Eighteen
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I spent dreaming the dreams of the arbor, of leaf and root and sap, moving slowly through flesh like softened stone.
The blood of trees is their sap, and it flows through veins, just like it does for mammals, moving through the flesh of the tree according to existing channels.
As a tree, I didn’t have a mouth, but I did have veins, and the sap that moved through them was tantalizingly close to my awareness, so close that I could almost reach out and touch it.
If I’d been capable of reaching for anything.
The sap moved, and I slept, only partially aware of my own existence, frozen and vital at the same time.
It would have been a fascinating contradiction if I’d been fully capable of understanding it.
As it was, it was just the world. My roots dug deep, my branches reached high, and I slept, skating across the surface of my own thoughts like I couldn’t break the barrier keeping me from immersing myself in them.
Then there was pain, sudden and shockingly sharp, more intense than I would have thought possible if it hadn’t been there, slashing down the front of me, four hot lines of agony drawn in an almost straight downward line.
Sap welled up in the slashes, and that was a secondary pain, the feeling of something that was mine, that had always belonged inside of me, suddenly flowing out into the world where I was not.
Someone was speaking. I didn’t have ears, didn’t have the ability to hear, but I could feel the sound vibrating across my skin, even if I didn’t have the experience I’d need to decode and comprehend it.
The speech continued, and then there was another lashing slash of pain along the front of me, cutting downward.
I would have screamed, if I’d had the capability.
What was this pain? What was the purpose of it?
Straining myself as hard as I could, I grabbed for the sap dripping down the front of me, trying to draw it back into my torn tissues. But the barrier of my bark had already healed up behind the escaped droplets, leaving the sap with no way back inside. It was lost. It was gone.
I was lost.
The pain had served one purpose, at the very least: I was awake now, still wooden, but no longer skating across quiet vegetable dreams, no longer drifting within the prison of my own body.
I strained for the sap, and nothing changed.
I didn’t have a mouth, but I could taste the sugary sweetness of the sap where I’d been cut, sunk into the healed tissues of my injury.
For a tree, the whole body is the mouth, in a way. By cutting me, whoever was out there had freed my sap from my vascular system, allowing me to “taste” it. I just hadn’t been awake enough to do anything about it.
Please, I thought. Do it again.
As if on command, another lash of pain ran across my surface, four more hot lines of agony opening in my flesh.
This time, I was prepared: I pulled at the sap, not to contain, but to consume, drinking it down like it was a delicacy intended only for me.
It was sweet. I shouldn’t have been aware of that, but I was, and when I had filled myself with as much sweetness as I could hold, I shifted my awareness upward, toward my crown of branches.
They were suddenly wreathed in a lattice of delicate gold and green threads, lacy as a leaf after a caterpillar has done its work, holes flexing with the rest of the pattern as it moved.
I reached out, not with anything real, but with the idea of reaching, and snagged a portion of the lattice.
It snapped when I tugged on it, and while the threads flapped around, seemingly trying to reunite, it didn’t repair itself. Fascinating.
I reached out again, this time grabbing as much of the pattern as I could hold, and yanked.
Threads snapped and sprang away from me, releasing their tension.
Another four lines of hot pain cut themselves down my center, and this time I welcomed it, reaching for as much of the sap as I could snatch before it trickled uselessly away.
More and more threads dissolved in my grasp, becoming nothingness, becoming ash and silence.
Slowly, my lungs began to expand again. Slowly, I remembered that I had lungs, that lungs were a real thing that actually existed and could breathe on my behalf.
The stiffness melted out of my arms and shoulders, until they fell back down by my sides and I was gasping, struggling to pull in more air than my still-half-frozen body would allow.
I inhaled, and then I bit the inside of my cheek, rewarding myself with a gush of hot red blood that tasted nothing at all like sap, savory-sharp in place of sweetness. That was a relief.
Blood coating my newly restored teeth, I set myself to the work of ripping away every scrap of lace, untangling my limbs from the lingering fragments of enchantment.
When I unlocked my waist, I almost lost my balance, suddenly forced to contend with my frozen legs.
As soon as I started to wobble, Tybalt was there, grabbing my shoulders and holding me up.
“Are you well?” he asked, strain in his voice.
I twisted my head around until I was facing him, then planted a kiss on the line of his jaw. “I was just a tree, my head aches, but I’m almost out of it, and the spell isn’t self-repairing anymore. It had a job, it did the job, it’s easy to unwind now. How did you find me?”
“You were the only new tree in the middle of the path. If that had somehow not been enough, you were the only tree with a candle at its base and a knife jammed through one of its branches.” The strain faded, replaced by dry detachment.
That told me, more than anything he could possibly have said, just how upset he really was.
I couldn’t entirely blame him for that. A surprising number of my life-threatening adventures have taken place while I was entirely on my own.
If I’d come into this one without backup, he might not have been able to find me again.
Speaking of which … “Were you sharpening your claws on me?”
“It seemed the most effective way to make you bleed when you had left the mammalian world behind,” he said, with a very slight shrug. “Your bark healed as quickly as your skin would. It was efficient.”
“Yeah, but it hurt.”
“At least when you were transformed into a tree, rather than a pale mockery of your own self, I was able to slap you back to your senses in a matter of minutes.”
“I know, sweetie. If it helps, it’s not like I was trying to get turned into a tree.”
“I know. It’s never your intention to live out such horrors.”
The last of the threads broke away in my hands and I was suddenly able to move my feet again, unrooted from the ground.
I bent, picking up my candle from where it had fallen.
It immediately roared back to life in my hand.
The shell knife was already back at my belt, returned to its sheath as it always did when it was no longer needed.
Homing weapons might be the best thing the Luidaeg had ever come up with.
I turned back to Tybalt, who was quick to put his arms around my waist and pull me close to him, close enough for me to smell his magic sizzling on his skin. “Do not do that to me again, little fish.”
“I didn’t have any control over whether I did it this time!” I protested.
“Even so. My heart is tired, and cannot handle the possibility.”
“All right,” I said. “All right. I’ll try to avoid being shot by any more enchanted arrows, okay? But for right now, we need to go and find Raysel. She’s probably scared out of her senses.”
I didn’t mention that if they’d been able to turn me into a tree that quickly, there was no telling what they’d been able to do to Raysel by now.
I shook my head like that could get the lingering taste of maple syrup out of my mouth, then turned to start down the path again.
Tybalt let go of me with great reluctance, falling into step as we hurried to make up lost ground.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“About an hour, maybe two,” he said.
“So long enough to be intensely upsetting, not long enough to really change the situation. Got it.” I sped up, and he did the same, the forest passing around us in an unchanged tangle of trees and thorns.
There were no further horns, no further hunters. I frowned.
“They must not have realized you were with me.”
“You do rather famously rush into danger alone. Perhaps they assumed this was a normal life-threatening exercise for you, and that I had decided to stay home.”
“Quiet, you. I brought you with me, didn’t I?
But when you ran ahead as a cat, they must have decided I was by myself.
That’s why they didn’t stick around to turn you into a tree, too.
That’s a damn good thing. I think—I want to think—I would eventually have snapped out of it on my own, but who knows how long that would have been?
A few hours is fine. A few weeks is not.
You would have been climbing the walls. Miranda would have been hungry.
No. I can’t go out alone right now, but going out and letting people think I’m alone is just good tactical sense. ”
Tybalt gave me a sidelong look. “Yes. ‘I will make myself a target, but it’s all right as long as whoever’s with me can get away,’ that’s exactly the sort of reassuring thing I like to hear from you.
What other reassurances do you think you might be able to offer me, if we really, really dig deep for our options? ”