Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  “No worries, you can count on me,” she said.

  Chapter 18

  After leaving Thierry’s house, Rainbow raced to Christophe’s flat and rang the bell. Christophe had said he’d mistaken his feelings for Emilie, but would his jealousy of Eole make him reconsider them?

  She heard him jog down the stairs in his metal-capped safety shoes, which meant the intercom was broken again. He opened the door and peered behind her.

  “No shadow today?”

  “I’ve left him at the library.”

  “Good.” He kissed her briefly. “Let’s eat. I have to get back to work soon.”

  He was still in a strange mood. She apologised for being late and told him about Thierry’s offer. His demeanour softened and they went upstairs to his flat, where lunch was congealing on the table. Apple and Acorn scampered to the door, and she grabbed Apple before he could dash downstairs.

  “We didn’t finish talking about Eole yesterday,” said Christophe as they ate.

  “Well, you went all jealous on me and stomped off.”

  “Can you blame me? Eole’s a bit strange, but he’s good-looking.”

  “Come on, you know I don’t care about appearances,” she said.

  “It’s more than his looks. There’s something in the way you drew him, something intimate. A kind of longing.”

  Rainbow stopped chewing. She’d believed him to be her soulmate when she’d done some of the drawings. Were her feelings so obvious in her art?

  “When I saw you arrive together,” he continued, “I got this heavy feeling in my heart. Something almost tangible seemed to link you. A bit like with you and Mary before you hugged the silver maple. It hurts because I love you.”

  “Oh, Chris.” She took his hand. “I’m not in the least bit attracted to Eole. You probably just picked up on the vibes of us being together for a week. There’s nothing at all between us.”

  “So why did you tell him he’s your soulmate?”

  She frowned. “He told you that?”

  “It was the first thing he said.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes: Oh. You say he’s dangerous, but you still hang around with him. You tell him he’s your soulmate but won’t admit it to me. I don’t understand, Rainbow.”

  She realised that trying to protect Chris from being jealous actually made things worse. The only solution for them to find their former trust in each other was to be completely honest.

  “It’s complicated,” she sighed. “Basically, he’s got a gift that I promised to keep secret. At first I thought he was my shepherd. I was a bit hasty and told him he was a kind of soulmate to me. Then I discovered that he’s not the shepherd I’m looking for. He’s the Tree Slayer – or, rather, the Tree Slayer takes advantage of his gift. But Eole is attached to the idea of being my soulmate. I’ve got to keep him happy because if he gets upset, the Tree Slayer will use him to destroy this One Tree I must save. And meanwhile I still haven’t found my Val d’Azun shepherd.”

  “I see. Kind of. But it’s not fair to pretend Eole’s your soulmate. You should tell him the truth.”

  “I’ve tried, but he’s got the soulmate thing stuck in his head. He knows I’m with you.”

  “Does he? He’s pretty possessive. But I suppose that’s not your fault. Anyway, I’m going to give you a chance to prove you’re not in love with him.”

  “Go on. How?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Come on holiday with me.”

  A slow smile spread across her face, which was nothing compared to Mary’s explosion of elation. “Cool! When?”

  “After your conferences in Massane. I’ve booked the July bank holiday week off work, remember?”

  Thierry also took his holiday around Bastille Day, which meant he wouldn’t need her. This was the sign she’d been hoping for. “Can we go back to the Val d’Azun?” she asked.

  “That’s exactly what I was going to suggest, since you’ve fallen under the charm of the Pyrenees. We could try paragliding and go mountain biking and potholing. And canyoning. We could climb a peak and sleep under the stars.”

  She thought of wildflower prairies, marmots and rocky peaks. It would be romantic. And she’d be able to hunt for her shepherd with Christophe beside her, as she’d originally intended.

  “What do you think?” asked Christophe.

  Emilie wouldn’t dare interfere in her and Christophe’s relationship when she heard about this.

