Alfra, Verdunesta
Lastly in this present company are the Verdunesta, who are to most travelers the very face of the Alfra, for they are the most met along forest borders and river-roads. Their lineage stands at the center of the grove-people’s great ring, not for pride of station but for breadth of keeping: they are the everyday wardens whose watchfulness knits a thousand little safeties together into a season of peace. In form they answer to the common measure of their kind—five feet in height more often than not, light of frame, strong in the quiet way of vines that lift whole walls by patience. The ear is keen, the eye shrewd; their movements are a lesson in economy, wasting neither breath nor step.
They are masters of the forest’s lesser paths, those narrow runnels that only deer and the wind recall. Their feet make no more sound than a falling leaf, and their hands speak to beasts in a grammar older than speech. Hounds of the green—wolves, cats, and keen-eyed birds—take them for natural companions. In the deep wood they are near unfindable, their garments and skins drinking in light and shade until distinction fails. Yet remove them to open plain or to desert, and their gifts are thwarted; the long sight of the flat world makes them uneasy, and their craft of vanishing comes to little where there is no shelter of branch or fern. Of Tovan Ki they are the least given among the Alfra lines, though not barren of wonder: some few show a knack for coaxing growth or for settling a beast’s fear with a touch.
They dwell in temperate forests and along watered valleys, where villages are built with a courtesy toward root and river. Roofs follow the line of limb; bridges grow from living wood; and ladders are cut where sap will bear it without harm. Children learn the bow before they are fit to carry it far, and tracking is taught as a form of prayer—seeing in the land’s handwriting the will of the season. Their feasts are communal, their work likewise; it is said that among the Verdunesta, no one eats alone unless they wish it, and even then a portion is set by their door lest hunger change its mind.
To Ida and other neighbors they are the typical forest folk—swift to aid a lost child, stern to a poacher, patient with a stranger who minds his feet. Many misunderstand such patience for softness, but the mistake is seldom made twice. When wrong is done to the wood, the Verdunesta bend the whole place against the offender: paths close, noises mislead, and the little folk of tooth and claw begin to take an uncommon interest in the trespasser’s ankles. Thus let it be entered in the roll: the Verdunesta are the heart’s habit of the Alfra, guardians by custom and by love, without whom wide swathes of Sholan’s green would long since have fallen silent.