To Light A Candle

tree? Or a willow?”

“Willow trees grow best near water,” Kardus said with a gentle smile. “But there is an ash here. I will take you.”

He led Cilarnen away from the others, stopping before a slender tree with smooth grey bark, which looked pretty much like every other tree in the woods to Cilarnen. “And now?” the Centaur asked.

“I need a straight length of wood about as long as my arm and as thick as my thumb,” Cilarnen said, gazing up at the tree. There seemed to be some suitable branches, but they were fairly high up. “Living wood.”

And I have now merited Banishment all over again, speaking of the secrets of the Art with a non-Mage. Oh, well. They’ll have to catch me before they can Banish me, Cilarnen thought with bleak humor.

Kardus reached out and put his palm against the trunk of the tree. “Dryad, if you sleep here, know that we do not ask this lightly. We will take only what we need, and use it well. I promise you this.” He turned to Cilarnen. “Climb and cut. Take only what you need.”

One of the gifts that the folk of Stonehearth had pressed upon Cilarnen at his leavetaking was a good heavy knife, more than capable of cutting through a tree branch if he was careful. But getting up the tree looked like more of a problem. At last, Cilarnen managed to reach the branch he was after by standing on Kardus’s shoulders and clinging to the slender trunk of the ash for dear life.

That left him only one free hand. It would have been easier to just saw away a big cluster of branches near the trunk, and then take what he needed after it had fallen to the ground. He started to do that, but then he remembered Kardus’s words.

He’d spoken to the tree. As if there might be something alive inside.

As if dryads were real.

Demons were real. Maybe dryads were more than Illusory Creatures.

Cilarnen hesitated, then adjusted the placement of his knife, reaching far out along the branch and feeling the strain in his shoulder as he stretched. At last the length of wood he wanted eased free.

And Cilarnen, caught off-balance, fell sprawling into the snow.

He landed flat on his back, winded but unhurt—the snow was thick, and he hadn’t fallen all that far.

He staggered to his feet, brushing snow from his clothes. He’d dropped both the branch and the knife, of course, but the knife had made a deep hole in the snow crust where it had fallen, and the branch was sticking up out of the snow like an arrow. He picked them up.

“Now you must thank the tree, for giving so graciously of herself,” Kardus said.

“Is there really a dryad in there?” Cilarnen asked cautiously, turning toward the tree.

“I do not know. I do not have the magic to see her if she is there,” Kardus said, a little wistfully. “And this would be her season to sleep, in any event. But it is always proper to give thanks for the bounty of forest and field —and to the Otherfolk, even if you cannot see them.”

Cilarnen nodded. “Thank you, dryad,” he said to the tree. “I really need this.” He felt strange talking to a tree—but then, he’d felt equally strange talking to Centaurs not so very long ago.

“Good,” Kardus said approvingly.

Cilarnen looked down at the length of wood in his hands. It looked nothing like the polished, elegant tool he had used back in the City. “I need to trim this,” he muttered under his breath.

He found an outcropping of rock and used it to steady the branch while he trimmed the ends flat. He carefully cut away all the tiny twiglets sticking out from it, measured it against his arm, and trimmed again.

Not elegant. But a wand of living ashwood. If it wasn’t polished smooth with virgin beeswax and bound in fine silver, those things shouldn’t matter.

“Eleph. Vath. Kushon. Deeril. Ashan.”

The sigils every first-year student committed to memory. The building blocks of the High Magick. Cilarnen traced them in the winter air, whispering their names under his breath.

They hung before him, perfect shapes of colored fire.