The Tree of Water

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “You know what they say about curiosity, don’t you, Ven?”

  “That it killed the cat?”

  “I’ve always heard that it sinks a ship—and since I hoard sunken ships, that makes me rather fond of the curiosity of humans. And other land-livers. Well, this has been amusing, but it’s growing dull. If I were to just kill you, then you will no longer know her name, now, will you?”

  “That’s right,” Ven admitted. “I no longer will. But if you kill me, you will never know it. At least I will have had it for a little while. Let’s trade. I am willing to give you her name and forget it, if you will guarantee our safety and tell me what I want to know.”

  A gleam of interest made the huge eyes glow even more brightly.

  “What is it that you want to know?”

  Ven thought hard, trying to see the questions as if they were moves on a chessboard, as his father had taught him when making a business deal. He finally decided that he had nothing to lose by asking his most important question first.

  “How can I save Amariel?”

  The dragon snorted.

  “Predictable. Well, I can certainly tell you that—but I suspect it’s not the question that is really bedeviling you, Son of Earth. If your friend were not injured, what would you have asked me?”

  Against his will, Ven’s curiosity rose until it tickled the hairs on his head floating in the heavy water of the Twilight Realm. He tried to keep the words in check, but they fought their way out of his mouth in spite of himself.

  “How can I find Frothta, the Tree of Water?”

  The giant beast threw back his horned head and laughed. The floor of the ocean shook, rattling the mountains of coins and causing the broken ships to pitch about as if on the waves of the surface above. The line of wheels spun crazily and the carefully displayed figureheads trembled as if they were alive.

  And terrified.

  “We have a bargain, Son of Earth. But you will not like the answer.”

  33

  A Bargain Struck and Fulfilled

  “Whatever that answer is, I will accept it, as long as it is the truth,” Ven said.

  “Very well,” said the sea dragon. “I agree to your terms.”

  “Not to be offensive, but would you please just say what those terms are, and take the oath?”

  The giant sea serpent sighed comically.

  “Whoever taught you the art of negotiation must have had some skill at it. All right.” Lancel lifted his giant talon from Char’s throat, then reached over with it to the figurehead display and wrapped it around the damaged statue of the smiling woman with the closed eyes and the watery sleeves. He set it directly in front of Ven. “In return for the knowledge of the name of this figurehead, which you will forfeit forever, I swear to bring no harm to you, Char, Coreon, Amariel, and Teel, and to answer three of your questions truthfully, to the best of my ability. There. Satisfied? The answer had best be yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, then.” The sea dragon extended his enormous claw, flexed the talons, then held it directly under Ven’s chin. “Give her name to me.”

  Ven tried not to move. He closed his eyes, remembering the first time he had seen her, the sunlight on her wooden face, the wind shaking the sails above her as if the cloth sheets were itching to weigh anchor and get out to sea. How happy he had been on that day, he thought, when finally he would have the adventure he had been dreaming of.

  He could never have imagined it would have led him here, to the blackness of the Twilight Realm, a hundred or more fathoms deep in the sea.

  With the sulfur breath of an ancient beast washing over him.

  His palm itched. Ven clenched his fist tighter, thinking about the gift of the Time Scissors that the first scale he had drawn had bestowed on him. If I had it to do all over again, would I have stayed home that day? he wondered.

  Never.

  “Her name is Angelia,” he said.

  The water around him swirled as the giant claw swept in front of him as if trying to slash his face. Ven opened his eyes.

  The dragon was staring at him, the look of malice gone, replaced by curiosity. He was holding his clenched claw aloft in the drift.

  “Wait a moment,” Lancel said. Ven could see him shifting his gargantuan body around, searching the vast hoard of treasure behind him with his tail. Finally, when he located what he was looking for, he brought the tail forward over his head, clutching something small and wooden. The dragon laid it in the sand at his feet.

  It was a broken piece of the hull of a ship, with a line of rusted rivets down the keel seam. Its edges were singed black, as if by fire that had burned like acid. A single word was carved into it.

  Angelia, it read.

  “Do you recognize this?” the dragon asked. The thrum of his thoughts was soft.

  Ven stared at it.

  “I think so,” he said after a long moment. “I think that may be a piece of a ship my father built that I was inspecting on my birthday.”

  “Did you carve this word into it?”

  Ven’s forehead furrowed. “Yes. I believe I did.”

  “And what does it say?”

  He stared at the wooden planks as hard as he could.

  * * *

  Old Max, the Nain who is the master painter in my father’s factory, doesn’t know how to read. He used to ask me what various things said, things that I could read from the time I was just a tot of twenty or so years. I could not understand how someone could be that much older than me and yet unable to do so for himself.

  Looking at the word on the wooden fragment was a little like it must have been for Max. I could see the letters, and individually I knew what they were, but it was as if the word itself was written in another language, or runes, pictures or symbols that meant something to other people who can translate them, but not to me.

  Even more strangely, I cannot remember them even when I read them in my journals. They scatter across the page in front of my eyes and run from me, refusing to be read.

