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.
It was changing now, that was true. I was going into the tree, as much as the tree was coming into me. It did not feel any gentler. It felt as if the nerves that had once webbed through my hands and feet were now being forced throughout the stiffness of the tree. Little ripped bits of me were being torn away from their old places and forced into new and foreign locations. In the most fitting of reversals, I felt I was being torn down into a sort of lumber and rebuilt as a tree.
“Let go of your old body,” Lisana was urging me. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t know how but I no longer knew how to speak to her. I was starting to feel new sensations but I was not sure how to interpret any of them. Was that wind? Sunlight? Was that the comforting grip of soil upon my roots? Or was it sandpaper against my flesh, light shining in my eyes, a terrible shrilling in my ears? This body didn’t fit my senses or my senses didn’t fit this body. It was all a mistake, a terrible mistake. I wanted it to stop, wanted to simply be dead, but there was nowhere I could turn for help.
The changes went on, and on, and on. For what seemed like a very long time, it was hard to think. It is always hard to form cogent thoughts when in severe pain, but that small voice that seems to keep babbling in the mind when the larger, controllable voice falls silent, even that one was absent. Thoughts happened in bits and made no sense even when put together, like scattered pieces of a book’s torn pages.
My awareness was being fused with the tree’s life. Leaves turning toward the sun. Roots taking up water. Leaf buds slowly unfurling. Very gradually, I began to be aware of this new body’s senses and needs. It had a different sort of awareness of the world. Light and temperature and moisture were suddenly far more significant to me. For a fixed creature, these things matter so much more than to something that is mobile and can seek out what it needs. I became aware that to live I had to harvest all resources within my reach. With the nutrients from my old body, I could grow taller, produce more leaves. I could capture more of the sunlight streaming down from above, and I could shade the ground beneath me to make it harder for competitors to sprout. I wanted next to nothing growing beneath my reaching branches. The leaves I dropped there were my nutrients, to rot and nourish my own roots. I wished to benefit from all the moisture that fell within the range of my reaching roots, not share it with competitive life. It was only when I found myself thinking that in many ways a tree was not so different from a man that I realized I was using my mind again.
“Nevare? Are you there now?”
Her voice reached me in a new way. It came from the wind rustling her leaves, and more intimately, from the fallen trunk that we shared. I reached for her and found her. It was like clasping hands, and then it was far more than that.
“You’re finally here. All of you. All the way here.”
“Yes. I am.” It was so easy to be completely aware of her. I had not known, before, that we had been shouting to one another across such a distance. Now when she spoke, her thoughts blossomed effortlessly in my mind. She had been the one reaching out to me, manifesting in a human shape that I could recognize in order to reach me. I had seen and comprehended only the tiniest fraction of what she truly was. Now I saw all of her. Lisana as tree was as lovely and seductive as Lisana as woman, and she was both. She was such a being, such a glorious life. I had never seen a person in such full spectrum. It was the difference between seeing a garden by torchlight and then beholding it in all its color and detail on a sunny day.
“Look at yourself,” she commanded me, pleased with the unspoken flow of compliments I had directed at her. “Just look at what you are becoming.”
My little tree had already put the harvested nutrients from my body to work. New twigs had formed, fresh leaves budding on them, and the leaves I’d had were a deeper green and larger. I stretched them toward the light and wind, marveling that I could do so. I felt the sun kiss my leaves, enjoyed the light wind that stirred them, felt even the weight as a large bird alighted in my branches. I felt him shift his weight, felt the lick-lick of his strong beak as he whetted it against my branch. Then he spoke.
“Hello, Nevare. I’ve come to collect a debt.”
It was the voice of a god, trickling through me like cold blood mingling with warm. Orandula, the Old God. God of balances, god of death. He was a darkness there in my branch, his claws digging into my bark, his body hiding my leaves from the sunlight. A wave of foreboding shivered through me.
And yet, what could he do to me now?
“What can’t I do to you now?” he replied to my unspoken thought. “Over and over, I’ve given you the chance to make the choice. Pay for what you took. You can give me a death or give me a life. I even offered to let you give me the boy. But over and over, you’ve refused the opportunity to make things right with me.”
