Renegade's Magic ss-3

by Robin Hobb

  I found and ate a cluster of bright yellow mushrooms growing in the moss on top of a tree root. I came to a place where parasitic vines had attacked on older tree. The tree was losing its leaves and patches of its bark had fallen away, revealing the holes and tracks of insects intent on rendering it down into soil. But the vine that cloaked the dying tree was lush with thick foliage and large teardrop-shaped fruit, so purple they shone black in the filtered sunlight. Some of the fruit was so ripe that it had cracked and lightly fermented. Purple juice dripped from them. Bees and other insects hummed ecstatically round the vine, while over my head I could hear the competitive twittering of small birds. Some of the fruit had fallen to the forest floor. There was a busy trail of large black ants carrying off gobbets of pulp.

  The other happy feasters convinced me that the fruit was edible. I picked one, sniffed it, and tried a small bite. It was so ripe that juice and soft flesh gushed into my mouth as my teeth pierced the skin. It was far sweeter than a sun-ripened plum, almost sickeningly so. Then the flavor of it flooded my mouth and I nearly swooned with delight. I discarded the large round seed and reached for another.

  I don’t know how many I ate. When I finally stopped, the skin of my belly was tight against the waistband of my trousers, and my arms were sticky to the elbow with juice. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and came back a little to myself. The pile of seeds at my feet numbered at least a score. Instead of feeling queasy, I felt only blissful satiation.

  As I walked slowly away, I tingled with well-being. I became aware of the music of the forest, a symphony made by the subtle buzzing of insects, the calls of birds, the flutter of leaves in an unseen breeze overhead. Even my deadened footfalls were a part of the whole. It was not a symphony of sound alone. The scents of loam and moss, leaf and fruit, meshed with the sounds I heard, and the physical sensations of walking, of brushing past a low branch or sinking deep into moss. The muted colors in the gentled light were a part of it. It was all an amazing whole, an experience that involved me more completely than anything I’d ever felt in my life.

  “I’m drunk,” I said aloud, and even those words intertwined with the sudden spiraling fall of a leaf and the soft snag of a cobweb across my face at the same moment. “No. Not drunk. But intoxicated.”

  I liked speaking aloud in the forest, for it made me more intimately a part of it. I walked on, marveling at everything, and after a time, I began to sing wordlessly, letting my voice be guided by all my senses. I spread wide my arms, heedless that my coat fell to the forest floor. I walked away from it, singing with my whole heart, with every bit of breath I could draw into my lungs. I was transported with joy simply to be me traveling into the depths of the forest.

  Simply to be who I was.

  Who was I?

  The question was like recalling a forgotten errand. I was someone, going somewhere, on my way to do something. My steps slowed, and for a long moment I was intrigued with the idea. I was centered and certain, confident of myself, but I could not quite define with a name who I was.

  Nevare. Soldier’s Boy. Like a slow waltz of two halves that have joined to be a whole and then spin apart again, I felt that sundering. And with Soldier’s Boy’s departure from my awareness, I suddenly felt the gap he left in me. I had been a whole creature, peacefully content in that wholeness. And now I was less than whole, and I thought I could understand how an amputee felt. My keen pleasure in the forest dwindled to my ordinary awareness of its pleasant smells and gentle light. The communion I had felt with it became a handful of threads rather than a complex network. I could not recall the song I had been singing. I’d lost track of my place in this world. I was diminished.

  I blinked slowly and looked around me, gradually becoming aware that this part of the forest was familiar. If I climbed the ridge before me and veered to the east, I’d come to Tree Woman’s stump. I suddenly knew that was the destination I’d been walking toward all day. Home, I thought, and that was like an echo of someone else’s thought. Soldier’s Boy considered her his home. I wasn’t sure what Nevare considered her.

  When I’d first encountered Tree Woman in Dewara’s spirit world I saw a fat old woman with gray hair leaning up against a tree instead of the warrior-guardian I’d expected to battle. Challenging her would have gone against everything my father had ever taught his soldier son about chivalry. And so I had hesitated and spoken to her, and before I recognized her power, she had defeated me and made me hers.

