He didn't solve it that day, though, and he returned to the dwelling tree to find Lirenna humming a tune as she trimmed the windows, carving away the bark that kept trying to close up the hole in the tree's swollen trunk. It didn't need doing. It only needed a couple of trims a year, but caring for the tree gave her a joy that mounted ever greater with every day that passed, making her shine with a radiant beauty that seemed too great for the mortal world to contain. She leapt into his arms with a cry of delight as soon as he passed through the door and Thomas was infected by her happiness so that he laughed in return as he hugged her back.

     "Now that's the kind of reception a man deserves when he returns home after a hard day's work," he said. "A hug from his wife and dinner on the table."

     "Dinner at midday?" asked Lirenna with a quizzical smile. "What strange habits are you picking up here? The sooner I get you back to Haven, the better."

     "Leave your tree just three weeks after moving in?" asked Thomas. "I thought you liked it here!"

     "I do!" cried the demi shae, hugging him tighter. "I do, I do, I do! But I love Haven too! I want to live in both places at the same time!"

     "Well, this is a University for wizards. If it's possible, this is the place to do it. I'll tell the others, we'll make it Pondar's next project."

     "Have you found out what his current project is yet?" asked the demi shae, releasing him and pulling him towards Thomas’s new armchair into which they collapsed together.

     Thomas pulled him arm free, where it was trapped behind Lirenna's back, and put it around her shoulders. "Not yet," he said. "The others warned me not to even ask. It's very secret. Even Pondar himself's only working on a small part of it, and I'm not sure even he knows what it's all about."

     "Very intriguing," said Lirenna, turning her head to look at him and squinting to focus on his face, only a couple of inches away from hers. "One more puzzle to add to all the others."

     "There's probably puzzles like that all the time in a place like this," said Thomas. "We'd probably have noticed it during our apprentice days if we hadn't been kept so busy studying. Hey, you'll never guess who I met just now!"

     He told her about his meeting with Elmias Pastin, and the demi shae stared in wonder, having assumed that the senior wizard, who'd been getting on in years even back in her apprentice days, must surely be dead by now. The former director of extra planar studies had been her favourite teacher as well as his, though, and the news that he was still alive delighted her. She made up her mind to visit him as soon as she could arrange it and find out what he'd been up to in all the years since they'd last seen him.

     They ate a quick lunch, and then went for a stroll through the surrounding woodlands, being careful not to stray any closer to the centre of the small forest, where the other shae folk lived. They found a place where the yellow sun was shining through a gap in the overhead canopy, warming the bole of a large malla tree, and they sat with their backs against it, Lirenna nestling comfortably against Thomas’s shoulder. The sun was warm on their legs and faces and a gentle breeze ruffled their hair, so that Lirenna's silky soft locks tickled both their cheeks. They sat there in silence, just enjoying the moment, both of them wishing it would last forever. They both knew it couldn't, of course, and so they concentrated on making the most of it while they could. On fixing this moment in their memories so they'd be able to re-live it any time they chose.

     Lirenna had one of Thomas’s hands in her lap and was playing lazily with his fingers while he stroked the bare skin of her shoulder with his other hand. The sounds of children at play drifted over from deeper in the woods, the happy musical laughter of shae children, and Lirenna tilted her head to listen, a dreamy smile of happiness on her lips. The sounds of birdsong and the activity of small animals also came from that direction. The woodland creatures knew that they had nothing to fear from the shae folk. Lirenna had once seen a pureblooded shae man stand motionless in the middle of a forest with a handful of hazelnuts in his open palm, and a squirrel had come bounding towards him and scrambled up his leg to get them. It wasn't unusual to see a shae with bird droppings on his arms and shoulders from birds that had decided to sit there while the shae was going about his business. The shae folk enjoyed it, didn't mind at all, and the birds saw the shae folk as some kind of funny walking perch, as safe and harmless as a small tree. They were a part of nature in a way that humans could never be. Not even the most dedicated druids.

     The noise of laughing children grew louder as they got closer, scampering through the undergrowth, but Lirenna knew that if she went to the place where they'd been playing she would be lucky to find the smallest sign that they'd been there. A few bent leaves, perhaps, or a small broken twig, but certainly not the large area of trampled and crushed vegetation that a group of human children would have left. The shae folk revered and worshipped nature, and while they often changed and manipulated the growth of living things to serve their own ends, such as with the dwelling trees, no shae, not even the youngest, most overexcited child, would ever cause needless damage to any living thing. Their parents made sure to instil their reverence for nature into them as soon as they were old enough to understand it, although it was rarely something that needed to be taught. They just soaked it up from their parents and the other adults around them, or maybe they were just born with it. An instinctive behaviour like the nest building of birds or the dam building of beavers.

     Suddenly there was a commotion over to their left, and four shae children burst into the clearing, three of them chasing the fourth who was wearing a garland of golden, fallen leaves. They were smaller then Derrin, but being pureblooded shae folk they might have been twice or even three times his age. That was still very young for shae folk, though, and they had the size and mentality of human five year olds.

     They froze, staring in shock and surprise at the human and his demi shayen wife, and two of them, apparently sisters, huddled together, as if each wanted to protect and be protected by the other. Thomas gave them a reassuring smile and a wink, but that was too much for the young shae folk and they scampered back into the forest with the speed and grace of gazelles. This time there was no sound at all except the natural sounds of a living forest. A human who didn't know better might have thought there wasn't another living soul nearer than the University buildings.

     "I wonder what Derry's doing now," murmured Lirenna dreamily. The yellow sun was moving, and they might have to shift position soon if they wanted to stay in its warmth. At the moment, though, that seemed as much effort as climbing a mountain.

