Chapter Fifteen
Kiela didn’t intend to stay up late reading, but the water-magic texts were tricky—the answers always seemed just a few pages away, as elusive as a shadow. By the time she woke, the sun was streaming through the windows. She padded into the kitchen to help herself to a glass of water. As she primed the pump, Caz burst in from the back garden. His tendrils were flailing high above his root ball.
“Are you okay?” Kiela asked. “Is it the cactus? What happened?”
“It’s . . . we, uh . . . you have to come see. We have visitors. Lots of visitors.” He punctuated each sentence with another wave of his tendrils. She hadn’t seen him this worked up since . . . Since the library burned, she thought.
Leaving the sink, she hurried out the back door into the garden. Caz hopped behind her and bumped into her ankles as she halted abruptly and stared.
In every direction she looked in the garden, there were . . . oh my goodness, was that a bear? Or not a bear exactly, because it wasn’t made of flesh and fur. It was . . . the idea of a bear, shaped from a cloud. Vast as a boulder but as insubstantial as mist, it hovered a foot off the ground above the daisies. Its shape wavered, wisps of cloud stirred by the air.
As soon as she saw one, she spotted another and another, cloud-smoke-wispy creatures that looked like bears of various sizes.
Beneath the pumpkin leaves: a tiny one like a puff of clouds.
Within the raspberry brambles: a tall and broad bear, made of smoke.
On the roof: the largest yet, spilled across the shingles, wider than her arms could reach, so large it obscured her view of the chimney, but soft and weightless.
Each of the bears had eyes that glowed like embers of a fire, flickering with an intensity that was both wild and beautiful.
“Forest spirits,” she breathed.
She’d read about them, in scholar Cypavia’s Examinations of the Function of Forest Spirits in Fact and Fiction, and she knew they weren’t technically spirits. Originally, their species was from the flying islands in the far western reaches of the empire. When their kind first floated down to the islands in the sea, they hid in the forests and were mistaken for ghosts. Later, when their connection to the trees was discovered, they became known colloquially as forest spirits or tree spirits.
She wished she had Cypavia’s books with her here. The scholar had studied them for decades, embedding herself in their most secluded forests, working to untangle the myths from the facts. On occasion, she could be coaxed to emerge from the trees to give a lecture at the University of Alyssium, and it was said those lectures were absolutely fascinating, especially given how animated she’d be about her topic. Kiela had been tempted to attend one once, but the idea of squeezing herself into the crowded audience . . . She had listened to a secondhand description of the talk, though, and it was indeed riveting.
Fact: they were neither ghosts nor spirits. A more accurate name for them was cloud bears. Or, given their function, tree guardians.
Fact: they acted as guardians of the forests and were fiercely protective of the trees.
Fact: they were shy, solitary creatures. Solitary? she wondered, as she spotted several more, tucked into the corners of her garden and visible over the top of the fence.
Fact: they did not punish trespassers. They did not kidnap innocent children who strayed from the path. They did not destroy villages whose inhabitants ventured too far into the forest with their axes and saws . . . except for when they did.
Some of the stories about cloud bears were true. If you were a danger to their trees, they would sweep over your home, as silent as the fog, and when the mist cleared, you would be gone, never to be heard from again.
Kiela was thinking all of this as she stared at the creatures, and her heart began to beat faster, her palms began to sweat, and she was acutely aware that she and Caz were surrounded. What if they were here to punish her? She had cast a spell that caused the raspberries to spread into the forest. She had tried and failed with several apple trees before her eventual success. What if the cloud bears had decided she and her illegal magic were a danger to their protected forest?
Caz tucked himself behind her ankles. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
“What do they want?” he asked.
She didn’t know that either. “I’ve never heard of them gathering like this. It’s extraordinary.” She tried to think positively. She and Caz had mastered the spell at the end. Maybe she could explain that? Did the cloud bears understand speech?
“Oh, yay,” he whispered, “we can take notes. Publish a paper. Posthumously. It’ll make us famous, but oops, we’ll be dead, attacked by rampaging tree spirits. What a pity.”
“They don’t seem hostile.” They were merely watching, silently, with their fiery eyes, from everywhere. Twisting around, she glanced behind her and saw, beside the sprawling immense bear, yet another one on the roof of the cottage, half-hidden behind the chimney and perched on a branch that hung over the kitchen. The cactus, she noticed, was huddled in a corner of the garden, beside a basket, doing its best impression of a lifeless rock. Occasionally, though, a few of its needles trembled.
Kiela took a step forward.
The shadow-clouds shifted, as if blown by a breeze.
She stopped.
Raising her voice, she asked, “Can we help you?”
It seemed to be the right question to ask.