  I became her apprentice mage. And then her lover.

  My heart remembered those days with her. My head did not. My head had gone to the Cavalla Academy, taken courses, made friends, and done all that a loyal soldier son should. And when the opportunity came for me to challenge Tree Woman as an adversary, I had not hesitated. I’d destroyed that other self who had been her acolyte, taking him back inside me. And then I’d done my best to kill her as well.

  Yet at both those tasks, I’d failed. The Speck self I’d taken back inside me lurked there still, like a speckled trout in the deep shade under a grassy riverbank. From time to time I glimpsed him, but never could I seize and hold him. And the Tree Woman I’d slain? I’d only partially severed her trunk with a cavalla sword. That deed, impossible in what I considered the real world, had left its evidence here. Upon the ridge ahead of me was the stump of her tree. The rusting blade of my sword was still embedded in it. I’d toppled her. But I had not severed her trunk completely. The ruin of her tree sprawled on the mossy hillside, in the swathe of sunlight that now broke through the canopy of the forest there.

  But she was not dead. From the fallen trunk, a new young tree was rising. And near her stump, I’d encountered her ghostly form. My adversary was still as alive as I was and the hidden Speck self inside me loved her still.

  As Tree Woman, she was an enemy to my people. She was frank in her hope that something I would do would turn back the tide of “intruders” and send the Gernians away forever from the forest and mountain world of the Specks. At her behest, Speck plague had been spread throughout Gernia and still continued to afflict my country. Thousands had sickened and died. The King’s great project, his road to the east, had come to a standstill. By all I had ever been taught, I should hate her as my enemy.

  But I loved her. And I knew that I loved her with a fierce tenderness unlike anything I’d ever felt for any other woman. I had no conscious reason to feel that passion toward her, but feel it I did.

  I toiled up the last steep stretch and reached the ridge. I hurried toward her, the anticipation of my hidden self rising with every step I took. But as I approached her stump, I halted, dismayed.

  The stump of her tree had silvered and deadened. Even the unsevered piece that had bent with her falling trunk and kept the branches of it alive had gone gray and dull. I could not see her; I could not feel her. The young tree, a branch that had begun to grow upright after her trunk had fallen, still stood, but barely.

  I waded through her fallen and dead branches to reach the supine trunk and the small tree that grew from it. When Tree Woman had crashed to the earth, her passing had torn a rent in the canopy overhead. Light poured down in straight yellow shafts, piercing the usual dimness of the forest and illuminating the small tree. When I fingered the little tree’s green leaves, they were flaccid and limp. A few leaves at the ends of the branches had begun to brown at the edges. The little tree was dying. I put my hands on her trunk. My two hands could just span its diameter. Once before, in a dream, I had touched this little tree and felt how it surged with her life and being. Now I felt only dry, sun-warmed bark under my hands.

  “Lisana,” I prayed softly. I called her by her true name and held my breath waiting for some response. I felt nothing.

  A wandering breeze ventured in through the hole in the forest’s roof. It stirred my hair and made pollen dance in the shaft of light where I stood.

  “Lisana, please,” I begged. “What happened? Why is your tree dying?”

  The answer came t
o me as clearly as if she had spoken. Last night, I’d been able to escape my cell because the roots of a tree had broken through the mortar and stones. As I’d climbed those roots to escape, I’d felt Lisana’s presence there. Had the roots of her tree grown all that way, from here to Gettys, and then torn down the walls to free me? It was impossible.

  All magic was impossible.

  And all magic had a price. Only a few days ago, Epiny had stood here by Lisana’s stump, and they had summoned me in a dream to join them. In hindsight, Lisana had been more ephemeral than usual. And more irritable. She’d been spiteful toward Epiny and merciless toward me. I tried to recall how her little tree had looked then. The leaves had been drooping, but not alarmingly so. It had been a hot day.

