If. That word was everywhere. It loomed all about him like an impenetrable wall.
What should he do?
He waited some more, half hoping that the tree would try to communicate with him, that it would take the initiative and show him a way to speak with it. But after standing in front of it for what seemed an interminable amount of time, he gave up hoping. The effort to communicate would have to come from him. He was the supplicant; he was the one who was going to have to find a way to break through.
He had communicated with the aeriads just by speaking aloud. Would that work with the tanequil, as well?
“My name is Penderrin Ohmsford,” he said. “Can you understand what I am saying?”
He felt foolish speaking that way, and he knew as soon as the words were out that there wasn’t going to be any response. The tanequil was different from the aeriads. He was going to have to find a different way of speaking to it.
He walked up to the tree and placed his hands on its bark, running them slowly over the hard, rough surface. He was surprised at the warmth he found there, a pulsating heat that radiated outward to spread through his own body. He kept his hands in place as the heat entered him, thinking that might be the beginning of a way to connect.
But nothing more happened.
He took his hands away, staring upward into the thick nest of intertwined limbs. The orange-tipped leaves shimmered in the moonlight overhead, a rippling that reminded him of a sunset’s glow on the surface of the Rainbow Lake. Rustling sounds emanated from that shimmer, soft and gentle, and he reached for them with his senses, drawing them in, trying to sort them out and make them into words.
But nothing revealed itself.
He moved back again, gaining some distance, hoping that by doing so he might also gain some perspective. But as he walked slowly around the tanequil, studying its shape, he began to doubt that such a thing was possible. From every angle, the tree appeared the same—ancient and huge, a knotted enigma a boy could never hope to untangle. It was a tree, and as such he understood some little bit about it. But it was a tree of such immensity—of size and shape and age and immutability, of innate intelligence and deep understanding—that it defied him. He recognized its power, but he could not begin to come to terms with it. The longer he tried to decide how it might be done, the more certain he became that it couldn’t. The tanequil was too remote, too foreign, and too impenetrable for anyone possessed of less magic than a Druid.
Khyber, he thought, would be better suited for this. He wished suddenly that he had agreed to let her come.
But that was ridiculous. It wasn’t Khyber who had been sent by the King of the Silver River. He was the one who had been told that he could find a way to communicate with the tree.
He sat down, crossing his legs before him, resting his chin in his hands, staring at its mottled trunk, and trying to think the problem through. There had to be a means for doing so. He might not know what it was yet, but he should be able to find it if he just thought about it long enough. Communication with living things came about in all sorts of unexpected ways. He had discovered that over the years; he knew it to be true. So there was a way to communicate with the tanequil too. There was a way to understand it and to make it understand him.
How do trees communicate?
He had no idea. Until then, he had never heard of one that did. Save for the legendary Ellcrys, when it spoke with the Chosen of the Elven people. But the Ellcrys was formed from a human who had willingly agreed to be transformed into a tree. So there was human nature buried somewhere deep within the Ellcrys. He wasn’t sure the same could be said of the tanequil. He knew nothing of its history, nothing of how it had come into being. He could not presume that there was anything human about it.
He must find another way, then. It was a tree, and, as such, a plant. What did he know of plants and their relationship with the world? They were alive and took their nourishment from the soil. Some, like the tanequil, were very old, and because they could not move, they had to be very patient. They had endless amounts of time to think, and so they could reason in ways unknown to humans, who were never in one place long enough to give themselves over to reasoning as trees could.
He sighed, staring up into the branches. He was imbuing the tree with human characteristics. Should he be doing that? Did the tanequil think? Did it reason? Could it understand such concepts as patience? Did it do more than root and nourish as the eons passed and the world changed about it?
He thought for a time about the ways in which he understood other living things. Birds and animals he understood from their calls and cries, from the way they moved or didn’t move. Insects communicated in much the same way, but without thought. Grasses and flowers possessed limited communicative skills, all in the form of instinctual responses to heat and cold, to wet and dry. Days earlier, in the Klu Mountains, he had read the responses of lichen to the sun’s movement by touch …
He stopped himself. Would touch work here? He had tried placing his hands on the tanequil, but its bark was like an armor that protected it from the elements, designed specifically to shield it. It didn’t take in nourishment or produce responses to the elements through its bark.
It did those things through its roots.
He stared at the tree. Was that the way to communicate with it—through its roots? How in the world was he supposed to do that, especially when those roots were buried dozens—perhaps hundreds—of feet underground? The prospect of digging down to find them seemed ridiculous. Surely that wasn’t what he was intended to do if he wished to communicate with the tree.
If Cinnaminson were there, she might be able to offer a different perspective. In her blindness, sometimes she saw things more clearly than he did. He still didn’t know why she had been ordered to leave him alone even though the aeriads had been so specific about her coming with him. Frustration and irritation warred with each other as he thought about it.