“I think it’s too late for you to threaten me,” I replied sanguinely. “I’m already dead.”
“Are you?” He hopped closer to my trunk. I could almost feel him cock his head and stare at me. He pecked at my branch. It made my leaves shiver. “Do you feel dead?”
“I—” I didn’t feel dead. I felt more alive than I had in a long time. For a few brief moments, I’d felt free, entering a new existence.
“Whatever you are. Do not take him from me.” This came as a low-voiced plea from Lisana. “We have been through so much, sacrificed so much. Surely the magic cannot demand more of us than what we have done.”
“Magic?” He shifted the grip of his black bird-feet on my branch. “I care nothing for magic. I do care for debts. I do not forget them.”
“What do you want from us?” Lisana demanded of him.
“Only what I’m owed. And I’ll even give you, one last time, the choice. Choose now, Nevare Burvelle. Choose what you give me. Or I’ll take what I please.”
“What does he mean, a life or a death?” she cried to me.
“I don’t know. I think he finds it funny to play with the words. Gernians speak of him as an old god, one most of them have set aside. Few worship him anymore. When he is worshipped, he is the god of death. But also of balances.”
“It makes great sense,” Orandula interrupted. “How can one be the god of death without also being a god of life? It isn’t as if they are two separate things. One is the discontinuation of the other, don’t you see? Whenever one stops, the other begins.” He shifted on my branch. “They balance.”
“So if he asks you for your life, then you are giving it to him and choosing death?” Lisana spoke only to me.
“So I’ve supposed. I don’t really know and he won’t explain.”
The god laughed. “Explaining would take all the fun out of it. Besides, even if I explained, you still wouldn’t understand.”
Lisana was beginning to be frightened. We had just thought that we were finally safe. “What if you offer him your death? What happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you just ask him?” Lisana sounded amazed that I would not have done so long ago.
“I don’t think he would answer that question. I think he finds it amusing to demand a price of me when I do not know what I am agreeing to give him.”
With a sigh like wind through new leaves, she brushed past me to confront him. “If he offers you his death, what do you take?”
“Why, his death, of course.”
“So you would kill his tree, then?”
I felt him shift his weight and suddenly I could see him. It was a different way of seeing. I knew the shape of him and how he blocked the light from my leaves. He’d cocked his head at Lisana’s tree. “No. Of course I wouldn’t kill him. That would be giving him death rather than taking death from him.” The bird puffed his feathers with a shiver, then settled them and began grooming them again. “I’m not going to wait much longer,” he warned us.
“Tell him to take your death,” Lisana said decisively.
“How can you be sure?”
“The only other option is offering him your life. We know how that would end. He says you must decide quickly, before he does. So. We have two choices. One we know is bad. Take the other. It may also be bad, but at least there is a chance it is good.”
“Not with this bird,” I said sourly.
Orandula cawed out a loud laugh. “So. What do you choose?”
I steeled myself. “Orandula. Let it be finished between us. Take my death, to pay for what I took from you.”
“Very good,” he said approvingly. “Very good indeed.”
He spread his wings and leapt from my branch. Before he touched the ground, he was flapping heavily. Slowly he gained altitude. When he was so high I could scarcely feel his shadow as it passed over my leaves, he cawed again. Once, twice, three times.
“Is he gone?” Lisana asked me.
“I don’t know.”
In the distance, I suddenly heard answering caws. They came from far away, but when they were repeated a few moments later, they seemed much closer. Lisana held tightly to our shared awareness, as if she were gripping my hand. “He called other birds,” she said.
“I’ve seen croakers do that, when they find something dead. They call the rest of their flock to share it.”
“Something dead?”
“My old body, I suppose.” I could sense it down there. It was a weight on the trunk of Lisana’s tree. My roots were firmly in it. Some nutrients had leaked out of it like water from a leaky skin. No matter. They would go into the soil at the base of the fallen trunk. Eventually I would have them. The thought gave me pause. “How long has it been?” I asked Lisana.