  Even then, her roots must have been working their way, through clay and sand, rock and soil, to reach Gettys and the prison where I was held. Even then, she had been employing all the magic at her command and all her physical resources to reach me. I should have guessed that something of that sort was happening when I could barely perceive her in my cell. Why had she done it? Had the magic forced her to sacrifice her life to save mine? Or had that offering been her own?

  I pressed my brow against the slender trunk. I could not feel her at all and suspected that the amount of life remaining in this little tree was not enough to sustain her being. She was gone, and it tormented me that I could remember we had shared a love but could recall no specific memory, no detail of how it had begun. I had dreamed of our trysts together, but like most dreams, I awoke grasping only bright fragments of memory. Such gossamer glimpses were too frail to survive harsh daylight. They did not feel like true memories to me, yet the emotions I felt were unequivocally mine. I closed my eyes and tried to will those memories to the forefront of my mind. I wanted at least to recall the love we had shared. It had cost her dearly.

  In that focused contact, I felt a wisp of her being brush mine. She was feeble, a moon waning away to nothing. She gestured weakly at me, warning me back. Instead, I pressed closer. “Lisana? Is there no way I can help you? Without your intervention, I would have died.”

  Her bark was rough against my forehead. I clasped the trunk of the small tree so tightly that it stung the palms of my hands. Abruptly, her image came more clearly to me. “Go away, Soldier’s Boy! While you can. I gave my being to this tree. It consumed me and became me. That does not mean I can control its appetite. All things desire to live, and my tree desires life fiercely. Get away!”

  “Lisana, please, I—” And then a red pain pierced my palm and shot up into my wrist.

  “Get back!” she shrieked at me, and with a sudden burst of strength, she pushed me away.

  I did not fall. The tree already gripped me too strongly for that. My forehead ripped free of the questing rootlets that had penetrated my brow. Blood ran bright red before my opened eyes. I bellowed in terror and with inhuman strength pulled my hands free. Dangling rootlets, red with my blood, pulled from my palms as I jerked my hands back. The tendrils dripped and twitched after me like hungrily seeking worms. I staggered back from the tree. With the back of my sleeve, I wiped blood away from my brow and eyes and then stared in horror at my wounded hands. Blood trickled from half a dozen holes in my flesh and dripped from my palms. As the drops fell to the forest floor, the moss at my feet hummocked and quivered. Tiny tree roots wormed up from the soil and moss, squirming toward the red drops that glistened like red berries. I pressed my bleeding palms to my shirtfront and staggered backward.

  I felt dizzy with horror or perhaps blood loss. Lisana’s tree had tried to eat me. My pierced hands ached all the way into my wrists. I wondered how deeply the roots had wormed into me, and then tried not to think of that as a wave of vertigo swept over me. I focused on taking another couple of steps backward. I felt sickened and weak; I wondered if the roots had done more to me than pierce my flesh and absorb my blood.

  “Move back, Nevare. Keep moving. There. That’s better.”

  Tree Woman was a misty embodiment of herself. I could see through her, but my sense of her was stronger. My head was still spinning, but I obeyed her, staggering away from the young tree.

  “Sit down on the moss. Breathe. You’ll feel better in a little while. Kaembra trees sometimes take live creatures as nourishment. When they do, they sedate them so they do not struggle. What you did was foolish. I warned you that the tree was desperate.”

  “Isn’t the tree you? Why would you do this to me?” I felt woozy and betrayed.

  “The tree is not me. I live within the tree’s life, but I am not the tree and the tree is not me.”

  “It tried to eat me.”

  “It tried to live. All things try to live. And it will now. In a way, it is almost fitting. I took from it to rescue you. And it took from you to save itself.”

  “Then—you’ll live now?” My mind seized on that most important fact.

  She nodded. It was hard to see her against the bright sunlight, but I could still make out the sadness in her eyes that contradicted her soft smile. “I’ll live, yes. For as long as the tree does. I spent a lot of what I had regained to reach for you in that cell. It will take me a long time to rebuild my reserves. But what you have given me today has restored me for now. I have the strength to reach for sunlight and water now. For now, I’ll be fine.”

  “What is it, Lisana? What aren’t you telling me?”