  It’s like the dragon reached into the recesses of my mind and dragged the word out from within my brain, leaving nothing behind but the hole.

  * * *

  “I have no idea,” he said finally.

  The dragon’s smile spread slowly across its massive face, its teeth gleaming like swords in the drift.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Now, what are your other questions?”

  Ven continued to stare at the wooden scrap of the ship for a moment longer. Then he shook his head as if shaking off sleep.

  “Hmmm? Oh, yes. The ship, the Athenry. Is it part of your collection?”

  “No,” the dragon said. “I have never heard of it.”

  The boys looked at each other in disappointment.

  “Oh, well,” Ven said. “I guess that will just have to remain a mystery.”

  “That happens a lot in life,” Lancel said. “Even when one is a dragon and knows the secrets of all the world, there are some things that are just destined to remain in shadow. It makes life interesting, I suppose. I won’t count that one—so I’ll give you another question out of the, er, goodness of my heart.” He chuckled. “What is your last question?”

  Ven looked embarrassed.

  “Uh—what is the Great Blowhole?” he asked.

  The dragon grinned even more broadly.

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “There are many vents in the depths of the ocean Trenches, black smokers where volcanic lava and steam belch forth from the fiery core of the earth beneath the floor of the sea. I was born in such a place—that’s where my breath comes from, acidic metals released into the sea in the hot steam of those vents. They could be called ‘blowholes,’ but bigger ones open all the time, so I don’t know that there is one ‘great blowhole.’ I think it’s just an expression, a myth without any truth behind it. Sadly, sometimes that’s all there is to the story, Son of Earth.”

  “And Frothta? Is that just a myth as well?”

>   The dragon’s eyes brightened to an even greater intensity.

  “Ahhhh,” he said. “No, Son of Earth. The Tree of Water is no myth. It, like all five of the World Trees, was born at the beginning of Time. Those trees grow at the places, the exact spots where each of the five elements—earth, wind, water, fire, and ether, the ancient word for starlight—first appeared in the world. The element of water was the third element to be born, so there are two elements that are older and more powerful than it is—ether and fire—and two that are younger and weaker, air and earth.”

  “I know of another World Tree, the one known as Sagia,” Ven said. “I had a chance to go and see it, but I had to miss it so that I could return Amariel to the sea before she became human forever.” He tried to hold back his thrum, but found that his thoughts were flowing freely to the dragon, almost as if Lancel was summoning the knowledge out of his head.

  The dragon chuckled.

  “Merrows can be a lot of trouble,” he said. “But at least they are tasty.”

  “Is the Tree of Water still alive?”

  The dragon’s smile faded, and his expression became thoughtful.

  “I cannot say that I know the answer to that for certain,” he said. “Frothta grows in a place that it would be almost impossible for me to see her, if I were foolish enough to want to look. But I assume she is still alive, because she is one of the five great sources of magic from the Before-Time in the world. While the modern world either has forgotten that time, or never knew about it in the first place, it is the Old Magic that keeps the fabric of the world intact, Son of Earth. When that fabric is torn, it weakens the world, makes it vulnerable to that which would destroy it. If the Tree of Water had died, the sea itself would know it—and sea dragons especially. Dragons would be the first to know, in fact.”

  Ven had heard another dragon say almost the same thing.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because, being born of the last element to emerge in the world, the earth, dragons contain a little bit of each of the five elements. Each of the elements has its own magic, but when all five are together, there is greater power, greater magic—some say miracles are possible when it happens. That’s why the foolish seek us out—they know we have the answers that no one else knows to questions others have not even thought of. The even more foolish fear our power, and seek to destroy us for the same reason.”

  “If dragons didn’t hate each other, they could rule the world.” Char clapped his hand over his forehead as the thought leaked out through his thrum.

  The sea dragon laughed nastily.

  “Dragons are territorial beings, jealous and even occasionally a bit possessive.” Lancel hurriedly returned the figurehead to her place in his collection as he spoke. “But even as violent and destructive as some of us can be—and I must admit, I am among those who like to rip things up a good bit—a dragon would never kill or intentionally harm another dragon, no matter how vehemently it hates its fellow beast.”

  “Why is that?”

  The giant serpent’s thrum was as serious as Ven had ever heard.

  “Because there are a very limited number of us,” Lancel said. “Very few dragon younglings have been born since the Before-Time, and the human spawn have made it a point to try and destroy us. Each dragon is part of the shield that protects the Earth, the element from which we were born, from the evil that lurks within its very heart.”

  “And what is that evil?”

  Smoke began to seep from his nostrils as Lancel’s thrum grew angry.

  “I will not name it, especially this deep,” he said. “But while each of the five elements have the power to both destroy and heal, only one is evil.”

  “Fire?” Ven guessed.

  “Not in its purest form. But there are types of it that are demonic, hungry at all times, not the way the sea is, for sustenance, but for cruelty, for willful and mindless destruction. Those forces are contained, for the most part, deep within the earth. But it is only the shield that the dragons of the world maintain that keep those forces from escaping. One day, when we can no longer maintain the shield—”

  The dragon’s thrum came to an abrupt end.

