Turning into a side lane that squeezed between the hulking girths of two contiguous trunks before leading into the broader forest, Maldoch tapped Terwain's shoulder with his staff and bluntly urged him, “Take every shortcut you know to get us to the Grove as quickly as possible. I don't want my boy expiring on me before we reach him."
"It'll still take the better part of a day,” said the aged Elf.
"That's too long,” murmured the wizard.
"You could always try zapping us there,” suggested Terwain.
Rubbing the swelling on the back of his head, Maldoch discounted that idea. “Once fallen, twice shy."
"The only other alternative is to saddle up a Garvian for you."
"I don't ride, Terwain."
"Walk fast then. With your long legs it shouldn't be a problem."
They camped that night under the stars in a mixed copse of alders and willows flourishing beside a cheerily gurgling brook. At least Maldoch assumed the stars were shining. The canopy of overhead branches, bushy with eternal foliage, completely veiled the night sky.
Settling down on a makeshift bed of ferns, the wizard breathed in the invigorating woody scents of Gwilhaire. Of all the places in Terrath he journeyed to, the Elf forest was the one spot he totally relaxed in. Serenity abounded here in profusion, the unobtrusive quiet magically infusing the woodland inhabitants with its calming essence. A nonsensical observation made by Parndolc ages ago sprung to mind: “Gwilhaire is the perfect place to recharge your batteries.” The technological reference had always been lost on the spellcaster, but he respected the sentiment. The Elven homeland was the embodiment of a Terrathian Eden, a refuge of abiding naturalness uninterrupted by...
"Piece of cheese?"
Maldoch declined the offering and sighed, giving in to having his meditation disturbed. He reached for the fruit basket Terwain appropriated free of charge from a vendor under the guise of royal patronage, taking a good-sized bite of a juicy apple-pear. Elves were strict vegetarians and whilst Maldoch admired their adherence to a no meat diet he sorely missed tucking into a decent steak.
"Merainor's changed,” he said in passing to Terwain after swallowing the sweet tasting chunk.
"You noticed. That's Eroc's doing."
"Disapproval, Terwain?"
Nibbling absently on a slice of Troll cheddar manufactured from unihorn milk, the royal counsel shared his thoughts. “On the contrary, I wholeheartedly support the gerent's way of thinking. He strongly advocates we keep ourselves isolated from the Fellow Races. Better not to be dragged into the mindless wars afflicting Men and Dwarfs."
Crunching into his fruit again, the wizard debated, “That's foolishly naïve thinking, even for an Elf."
"Don't underestimate Eroc. He has the muscle to put his trade goods where his mouth is. Janyle is strategically placed to seal off the border at Rift Dale anytime he chooses."
"You're meant to be loyal to your queen."
"That I am. My job description includes taking cues from her boyfriend."
"I've been absent from Gwilhaire too long,” muttered Maldoch, tossing away his half-eaten core.
"Litterbug,” condemned Terwain.
"Think of it as compost for the trees. Has Merainor reversed her position on outside contact entirely?"
Terwain shook his head. “She hasn't fully embraced Eroc's ideals. That's why you're still allowed in."
Maldoch and Terwain had never gotten along famously in the past, and this devotion to Eroc the Guru was not about to improve their love/hate relationship. “Out of interest, how did you advise Merainor on this Goblin incident?"
"I advocated that she let the Losther die."
"You're such a delight,” ribbed the wizard. He forlornly eyed their fireless campsite. Elven intimacy with their forest, a bond that some laughingly said stretched to hugging trees, precluded burning any wood. That did not present a problem in the perpetual Elf springtime, since it never grew cold enough even to put on a sweater, but it made boiling water difficult. Thank heaven for geothermal activity in the region. “I could murder a cup of tea,” Maldoch said wistfully, too lazy to conjure up a pot.
"Expand that to include a certain Goblin and I could almost get to like you, wizard,” wisecracked Terwain. Maldoch's lackluster reaction prompted the sarcastic Elf to say goodnight and roll over, mumbling nastily before he went to sleep, “We arrive at the Grove first thing in the morning. With any luck the boy will have perished by then and this hassle resolved itself.'
