove is the anchor. The entity has not been drifting in through the boundary. It has been here.

It had been here for a long time.

He stopped at the edge of the trees and looked up. Seven of them — large, old, bark the colour of old bone in the lamplight. The canopy moved above him. Not with the wind. The wind had died when they entered the clearing.

Against the wind. Phase-lag. He had read about it once, in a survey appendix nobody had indexed properly. He wished now he had read it more carefully.

"How long?" he said quietly.

Elvira was standing beside him. She had come immediately when he sent for her — no hesitation, no questions, just: I'll be there. She was looking at the trees the way she looked at everything: with the attention of someone who had been observing something for a long time and was finally seeing the mechanism.

"The oldest report I have for this grove is two hundred and forty years," she said. "But the causeway was built around it. They left a gap." A pause. "You do not build a causeway around seven trees unless someone told you not to touch them."

He looked at the gap in the old stonework. She was right. Someone had known.

Whatever had used those three centuries to get comfortable was still here. The question was what they were going to do about it.