  “Enough. I have told you more than I should have.”

  “But where is the Tree of Water?”

  “Why do you care?” Char demanded. “Aren’t we goin’ home now?”

  “Yes,” Ven said quickly. “But I can’t waste the chance to find out a piece of lost lore, some magic left over from the Before-Time, from one of the only beings who knows the answer. That’s what King Vandemere asked me to do—find and record the magic in the world. Scarnag loaned me a book from his library, with pictures of the dragons of the world in it. For all I know, there is one of you in there, Lancel. I gave that book to King Vandemere for safekeeping before I left on this journey, so I didn’t get a chance to study it. There was no text, just pictures. It had a drawing of Sagia, the World Tree that grows in the Enchanted Forest. It may have had one of Frothta as well. Lancel, please tell me—where is the Tree of Water?”

  The giant beast eyed him intently.

  “Search your memory. What have you been told about it?”

  Ven thought back to Madame Sharra’s words on the morning when he first pulled the scale from the sleeve of Black Ivory.

  If you are looking for lost magic that was born in the Before-Time, you will need to find a place that no one else could look for it. It might be in a place of extremes—the hottest and coldest part of the sea, the highest and lowest place in the world, the brightest and darkest realms, all at the same time. Or you might have to accept that it no longer exists, as the rest of the world has. And that now Frothta is merely a symbol, just like all the rest of the runes and images on the scales of the Deck.

  A prediction of your future.

  What does it mean? he had asked the Seer about the card in his hand.

  When this card is drawn in a reading it can have many meanings, Madame Sharra had said. Sometimes it warns of an impossible task. Sometimes it can mean bringing new power to an old or dead situation, the solving of what had been an unanswerable riddle or a lost cause. It can sometimes warn of something that is too good to be true. Right side up, it can signify breathing underwater, while upside down it can warn of drowning. And sometimes, it just means “the sea.”

  Almost all of which seemed to describe the journey that had led him to this moment.

  “You’re right,” he said to the sea dragon. “I’m not going to like the answer to this question.”

  The dragon smirked.

  “And the answer is the same to both of your first two questions,” he said. “Because the only way to save your merrow friend from death is to find the Tree of Water. And to find it very soon.”

  34

  The Diving Bell

  * * *

  Maybe it was because he had brazenly told me his name, and so in some small way I had the power to know if he was lying or not.

  Or maybe it was because I already knew in my heart how badly Amariel was hurt.

  But Lancel’s thrum rang through me like a great ship’s bell tolling in the Deep.

  I knew that what he was saying was the truth.

  I knew that he was telling me that my friend was dying.

  And that it would be all but impossible to save her.

  The dragon was telling me that I had to uncover a miracle, something that even he was not sure still existed.

  And that a miracle was Amariel’s only chance.

  Not just any miracle. This miracle.

  It was clear by the sympathy that was below the amusement in his thrum that he did not believe in the possibility of that miracle.

  I guess we weren’t going home now after all.

  * * *

  “Tell me where,” Ven said. “Please help me. I can’t find my way in the way in the dark.”

  The dragon smirked.

  “You think this is dark?” he said. “You have not even begun to see
dark, Son of Earth. To your night-eyes, this may seem like a dark place, but you are still in the Twilight Realm, where the light from the sun above the surface still penetrates the gloom, at least a little. To find the Tree of Water, you will need to go to the deepest part of the ocean, into the Realm of Midnight, where no light at all is seen. That is the realm of ghosts who wander the deep, lost souls that sought to find magic in the depths—much as you want to do.

  “The creatures that live in those all-but-frozen waters of eternal night are the stuff of nightmares themselves: ghostfish and goblin sharks, anglerfish, tripod fish, sea cucumbers and snipe eels, black swallowers and vampire squid, bristlemouths and long-nosed chimaera, light-eating loosejaws and tube-eyes. They haunt the depths, looking for any food they can find, along with the hagfish, the fangtooth, gulper eels and giant tube worms, hatchetfish, six-gilled sharks, lantern fish, and sea vipers. Many of these creatures carry the only light in that realm of endless blackness, so beware of them.”

  Ven could only nod. He was trembling, and he could feel both Char and Coreon trembling beside him as well, either from cold or fear.

  “And going down to the Midnight Realm is only the first step,” the dragon continued. His thrum sounded amused again. “You will have to descend even farther than that to find if Frothta still lives. Deeper than the Realm of Midnight is the Abyss, a full three thousand fathoms down into the very cellar of the world. Were it not for the salt in the sea, that water would be ice, it is so cold in the lifeless Abyss. And while that truly is the floor of the ocean, there is a place even deeper.”

  “The Trenches,” Coreon whispered.

  “Ah—you’ve heard of them, then?” the dragon said. “Good—then the sea Lirin remember the tales from the Before-Time, of the cracks in the world five thousand fathoms or more down, where new islands form and the earth splits and spits out lava, even in the freezing black of endless night. It is said that in that empty land of death, Frothta once grew atop a seamount, the highest mountain in the world, in the depths of the deepest trench of the ocean. And if she still lives, that is where she would be found.”