Oaken Grove was exactly what its name implied, an avenue of mature oaks blooming with green finery at the end of which loomed the mightiest tree in all of creation.
Arriving a couple of hours after sunrise, Maldoch and Terwain were intercepted by a crippled Elf hobbling out of a ramshackle hut guarding the head of the path running the length of the tree-lined boulevard. “Stop. Halt. Strangers no go further,” he warned them in a brittle voice, brandishing a sun-bleached stick threateningly to back up his words.
"Garond, it's me ... Terwain!” the Queen's Counsel shouted at Oaken Grove's caretaker. “I've brought the wizard."
The defensive Elf warily lowered his stick.
"He's deaf as a post,” Maldoch criticized under his breath to Terwain.
"Very hard of hearing,” confirmed Merainor's consultant.
"Eh? What bard nearing?” Garond said hotly, raising his bashing stick again and glancing about agitatedly.
Terwain snatched the baton away from the crabby caretaker and then introduced the pair. “Garond, official Keeper of the Shadult Greenthe, this is Maldoch the Magnificent."
Inspecting each other, neither wizard nor Elf looked particularly impressed. Garond hardly seemed elfin. He stood pitiably short in stature, untidily dressed in threadbare tunic and leggings dyed an unimaginative brown, presumably to conceal the smelly fact that his clothes had not seen the business end of a washtub in ages. His free-range hair was uncut, with the odd leaf tangled up in the uncombed strands. Even his gaunt, triangular face sported blondish fuzz—the nearest an Elf came to growing a proper beard. Then there was the feral glint in the keeper's almond eyes that was decidedly repellent. Maldoch, counted an oddball himself in many circles, had encountered all manner of eccentric characters in his time. But Garond topped the list for strangeness. He was converse to everything recognizably Elven.
"Where's what's-his-name ... the old keeper?” Maldoch asked in a curious whisper.
"Up and died on us,” said Terwain.
"Couldn't a better replacement be found?” the wizard wondered, leaning backwards while Garond actually sniffed him.
Coming across Maldoch's staff, the peculiar caretaker examined the rune inscribed wood with quivering fingers, stroking the polished wood of the spellcaster's staff as a look of holy ecstasy replaced his scowl of greeting. ‘Come along. Come,’ Garond invited, limping away off down the boulevard and beckoning for the elders to follow, but not before making a grab for his confiscated stick.
Holding it aloft out of Garond's reach, Terwain chastised him in a schoolteacher manner. “I'll hang on to this for the time being. You can have it back when you learn to behave better."
"What's his story, Terwain?” nudged Maldoch, passing by the dilapidated and windowless shed serving as the caretaker's crude abode. The hovel matched Garond's appearance to a tee. A house does reflect its owner's personality.
"Born almost totally deaf, Garond didn't have a great start in life. Because of his hearing impairment he was shunned as a boy, even by his parents, and as a result of that treatment grew up maladjusted and churlish."
Long considered the noblest of the Fellow races, the Elves were as “human” as any other Terrathian people and largely intolerant of deformity. Placing great emphasis on physical perfection, those who did not conform to elvish purity were reviled.
"The wild child ran away from home and went bush out by the banks of the Fendythe Ribbon. There he lived for a good many years, communing with nature and terrorizi
ng the locals with his rowdiness. His extreme lifestyle gave rise to the tale of a malevolent wood sprite.
"Our queen heard the legend and was intrigued enough to dispatch a company of Foresters to investigate. To cut a tedious story short, they tracked, trapped, and transported the untamed youth to Lothberen. Merainor took a personal interest in his case and after a while managed to domesticate him. She charged me with finding a position suited to his talents and temperament, so I had Garond apprenticed to the Shadult Greenthe Keeper. The caretaker was getting on in years and the lad exhibited a remarkable empathy for trees. It was a match made in Urvanha. Garond may be a couple of sticks short of a bush, but he takes his job seriously."
Taking on board the fantastic yarn, Maldoch was prompted by the row of stately oaks lined on either side of the grassy avenue to ask, “The Tree of Infinity accepted him?"
