Before dawn they left with almost nothing: a skin of water, a knife apiece, bedrolls, flint and steel, and their bows and quivers.
"Water. Shelter. Fire. Food is last. Pride is never," Athelan said, voice low in the gray light.
Lytavis nodded, breath fogging in the chill. "Water, shelter, fire."
Day One
The forest woke around them: finches starting in the thorn, the soft tick of falling dew.
Athelan taught her to read water first - how a strip of greener moss marked a seep, how alder and willow meant a stream was near. They dug a shallow drip pit at the base of a rock, lined it with leaves, and waited until the slow gather was enough to boil.
"Cold water can carry sickness," he said, lacing a green branch to hang their small iron pot over a twig fire. "We make it safe, or we go thirsty."
Fire came stubbornly. Her first shower of sparks died on damp bark. The second, too. On the third, Athelan shifted nothing but her breath:
"Long, slow - like coaxing a skittish foal."
The ember caught. The tinder sighed to flame. Pride warmed her as surely as heat.
By noon he had her walking silent, heel to toe, finding the dark earth between last year's leaves. He showed her how thistle-down revealed wind, how loose hair lifted when the current changed, how to read sign where a hare had fed - clean cuts at ankle height - and where a boar had gouged the bark, which meant do not follow.
They built a windbreak lean-to before dusk: ridge line tied hip-high between two young pines, boughs thatched down the back, a bed of springy fir to lift them from the ground.
"Heat goes to the earth," Athelan said, spreading his cloak. "We sleep on needles, not in them."
They ate what the day offered: wood-sorrel and wild leek, a handful of moonberries along a sunny bank, and a single trout Athelan lifted from a dark run with a woven basket trap.
Lytavis fell asleep bone-tired and smiling, smoke in her hair, the little fire crackling like a cat's purr.
Day Two
"Your turn to lead," he said at first light. "Keep the wind in your face. Choose a path you can defend."
She took them along the shadowed ridge, where the ground was quiet and the sun didn't glare off sights. Skye ghosted above the canopy, a black stitch sewing sky to trees.
They found fresh slots in soft earth - deer, light and recent. Lytavis waited for the wind to steady, then drew and loosed. The arrow flew clean. The deer folded without panic.
She was already kneeling, palm pressed gently over the heart that had stilled, whispering thanks. Athelan said nothing - only bowed his head with her - then guided her through the field dressing: where to open, how to keep the cavity clean, what to save, where to place the organ pile. Thin strips set over low smoke, fat rendered, nothing wasted.
Midday became lessons in snares - braided vine, a simple noose on a well-used run - and knots she practiced until her fingers cramped: timber hitch, clove, taut-line. When an afternoon squall rattled the trees, he had her add a drip edge to their shelter and taught her to dry her socks over steam, not flame.
That night he pointed to the constellations above the lean-to.
"If you're lost, find Elune's Eye," he said, tracing the seven bright points. "It'll set you true to the west. Failing stars, follow water: down to a village, up to a ridge."
Lytavis repeated the shapes until sleep took her, a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.
Day Three
Athelan said only, "Home," and let silence do the teaching.
Lytavis chose the high ground, skirted a cedar bog by the color of the needles, forded the stream at a gravelly bend where the current was strong but shallow. She rewrapped a blister with a strip of clean linen and Zoya's salve, then kept moving.
When the forest fell suddenly quiet, she halted - hand up, eyes scanning - until a manasaber padded across the path and vanished. Only then did she breathe and go on.
By late afternoon, the Ariakan villa came into view - lamplight like amber in the windows, smoke lifting straight into the calm.
Zoya met them at the gate with a laugh and a worried sound braided together. Lucien was already clearing a space at the table. Tyrande crashed into Lytavis a heartbeat later, arms thrown tight, then pinched her sleeve and mocked, "You smell like pride and smoke."
"I smell like learning," Lytavis said, grinning around the ache in her legs.
Dinner tasted like benediction: venison stew with thyme, root vegetables slick with butter, warm bread. Lytavis ate until the world softened at the edges. Tyrande, irrepressible, spent half the meal aiming compliments at Athelan like arrows: too direct by halves, all glitter and nerves.
"Your hands are very steady," she said while he sliced bread. "That must be… useful. For, um… bread."
Lytavis nearly inhaled a bite. Athelan lifted one brow and returned to his plate.
When the meal ended, he thanked their hosts, left a quiet, "She learns quickly," for Lucien, and made for the gate.
Tyrande was on his heels. "Wait."
She reached up, bold and trembling at once, ready to press her mouth to his.
Athelan's hand came up, firm but not harsh, fingers catching her wrist mid-motion. His golden eyes held hers, steady as stone.
"You are a child, Tyrande."
"I am a young woman," she insisted, chin lifting.
His gaze softened, but did not yield. "Not yet."
And with that, he released her and turned into the night, leaving her beneath the lamplight, heart pounding, equal parts mortified and defiant.
She returned burning with both. Lytavis folded her into a sideways hug that pretended not to be one.
"He could have been cruel," she said softly.
"He was worse," Tyrande groaned into her hands. "He was patient."
Skye clicked her beak from the windowsill. Ginger, half-asleep beneath the table, thumped her tail once.
Lytavis's muscles sang with fatigue; her mind, with new maps, new knots, new fires coaxed with her own stubborn breath.
Three days of sore feet and cold water, of shelter built from bough and line, of food earned and honored. She felt larger inside her skin.
And when sleep came, it smelled of smoke and pine - of pride tempered, fire remembered, and the quiet knowing she could always find her way home.
Notes in the Margin - Lucien Ariakan
Three days, and she returns with the smoke in her hair and the forest mapped behind her eyes. She walks differently now - not taller, but steadier, as though the ground itself has agreed to carry her.
Athelan says she learns quickly. I saw as much in the way she reached for bread tonight, knuckles bruised, nails rimmed with pine pitch, but her hand did not tremble. The marks of the forest remain on her skin, and she bears them as proudly as if they were jewels.
I have spent decades charting the hidden rivers beneath Suramar, yet it seems my daughter has already begun charting her own - mapped in knots and embers, in the quiet knowledge of how to return home from the wild.
I wonder what she will build with such lessons.