"When did you come to Slaver's Bay? Who brought you here?" Maggy looked at Myrcella and asked curiously.
After breakfast, the Dragon Queen once again began her routine bombardment for the day.
The Great Bear had spent all of yesterday afternoon keeping his aunt company, and today he had to go back to work as well.
In no time at all, only Maggy and Myrcella, the two idle ones, were left sitting by the long wooden table.
Yes, before leaving, the Dragon Queen had told them to go down again around ten o'clock. The dwarf had worked very hard last night and was still resting at the moment.
"It's been several months. Uncle Tyrion sent me here as a hostage for the queen and asked her to help treat the injuries on my face." Myrcella touched her smooth, delicate cheek and said with a complicated expression.
"Injuries?" Maggy focused her gaze. Beneath the fine, milky-white skin, she finally spotted a faint reddish mark. Following the trace upward, she also noticed a damaged earlobe.
"I am a White Septa of the Seven," Myrcella tugged lightly at the collar of her loose white priestly robe. "Sister Ashara taught me the Seven-Pointed Star. The queen helped me condense the Mark of the Sacred Priest, which allows me to use a weakened form of holy healing before the saints.
"Then she had me repair the injuries on my face myself.
"Before, even my ear and nose had fallen off. Now they are slowly recovering day by day."
Only saints with a piety level of two hundred could receive divine blessings directly from the Mother. Myrcella was clearly not qualified.
So Dany opened a small back door for people like her by solidifying divine magic into a runic imprint known as the Mark of the Sacred Priest.
With this mark, one could use a simplified version of holy healing by paying a much higher proportion of divine power as a usage fee.
Saints paid fifty percent of their faith power, while seventy-five percent of the faith power generated by a sacred priest's prayers went to the Great Black.
Maggy had heard about holy healing and the priest's mark from Sansa, so she was not surprised. Instead, she could not understand how Myrcella had suffered such severe injuries. "In King's Landing, who could hurt you? Could it have been Joffrey? I've heard he's quite mad."
To be clear, Maggy truly did not know that Myrcella had been sent by the dwarf to Dorne for a marriage alliance, nor did she know that Darkstar had wounded her.
This was the real speed of information circulation in the Seven Kingdoms without ravens delivering letters to fixed destinations.
After only a brief hesitation, Myrcella roughly recounted her experiences over the past few years.
"Ah, you're lucky you didn't return to King's Landing. Darkstar was only a special case, but King's Landing now…Your brother Tommen is dead, you know?King's Landing is in complete chaos. Even the king was assassinated, and the murderer still hasn't been found." Maggy sighed.
Myrcella's eyes reddened as she nodded. "I heard Sister Larella mention it. Tommen was still so young, so innocent. He knew nothing at all."
"Oh my, is Myrcella crying?" Suddenly, a little girl's voice came from the rose bushes.
"Who? Who's there?" The Bear Mother cried out in alarm. The bushes were only knee-high and could not possibly hide a living person.
She rubbed her eyes and looked around. The area was empty, with only the two of them present.
"I must be seeing White Walkers," the Bear Mother said, her face turning pale.
"It's Little Mist. She's inside a rosebud," Myrcella said. She stood up and jogged over to the bushes,伸伸出 a finger, and gently poked a pink bud about the size of an egg yolk.
"Bang!" The bud burst open in an instant. A cluster of fine red mist flew out from the flower's core and rapidly expanded into a mass as large as a sunflower, with a little girl's face appearing in the center.
"I was listening to the language of flowers. Why did you interrupt me?"
"Ah!" Maggy cried out, pointing at the face formed by the fiery mist and saying in horror, "What kind of sprite is this? It can even speak human language!"
"Her name is Little Mist. She's not a sprite. Well, she sort of is. She's a tree spirit the queen picked up in the rainforests of Sothoryos," Myrcella explained.
"I wasn't picked up from the rainforest!" The fire sprite suddenly shrank into a tight ball and then burst apart again, revealing a little girl about sixty centimeters tall. Her fiery red hair floated like seaweed, her face resembled a porcelain doll, and she wore a dress woven from green leaves and flower petals. A pair of transparent wings shimmering with red light extended from her back.
"I wasn't picked up from the rainforest," Little Mist repeated, tilting her head as she examined Maggy, as if seeing something invisible to ordinary people. Suddenly, she clapped her hands and laughed. "I know now. You're a follower of the Mother Goddess!"
"The Mother Goddess? Who's that? You can even turn into a human. How strange. Could you be one of those legendary ancient spirits?" Maggy said in a daze, as though she had stepped into one of the folktales told by an old wet nurse.
"Look at Her." Little Mist shot up three meters into the air and pointed toward a corner of the garden. Amid a patch of orchid grass stood a three-foot-tall tree stump. "She is your Mother Goddess!"
Maggy looked over in confusion. Her eyes widened more and more as she exclaimed in disbelief, "A weirwood? There's still a living weirwood in Slaver's Bay?"
The trunk was only as thick as a wrist, with bone-white bark. At its uneven top sprouted several red buds, and even three to five leaves shaped like bloody handprints had unfurled.
It was precisely the weirwood trunk Dany had obtained that day in the stone chamber where weirwood seeds were growing.
She had brought more than a dozen weirwood saplings from beyond the Wall, yet not a single one survived. Instead, this trunk, which had been intended to be split and made into sword hilts and staffs, had not died.
At first, it had merely failed to wither, lingering in a half-dead state, until one day when Little Mist carried a small watering can to water it and then sat on it, singing in the language of origin.
The drooping buds on the trunk hardened and then unfurled into a small blood-red hand-shaped leaf.
When Dany learned of this, she was stunned.
What delighted her even more was that this weirwood trunk provided a peculiar bonus to cultivating the Song of the Wind.