“What?”
“How long has that body down there been dead?”
She was unconcerned. “I didn’t keep track. It seemed to take a long time for you to come into your tree, longer than it took me. But that all happened so very long ago.”
I reached for her and effortlessly felt our communion, searingly sweet, true and ever fresh. I had never imagined such a connection. She laughed low, delighted at my gladness. I sensed something else. If I extended my awareness further, I could sense all the other kaembra trees that held the ancestral wisdom of the Specks. It was a community in a sense I’d never imagined it. I could find Buel Hitch if I wished, just by thinking of him. I could also, I suddenly discovered, feel the fear and injury of the kaembra trees closest to the end of the King’s Road. I pulled back from their misery and despair. It was a dark edge to what had been, until now, the purest pleasure to explore.
The croaker birds seemed to have come from varying distances. They were not graceful birds when they had to land on the ground. They spread their wings wide as they descended, but still seemed to land with a thud and a bounce. They were as ungracious as they were ungraceful. They waddled immediately to the feast. I felt, distantly, the first snapping beak that caught and tore a piece of flesh from my corpse. I regretted the loss; whatever they took removed nutrients that my tree could have consumed. The twinge I felt was reminiscent of pain without being as sharp. I sensed the damage to the discarded body. A second and third bird landed and hastened to the feed. Although there was plenty of space and lots of carrion to consume, they squawked and flapped at one another, jockeying for position. In between slapping one another with their wings, their heads would dart in, wicked beaks held wide, to close on flesh and worry loose strips of it.
Another bird dropped from the sky, and then three more, landing like fruit falling from a tree. They cawed and shrilled challenges at the ones that were already feasting. They slapped less with their wings now, seeming intent on ripping as much meat free as they could and gulping it down before their fellows could intervene.
“That must have been what he meant, when he said he would take your death,” Lisana said regretfully. “Your body would have given much nourishment to your little tree. I am sorry to see it go.”
“I regret it,” I said, thinking of the usefulness of the body rather than any sentimental attachment to it. “But if that is all he wants of me, then he is welcome to it.”
An especially large croaker bird had climbed onto my corpse. He feasted busily, tearing strip after strip of softening skin and fat from the soft meat of my belly. He shook a particularly juicy scrap, tossed it up and gulped it down, and then wiped his beak on my chest. Sunlight glinted off the brightness of the eye that he turned up to me.
“Ah, but we are only beginning. This is not your death. This is just what was left over. We shall tidy a good part of it away before I claim your death from you.”
Lisana shivered. “We do not need to watch this. Our deal has been struck and we owe you nothing more. Come, Nevare.”
As easily as that, she took me away from that slaughterhouse scene. “There is a trick to walking in the forest,” she told me as we put our backs to our trees and strolled away. “We can go wherever we have roots. And as you become stronger, you can even venture away from them, so long as you maintain contact with the forest itself. So many of the kaembra trees still share roots that we can go anywhere they grow.”
“Share roots?”
“The young trees sprout up from the root system of the older ones, for the most part. Others, like the ones at the edge of your cemetery, grow from a fallen branch.”
“I see.” And I grasped that in some ways, they were all one organism. The thought was a little unsettling, so I set it aside. We strolled on. I became aware of how much Lisana was helping me to “see” and “feel.” I was not as adept at simulating a human body as Lisana was. It took time for me to master making my feet touch the earth and being aware of the change from sunlight to shadow on my skin. I worked at it, refusing to be distracted by what I could still feel; the croaker birds were busily dismantling my old body.
I reminded myself that there was no pain. It was rather like skin peeling from sunburn or scratching a scab away. I was aware of the birds taking away pieces of me, but it did not hurt, except for an occasional twinge, as if they had reached the edge of dead flesh and were peeling into living skin. I flinched when it stung, and Lisana turned to me with concern in her face. “What was that?”
“You felt it?”
