CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE TREE

I had chosen a tree that was much younger than one a Great One would usually choose. Worse, it was not one that was rooted directly into the earth, but instead was a surviving offshoot of Lisana’s fallen trunk. I gripped it as tightly as I could. It had been less than two full years since I had felled Lisana’s tree. Kaembra trees grew with unnatural swiftness, but even so, this tree was spindly compared to what a Great One would ordinarily have chosen. I heard the feeders debating my wisdom with one another. One of them even had the temerity to suggest that they move me. I knew an instant of absolute terror as I felt their hands close on my wrists and ankles.

“Do not tamper with what a Great Man has chosen. Let him have his will.” Kinrove’s voice was full of authority. In a softer, more pensive tone, he added, “The magic lets us have so little will when we are men in this world; let him have what he can of it now.”

As they tugged, hauled, and pushed me into position, I was a sentient spark in a hulk of dead meat. Pain was gone; too much pain had assaulted me. I was no longer capable of feeling it. Instead, I had a profound sense of wrongness, of so many things broken in my body that it could never be repaired, not by a healer, not by time, not even by my applying the magic to myself. My body had become foreign territory. Organs inside felt torn as the feeders moved me. I could no longer move my fingers or my feet; I had a vague recollection of them swelling, but it was a physical rather than a mental memory. I stopped trying to inventory all that was wrong; this body could no longer function, and soon I would be leaving it.

I wondered if Dasie had hovered like this, a spark of awareness inside a carcass. As they had done with her, they centered my spine on the tree’s slender trunk and then bound me there. They put my legs straight out in front of me, though it felt an unnatural posture to assume. They wrapped them at knee and ankle, and then bound my chest, my neck, and my head to my tree. I felt them stand back to look at their work and wait.

I could no longer see. I could hear, but it was difficult to focus on the words. I was aware that Olikea urged Likari to the place of honor. He spoke first, as my primary feeder. It was hard to listen to him, and not just because my ears were ringing with death. His voice seemed older, as if his months of dancing had made him grow up, but not in the normal way. The memories he had of me seemed both childishly idyllic and humorously callow. He detailed how he had come into my service, how he had brought me food and guarded me in the caverns during my fever. He spoke of how we had fished together and how I had shared food with him. He spoke of how much warmth I gave off when he slept against my back, but also of the foul stench of my breaking wind at night, something he’d never made me aware of.

Olikea was the next to speak. Perhaps she had taken time to organize her thoughts on my pathetically slow journey to this place. She had put all her memories and images of me in chronological order. For the first time, I heard of how she had watched me, from the very first day of my arrival at the graveyard. She spoke of how she had educated me in the foods that would feed my magic, and took great pride in speaking of how she had taught me the ways in which a Great One should make love. She regretted she had never been able to catch a child from me. As I listened to her words, I thought that we had shared a child. Then I was suddenly aware of Lisana. She crept through our shared roots to reach me, her flowing thoughts finally touching mine with no barriers. She eyed Olikea, and perhaps there was a touch of jealousy in her words.

“I was never able to bear a child either. She has my sympathy. But sometimes I think, ‘You have one son. Why are you so greedy?’”

“I’m glad she has her son again. I hope she will keep him.”

“She will.” Lisana was slowly coming closer to me. Now I could see her. She appeared to me as a young woman, plump and healthy. She walked barefoot along the mossy trunk of her fallen tree, balancing carefully as she approached me. She was smiling, but the curve of her lips was the least of it. Her joy made her glow. She moved toward me so diffidently, her words so casual. I understood her attitude. We were moving toward a crescendo of joy. No words, no greeting could describe it. Even to try to do so would mar it. I tried to open my arms to her, but could not move. Oh, yes. They had bound me to the tree.

“Soon,” she said comfortingly. “Soon.” Almost unwillingly she added, “There will be some pain. But fix your mind on the thought that, no matter how bad it is, it does not last. But we will. Our trees are young. And I can feel the magic, flowing like a wild river, no longer dammed.”

“I did it, then?”

I could hear the voices of others, speaking of me, of what they had known of me. Olikea’s voice was gone; it was Kinrove who chanted now. I paid little attention to his words. I cared for nothing they might say, while Lisana, she who knew me best, stood before me, waiting. I felt a shiver up my back when I thought of the pain to come and then reined my thoughts away from it. Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?

Lisana’s smile widened. “Could not you tell that you’d done it? I could feel it, even at this distance. I think all of us who have served the magic knew; it was like a fresh wind blowing in the evening after a long hot day. Change is coming.”

“Then you are safe. And all will be well.”

Her smile became more tenuous. “It is to be hoped. And in the meanwhile, we shall have what we shall have.”

A second chill down my spine. “To be hoped?”

“It is as you have seen. Magic is not a single event, a snap of the fingers. It is not a matter of ‘do this and that will always happen.’ It is a cascade of actions, teetering on coincidences and luck, rattling to a conclusion that always astonishes us all. Yet there is a linked chain that goes back. When one follows it, if one is cynical, one says, ‘Oh, that was not magic at all, but merely happenstance.’” She smiled. “But to those who hold the magic, the truth is plain. Magic happens.”

“But you said, ‘to be hoped.’ Does that mean it isn’t certain?” The tingle down my spine became an itch and then something even more unpleasant. Don’t think about it. Don’t imagine the tiny rootlets growing suddenly against the sweaty skin of my back. Don’t imagine them spreading, probing, seeking for the easiest place to penetrate. A scratch, a bruise. It wasn’t an itch anymore. It stung. It would pass, it would end, soon, but I suddenly feared that this was only the beginning.

Time runs differently when pain counts out the slow seconds.

“Look at me, Nevare. Don’t focus on it.”

“To be hoped?” I demanded again, trying to distract myself.

“Those cascading events take time. The Gernians will not go away instantly. Their anger still seethes, and their axes still swing.”

“No.”

“Yes. Some will fall. How many, we cannot know. It is all a part of the slow working of the magic, Nevare. All a part of—”

The pain began. What had come before was not even discomfort compared to this. I felt the jabbing of dozens, no, hundreds of roots. They were greedy and seeking. They shot into me, ran up alongside my spine like a new system of nerves, ricocheted down the bones of my arms and legs. I felt my limbs twitch and flail, and heard the happy cries of those who witnessed the tree taking me. Inside me, like spilling acid, the roots flung out a network.

I was dead. I no longer breathed, my heart did not beat. Roots were spilling into my bowels and spreading, rasping through the meat of my body. I was dead. I should not be feeling this. I should not be aware of the ball of roots that boiled into the cavity of my mouth. Someone was shouting at me. “It does not last forever!” she cried. I wanted to scream back that this was forever, that this pain was all I could now remember, that a dozen forevers had passed since it began.