28. Now Tree
NOW: TREE
When I finally found a god tree, I found myself wishing for Fox or Jade to be by my side so I could cry out in delight with someone.
Even for Daisy to be at my feet would have been enough.
But I felt lonesome, that ghostly sensation of being so alone the vacancy of another person was like a presence alongside me, an empty space where a companion should be.
I had always been well with my lonesomeness, finding a solace in it even in childhood.
Losing Avery had altered that.
“I suppose,” I said aloud in the dark, “Magda would say that I talk to that lonesomeness. Make it a person. Or a god. Very well, which god will I speak to? I know Sister Sea the least, Brother Air is a mystery, and though I may be a child of fire, the Father does not seem like a good conversationalist.”
I laughed at my own joke. I had always been this way, speaking to Mother Earth when I was alone.
“Mother Earth, thank you for this god tree. And I know I am silly as I complained of a crowded house in the past, and now I complain of the brief time of being alone while I hunt. My Avery would say I am a woman of many moods.”
God trees had empty trunks with doorways only someone with magic could see.
Inside, the walls were hollow, and that was the only place the luminous mother’s moss grew.
I wedged myself into the opening in the trunk, and when I found myself inside the glowing circle, I had enough room to sit and almost stretch my legs out.
I sighed and leaned back to place my head against the inside bark.
“I’ll just pray to all of you then,” I went on.
“I am terrified. Terrified for Adelaide. Terrified for all of us and this caravan on a path of certain damnation. I worry Ilsit will say something to get herself killed. I worry Starling will sniff around Jade and realize who she is. I worry my Fox will be seen as defective and mistreated. I miss my man and I miss his being our guardian. I do not understand my feelings for Thane. I do not know what the rest of this life looks like, and that makes me quake with fear.”
Eventually I stood up and found a natural break in the inner bark that my hand could fit through.
I slid my foraging knife into the opening and scraped up a handful’s worth of the moss.
I deposited it into the bag and went back inside for more, circling my wrist so that the moss all around the little opening was collected.
Forgetting every time Magda had slapped my wrist for it, I went back into the opening, reaching a bit farther out with my knife.
And I got stuck.
“Damn,” I growled. “Godsdamn it.” How could I be so stupid?
I had been taught since I was a girl not to do this.
I had been told not to be greedy in the god tree, to take only what an opening’s reach allowed for collecting.
But, like a dimwit, I had disregarded my schooling and stuck my arm too far in to get it back out.
“I will die here,” I announced as if I had a listener.
“Even if the girls think to look for me, none of them can see an opening in a god tree. None of them will be able to step inside and help me cut my way out. I am going to miss the caravan leaving in the morning because no one else on the bloody thing has any Tintarian magic in them. I am a complete and utter twit.”
I spent an hour stamping my feet and jerking my hand around inside the bark, nearly losing my knife in the process.
I tried prying away the inner bark around my arm so as to widen the opening, but as Magda had always said, the tree’s bark was hard enough to protect its hollowness but moist enough that it would not crack. It was unbreakable.
“Godsdamn it!” I yelled, not caring who heard me. “Fuck me.”
“Is that how you solicit your lovers?” came a man’s voice.
I jumped so hard I scraped my wrist. My head jerked away from the opening to the sight of the Vyggian sliding in through the god tree’s door.
I gaped.
As always, that pale eye’s lid was halfway down, mouth halfway to smiling but not with any warmth, like he was weighing whether or not he could be bothered to speak to a person. He leaned against the opposite side of the inner circle, eye appraising me in the dim blue glow.
I could not breathe. He had not only found me out, in the process of gathering mother’s moss, but I was trapped by my own carelessness.
I was at his mercy. And he was too close for my comfort.
If I leaned outward and stretched my left arm, the free one, across the circle, I could almost touch his chest.
“If I am being honest, madam midwife, I would have thought you would have little need of such blatantly declared demands,” he went on, his hands lifting to loop his forefingers into the neckline of his jerkin.
“Little need of—what?” I stuttered.
He shrugged. “I have commented on your allure before. You know what I think. Why must you seek out your bedmates by shouting ‘fuck me’ in the street? Or in this case, in the god tree? Is that how you invite men into your bed?”
“You speak rather plainly about my bedding habits,” I said. I was in an undignified, precarious position, but I would not let him see me afraid. I put my shoulders back as far as I could with half my forearm and hand stuck in the tree.
That single eye flitted to my bosom, but it was so quick I wondered if I had imagined it.
“What else would you rather speak plainly about?” he asked. “That you are clearly of enemy lineage and therefore, a spy, or that you gather an outlawed thing? I would think your shameless mating call a safer subject.”
I was near to admitting defeat, to shutting my mouth and letting him carry on his duties and turn me in, when my daft mind finally caught up.
He could see the doorway in a god tree too.