  “You bet!” she said. “Don’t count on me for the paragliding, though.”

  “Chicken! It’ll be even better than dune jumping. Let’s send off for some brochures right now.”

  Rainbow hummed as she drove to the library after lunch, not caring if anyone heard her through the open Mini windows. Thierry still wanted her. She and Chris had overcome their problems and were back on track. She had plans for the next step of her mission, and Eole had promised not to unleash a gale again. As long as he kept his word, everything would be fine.

  She hoped he fully understood the destructive power of his special skill. If she lost her temper, her gift would only allow her to knot a few branches. But when Eole got angry, he flattened whole forests. No wonder the Tree Slayer had chosen him.

  It was horrible to think it was inside Eole right now, biding its time, waiting for him to lose his temper or have an episode and lose control. It may even be feeding on poor Eole, gathering force until it could take full possession of him and command him to create a storm. The thought made her blanch. If naming a gale gave it more strength, then warning Eole he risked being possessed by an evil spirit – one already lodged inside him – would make him even more susceptible to its power.

  She couldn’t tell him, and she wouldn’t be able to influence him or calm him once he’d gone home. But the success of her mission depended on him resisting the Tree Slayer. There was one more thing she could do before he left.

  Eole didn’t manage to buy a sandwich on his own, even though he could buy one perfectly well in Argelès-Gazost. If he hadn’t started imagining all the possibilities of what the shopkeeper might say and the questions she might ask and the decisions he would have to make, it might have been fine. As it was, he’d preferred to stay hungry when the library closed at midday, and to wait for Rainbow for two hours and five minutes here on the bench.

  She was looking all sparkly again.

  “Hey, Eole! Did you do lots of research?”

  He nodded. Reading hypnotherapy books in Cognac library had felt less like betrayal than reading his birthday books. His brain told him that Tintin didn’t belong here, and therefore Eole wasn’t forsaking his memory by learning something new and not sharing it. This had thawed his frozen mind, and he’d managed to read everything he’d taken from the library shelves.

  Rainbow looked him up and down as they walked back to the car. “Have you forgotten your headphones?”

  “No.” He pulled them out of his pocket to show her. “I don’t need them in towns.”

  The lead unwound and dropped to the floor, the jack making a metallic ‘clink’ on the stone cobbles.

  “Careful. Don’t drop your Walkman,” she said.

  He rolled up the lead and put it back in his pocket. “I haven’t got a Walkman.”

  She wore a confused expression, even though he couldn’t find anything ambiguous in his sentence. Then she made a lightbulb-moment face.

  “Clever tactic. Maybe I should wear headphones when I want some peace.”

  She drove them back towards the commune, but stopped at a car park on the edge of a wood.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Out you get.”

  He put on his headphones and followed her reluctantly along a path.

  “You see these dead and damaged trees?” said Rainbow. “This is your fault. You and the Tree Slayer did this.”

  They were hundreds of miles from Brittany. He hadn’t realised he had so much force, though of course he’d only started the gale. The Tree Sl
ayer had intervened and blown down these trees, not him. He couldn’t remember how many hours he’d blown for, but he knew it was the middle of the night when he’d come down from the hill, exhausted and hurting from the loss of Tintin.

  Many of the trees here were uprooted and others leaned drunkenly against each other. Rainbow stroked them as she passed, like he stroked Darwie. She looked sad as she pointed out sawn-off, horizontal tree trunks on each side of the path. He didn’t like her to look sad.

  A tree beside him creaked. It was dangerous to walk here. One might fall on them at any minute, like one had fallen on Tintin. He stopped and told her they should go back to the car.

  “Come on. We’re nearly there,” said Rainbow.

  He dragged his feet as they fought through undergrowth, squeezed under toppled trees and weaved through thickets. At last she stopped at a fallen trunk. She put her arms around it, like she did with Christophe. Eole wrapped his arms around himself and asked her if they could go now.

