by Beth Cato
“Fort Wilcox is just ahead,” she murmured to Kethan. “When I served at the front, I stayed at the northern pass, but I knew many men who were processed through here. This will be the ideal place to find out where the Tree can be found.”
Please, Lady, let the southern pass be the best route. If we must go north as well . . . I don’t know.
“Infantry cannot have journeyed there yet. We need sailors. Let us walk toward the mooring towers and find the closest pubs. ’Tis the perfect time for the night’s pilots to settle in for a pint.”
Black masts lined a far edge of the brick-walled fort. Not far away they found a tavern. CID’S WRENCH, read the sign, and showed a carving of a bearded man with thick goggles. Men’s voices boomed through the windows as piano keys bounced to some ragtime tune. Pillars flanked the door, each plastered with sheets bearing images of airships and lists of names. ARE OUR BOYS, read the barely legible scrawl above.
“No.” King Kethan stopped Octavia’s approach to the door. Mr. Stout’s black hat cast a heavy shadow across his face. “You do not belong in there and—do not argue—you know well that they will not talk with you as a peer.”
She grunted and looked at him askance. “You know little of recent history, Your—ah, Grandfather.”
“I know pilots,” he said, and with surprising swiftness he pressed through the heavy door. At least his smell didn’t stand out with the factories nearby, and any airship crew would reek of aether.
“Balderdash,” she muttered, looking around. She couldn’t linger out front. Little traffic flowed down the street, pedestrian or otherwise. She walked to the next storefront, a shuttered tobacco shop, and tucked herself in a niche on the portico.
She pressed a hand to her satchel. “How are you doing in there?”
It writhed in response.
With almost no one else around, it was easy to focus on Leaf and his body. Exhaustion strained his wings from long days of flight. Where did you go, little one? I should place you in a circle later, provide some pampria.
“—hard to believe, the Wasters taking a direct stab like that,” said a man, his voice carrying down the street.
“You daft? ’Tis not hard to believe at all. They killed the whole royal family in my grandpap’s day.”
“True enough. At least they never made it past the garden. Thank God for Clockwork Daggers last night, or Evandia . . .” The voices faded away.
Interesting.
A few minutes more and the King emerged. He looked both ways in search of her. Octavia crept from her hiding place. As they reunited, she noted that his body sounded the same as before, with a small alteration.
“Beer?” she asked, an eyebrow arched.
“You could not expect me to blend in if I ordered an aerated water, did you, Granddaughter?” He motioned with his head and they resumed their walk east. “ ’Tis customary for young pilots to buy a pint for an old man. I daresay that was the finest drink I have had in all my life.” He covered his mouth as he emitted a small burp. “Your pardon.”
“You’re excused.” Oh, Mother. What would you think of this scenario? “Two soldiers walked by, discussing a Waster assassination attempt in the palace garden last night.”
“Yes. Talk abounded. ’Tis a necessary and sound strategy for Evandia’s court. Propaganda has its purposes, especially on this eve of war.”
“Was there any other footle?”
“One of the pilots claimed to have seen the Tree. His peers ribbed him on the subject, but by his manner, I judge he told the truth. ’Tis due east of us, only a few days’ ride on the plains. Caskentia is astonished. The Tree is along a major flight route south of the Arlingtons, where our dirigibles often dropped bombs to discourage settlement. Wind shears always pushed airships away from that particular point. Now they theorize that the wind was part of the enchantment.”
“A solid week of riding, then, more with snow.” Her calves and arms throbbed. If I have that much time before I’m ready for planting.
“The pass was never improved? No rail? No. Of course not, not with the wars.”
“I’ve never even heard of a rail being considered there.”
“We had many grand plans.” His voice was so soft she almost missed his words against the rattle of wheels.
Octavia’s grand plans seemed just as fruitless. No horses were to be found; not that any would have let the King ride, anyway. The livery stables were shuttered, the proprietors gone, or in one case, drunk.
“Every horse, every damned one, requisitioned without a coin to me. Needed for the war, they say. Needed to feed their damned soldiers, I say.”