“Of course. We are connected.” She frowned thoughtfully.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
She wet her lips, considering. “You are not dead, of course. But that body should be. You should not be able to feel pain—”
I lost the rest of her sentence as a slash of red heat went up my back. It felt like I imagined the lick of a whip would feel, and like a whip weal, it continued to sting after the initial burn. I caught my breath. “What is that?”
“I don’t know.” She seized my hand and held it tightly in both of hers.
Another scalding stripe of pain struck me, this time across my belly. “He’s doing something to me.”
“So I fear,” she said. Her eyes had grown very large. “Nevare. Stay with me. You want to stay with me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. What do you mean?”
“As before.” She let go of my hand with one of hers. She reached up and with her free hand, gathered a large handful of hair on the top of my head. She gripped it firmly, almost painfully, so that it strained against my scalp.
“What are you doing?” I asked her, fearing that I already knew.
“I do not know how he could do it. But if he tries…if he tears your body from this place, just as Dewara once did, then I will still keep your soul. Or as much of it as I can.”
“You would divide me again?”
“I hope not. I hope that all of you will stay.” Tears had begun in her eyes. She put her free arm around me and pressed the soft flesh of her body against mine. “Hold tight to me,” she pleaded. “Hold very tight. Don’t let him take you away.”
“I won’t.” I put my arms around her. I kissed her. “I’m staying with you,” I promised. Our mouths were so close I felt her breath against my lips. I felt her tears cling to my cheeks. Another streak of pain raced down my back. I cried out, but held tight to Lisana. Another stripe, this one right next to the first. And another.
They came in a methodical flogging now, one after another, each agony laid down next to the previous one. I could not control my response to it. The body I had imagined for myself in Lisana’s world had a bloody ruin for a back. The blood streamed down my legs, and I trembled with the pain, but held on to her. There was nothing else I could do, no way to defend myself from the greedy flesh-stripping birds that attacked me in another world.
It went on for a very long time. When Lisana could no longer hold on to my body because of the damage it had sustained, when I had sunk to my knees, moaning with pain, still she stood by me, weeping and gripping grimly the handful of hair on the top of my head.
The first time I had ever met her, when we had come together as adversaries, I as Dewara’s champion and she as the guardian of the dream bridge, she had seized me in the same way. And when I fell into the abyss, she had kept that grip, and jerked out of me a core of my person. She had kept that piece and it had grown to be Soldier’s Son. But what would happen to me this time, neither of us knew. I did not even know if I would be torn from her world. Perhaps, when Orandula was through with his torment of me, he would let me go, and I could heal and be with her.
A grimmer thought came to my pain-encrusted mind. Perhaps the torment would never end. Perhaps this was what the Old God meant by taking my death from me. That even after my life was over, I would know no peace. It seemed too cruel a fate to contemplate; could anyone, even a god, do such a thing?
For the first time since the torment began, Orandula spoke to me. “Of course I could. But that is not what we agreed upon. You told me I could take your death. And I will.”
“Please! Mercy,” I begged.
“But I am not the god of mercy. I am the god of balances.”
“By the good god, please stop!” I begged him.
“I do not know this good god. Truth to tell, I sometimes think he is whatever god is giving you what you think you want. And thus perhaps all of us take turns being your good god.”
“Then be the good god to me now,” I begged. All I could feel was pain. Sunlight on my leaves was gone, Lisana holding my hand was gone, even her grip on my hair had vanished. There remained only me and the eternal punishment of this god. “God of balances, balance this, this justice you claim from me with the mercy I beg.”
Another searing stripe of pain. Was this the flogging I’d escaped in that other life? Did this pain now balance the pain I hadn’t had then? It was a senseless question.
Orandula seemed detached from what he did to me. “Balance justice with mercy? But surely justice can be balanced only with injustice.” Words tumbled and bumped in my head. If mercy was not justice, was it an injustice when mercy was given?
Beaks were rummaging in my guts, snapping and snipping, pulling out bits of this and that, tugging them away.
“Please.” In all the world, there was only Orandula left to speak with. “Please, make it be over.”
I had not known I was going to beg for that. But there it was, the words were out of my mouth.
“Very well,” the god replied. And I knew darkness.