  “Why don’t you touch the tree?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want tree-stink on his hands.

  “Go on, Eole. Touch it. Here.” She pointed to a spot.

  He sighed and put the tip of his index finger on the mossy bark. He would wash it three times with soap when he got back to the commune.

  Rainbow stared at him. Was he supposed to be doing something?

  She hugged the tree again and put her cheek against it. Her eyes were closed, so he took his finger away. After thirty seconds, she opened her eyes.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Poor oak.”

  She made him do the same on an upright tree too, and then looked disappointed, as if she’d expected something to happen, as if she still thought he was the Tree Slayer. He shook his hand and wiped it on his shorts to get rid of some of the smell. Rainbow sat down, her back against the trunk, and told him to sit down too. He did so, making sure he wasn’t touching any trees.

  “You caused all this destruction to avenge one person, Eole. What would Tintin have said about that?”

  He hadn’t thought about his gale from that perspective. Would Tintin have been disappointed in him for losing his control over his special skill?

  “I’m going to tell you something important,” she continued. “Why don’t you take off your headphones?”

  He shook his head. If he took them off, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “Never mind. Can you hear me properly?”

  He nodded.

  “When you have a special skill, you have a responsibility to be careful how you use it,” she said. “The more powerful the skill, the bigger the responsibility.”

  He and Tintin had never talked about the ethics of his special skill. They’d focused on making cloud art and doing experiments to measure the capacity of his lungs, not on his responsibilities.

  “You’re going home tomorrow, so I want you to remember this,” she said.

  “I’m not going home. I’m your soulmate.”

  “Listen: you have an important role to play in the mission, and you don’t have to stay with me to do it. You’ve already promised never to blow up a storm again, but actually your role should be bigger than that, since you’ve got so much power. Whenever there’s a gale, you must counteract it so the Tree Slayer doesn’t use it to harm more trees. If you protect trees, you’ll save my life. And Amrita’s. Your role is vital, Eole. Can you promise to do that?”

  He didn’t care about the trees or Amrita. But if that’s what it took to be Rainbow’s soulmate and save her life, he would do it. He’d have to chart the movements of the winds, which would be interesting, and he’d need to know where she was all the time. But would it be enough? He’d only be able to protect her approximately eighty per cent. To give her one hundred per cent protection he’d have to stay close to her.

  “Eole?”

  She’d told him he didn’t have to stay with her, not that he mustn’t stay with her. Whether he settled for one hundred per cent or eighty per cent depended on how things went with Alexandra tomorrow.

  “I promise,” he said.

  Chapter 19

  Rainbow watched Eole take off his headphones as she started the Mini’s engine. He was always putting them on and taking them off. Until her discovery at the library this afternoon she’d thought he was listening to classical music. She reversed out of the parking space and asked him why he bothered wearing them in her company.

  “It’s not because I don’t want you to talk to me,” he said. “It’s because they block out the voices.”

  Headphones wouldn’t work for Mary’s voice – not that she noticed it so much these days. Was she getting used to Mary, at last, and becoming truly whole? It was strange to think that headphones would stop an inner voice. The act of wearing them must have a psychological effect on Eole. She wondered if the voices did belong to the Tree Slayer, and what they sounded like. She couldn’t ask him directly, of course.

  “What kind of things do your voices say?” she asked, as they drove towards the commune.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you understand them?”

  He shook his head.

  “So they’re in a foreign language?” The Tree Slayer wasn’t that clever if it had chosen the wrong language for Eole.

  “No. I listened to the recordings of all the foreign languages in the Paris library and it didn’t match any of them. It’s not a language.”

  “I bet your mum thinks it’s God speaking to you in tongues.”

  “It’s noises. And she’s not my mum.”

  “Noises? In your head?”

  “No. Outside my head. The voices make it complicated to concentrate on what people are saying because they go on and on all the time and distract me.”