When Dany sat beside the trunk and listened to the Song of the Wind, her efficiency was a hundred times greater than elsewhere.
This was no longer just cheating. It was as if the trunk itself were teaching her its own experience of the Song of the Wind.
Yang Dan's Song of Fire was of a higher order than R'hllor's, so Yang Dan seized R'hllor's Song of Fire. Dany's Song of Fire was, in turn, of a higher order than Yang Dan's, and she shook His exclusive control over the Song of Fire.
However, Dany's ability to condense the Song of Wind was not because her Song of Wind surpassed that of the Gate Guardian, but because the Gate Guardian had already fallen silent, and the world needed a singer to chant the Song of Wind.
In fact, over the billions of years since the world's birth, many beings have gained insight into the Song of Wind, but none of their Songs of Wind matched the Gate Guardian's, and thus none could replace the Gate Guardian's position.
Xiao Wu's Primal Language Song seemed to awaken the Gate Guardian's memory of the Song of Wind within the tree trunk.
Dany did not know for sure, but she could be certain that there was no consciousness within the trunk, because she had been inside it.
That day beyond the Wall, at the greenseer sanctuary, her thoughts had entered the roots of the weirwood, descended into the dark depths of the earth, and entered the trunk to observe what the tree had witnessed.
But this trunk had only just begun to grow. It had neither roots that reached deep into the earth nor a rich breadth of experience and vision. Dany could only see events within a radius of ten meters, and could only trace them back to the moment when Xiao Wu awakened it with her song.
Meiji walked up to the trunk, squatted down, and asked in confusion, "Weirwood trees can't leave Westeros, can they?"
"Xiao Wu is a tree spirit. She understands the language of trees and flowers, so she can make a weirwood grow," Myrcella said.
"I'm not a tree spirit. I'm a fire spirit created by Mother Goddess Dany," Xiao Wu said unhappily.
"Don't deny it. Maester Aemon and the scholars all say you're a tree spirit. Besides, if you weren't a tree spirit, how would you understand tree speech?
You must have injured your brain when you were contracted by the queen," Myrcella asserted with certainty.
"I couldn't understand flower speech before. Mother Goddess taught me," Xiao Wu said.
Uh, that was not something Dany had taught her. Dany herself did not understand it.
Flower speech and tree speech were not linguistic information, but a kind of state information.
It was a skill Xiao Wu comprehended on her own after singing to the weirwood trunk every day.
Dany suspected it was related to the Children of the Forest's innate gifts and the Song of Wind.
In truth, her Fire of Creation was the more important reason. The Children of the Forest could hear the "voices" of trees, but they could not make old trees bloom anew.
Xiao Wu was born from fire, and her very body was composed of flames, carrying within it a special, vigorous vitality.
Then she sat on the weirwood every day to sing, while constantly listening to Dany's Song of Wind. This state was almost the same as that of the first Child of the Forest who lay sleeping on the Gate Guardian's trunk.
Xiao Wu could naturally chant Mother Goddess Dany's Song of Wind, and the Song of Wind then "sent" the fiery vitality within her into plant bodies, thereby activating the talent of a "super little gardener."
Since she was already a "tree spirit," Meiji was no longer surprised by Xiao Wu's gardening talent. Instead, she asked in puzzlement, "How did you know I worship the Old Gods?"
"The Old Gods?" Xiao Wu shook her head blankly. "What are the Old Gods?"
"Then why did you say it is my mother god?" Meiji pointed at the weirwood trunk and rephrased her question.
"There's a thread on you that connects to Him, and there's also a thread on me that connects to Mother Goddess Dany."
"What thread? Your brain really is damaged," Meiji concluded.
"I'm not talking to you anymore."
Xiao Wu made a face at her, then transformed back into a mass of fiery mist, light as smoke and illusory as firelight. In an instant, she poured into a flower bud and vanished.
"Isn't this just a godswood? This weirwood is the heart tree!" Meiji looked around and suddenly realized it.
"It really does look like one," Myrcella nodded lightly.
"Sigh, it's rare to encounter such an authentic godswood in a foreign land thousands of miles away. It would be a pity not to perform a sacrifice."
As she spoke, Bear Mother parted the bluegrass, sat cross-legged before the weirwood trunk, and began to meditate.
Well, the Old Gods have no canonical doctrines. So-called prayer is nothing more than reflecting on one's recent actions beneath the weirwood tree, which is to say, examining oneself thrice daily.
Before dinner, Dany, having returned home from work, habitually went to cultivate beside the weirwood. As soon as she merged her thoughts into the trunk, she sensed that the weirwood had changed again.
It seemed to have formed a connection, somewhere in the unseen.
But her thoughts could not cross over, nor did she know where that place was.
"Strange. Could it be connecting to the sanctuary's roots as well?"
Then she delightedly discovered that the buff accelerating her comprehension of the Song of Wind had been upgraded again.
Every heart tree and weirwood worshiped by followers of the Old Gods is equivalent to a signal tower, and countless signal towers connect into an omniscient information network covering the continent.
At this moment, because of Bear Mother's unintentional act, the weirwood trunk atop the pyramid sensed that network on the distant continent.
If a few hundred more Old Gods believers from Westeros were to come and pray before the trunk daily for several hundred or a thousand years, perhaps Dany could sit at home and know the affairs of the Seven Kingdoms.
Of course, the premise is that the master of the plant omniscience network does not cut off her connection.
As the days passed, the dwarf's nightly wailing grew shorter and shorter. When Meiji and Myrcella went to see him the next day, they also found that his complexion was improving.
Then Meiji widened her eyes, carefully scrutinized the dwarf on the bed, and said in shock and uncertainty, "You've grown taller?!"
(End of chapter)
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