"That it did. It even marked Garond as special by crippling him, presumably so he would not be able to wander too far from Oaken Grove and his commitment. My own theory is that the Tree lamed his leg to keep him close by and safe. It's the parent he never had."
Maldoch was perturbed by that disclosure. His contact with the Shadult Greenthe over the centuries had been limited by time constraints and a healthy respect for Elven sensitivity, yet what he gleaned from those short exposures to the uniquely sentient bole led him to believe that the tree was a benevolent entity. The thought that it was capable of inflicting hurt on someone out of a perverse sense of ownership chilled the wizard to the marrow and he quickened his step, eager to reach the end of the avenue. Foremost on his mind was the knowledge that Garrich lay in the clutches of this now violently unpredictable organism.
Majestic leapt to mind when one first laid eyes upon the Shadult Greenthe. Shooting skywards close to 500 feet, the colossal bole stood alone in a broad clearing, dwarfing the boulevard oaks leading up to it. An impossible hybridization of deciduous and evergreen, the giant woody plant was foliaged in waxy gold and silver star-shaped leaves festooning downward sprouting boughs thicker than a birch trunk that tapered to arrow thin ends. Displaying a tentacle-like quality, a number of the lowermost branches writhed in the windless air like swaying snakes. Garrich was cradled in a gently rocking hammock of those interlocking tree limbs a storey above ground, for all intents and purposes sleeping like a baby.
Maldoch slowed and fought down the impulse to dash forward, letting Garond approach the mystical tree alone. Terwain joined the wizard scrutinizing one of the flexible branches snaking down to entwine the caretaker's head, its woody tip caressing the star-struck Elf's cheek. Caught up in the rapture of the embrace, Garond was oblivious to making a spectacle of himself.
Feeling movement in his hand, Maldoch noticed his knotty wooden rod twitch. It was predicted. Way back in the thirtieth year of the seminal Second Epoch, the inscrutable Shadult Greenthe sacrificed a branch to a battered, do-gooding wizard with a penchant for battling Evil in its varied forms who required a personal talisman to project his power and ideals. And so the Maker Staff was fashioned and passed into legend, equally as famous as its celebrated user. The wizard's prop reacted now like a fostered child paying a quick visit to an interested parent, wound up and eager to please.
"Stop that!” he whispered sharply to the animated wood. He gripped his lively staff firmly with both hands to reduce the jerking.
A moment later, the Keeper disentangled his head from the touchy-feely tree and loudly announced, “Wizard. You she wants near."
Arching a shaggy eyebrow, Maldoch queried, “She?"
Terwain elbowed the spellcaster. “Garond reckons it is a she. His is a classic case of acute motherly fixation.” Maldoch looked sideward at the old Elf, who divulged, “I dabble in psychoanalyzing. It's a hobby."
"Are there that many neurotic Elves?"
"Hardly. That's what makes psychiatry fascinating.'
Leaving Terwain where he loitered, Maldoch boldly made his way across the glade to halt beneath the overhang of spangling leaves. The fifty-foot girth of the vertically grooved trunk made the larger-than-life wizard seem cosmically puny, like a flea rubbing shoulders with an elephant. He remained stock-still after holding the quivering Maker Staff aloft, allowing the Shadult Greenthe to get reacquainted with its adopted-out limb. When the exploring branches finished their wrap-around bonding, the satisfied Maker Staff becoming a dead weight in the wizard's grip once more, they retracted upwards, leaving one to coil about Maldoch's wrist.
The tree's touch felt disconcertingly rubbery, not at all wooden. Maldoch was humbled by the bole's expansive consciousness brushing his own miniscule awareness. The Treesingers referred to the powerhouse of Elf culture and magic as “The Living Tree of Infinity", and the spellcaster was inclined to agree. Although tentatively dating the Shadult Greenthe at 3,000 years, he suspected the monster plant to be much older, possibly predating even the order of wizards. What seed it had grown from, who planted it, how it gained sentience, and why it allied itself to the Elves remained elusive mysteries to this day, its ancestral roots buried in the unexcavated earth of Time. All Maldoch construed was that this mighty tree somehow lured the progenitors of the traditional Elf nation to split from their Illebard kin 2,000 years ago and set up camp at Lothberen, whereby the custom of having the Shadult Greenthe select an infant queen from the babies presented to it every two centuries was inaugurated. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement at the simplest level imaginable. The Elves took care of the Tree, while the Tree cared for the Elves.
