As I walked slowly away, I tingled with well-being. I became aware of the music of the forest, a symphony made by the subtle buzzing of insects, the calls of birds, the flutter of leaves in an unseen breeze over head. Even my deadened footfalls were a part of the whole. It was not a symphony of sound alone. The scents of loam and moss, leaf and fruit, meshed with the sounds I heard, and the physical sensations of walking, of brushing past a low branch or sinking deep into moss. The muted colours in the gentled light were a part of it. It was all an amazing whole, an experience that involved me more completely than anything I’d ever felt in my life.
‘I’m drunk,’ I said aloud, and even those words intertwined with the sudden spiralling fall of a leaf and the soft snag of a cobweb across my face at the same moment. ‘No. Not drunk. But intoxicated.’
I liked speaking aloud in the forest, for it made me more intimately a part of it. I walked on, marvelling at everything, and after a time, I began to sing wordlessly, letting my voice be guided by all my senses. I spread wide my arms, heedless that my coat fell to the forest floor. I walked away from it, singing with my whole heart, with every bit of breath I could draw into my lungs. I was transported with joy simply to be me travelling into the depths of the forest.
Simply to be who I was.
Who was I?
The question was like recalling a forgotten errand. I was someone, going somewhere, on my way to do something. My steps slowed, and for a long moment I was intrigued with the idea. I was centred and certain, confident of myself, but I could not quite define with a name who I was.
Nevare. Soldier’s Boy. Like a slow waltz of two halves that have joined to be a whole and then spin apart again, I felt that sundering. And with Soldier’s Boy’s departure from my awareness, I suddenly felt the gap he left in me. I had been a whole creature, peacefully content in that wholeness. And now I was less than whole, and I thought I could understand how an amputee felt. My keen pleasure in the forest dwindled to my ordinary awareness of its pleasant smells and gentle light. The communion I had felt with it became a handful of threads rather than a complex network. I could not recall the song I had been singing. I’d lost track of my place in this world. I was diminished.
I blinked slowly and looked around me, gradually becoming aware that this part of the forest was familiar. If I climbed the ridge before me and veered to the east, I’d come to Tree Woman’s stump. I suddenly knew that was the destination I’d been walking towards all day. Home, I thought, and that was like an echo of someone else’s thought. Soldier’s Boy considered her his home. I wasn’t sure what Nevare considered her.
When I’d first encountered Tree Woman in Dewara’s spirit world I saw a fat old woman with grey hair leaning up against a tree instead of the warrior-guardian I’d expected to battle. Challenging her would have gone against everything my father had ever taught his soldier son about chivalry. And so I had hesitated, and spoken to her, and before I recognized her power, she had defeated me and made me hers.
I became her apprentice mage. And then her lover.
My heart remembered those days with her. My head did not. My head had gone to the Cavalla Academy, taken courses, made friends and done all that a loyal soldier son should. And when the opportunity came for me to challenge Tree Woman as an adversary, I had not hesitated. I’d destroyed that other self who had been her acolyte, taking him back inside me. And then I’d done my best to kill her as well.
Yet at both those tasks, I’d failed. The Speck self I’d taken back inside me lurked there still, like a speckled trout in the deep shade under a grassy riverbank. From time to time I glimpsed him, but never could I seize and hold him. And the Tree Woman I’d slain? I’d only partially severed her trunk with a cavalla sword. That deed, impossible in what I considered the real world, had left its evidence here. Upon the ridge ahead of me was the stump of her tree. The rusting blade of my sword was still embedded in it. I’d toppled her. But I had not severed her trunk completely. The ruin of her tree sprawled on the mossy hillside, in the swathe of sunlight that now broke through the canopy of the forest there.
But she was not dead. From the fallen trunk, a new young tree was rising. And near her stump, I’d encountered her ghostly form. My adversary was still as alive as I was and the hidden Speck self inside me loved her still.
As Tree Woman, she was an enemy to my people. She was frank in her hope that something I would do would turn back the tide of ‘intruders’ and send the Gernians away forever from the forest and mountain world of the Specks. At her behest, Speck plague had been spread throughout Gernia and still continued to afflict my country. Thousands had sickened and died. The King’s great project, his road to the east, had come to a standstill. By all I had ever been taught, I should hate her as my enemy.
But I loved her. And I knew that I loved her with a fierce tenderness unlike anything I’d ever felt for any other woman. I had no conscious reason to feel that passion toward her, but feel it I did.
I toiled up the last steep stretch and reached the ridge. I hurried towards her, the anticipation of my hidden self rising with every step I took. But as I approached her stump, I halted, dismayed.
The stump of her tree had silvered and deadened. Even the unsevered piece that had bent with her falling trunk and kept the branches of it alive had gone grey and dull. I could not see her; I could not feel her. The young tree, a branch that had begun to grow upright after her trunk had fallen, still stood, but barely.
I waded through her fallen and dead branches to reach the supine trunk and the small tree that grew from it. When Tree Woman had crashed to the earth, her passing had torn a rent in the canopy overhead. Light poured down in straight yellow shafts piercing the usual dimness of the forest and illuminating the small tree. When I fingered the little tree’s green leaves, they were flaccid and limp. A few leaves at the ends of the branches had begun to brown at the edges. The little tree was dying. I put my hands on her trunk. My two hands could just span its diameter. Once before, in a dream, I had touched this little tree and felt how it surged with her life and being. Now I felt only dry, sun-warmed bark under my hands.
‘Lisana,’ I prayed softly. I called her by her true name and held my breath waiting for some response. I felt nothing.
A wandering breeze ventured in through the hole in the forest’s roof. It stirred my hair and made pollen dance in the shaft of light where I stood.
‘Lisana, please,’ I begged. ‘What happened? Why is your tree dying?’
The answer came to me as clearly as if she had spoken. Last night, I’d been able to escape my cell because the roots of a tree had broken through the mortar and stones. As I’d climbed those roots to escape, I’d felt Lisana’s presence there. Had the roots of her tree grown all that way, from here to Gettys, and then torn down the walls to free me? It was impossible.
All magic was impossible.
And all magic had a price. Only a few days ago, Epiny had stood here by Lisana’s stump, and they had summoned me in a dream to join them. In hindsight, Lisana had been more ephemeral than usual. And more irritable. She’d been spiteful towards Epiny and merciless towards me. I tried to recall how her little tree had looked then. The leaves had been drooping, but not alarmingly so. It had been a hot day.
Even then, her roots must have been working their way, through clay and sand, rock and soil, to reach Gettys and the prison where I was held. Even then, she had been employing all the magic at her command and all her physical resources to reach me. I should have guessed that something of that sort was happening when I could barely perceive her in my cell. Why had she done it? Had the magic forced her to sacrifice her life to save mine? Or had that offering been her own?
I pressed my brow against the slender trunk. I could not feel her at all and suspected that the amount of life remaining in this little tree was not enough to sustain her being.