The croaker birds seemed to have come from varying distances. They were not graceful birds when they had to land on the ground. They spread their wings wide as they descended, but still seemed to land with a thud and a bounce. They were as ungracious as they were ungraceful. They waddled immediately to the feast. I felt, distantly, the first snapping beak that caught and tore a piece of flesh from my corpse. I regretted the loss; whatever they took removed nutrients that my tree could have consumed. The twinge I felt was reminiscent of pain without being as sharp. I sensed the damage to the discarded body. A second and third bird landed and hastened to the feed. Although there was plenty of space and lots of carrion to consume, they squawked and flapped at one another, jockeying for position. In between slapping one another with their wings, their heads would dart in, wicked beaks held wide, to close on flesh and worry loose strips of it.
Another bird dropped from the sky, and then three more, landing like fruit falling from a tree. They cawed and shrilled challenges at the ones that were already feasting. They slapped less with their wings now, seeming intent on ripping as much meat free as they could and gulping it down before their fellows could intervene.
“That must have been what he meant, when he said he would take your death,” Lisana said regretfully. “Your body would have given much nourishment to your little tree. I am sorry to see it go.”
“I regret it,” I said, thinking of the usefulness of the body rather than any sentimental attachment to it. “But if that is all he wants of me, then he is welcome to it.”
An especially large croaker bird had climbed onto my corpse. He feasted busily, tearing strip after strip of softening skin and fat from the soft meat of my belly. He shook a particularly juicy scrap, tossed it up and gulped it down, and then wiped his beak on my chest. Sunlight glinted off the brightness of the eye that he turned up to me.
“Ah, but we are only beginning. This is not your death. This is just what was left over. We shall tidy a good part of it away before I claim your death from you.”
Lisana shivered. “We do not need to watch this. Our deal has been struck and we owe you nothing more. Come, Nevare.”
As easily as that, she took me away from that slaughterhouse scene. “There is a trick to walking in the forest,” she told me as we put our backs to our trees and strolled away. “We can go wherever we have roots. And as you become stronger, you can even venture away from them, so long as you maintain contact with the forest itself. So many of the kaembra trees still share roots that we can go anywhere they grow.”
“Share roots?”
“The young trees sprout up from the root system of the older ones, for the most part. Others, like the ones at the edge of your cemetery, grow from a fallen branch.”
“I see.” And I grasped that in some ways, they were all one organism. The thought was a little unsettling, so I set it aside. We strolled on. I became aware of how much Lisana was helping me to “see” and “feel.” I was not as adept at simulating a human body as Lisana was. It took time for me to master making my feet touch the earth and being aware of the change from sunlight to shadow on my skin. I worked at it, refusing to be distracted by what I could still feel; the croaker birds were busily dismantling my old body.
I reminded myself that there was no pain. It was rather like skin peeling from sunburn or scratching a scab away. I was aware of the birds taking away pieces of me, but it did not hurt, except for an occasional twinge, as if they had reached the edge of dead flesh and were peeling into living skin. I flinched when it stung, and Lisana turned to me with concern in her face. “What was that?”
“You felt it?”
“Of course. We are connected.” She frowned thoughtfully.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
She wet her lips, considering. “You are not dead, of course. But that body should be. You should not be able to feel pain—”
I lost the rest of her sentence as a slash of red heat went up my back. It felt like I imagined the lick of a whip would feel, and like a whip weal, it continued to sting after the initial burn. I caught my breath. “What is that?”
“I don’t know.” She seized my hand and held it tightly in both of hers.
Another scalding stripe of pain struck me, this time across my belly. “He’s doing something to me.”
“So I fear,” she said. Her eyes had grown very large. “Nevare. Stay with me. You want to stay with me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. What do you mean?”
“As before.” She let go of my hand with one of hers. She reached up and with her free hand, gathered a large handful of hair on the top of my head. She gripped it firmly, almost painfully, so that it strained against my scalp.