The King read Octavia’s mood and stayed silent as they walked beyond the fort, beyond Mercia. The snowcapped Pinnacles lay directly ahead. What would Alonzo do in this situation? He could pilot a buzzer, though three-seaters are very uncommon. He probably wouldn’t have qualms about stealing a horse if necessary, though I haven’t even seen many horses today to steal, if one would even tolerate the King. Lady, what do we do?
Octavia’s legs throbbed, and not merely from all the walking. Every little itch across her body reminded her that the bark was thickening, spreading.
Leaf squawked and rustled about. She glanced around. Paved roads were far behind them. Ahead, the dirt road contained ruts deep enough to hide small children. Farmhouses were few, traffic minimal, all of it going east.
“I’ll let you out,” she said. “But you must hide from other people.”
Leaf burst out of her satchel like a green fireball, chittering all the while. She tried to smile. Leaf’s wings stretched as he soared higher and she felt a pang of worry—was he leaving so quickly?
“There were more woods in my day. More farms.” King Kethan studied the green countryside. “Such land stretched all the way to the marshes at Leffen and down to the Giant.” He faced south to where the volcano dominated the skyline, its deep crags permanently white.
Octavia reached into her open satchel and pulled out bread rolls. She passed one to the King, and kept the other with tiny bite marks in the crust. Kethan’s teeth crunched into the stale roll.
We must press on. If nothing else, I can help the King cross the pass. If he can make it to the Tree, where all of this began, there must be something that can be done for him, for Caskentia.
A military lorry rattled past. Her next taste of the roll was all dust. The Wasters mentioned they had a settlement near the Tree. That will be Caskentia’s focus of attack. Judging by the bustle, the airship bombardment will happen within days, with ground forces following.
How many will die in the battle? How many more because they try to chew the Tree’s leaves? Oh Lady, I’m glad you’re visible for our sake, but your presence is going to create a massacre on all sides.
“I spy the gremlin again.” King Kethan pointed southward, where a small blip moved in a way unlike any bird.
“Good, I’m glad he—” She stopped as if choked.
Something approached them from a fallow field in that same direction. She saw a blur of movement and heard a familiar high-pitched voice, like that of a teenage girl.
“Ridemeridemeridemeridemerideme.”
“The branch,” Octavia whispered. “It can’t be.”
“What is it?” asked King Kethan, a hand to the knife at his waist.
It galloped over the slight rise in the field: Octavia’s glorious horse, brought for her by the Wasters, the faithful mount through her trek to the southern nations. The mare was no longer white but green and brown, formed of ropes and gnarls of bark. The horse was underneath, dead beneath living barding. Chlorophyll pumped through a body that still wore flesh. Constricting vines bound a broken foreleg and made it function. The mane and tail were tattered masses of hair blended with vines and leaves.
“God have mercy,” King Kethan whispered. �
��Is this some kind of chimera from Tamarania as well?”
“No.” Octavia could barely speak through her horror.
The horse bounded over a fence and stopped before them. Blank white pupils stared her through, hooves dancing on the hard dirt. The saddle was still there, stirrups and all, as if the growth had been very careful to preserve it. The branch was no longer visible on the saddlebag—it was just another piece of wood, a part of the greater whole.
“Ridemeridemeridemerideme.” The horse’s lips did not move to speak, but rigor mortis bared the teeth as if it posed for a dramatic statue for some town center.
“What happened?” The King looked to her for an answer.
Leaf chattered and landed on Octavia’s shoulder. She was too numb to even greet him. “I . . . this was my horse, the one I was riding to Tamarania. At the ravine, I had to leave her behind. In my hurry, I left a true branch of the Lady’s Tree tied to the saddlebag. The horse . . . is dead. No normal horse could gallop that far, that fast. This . . . this is a different sort of chimera.” One like me.
She pressed a fist to her chest in acknowledgment of her beautiful mare. The branch must have goaded the horse onward, leading to starvation or sheer exhaustion, and had taken over the body at some point. It was impossible to tell now. Lady, let that horse have known mercy. It was not a prayer or request, but an order.