A whisper of a breeze swept through the garden, but Kiela didn’t feel its breath on her face. She waited, and a few seconds later, a cloud bear about the size of a cat inched forward from behind one of her plants. It was holding a leaf in its wisp-like paws. Laying it on the ground at Kiela’s feet, it looked up at her with its flickering-flame eyes and then it scurried back behind the plant.
Kiela picked up the leaf. It was long and slender, supple and green.
“Willow,” Caz identified.
Another tree guardian scooted forward—this one even smaller, the size of a rabbit. The little cloud bear laid a tiny branch covered with apple blossoms at her feet and then retreated. Kiela picked that up as well.
“Apple tree,” Caz supplied.
A third cloud bear swept toward her at the speed of wind, and this one was not small. It loomed over her, so large that she couldn’t breathe. Everything in her screamed to run. It could envelop her in its mist, swallow her whole. But it merely dropped a shriveled branch at her feet that was covered in dead leaves. This time, the cloud bear didn’t retreat. It sat in front of her and looked down at her with ember eyes.
“Sycamore,” Caz said. “I think. Why—”
“I can guess,” Kiela said. She knelt and picked up the twig with the dead leaves. “You want us to fix your tree, like we did the willow and the apple trees?”
The windless breeze echoed through the garden again, and all the cloud bears crept forward until all she could see in every direction was a kind of waiting fog, with eyes. It was, to say the least, disconcerting. Caz scooted closer to her until his root ball pressed against her foot. She felt stray bits of soil drop into her shoe.
Softly, she whispered to Caz, “It’s okay. I think they just want our help.” Louder, she said to the bears, “Wait here—I’m going to get the spells . . .”
“Remedies,” Caz murmured.
“. . . and then you can show us where the sick trees are, okay?”
She had no idea if that was okay with the tree guardians or not, but they didn’t move as she and Caz went inside to retrieve the basket of pine cones. She had no idea how many sick trees there were in the forest, but judging by the number of tree spirits in her yard . . .
“We were going to sell those,” Caz said mournfully, trailing after her. “That was the plan, so you can eat and not get as sick as the trees.”
“I know, but they need our help.”
Caz humphed. “Did anyone help us when we needed help? Did anyone tell us to evacuate when the library was breeched? Did anyone check to see if we were okay? If the smoke had reached our floor? Did anyone care that we were in danger?”
Kiela thought for a moment. “Larran came when he saw smoke. He fixed our chimney.”
Another snort. “Larran thinks you’re the answer to every question he’s ever had.”
“He . . . what?” That was absurd. “He doesn’t ask me questions.” He mostly talked about his merhorses, which she didn’t mind, but . . . “What in the world do you mean by that?”
“If you have to ask . . .”
“I do have to ask, obviously,” Kiela said. “Because you aren’t making sense.”
Outside, she heard the wind pick up—or was it the wind? She glanced out the window over the kitchen sink, and it was crowded with cloud bears, their ember eyes staring in at her and Caz.
She shot Caz a look. “We’ll continue this later,” she told him.
Carrying the basket of pine cones, Kiela scooted out into the garden. “We’ll help as many of you as we can,” she said to the forest spirits. “Who’s first?”
A midsize bear led the way. Around them, the others streaked between the trees like scraps of mist at dawn after a rainfall. They clung between the leaves and then dissipated, until Kiela wasn’t certain she’d seen them at all. It was as beautiful as a meteor shower.
The sun fell through the leaves, filtered through the green, reminding Kiela of the North Reading Room in the Great Library with its stained-glass windows that cast patterns on the tables. The forest was hushed just like the library as well, but it was the hush of focused attention, not of sleepiness—a heightened silence that flooded everything. She and Caz didn’t speak.
She couldn’t stop thinking about what Caz had said about Larran. Why had he said that? It didn’t make sense. She didn’t have any answers. She had access to answers, but that wasn’t the same, and, besides, Larran didn’t know about the spellbooks. Wait, no—Caz hadn’t said Larran thought she had the answers.
He said Larran thinks I am the answer.
She turned those words over in her head.
I am the answer.
She shook her head.
Nope, still doesn’t make sense.
A cloud bear hovered on top of a fallen log, waiting for them to catch up, and the other tree spirits streamed on either side. She kept catching glimpses of them between the ferns—eyes watching her. It should have been unsettling, but now that they were between the trees, there was something oddly comforting about it. They were deep into the forest, climbing over mossy rocks and logs, far from anything familiar and so very different from the city she’d been living in, yet it felt as familiar as a childhood dream.
She tried to keep track of their path: left beside the tree with a triple trunk, straight by a boulder made of pink quartz, across a stream that trickled over mossy stones, but after a while she fell into a kind of meditation.
Everything felt soft and alive, and she felt as if she were welcomed within.