  “Hang on: you mean the voices are all around you? They’re real voices?” That didn’t sound as if it could be the Tree Slayer.

  He nodded. “Except when I’m indoors. Or in town. Or on the mountain tops. They come when I’m too close to plants and trees and–”

  “Trees? This is crazy! It’s the trees. You can hear the trees talking.”

  “No I can’t. Trees don’t talk.”

  She swerved into a lay-by and stopped the car. This was incredible. The Tree Slayer’s voice would be internal. Eole’s voices had to be the trees. It explained why he’d never worn his headphones on the bare summer pastures, but had kept them on in the wooded valley. And why he wore them here.

  “How do you know trees don’t talk?” she said. “They don’t bend their branches when someone puts their hands on them, either.”

  “Yes they do. I’ve seen you do that to them.”

  “Exactly! So why shouldn’t the trees be talking to each other? Or even to you?”

  “You’re starting your theory in the wrong place,” said Eole. “You should collect the evidence first, then deduce a theory from your empirical proof. I don’t have enough evidence yet. All I know is that the voices speak through nature and are accompanied by smells.”

  “It’s the trees’ voices, I’m sure,” she said. To think that trees talked – and that Eole could hear them! “But what do you mean about smells?”

  “Part of the anomaly that gives me my special skill is the overdeveloped sense of smell in my olfactory receptors. I can smell things in more detail than most people. Trees stink, for example. Tintin and I did a battery of tests–”

  “Jesus, Eole!” The smells could be the chemicals Thierry had told her about, like the gas the acacia trees give off as warnings when giraffes browse on them. But if he could hear the trees and smell their chemicals – which probably wasn’t very pleasant, come to think of it – was he her soulmate after all? Her soulmate and the Tree Slayer’s host?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask,” he muttered.

  This changed everything. He was her other half, her guide to Koad. But his gift wasn’t equal to hers: it was far superior. She
wasn’t sure she liked this new development. She didn’t want Eole to be closer to trees than she was. He didn’t deserve it.

  “I told you I was connected to trees,” said Rainbow. “I showed you. I even said how I’d love to find someone who was as close to trees as me. Why didn’t you say anything about the voices coming from them or through them?”

  “It didn’t occur to me. Anyway, everyone always has their own opinion on what the voices are. No one ever asks me what I think.”

  He had a point. She’d assumed he heard a voice like Mary’s or that it was the Tree Slayer’s voice; his mum was convinced it was God; and whatever Domi had thought was confidential.

  Domi. This must be what Domi had suspected after the hypnotherapy. But wouldn’t he have told her something so important to her mission? Perhaps she was jumping to conclusions in believing the voices he heard were the trees. Or – came Mary’s suspicious thoughts – could Eole be making this up so she didn’t send him home? It might even be the Tree Slayer prompting Eole to invent this pretence.

  How could she tell what came from Eole and what came from the Tree Slayer? She was sure no one could tell which reactions were hers and which were Mary’s – even she had difficulty at times. Not often, but occasionally.

  There was one way to be sure: she could ask Eole if he could guide her to Koad. On the other hand, she mustn’t let the Tree Slayer know the details of her mission. No wonder Amrita had implied she should vanquish it before setting off for Koad. How would she get out of this conundrum?

  She needed time to think about what to do. He could hear the trees’ voices, but he didn’t understand them. He was her other half, but she couldn’t ask him to guide her to Koad. What was the point of him being able to hear the trees he resented? It was so unfair. Why hadn’t Amrita given her the gift of hearing trees talk instead of her stupid branch-shaping gift?

  “Anyway, the voices are irrelevant,” she said, “since you don’t understand what they’re saying. You’d better go home and concentrate on counteracting the winds and not making any more gales. Leave the trees to me. Some of them speak to me too, through images. And I can sense their feelings. I don’t need to hear their language or smell them or whatever other disgusting thing your gift lets you do.”