“Lisana, please, I—” And then a red pain pierced my palm and shot up into my wrist.
“Get back!” she shrieked at me, and with a sudden burst of strength, she pushed me away.
I did not fall. The tree already gripped me too strongly for that. My forehead ripped free of the questing rootlets that had penetrated my brow. Blood ran bright red before my opened eyes. I bellowed in terror and with inhuman strength pulled my hands free. Dangling rootlets, red with my blood, pulled from my palms as I jerked my hands back. The tendrils dripped and twitched after me like hungrily seeking worms. I staggered back from the tree. With the back of my sleeve, I wiped blood away from my brow and eyes and then stared in horror at my wounded hands. Blood trickled from half a dozen holes in my flesh and dripped from my palms. As the drops fell to the forest floor, the moss at my feet hummocked and quivered. Tiny tree roots wormed up from the soil and moss, squirming toward the red drops that glistened like red berries. I pressed my bleeding palms to my shirtfront and staggered backward.
I felt dizzy with horror or perhaps blood loss. Lisana’s tree had tried to eat me. My pierced hands ached all the way into my wrists. I wondered how deeply the roots had wormed into me, and then tried not to think of that as a wave of vertigo swept over me. I focused on taking another couple of steps backward. I felt sickened and weak; I wondered if the roots had done more to me than pierce my flesh and absorb my blood.
“Move back, Nevare. Keep moving. There. That’s better.”
Tree Woman was a misty embodiment of herself. I could see through her, but my sense of her was stronger. My head was still spinning, but I obeyed her, staggering away from the young tree.
“Sit down on the moss. Breathe. You’ll feel better in a little while. Kaembra trees sometimes take live creatures as nourishment. When they do, they sedate them so they do not struggle. What you did was foolish. I warned you that the tree was desperate.”
“Isn’t the tree you? Why would you do this to me?” I felt woozy and betrayed.
“The tree is not me. I live within the tree’s life, but I am not the tree and the tree is not me.”
“It tried to eat me.”
“It tried to live. All things try to live. And it will now. In a way, it is almost fitting. I took from it to rescue you. And it took from you to save itself.”
“Then—you’ll live now?” My mind seized on that most important fact.
She nodded. It was hard to see her against the bright sunlight, but I could still make out the sadness in her eyes that contradicted her soft smile. “I’ll live, yes. For as long as the tree does. I spent a lot of what I had regained to reach for you in that cell. It will take me a long time to rebuild my reserves. But what you have given me today has restored me for now. I have the strength to reach for sunlight and water now. For now, I’ll be fine.”
“What is it, Lisana? What aren’t you telling me?”
She laughed then, a sound I felt in my mind rather than heard. “Soldier’s Boy, how can you know so many things and nothing at all? Why do you persist in being divided against yourself? How can you look at something and not see it? No one understands this about you. You use the magic with a reckless power that in all my time I have never witnessed. Yet when the truth is right before you, you cannot see it.”
“What truth?”
“Nevare, go to the end of the ridge and look out toward your King’s Road. Tell me where it will go as they push it onward. Then come back, and tell me if I will live.”
The pain in my hands was already lessening. I wiped my sleeve over my forehead and felt the roughness of scabbing. The magic was again healing me with an unnatural swiftness. I was grateful, and also a bit surprised, not that the magic could heal me but at how easily I accepted it now.
I was full of trepidation as I walked to the end of the ridge. The soil there was stony, and as I approached the end, the trees became more stunted until I stood on an outthrust of stone where only brush grew. From that rocky crag I could look out over the valley below me. The vale cupped a lining of trees, but intruding into that green bowl, straight as an arrow, was the chaos of the King’s Road. Like a pointing finger, it lanced into the forest. To either side of it, trees with yellowing leaves leaned drunkenly, their side roots cut by the road’s progress. Smoke still rose from an equipment shed, or rather, from the ashes of one. Epiny had been thorough. She’d set off three explosions down there in an attempt to distract the town from my escape. Wagons and scrapers were a jumble of broken wood and wheels in one area under the scattered roof of a shed. Another collapsed building still smoldered and stank in the sweet summer air. And it looked to me as if she had exploded one culvert. The road had collapsed and the stream that had once been channeled under it now seethed through the rocks and muck. Men and teams were already at work there, digging the muck away and preparing to lay a new conduit for the stream. They’d have to repair that section of road before they could push the construction any deeper into the forest.