As they crossed the forest, though, she began to notice hints of decay: a stunted tree, a bare grove, a trickle of water that had once been a river. When the cloud bear in the lead stopped, she should have been ready for what they’d find.
A dying tree.
She knew that would be where they were being led, but what she hadn’t guessed was the vastness of the tree. It was enormous, with a trunk wider than her arms could possibly reach and mottled bark that looked like a painting. Its thick limbs spread above them, like open arms that wanted to embrace the sky. Only a few leaves clung to its branches, the rest were bare.
A rabbit-size cloud bear danced around the roots and then curled as if in need of comforting between two enormous exposed roots that threaded through the mossy ground, while a massive seven-foot cloud bear hovered nearby, in a patch of ferns. The tree had to be at least two hundred years old.
“It’s old,” Caz said. “Do you think the spell will work?”
“There is a bristlecone pine tree that’s nearly five thousand years old.” Kiela laid her palm on the trunk. “A cypress on the island of Illirna is reported to be as old as the island itself, which is said to be two thousand years old. A fig tree on the island of Oteg has been worshipped by the islanders for over a thousand years. And an olive tree that’s said to be as old as time itself. They’d consider this tree a child.”
“Very nice, but what if the remedy fails because the tree has reached the end of its natural life?” He kept his voice low. “Do you have any idea where in the forest we are?”
She shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s an island. Walk far enough, and we’ll reach the shore.” Tilting her head back, she looked up at the stripes of blue sky between the bare branches.
“If they let us go,” he said darkly.
“They haven’t threatened us,” Kiela whispered back. “Don’t assume the worst.”
“Oh? You haven’t read the Tales of Nivve, collected by the scholar Idya Warne, have you? In one, there was a child lured into a forest by tree spirits, and he walked out as only bones.” He dropped his voice even lower. “He’d been stripped of all his flesh.”
She dug through the pine cone basket, searching for the largest one. “I am certain scholar Cypavia would say that was metaphorical. Bones can’t walk. Also how did Idya Warne know that the forest spirits were to blame? Are they even solid enough to hurt? And why would they want to?” Glancing at the cloud bears that were drifting between the bushes, she added, “I don’t think we should be having this conversation now anyway.” It was a bit too late for doubts about the wisdom of following incorporeal creatures into the woods.
Kiela pulled out the trowel and knelt between two of the great roots. As she stabbed the mossy ground with the tip of the trowel, a keening noise rustled through the bushes around her.
“In another tale,” Caz whispered, “the spirits swallowed an entire village because they objected to them chopping down trees to build their houses and fill their fireplaces.”
“I feel like this book is anti-tree propaganda,” Kiela said. “Whom did the scholar credit as the author, and did he own a lumber mill?”
She peeled a square of moss back and dug into the soft earth.
The keening grew louder.
Looking up, Kiela said, “I have to bury the remedy between the roots. It won’t work otherwise.” She’d recited the spell to plenty of pine cones—all the ones in the basket, in fact—but the spell only activated after it had been buried. She was positive it was necessary. “I’m sorry for harming the moss.” She wondered if any of the tree guardians belonged to the moss and if they’d be offended. Gently, she pushed more of it aside, hoping its roots would stay intact and it could regrow over the spot where she was digging.
The tiniest cloud bear drew closer, and she let it inspect the start of her hole.
When it withdrew, she asked, “May I proceed?”
The bear inclined its head.
So it can understand me, even if it can’t speak. She’d suspected as much, though it was unclear earlier whether it had understood her words or simply the act of bringing the basket of pine cones outside. She wondered how intelligent they were and what they thought of the islanders. Did they share Caltrey willingly? Her parents hadn’t talked much about the history of the island, but she knew people had lived here for many generations. The villagers and fisherfolk weren’t newcomers, but to a several-centuries-old tree, perhaps they were.
She wondered if anyone had studied the forest spirits of Caltrey. Cypavia had worked primarily on the islands to the west, both those on the sea and in the air. Kiela didn’t think anyone had studied these particular cloud bears.
If they haven’t, she thought, I could.
After she grew her jam shop. After she proved she could feed herself. After she healed the forest. And helped the island. And figured out what Caz meant when he’d said Larran thought she was the answer . . .
Kiela buried the pine cone.
She thought about leaving it to do its work—she’d already said the spell once when they’d assembled the remedy. But would it be enough? This was an exceptionally large and old tree.
It couldn’t hurt to say it again.
She chanted the words to the spell out loud. After testing so many pine cones, she had the phrases seared into her mind, and she was confident that she pronounced each of the ancient syllables correctly. While she chanted, it felt as if the forest stilled—the birds were silent, the breeze died, and the tree spirits were motionless around her.
As she said the last syllable, Kiela rocked backward and exhaled.