  She laughed then, a sound I felt in my mind rather than heard. “Soldier’s Boy, how can you know so many things and nothing at all? Why do you persist in being divided against yourself? How can you look at something and not see it? No one understands this about you. You use the magic with a reckless power that in all my time I have never witnessed. Yet when the truth is right before you, you cannot see it.”

  “What truth?”

  “Nevare, go to the end of the ridge and look out toward your King’s Road. Tell me where it will go as they push it onward. Then come back, and tell me if I will live.”

  The pain in my hands was already lessening. I wiped my sleeve over my forehead and felt the roughness of scabbing. The magic was again healing me with an unnatural swiftness. I was grateful, and also a bit surprised, not that the magic could heal me but at how easily I accepted it now.

  I was full of trepidation as I walked to the end of the ridge. The soil there was stony, and as I approached the end, the trees became more stunted until I stood on an outthrust of stone where only brush grew. From that rocky crag I could look out over the valley below me. The vale cupped a lining of trees, but intruding into that green bowl, straight as an arrow, was the chaos of the King’s Road. Like a pointing finger, it lanced into the forest. To either side of it, trees with yellowing leaves leaned drunkenly, their side roots cut by the road’s progress. Smoke still rose from an equipment shed, or rather, from the ashes of one. Epiny had been thorough. She’d set off three explosions down there in an attempt to distract the town from my escape. Wagons and scrapers were a jumble of broken wood and wheels in one area under the scattered roof of a shed. Another collapsed building still smoldered and stank in the sweet summer air. And it looked to me as if she had exploded one culvert. The road had collapsed and the stream that had once been channeled under it now seethed through the rocks and muck. Men and teams were already at work there, digging the muck away and preparing to lay a new conduit for the stream. They’d have to repair that section of road before they could push the construction any deeper into the forest.

  My delicately raised girl cousin had struck in a way that I, a trained soldier son, had never even imagined. And she had succeeded, at least for now, in halting the progress of the King’s Road builders.

  But as I was smiling at her success, my grin suddenly stiffened into a sort of rictus. This road, cutting through the mountains and to the sea beyond them, was my king’s great project.

  With that road, my king hoped to restore Gernia to greatness. And I looked on its delay and destruction with pleasure. Who was I?

&n
bsp; I gazed down on the aborted road again. It pointed straight toward me. Well, not precisely straight. It would cross the valley and then climb the hill I was standing on…Slowly I turned my head to the left, to look back the way I had come. Tree Woman. Lisana. Her stump and fallen trunk were exactly in the path of the road. If the tree cutting continued, she would fall to the axe. I looked back at the road, cold flowing through my veins. At the end of the construction, two freshly fallen giants sprawled in a welter of broken limbs. They’d taken other, smaller trees down with them as they fell. From my vantage point, the new rent in the forest canopy looked like a disease eroding the green flesh of the living forest below me. And the gash was heading directly toward my lover’s tree.

  I watched the men toiling below. The sounds of their cursing and shouted commands could not reach me here. But I could smell the smoke of last night’s fire and see the steady procession of wagons and teams and road crews as they toiled like ants mending a nest. How long would it take them to fix the broken culvert and patch the road? A few days, if they were industrious. How long to build new wagons and scrapers, how long to build new sheds? A few weeks at most. And then the work would press on. The magical fear that the Specks had created still oozed down from the forest to deter the workers and sap their wills. But, fool that I was, I’d given the commander the means to overcome even that. I’d been the one to suggest that men half drunk on liquor or drugged with laudanum would not feel the fear as keenly and could work despite it. I’d even heard that some of the penal workers now craved the intoxicants so much that they clamored to be on the work details at the road’s end. The drugged and desensitized men would push the road on into the forest. I’d enabled that. It had almost earned me a promotion.

  I recognized uncomfortably that my heart was turning more and more toward a forest way of thinking. The divide in me ran deep now. I was still a Gernian, but that was no longer sufficient reason to believe that the King’s Road must be pushed through at all costs. I glanced back toward Tree Woman’s stump. No. The cost to me alone was too high. It had to be stopped.