“We have our horse,” the King said quietly.
She nodded. “We do.”
They rode.
THE MARE, GRAFTED WITH the Tree’s branch, galloped with the snap and rustle of wood as if in a windstorm. Twigs prodded the muscles to movement. Octavia bowed over the saddle horn, greenery lashing at her face. The King sat behind her with one arm around her waist. Her satchel thwacked her lap in constant motion.
King Kethan sobbed those first few minutes of the ride. She turned her head to question him, but before she could ask, he said, “To ride a horse again, even this horse, after so long . . .”
She patted the hard strings and knobs of his knuckles to show she heard and understood.
Each long stride covered tremendous stretches of ground. The hills, which would have been a day or two’s walk away, surrounded them within hours. The horse did not slow. Did not need food. Did not need rest. It needed only to gallop east. Farmers with wagons stopped to gawk. Soldiers roared and blared horns as they zipped past. More than a few took shots at them. Octavia submerged her hands in the tangle of greenery to grip the reins. The pressure of her thighs and heels still found some of the softness of the former horse as she directed it to zig and zag. Their mount immediately resumed its steady course.
The horse knows where it’s going more than I ever would.
Sometime in the early hours of the night, they entered the mountains. The cold caused her to hunker lower, the heat of her own breath in brief clouds against her face. King Kethan’s body didn’t carry warmth, yet his presence was a solid comfort. Every so often, Leaf ducked into view, chittering as he made a grand loop. All around them were rocks, snow, and desolation. This was a place paved and stripped by decades of war. They passed valleys where fortifications stood as frosted ruins, and more where feeble campfires illuminated the night in brief flashes. Men stared, agape.
Mr. Drury once told me that Caskentia always blames the Waste. He was right. These soldiers probably think this horse is some monstrosity from the Dallows. They would be right, too, in a way.
The factory exhaust of Mercia was left behind. Stars sparkled with fierce clarity made even fiercer by the intensifying cold.
At last, heeding the call of her bladder and sore muscles, Octavia forced the mare to a stop. Her attempt to dismount resulted in her falling almost face first onto the ground. Her numb hands punched through wrist-deep snow. The sensation made her gasp with shock, but at the same time she was relieved to feel anything at all. She had known too many boys who lost extremities due to exposure at the northern pass. This change in my body must be helping me to tolerate the temperature, like a tree surviving the winter.
Still, the very human part of her was nauseous with cold. Her teeth chattered with violence. Suddenly her coat sleeves fell forward over her arms. The gorgeous green coat had split in half. Where the King had leaned against her, the fabric had dissolved to powder. She rubbed her fingers together. The gloves had disintegrated in patches.
“Octavia?” King Kethan landed beside her with grace. His nose and hands had blackened with cold, but the skin beneath already burbled with regeneration.
She stood, tottering as she shook free of the mangled coat. The horse pawed at the earth, clearly anxious to move on. A slow tendril of vine crawled around a fetlock and hoof and into the snow. The vine pulsed, like a person’s neck as they craned to drink water. She shivered, this time not from the cold.
“Privacy,” she said, and stumbled for the shelter of a nearby rock. She still had enough wits to know she should be leery of mountain lions and pitfalls, though her ability to react to such threats would have been laughable.
After a few minutes, she shifted her skirts back into place. The friction against her gloves was enough to tear the fabric. She shook the useless remnants from her fingers. In the glow of starlight against snow, she saw her hands for the first time in hours. Exhausted, overwhelmed, she screamed.
Octavia’s fingers were gloved in bark. The joints still moved, though stiffly. Was that from cold, or was it a permanent thing? Will I have trouble twisting open my jars? Holding a pen? What will Alonzo think? Horror, pity, fear—she couldn’t blame him for any of those reactions, not when she felt the same. A sob quaked through her chest.
“Octavia.” King Kethan was there in a matter of seconds, his knife unsheathed. He saw her hands, extended in front of her, and stopped. His expression was harder to read. A few steps more and he sheathed the blade and took her hands in his. She fought against the pull into his song. He faced the palm up, lightly touching the backs of her knuckles, taking in the texture.
