Folded inside the front cover
The Emberveil Isles are a handful of small green islands in a very large gray sea. Nobody agrees how many there are. The sea keeps making new ones, mostly at night, mostly in bad weather.
The small island in the middle is called Wildgrove. A great old tree grows at the heart of it. There is a pond as well, deeper than it looks.
That island is yours now. So is this book. So is all the walking. Sorry about that.
You are its Warden — the one who looks after it. Nobody else is coming to do that job.
Why it is so quiet
The creatures here are called kith. They are wild, they are clever, and they are shy of people.
When I was a boy there were kith everywhere. You could not put a boot down in the long grass without something small and grumpy climbing out from under it.
Then they started keeping away from us. Not all at once. Fewer of them every year, and then fewer than that.
By the end I could walk the whole island in a day and see nothing at all. Only the grass moving where something had just been.
People started calling it the Long Fade. It is only a name for the years the kith stopped trusting people. Nobody ever found out why they stopped.
Here is what I think. You can take it or leave it.
They did not go away. They went quiet on purpose. We gave them a reason to.
Nobody has ever told me what that reason was. I have asked all my life. But I have watched a kith make up its mind about a person. That is a big thing to be deciding. I do not believe we lost it by accident.
The tree in your Grove
Your Grove is the island you live on, and where your kith will live too. One old tree, one pond, and a lot of long grass.
The big tree is not only a tree. It is the heartwood. It wakes up a little every time a kith trusts you. Every other island has one as well, called a grove-heart, and those are stones.
When I was young the heartwood was lit. Not burning. Lit, the way a window is lit from somewhere inside. Every island had one alight. Every one of them went out while I was alive.
It is not dead. It is asleep. Put your hand on the bark. It is warm. Asleep is not the same as dead. Do not let anybody tell you that you were handed a dead thing.
The heartwood is not a lamp somebody lights. It keeps count.
It counts every good thing that has ever passed between people and kith here. When a kith trusts you, that is a bond, and every bond counts. Every gift counts. So does every time somebody sat down and waited instead of grabbing.
So when the kith went quiet, the counting stopped, and the light went out. That is why nobody has ever lit a heartwood by being clever about it. There is no trick in it.
It brightens a little at a time, and you will see it happen. Meet a new kind of kith and it brightens. Earn a bond and it brightens more.
Here is the part I would want somebody to tell me. Your tree answers all of them. Wake an island out at sea, and the tree at home puts out new leaves. One evening you will walk back into your own Grove and find it further along than you left it.
The book
The book in your hands is the Field Atlas — your book about every kith. It fills in as you meet them. Half of the pages are still blank.
That is not me being sorry. That is the work.
What you write in it is not decoration. Learning about a kith is how you come to know one. Find out what a kind of kith likes, and the next one you meet will settle beside you quicker.
Write down the times of day as well as the names. There are kith you will never see in daylight. One or two only come out when the tide turns. Being annoyed about it does not help.
How it is done
You cannot catch a kith. Nobody can. I have watched people spend whole summers finding that out.
Find one and sit down near it. Not on top of it. Near it.
Watch a while and it will show you what it likes. They look mysterious. They are not.
Give it what it likes. Then wait. Waiting is the part nobody is any good at. I have been bad at it for 60 years.
Do it properly and the kith will come to you. Then it asks you a question, and it is a real one. Take it home, or leave it wild?
Both are good answers, and it is your choice. But know this before you pick: a kith you leave wild goes back to the wild for good. It will not come back, even if you change your mind later.
Things I would want to be told
A lumen kith carries its own light. About 1 in 800 is born this way. There is no trick to it and no way to make one happen. You will simply be standing there one afternoon, and there it will be, and you will remember the spot for the rest of your life.
A kith blooms when it grows up. It happens once a kith has lived with you long enough and been happy enough. It stays the same one — same name, same markings, same day you met.
The other islands open one at a time. In front of each one is a passage. A passage is a small job to finish. Finish it and a new island opens. Each one teaches you what the next place will ask of you.
Bond with 2 kith of different kinds and the wood opens. Fill your Grove and the shore opens.
None of those is a wall. They all happen anyway, if you are doing this properly.
How far this goes
I will tell you the rest now. I would rather you heard it from me than heard it as a rumor from somebody else.
Wake 2 grove-hearts and a road opens out to Emberhollow. I never walked it.
Emberhollow is a burned crater on a floating rock. In the middle of the crater sits the Ember. It is the oldest grove-heart there is: the first one anybody ever lit, and the last one to go out.
It is cold now. It has been cold longer than there have been Wardens to be sorry about it.
I am not asking you to light it. I am telling you it is there. Then, when you are old and you hand this book to somebody else, you will know what you were walking toward.
The last of it
I am too old for the walking and you are not. That is my whole argument.
Go and be worth trusting. There is nothing hidden under that sentence. It is the entire job.
One more thing and then I will stop. There is a small kith hiding by a tree at the edge of the field. It has been watching you the whole time you have been reading this. It is not very good at hiding. And it has been waiting a long time for somebody.
Go and find it. Sit down near it. Wait.
— the Warden before you