Maldoch stood rooted in silence as the one-of-a-kind tree conversed with him. Talk is cheap, as the saying goes, which is perhaps why the Shadult Greenthe did not communicate in the conventional verbal sense. That and the fact it possessed no mouth, lips, tongue, or voice box. The attentive wizard was subjected to waves of emotion rolling over him ... recognition, followed by compassion for the invalid in its branchy care, overlaid above all else with curiosity. Maldoch returned the feeling of interest and the swish of rustling leaves announced the tree lowering the sickly Goblin to the ground as she retracted her communicative vine off the spellcaster.
Terwain came forward as Maldoch gravely checked Garrich over, the boy's swarthy skin pasty and beaded with sweat. His limp body convulsed in a continuous series of minute trembles. A leafy poultice plastered the side of the Goblin's face where the Drakenweed dart lodged its hooked point in his cheek. Lifting the bandage to inspect the wound, Maldoch grimaced at the nasty sight. Dead tissue blackened the sutured flesh in a vile circle, aiming to spread and cement its poisonous stranglehold.
"Though I cut the barb out of his flesh, the plant toxin continues its deadly work,’ an Elf hastening out of the trees ringing the opposite side of the clearing said over the armful of herbs and tubers he was struggling to carry.
Maldoch gently patted the dressing back down and skimmed his hawkish eyes over the turquoise robed newcomer. The approaching Lothberen was unremarkable other than a strikingly effeminate face and walk. “I was counting on you treating my boy, Prilthar,” the wizard said by way of greeting.
Depositing his bundle of medicinal plants beside the grounded cradle, Gwilhaire's careworn fair-haired senior healer looked sorrowfully at his Goblin patient. “I'm the only physician unprejudiced enough to treat the poor Losther. Fat lot of good it's doing him. My healing arts haven't been able to cure him so far. The Drakenweed poison is simply too potent!” He kicked out in frustration at the pile of collected allopathic remedies, scattering willow bark, mandrake roots, and sphagnum moss all over the trembling Goblin. Prilthar knelt and started picking the debris off Garrich, apologizing as he went. “Excuse my outburst. My calling is to save lives. I'm only prolonging the inevitable here.” Heaving a sigh of discontent, he finished his venting by echoing the grim pronouncements made earlier. “As surely as the sun sets, this boy will die before day's end."
"Easy, old friend,” consoled Terwain. “He's just a filthy Losther. Nobody will miss him when he gasps his last breath."
"Not so,” refuted Prilthar. “I will regret losing a patient of mine."
Terwain came ghoulishly back with, “There's always a first time."
"Can't the Tree heal him?” challenged Maldoch.
"Of course she feels him,” butted in the deaf Keeper. “Her branches like arms, mother's arms. Cuddle you, yes they will. But fix him? Nah, him too sick."
"I'm afraid Garond is right,” Prilthar said in support of the uneducated caretaker's assessment. “The Living Tree cannot repair the boy. Its diluted magic is staving off his death for the moment, but it cannot neutralize the toxin that is inexorably killing him. There is only one possible cure I'm aware of. Unless you have Tahriana's Leaf tucked away in your robes, Maldoch, you can kiss your Goblin friend goodbye."
The wizard slapped his forehead with the palm of his free hand. “My memory has more holes in it lately than Druscan cheese!” He spun to face Terwain. “How fast a trip to Rift Dale from here?"
The Elf oldster tapped his pointy chin with a spindly finger. “On foot, at speed, say just over a month."
"By Garvian?"
"A week and a half at most."
Thinking out loud, Maldoch pointed his staff at the Shadult Greenthe and stated to the three Elves, “The Tree regulates the seasons in Gwilhaire."
"Which is why we enjoy balmy springtime weather year round,” corroborated Prilthar.
Maldoch raised his voice for the Keeper's sake. “Garond, can you get her to lower the temperature in the Grove only, make conditions cooler?"
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