“Do you have feeling?”
“It’s not . . . it’s not from the cold, it . . .”
“I see what it is,” he said gently. “Had this begun before you ventured to the vault?”
“Yes.” The word formed a harsh cloud.
“I wondered, when a medician of all people was the one to open the vault, when such a horse arrived in answer to prayer.” He stepped back, pressing a fist to his chest as he bowed his head. “My Lady.”
“Wait. No. You’re the King. I don’t deserve respect like that, I—”
“Do you not realize what you are? Octavia Leander, of the North Country, you are the true vessel, the one who is meant to carry the Lady’s seed. You are the Tree’s true heir.”
Her chest shuddered. A dozen denials flared in her mind, all of them pointless. “What more do you know? What haven’t you told me?”
“Let us ride.”
It was a relief to hide her hands in the horse’s leafy mane again. If I can’t see it, it’s not happening. It’s not real. Without any guidance from Octavia, the horse wheeled about to resume its eastward gallop.
“I have spent decades pondering the enigmatic nature of the Tree and my condition.” King Kethan’s voice rattled against her ear. “The fact that seeds can bring back the dead is well chronicled. ’Tis my belief, though, that this is not meant to be a permanent resurrection.”
“Everything is finite,” she said, echoing his earlier words.
“The ultimate purpose of the seed is to create a new Tree. The Lady’s powers are fading. She cannot hide from humanity any longer. She has likely dragged on these past fifty years, past endurance, with these wars and my essence weighing on her all the more.”
“But why am I changing when I don’t have the seed yet?”
“Your blood has always connected with the Lady, has it not?”
Bloodletting. Every medic
ian felt the pain, that sensation that their arm would burst lest drops of their blood met the ground. A few seedlings would immediately sprout from the watered earth. Octavia had been stunned when her blood recently caused the Lady’s own blessed pampria to sprout, and then there was everything that happened in the Waster camp—her blood and the branch creating a full tree, and the combination of blood and Royal-Tea forming an army of vines in her defense.
“You’re saying this is something innate inside me, a part of being a medician?” She tried to calm herself with deep breaths. “As if I’m the perfect fertile ground, water, and climate for the seed to grow?”
“The connection is there. This must be another facet.”
“What happens if there is no seed available? What happens if the seed is available?”
“I know not.”
Will my bare feet touch the ground in these coming days and I’ll suddenly sink in roots, as the horse did? Will I be able to move afterward?
She had been quiet for several miles when King Kethan’s hand squeezed her waist. “I am sorry. I know my commiserations are inadequate, and yet . . .”
“You probably understand what I’m enduring more than anyone.” She clenched his hand for a moment as she thought on his delight when he tasted the flatbread and the beer.
If I become the Tree, will I taste water and dirt through my roots? Plants know saltiness in the soil, but what of sweetness? Never again to know the true flavor of chocolate or maple or to have turbinado sugar melt upon my tongue. Because I won’t have a tongue.
The selfishness of the thought bothered her. The inability to eat seemed so minor compared to the holy powers of the Lady’s Tree, but it was so very human.
The landscape passed by in blurs of white and gray and cold. Deep snow had fallen, and recently, but the horse did not hesitate. Octavia’s feet carved trenches in the snow as the mare plowed through. She dozed at long intervals to awaken with a start, Kethan holding her securely in the saddle. The sun glinted in the distance. They made few stops. King Kethan’s clothes drifted around him in soft tatters, his body blackened beneath. His pack was gone, the straps giving way at some point. Half the clothing, food, and water, lost. More than half, really, because as they rode her satchel had been the easiest place from which to grab food. Octavia cursed for not thinking of the danger to his pack before, but it would have rotted away even if she had tied it to the saddlebag. The saddle itself was gone. Sometime during the ride, the leather rotted through and had been replaced by a seat of wood, moss, and vine stirrups. The transition had been so subtle she had not even noticed until they dismounted. The enchantments on her medician gear, satchel included, still held for now, though she was glad she had packed extra clothing as a precaution.