Suddenly, he was just tired. He didn’t want to think anymore. He didn’t want to do anything but rest. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had slept.
He stretched out on the ground under the limbs of the ancient tree and closed his eyes. He needed only a few minutes, just long enough to clear his thinking, and then he would go back to work.
Overhead, the tanequil’s branches formed a silvery green canopy in the moonlight, its strange webbing of orange lines shimmering softly. He had the distinct impression that time was slowing down, that his own breathing had become the measure of its passing. His tension and frustration drained out of him until nothing remained but the leaden ache of his body.
He closed his eyes and slept.
As he slept, he dreamed. His dream was of home and his parents. He was back in Patch Run, and his mother was telling him that magic wasn’t important, that in some ways it was a burden. His father stood close by, using the wishsong to bring the buds of flowers into bloom. All around them, the sky was green and damp, and the air smelled of rain-soaked earth and leaves. Somewhere distant, an airship flew in silhouette against the sky, and he wished he were on it, safely aloft, safely away.
The scene changed, and he was hiding in a fortress, deep within its walls, down where only torchlight could penetrate the shadows and darkness. He crouched behind a wall, listening to sounds that came from the other side. He knew what was happening behind those walls, but he couldn’t bring himself to look. His aunt, the Ard Rhys, was a prisoner of creatures so terrible that even to look at them was death. They were doing things to her best left to the imagination. Those things were meant to change her, to alter her mind, to make her something she didn’t want to be. She was calling his name, begging him to help her, to save her from what was happening. Her cries were desperate, unbearable, filled with pain. She was all alone in that dark place, and he was the only one who could bring her back into the light.
But he couldn’t move.
He could only sit there, listening …
He came a
wake again, eyes opening to a sunrise brightening through the heavy canopy of the tanequil in a flush of pink light. He stared at the limbs and the sky and the light, fighting back tears and a sense of desperation that threatened to overwhelm him. He lay without moving, waiting for both to pass, waiting to regain control of his emotions, to breathe easily again.
Something stroked the skin of his arms, soft and feathery. Little fingers were touching him, fairy hands or insect legs. They moved along the backs of his hands and wrists. But their movement was circular, a stroking that suggested an attempt to soothe or ease. He grew calm. His tears dried and his heartbeat slowed. He took deep, steadying breaths.
Without moving his hands or wrists, he raised himself carefully on his elbows.
Tiny roots sprouted from the ground all around him, little nests of them, some so slender they matched the hairs on his arm. They formed a bed, poking from the earth, weaving and touching, twisting and stroking. They were everywhere, though he felt them only where his skin was exposed. In front of him, the tanequil’s limbs were swaying gently and its leaves shivering in time to the movement of the bed of roots that cradled him. He watched their undulation, watched the swaying of the tree, fascinated, mesmerized.
He lay back again and closed his eyes. The touching continued, and he lost himself in its hypnotic repetition. He reached out to it with his senses, embraced it, and made it a part of himself.
Then, deep within his consciousness, down where his heart beat and his life pulsed, he heard a deep, slow whisper, and even though it came from within himself, the voice wasn’t his.
–Penderrin–
TWENTY-FOUR
A single word spoken. His name.
–Penderrin–
Only it wasn’t spoken in the way that humans spoke. It didn’t come from a mouth or even from an independent source. It came from the stroking of the tree roots against his skin, his magic extracting from that touch a communication meant solely for him.
–Penderrin–
The tanequil was speaking to him. He had been wrong about how communication with the tree would happen. It wasn’t up to him to initiate contact; it was only up to him to be open to it. The tree would speak to him when it chose to. Trying to reach the tanequil on his terms was not going to work.
He lay against the earth, waiting for something more. But there were no further whispers, and he realized that the tiny fingerling roots were no longer stroking him. He rose to a sitting position and looked down. They were gone, all of them. He sat on a patch of sparse grass and bare earth from which no roots protruded and no sign of the ancient tree was in evidence.
He took a few moments to accept that the situation was not going to change, and then he rose and stood looking at the tree, trying to decide what to do next. Why had it stopped trying to communicate? Did it require something more from him? He couldn’t think what else he could do that would help. To allow communication, he had opened himself up to the tree, reached out with his senses, engaged the magic that was his birthright, and it had happened. What more was there for him to do?
He circled the tree, squinting in the glare of the sunrise as the light fell across his face. The forest was silent and untroubled, a vast hall in which even the smallest sound could be heard. It was a sacred place, and he was a supplicant come in search of healing and direction. He stilled his mind and opened his thoughts, reaching to make a fresh connection, his eyes on the tree as he replayed in his mind the still-fresh whisper of his name.
Nothing happened.
After a time, he sat down again, taking up a new position on the other side of the tree, with his back to the sun. He watched the way the light played over the branches and leaves, illuminating fresh parts of the tree as the sun lifted out of the mountains into the sky. He tried speaking to the tree, tried engaging it with his magic, with his thinking, even by touching the earth in the hope that he might draw out the root tendrils. He did everything he could imagine that might stimulate the tree’s consciousness.