“Uh, Kiela?” Caz whispered.
All the cloud bears had drawn closer, blurring into a fog that crept around her, Caz, and the sycamore tree. She couldn’t see the forest in any direction, only the dying tree before her. She looked up at its branches, and then she felt the roots convulse beneath her knees as magic flooded the old tree.
It looked like a wave of green light, beginning with the roots and pulsing through the trunk until it split at the branches. It chased down every limb. Every branch it touched burst into life: leaves budded and then unfurled, and the most glorious scent of green and life and spring and summer all wrapped together filled Kiela’s nose, mouth, and body. She felt as if she were breathing in the essence of the forest, alive and full of growth. Leaves layered over one another so fast that the sky disappeared and the sun vanished into a glow of green.
Pressing itself against the trunk of the sycamore, the rabbit-size cloud bear wept tears as bright as diamonds. Its tears rolled down the bark, and where they touched the soil, delicate white flowers bloomed. She’d never seen flowers like it: they were clusters of petals that glowed with the soft, white light of the full moon.
“Wow,” Caz said. “Just a suggestion, but if you want to stay inconspicuous, don’t say the spell twice.”
“Yeah,” Kiela agreed.
A breeze-like whisper swept through the tree spirits, and they drifted apart to create a clear path away from the sycamore tree. Kiela stood up and picked up the basket. Clearly, the tree spirits wanted to lead them to the next—
A unicorn stepped onto the path.
Kiela gasped.
Caz breathed, “Whoa.”
It was like moonlit water, so bright that tears sprang into Kiela’s eyes as she looked at it. Shaped like a dreamer’s idea of a horse, the unicorn was slender and graceful—closer to a line drawing than an in-the-flesh creature. Its neck curved like a wave, with its mane as the sea foam. The longer Kiela looked at it, the more she saw that it wasn’t as white as the moon, it was iridescent, like mother-of-pearl, with purples and reds and blues that swirled through its silvery white hide. Its horn was a slender spiral of gold.
It regarded them with ocean-blue eyes.
And then the forest spirits flooded toward it, and the unicorn disappeared from view.
Kiela found she was shaking. Seeing a unicorn . . . Well, it simply didn’t happen, not to ordinary librarians or ordinary island shopkeepers. It happened in tales. Or to children, who later believed they’d dreamed it. It was a gift.
“I think we should heal more trees,” Kiela breathed.
Beside her, Caz was quivering. “Yes, absolutely.”
As the setting sun tinted the sky rose and orange, Kiela and Caz staggered back to the cottage. They’d crisscrossed the forest and used every pine cone in the basket. They didn’t see the unicorn again, but they saw wonders all the same:
Birds with plumage that draped behind them like a grand cloak.
Cobweb-like moss that sparkled with twinkling lights.
A rainbow waterfall that poured down a white quartz cliff.
Countless creatures that Kiela had only read about, like the shy bird-foxes who could fit in the palm of your hand or the tiny golden monkeys who guarded ruby-red fruit or the squirrels with emerald tails.
She felt dazed and drained, and all she wanted to do was flop onto her bed. Maybe eat something first; ideally anything that didn’t need to be cooked or prepared. Maybe just raspberry jam. And then she’d sleep.
The cloud bears left them at the clearing in front of their cottage, and even after all the spectacular wonders she’d seen since dawn, Kiela thought it was a magical sight: their home, tucked between the bushes and trees, covered in ivy and flowers, with the sign she’d painted, “Kiela and Caz’s Jam Shop,” over the door and the new counter that Larran had built under the window. She wondered if they’d missed any customers today, and decided that next time they went traipsing off into the forest with magical beings, she’d leave a “come back tomorrow” note on the door.
She opened the front door, and they both went inside. Caz scooted himself out through the back door to the garden. “I’m going to check on the cactus,” he told her.
“Mmm,” she said. It was the most conversation she felt she could manage.
Going from lantern to lantern, she lit a few candles, and then she sank into a chair. She thought about not standing up again. She could sleep sitting, couldn’t she? No, she had to eat, and then she could drag herself to bed.
Caz hopped back inside. “You have to come see!”
“Unless it’s as good as a unicorn, I’m not moving,” Kiela said.
“Just come,” Caz said.
She pried herself off the chair and shuffled out to the garden. All around the garden, the tree guardians had left gifts: nuts, mushrooms, wild edible roots, as well as the ingredients needed to replenish her basket of remedies (pine cones, leaves, even a chunk of pine sap) and then some. There was also a tiny mountain of blueberries that she could use for another flavor of jam. And best of all, next to the house was a bush whose branches had been woven together to form an enclosure—a homemade chicken coop.
Within the coop was her errant chicken.
The hen clucked at her once and then settled placidly onto a nest of grasses and hay.