“You are not even remotely correct,” Orandula observed. There was amusement in his voice. Overhead, I heard the shifting of a heavy body in a tree’s branches. Then it lifted off with a flapping of wings that faded almost immediately. I listened intently. He was gone. Where was I?
I could see nothing, but I could hear. The ringing silence resolved itself into night insects singing their endless songs. Cautiously, I explored my other senses. I smelled and tasted blood. Pain hummed all around me, but I had specific pains, too. I’d bitten my tongue badly. My head pounded. My innards felt wrong, as if my guts had settled into a new and strange arrangement. I sorted out my agonies and knew that I was sitting upright. I tried to move, to shift even my leg, and cried out at the fresh pain it woke. I went back to stillness.
The darkness was an overcast night. It passed very slowly, and it was some time before I realized that the blackness was nothing more terrifying and dreadful than night. The coming of the dim dawn as sunlight flickered down through the canopy of the forest brought its own terror, however. I could see, and what I saw sickened me.
I sat where the Specks had left me. The beaks of the carrion birds that had torn the flesh from my body had shredded my bindings as well. I was naked. Shreds of rotting flesh surrounded and enthroned me. My decomposed body was a slimy scum on the earth around me. Pale roots networked through it. But that was not what horrified me.
What remained of my body was a monstrous thing. The layer of skin that covered me was so thin that I could see through it. As the light grew stronger, what I could see became ever more horrifying. Red muscle, white tendons, dark veins. Knobs of bone and gristle showing through in my hands. My breath came and went in short, trembling bursts. I wondered for an instant what my face looked like and then was glad I could not know.
As the sun grew stronger, it brought light and color into the world. My body became even more hideous. I turned my eyes away from it and looked around me. There was Lisana’s tree, lush and healthy. And when I turned my eyes up, my own tree towered over me, twice the size it had been when last I saw it. I was grateful for its thick leafy shade, for I feared what the sun could do to my nearly skinless body. The surface of my body stung all over like a skinned knee.
I moved cautiously, lifting my hands, not wanting to look at them but looking all the same. After a time, I stood. My bare feet protested. They barely had skin, let alone calluses to protect them. I was very careful as I picked my way through the fallen branches and other forest debris to reach Lisana’s tree. I stood looking up at it. “Lisana?” I asked softly.
There was no response. But it was more profound than that. I sensed nothing that could have responded. I set both my hands to the trunk of her tree. I didn’t like the sensation. The skin on my palms and fingers was new and thin. I pressed my tender hands against the roughness of her bark and feared I would tear what little skin I had. Nevertheless, I put my brow to her bark as well. “Lisana?” I called aloud. “Lisana, please, reach for me. I cannot feel you.”
But there was nothing. I stood a long time, hoping there would be something. I would have welcomed it even if her tree had tried to root into my flesh. But there was not even that.
When I glanced back at my tree, I could see that its roots were rapidly diminishing the leftovers of what I had been. But from that tree I sensed nothing, no awareness, no kinship, nothing at all.
No magic.
I don’t know how long I would have stayed there if thirst had not begun to assail me. I knew my way to the nearest stream, and I went there, carefully descending from Lisana’s ridge, taking each step as if I were made of cobwebs and glass. My breath shivered in and out of me. When I reached the water, I had to kneel down and cup it into my hands. It was cold and wet, a painful shock to my barely cloaked nerves. I felt the coldness of it running down inside me, even into my belly. I drank a lot of water, and then sat shivering. I’d looked at my hands when I drank from them. The memory made me shudder.
By midday, I was thinking more clearly, but only because I had pushed aside every part of my experience that refused to make sense. I’d evaluated where I was and what I had. My situation was desperate. I was naked, hungry, and vulnerable to everything from a thorn to an insect bite. I needed help. I could think of only one place and one person who would offer it. I stood up and left the stream.
I stumbled through the forest, moving with exaggerated caution lest I tear my new skin. Everything seemed too difficult. My legs were wobbly and sometimes I staggered unpredictably. Once, when I nearly fell and had to catch myself against a tree trunk, I ripped the thin skin on my palm. The sudden pain tore a shriek from me, and fresh blood ran from the cut, trickling down my wrist. In the distance, almost in response to my shriek, I heard birds caw raucously, as if laughing at me. I was so weakened and befuddled by all that I had been through that the sound brought tears to my eyes, and soon they were running down my cheeks as I tottered on through the forest. The salt tears stung my new skin.