Nothing worked.
Frustration washed through him. What had he done before that he was not doing now? Why wouldn’t the tanequil continue their conversation? Perhaps, he thought, it was a question of patience. Trees had infinite amounts, and for them conversations might require a much longer period of time. Perhaps one word at a time was all that it could manage, and he must wait awhile for the next.
He didn’t like that conclusion. He thought there must be a better one, a more sensible one. He went back to how things had begun, how he had been sleeping, dreaming of home, of the Ard Rhys …
He caught himself. Of the Ard Rhys, in danger, threatened because he could not help her, because he was incapable of acting. And then he had come awake in the sweat of his own fear and the roots of the tanequil had been reaching out to him. Responding, perhaps, to that fear, to his need to do something to help his aunt?
He lay down again on the earth, closed his eyes, and summoned pictures of his aunt in peril, jogging his memory, even though it was painful to do so, bringing to mind fresh images, fresh fears …
Almost immediately, the feathery touching begin again, a stroking of his skin that communicated a combination of reassurance and admonition. He remained still, giving himself over to the experience, but at the same time keeping his fears for his aunt at the forefront of his thoughts, the spark that he hoped would generate something more from the tree.
Hypnotically consuming, the stroking absorbed him. Lulled and calmed, he took a chance, speaking a single word in his mind.
–Tanequil–
–Penderrin. What do you require of me?–
The boy was so surprised by the response that he almost locked up, his mind going blank momentarily before he was able to construct an answer.
–A darkwand, so that I can reach my aunt, so that I can save her from the Forbidding–
–A darkwand formed of my body, of my limbs. What will you give me in exchange?–
Pen hesitated, surprised by the question. He had not thought to give the tanequil anything. The King of the Silver River had not mentioned anything about an exchange of gifts. Or was this something else? It might be that the tanequil was looking at a different sort of exchange entirely.
–What do you require?–
–What you ask of me. A part of yourself–
Pen took a deep, steadying breath, trying to stay focused on his aunt, on the Forbidding, on the journey he must make.
–What part of myself?–
As quickly as that, the stroking ended, the root tendrils withdrew, and the connection between them was broken once more. Pen lay where he was for a time, refocusing his thoughts on his aunt, stirring his emotions, and waiting for the words to come anew. They did not. He was left alone with his thoughts, his mind echoing with the words the tree had spoken and the silence that had replaced them.
Preoccupied with the crossing itself and with what waited, he had not thought to bring anything to eat with him when he crossed the bridge from Stridegate. He rose finally and went looking for food. He searched the forest about him, never moving too far from the tree, keeping the orange-tinged emerald canopy always in sight. But although he looked everywhere he could think to look, he found nothing save a tiny spill of water that trickled out of a fissure in a rock wall. He drank that, the water tasting of metal and earth.
He was about to return to the tanequil for another try at communicating with it when Cinnaminson appeared unexpectedly out of the trees, her face flushed with excitement as she rushed up to him.
“Penderrin,” she gasped, “it was incredible!”
“Where have you been?” he asked, taking her by the shoulders. “I was worried about you.”
She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as if she had been gone for weeks, rather than hours. He could feel the soft hiss of her breath in his ear as she laughed. “Did you miss me?”
He nodded, confused by her strange excitement. “Are you all right?”
She
pushed back from him so that they were face-to-face. Her smile reflected a child’s wonder as she reached up to touch his cheek. “Pen, I saw everything. The aeriads showed me. I don’t know how they managed it, but they let me see it all. They took shape and flew all around me, like tiny rainbow butterflies, changing colors and shimmering so brightly they seemed like pieces of the sun. It was so wonderful! Then they changed to become like me—girls, no older than I am! We danced and played! We laughed until I could hardly stand up! Do you know how long it has been since I laughed?”
He stared at her, shocked at the transformation. She had always been effusive, but she was alive now in a way he had never witnessed. It was as if she were being reborn into the world, made over by her encounter with the aeriads. He was surprised to find that he was vaguely jealous.
“Did you find out what they really are? Where they come from?”
She nodded. “They told me. They call themselves spirits of the air—aeriads—but they are much more. They call themselves seedlings, as well. They think of themselves as creatures of the tanequil, his children.” She stopped herself. “Their children,” she corrected. “I don’t understand this part, but they think of the tanequil as both mother and father. The tree is both man and woman to them, able to be one or the other or both as needed.” She shook her head. “I’m still learning.”
Pen thought about the tanequil’s voice in his head. Masculine, he reaffirmed, not feminine. Where was the mother side of the tree, then?
“Are you hungry?” she asked suddenly.
He nodded. “Starved. I’ve been looking for something to eat.”