     Thomas shifted his position to ease a cramp in his arms and snuggled closer to her. "Probably having the time of his life," he replied. "Settling in, making new friends. He'll probably spend the next couple of months just wandering around, exploring."

     "Just so long as he knows that there are some places it's best to stay away from, at least until he's got a better idea of the dangers." She waited for Thomas to respond to this, but her husband was silent, strangely quiet, and the demi shae twisted around to find an embarrassed smile on his face. "What?" she demanded. "What is it?" Realisation struck her and she laughed. "That's what you did, wasn't it? You went off exploring and got yourself into some kind of trouble."

     "It was on my very first day here," conceded Thomas, knowing that she'd give him no peace until he told her. "I was in a daze of excitement, I didn't know what I was doing. The University seemed like a wonderful playground to me. I was supposed to stay in my room and sort out my belongings, but you couldn't have kept me in there with iron chains!"

     He paused, and Lirenna had to give him a sharp prod in the side with her elbow. "Well, go on! Tell me! Where did you go?"

     "Don't ask me how, but somehow I found myself in amongst the brokenheart trees. They said later that I must have climbed the fence, that twelve foot high fence with the iron spikes on top, but I don't remember. The pollen of the brokenheart trees wipes out your short term memory, as well as its more famous, or rather infamous properties. The first woman to come past was a fourth year apprentice and I fell instantly, hopelessly in love with her."

     He blushed scarlet. "I followed her around like a lovesick puppy, begging her to return my love. At first she thought it was just a joke, but when she realised I was serious she reported me to the proctors. They tried telling me off, tried threatening to have me expelled and eventually locked me up in a cell overnight to cool off. After a night listening to me singing love songs to her, though, they realised that it was something more serious and brought in a cleric of Caroli to have a look at me. He soon figured out what was wrong and the proctors cast a spell on me to cure me."

     Lirenna was grinning with delight. "A brokenheart tree!" she cried in amusement. "How many other things haven't you told me?"

     "The proctors didn't know whether to laugh or punish me," continued Thomas, ignoring the question. "In the end they decided I'd learned my lesson and agreed to let the matter drop. I was really lucky, though. What if that girl had decided to take advantage of my condition? She could have kept me as her own private servant for weeks until the effects wore off. She might have taken advantage of me in other ways as well, even though I was only thirteen at the time."

     "As well for her that she didn't," the demi shae agreed, her eyes glittering at the thought. "I would have searched the world until I found her, and then taught her the consequences of misusing my property."

     "Your property?" asked Thomas with a raised eyebrow.

     "Yes, mine!" she confirmed fiercely, grabbing his arm and holding it tight. "Mine! There, I've got you! You're mine, human, and don't you forget it!"

     "I promise," agreed Thomas happily, gently freeing his arm to put it back around her shoulders. "And speaking of the lovelorn, Tassley made another pass at me this morning. She must have seen me on the way to the library and ambushed me on the way out. She was wearing the most amazing perfume, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd mixed something up with it, some kind of potion. My head started swimming and suddenly she was in my arms. It took all my willpower to fight her off!"

     "The bitch!" cried Lirenna in outrage. "Why I'll...I'll..."

     "You'll do nothing," said Thomas soothingly. "Just ignore her, leave her alone, and she'll eventually give it up. Try to get back at her, though, and she'll think she's getting to us. It'll just encourage her. I think it's a good sign, actually."

     "A good sign?" shrieked the demi shae in outrage. "How is it a good sign?"

     "Well, it means she's finally accepted that I'm not getting into her bed of my own free will. She's made three, how shall I put it? Three conventional attempts to seduce me, and I turned her down each time. She now knows she's got to resort to other means if she's really set on success, and I don't think failure's something she's used to. I'm trying to avoid making eye contact with her now, in case she tries to enchant me."

     "If she does that I'll tear her apart! Maybe I need to pay her a visit."

     "That would be the worst thing you could possibly do," Thomas told her. "She's past the point where it's just sex she wants, she can get that from anyone. She just sees me as a challenge now. If I'd gone to bed with her that first time, she'd have finished with me by now and dumped me for someone else. She's only still trying because she doesn't like to be beaten, but as soon as she sees that tripping me would be more effort than I'm worth she'll give me up as a bad job. I've seen her looking at some of the other young men who work over there. All I've got to do is stay out of her clutches long enough and she'll go chasing off after someone else."

     "She'd better if she knows what's good for her," the demi shae promised, her eyes burning with a cold fire, and Thomas knew she was quite capable of keeping that promise. It made him even more determined to resist Tassley's charms because, despite her several attempts to seduce him over the past couple of weeks, which he couldn't help but find flattering and ego building, he'd discovered a growing fondness for the attractive young wizardess and didn't want anything to happen to her. He decided not to tell his wife of anything else Tassley tried on him. She might read his mind and find out that way, but he wouldn't do anything himself to inflame the issue. Eventually Tassley would give up and pick on someone else. It was only a matter of time.

     Suddenly he felt Lirenna stiffen against him and heard a surprised intake of breath. "Tom!" she whispered. "Don't move, don't say anything, but look over there."

     She made the smallest movement with her head to indicate a direction off to her left and he turned his head to follow her gaze, his whole body tensing as he expected to see a poisonous snake or a giant spider. To his delight, though, he saw that the shae children had returned and were crouching behind the bole of a tree, watching them warily. Thomas grinned. He tried not to, he was afraid a grin like that would scare them away again, but he couldn't help it. He was just so full of genuine joy and delight to see them again.

     It seemed that they could sense the truth of the emotions he was displaying, though, because with shy grins and nervous glances at each other they rose from their hiding place and stepped timidly out into the clearing.