her; the villagers wanted the wood. So she had taken advantage of the full moon that night to weave a lunatic fringe that shrouded the tree, hiding it from them. .But that would last only a few days; when the moon shrank to a crescent, so would the fringe, betraying the tree's location. She had to accomplish her mission before then.
'But how can a trip to Castle Roogna help?' John asked. 'They use wood there, too, don't they?'
'The King is there!' Fireoak replied. 'I understand he is an environmentalist. He protects special trees.'
'It is true,' Smash agreed. 'He protects rare monsters, too.' Now for the first time he realized the probable basis for King Trent's tolerance of an ogre family near Castle Roogna: they were rare wilderness specimens. 'He always looks for the solution of least ecological damage.'
The dryad looked at him curiously. 'You certainly don't talk like an ogre!'
'He blundered into an Eye Queue vine,' Tandy explained. 'It cursed him with smartness.'
'How are you able to survive away from your tree?' the Siren asked. 'I thought no hamadryad could leave for more than a moment.'
'That's what I thought,' Fireoak said. 'But when death threatened my tree, desperation gave me extraordinary strength. For my tree I can do what I must. I feel terribly insecure, however. My soul is the tree.'
Tandy and Smash jumped. The analogy was too close for comfort. It was no easy thing to be separated from one's soul.
'I know the feeling,' the Siren said. 'I lived all my life in one lake. But I suddenly realized that it had become a desolate place for a lone mermaid. So I am looking for a better lake. But I do miss my original lake, for it contains all my life's experience, and I wonder whether it misses me, too.'
'How will you know the new lake won't be desolate for you, too?' Fireoak asked.
'It won't be if it has the right merman in it.'
The dryad blushed, her face for an instant showing the color of the fire of her tree. 'Oh.'
'You're a hundred years old-and you have no experience with men?' Tandy asked.
'Well, I'm a dryad,' Fireoak said defensively. 'We just don't have much to do with men-only with trees.'
'What sort of experience have you had?' the Siren asked Tandy.
'A demon-he-I'd rather not discuss it.' It was Tandy's turn to blush. 'Anyway, my father is a man.'
'Most fathers are,' the Siren said. 'Mine isn't!' Smash protested. 'My father is an ogre.'
She ignored that. 'I inherited my legs from my father, my tail from my mother. She was not a true woman, but he was a true man.'
'You mean human men really do have, uh, dealings with mermaids?' Tandy asked.
'Human men have dealings with any maid they can catch,' the Siren said with a wry smile. 'I understand my mother wasn't hard to catch; my father was a very handsome man. But he had to leave when my sister the Gorgon was born.'
After a pause, Fireoak resumed her story. 'So if I can just talk to the King and get him to save my tree, everything will be all right.'
'What about the other trees?' John asked.
Fireoak looked blank. 'Other trees?'
'The other ones the villagers are cutting down. Maybe they don't have dryads to speak for them, but they don't deserve destruction.'
'I never thought of that,' Fireoak said. 'I suppose I should put in a word at Castle Roogna for them, too.
It would be no bad thing to lobby for the trees.'
They found good locations in the trees and settled down for the night. Smash spread himself out on the glade ground; no one would bother him. His head was near the liquidly flowing trunk of a water oak Fireoak had chosen; he overheard the hamadryad's muted sobbing. Evidently her separation from her beloved home tree was harder on her than she showed by day, and the threat to that tree was no distant concern. Smash hoped he could find a way to help her. If he had to, he could go and stand guard over her tree himself. But he didn't know how long that would take. He didn't want to delay his own mission too long, lest the time for the Good Magician's Answer should run out. There was also the matter of the gourd-coffin's lien on his soul; anything he had to do, he had better get done within three months.
Already he felt not quite up to snuff, as if part of his soul had been leached away, taking some of his strength with it.
Next day the five of them marched north. The land leveled out, but hazards remained. Tandy blundered into a chokecherry bush, and Smash had to rip the entire plant out of the ground before its vines stopped choking her. Farther along they encountered a power plant, whose branches swelled out into strange angular configurations and hummed with power; woe betide the creature who blundered into that!
Around midday they discovered a lovely vegetable tree, on whose branches grew cabbages, beans, carrots, tomatoes, and turnips, all in fine states of ripeness. Here were all the ingredients for an excellent salad! But as Smash approached it, Tandy grew nervous. 'I smell a rat,' she said, sniffing the air. 'There are big rats down in the caves where I live; I know their odor well. They always mean trouble.'
Smash sniffed. Sure enough, there was the faint aroma of rats. What were they doing here?
'I smell it, too,' John said. 'I hate rats. But where are they?'
The Siren was walking around the tree. 'Somewhere in or near the vegetable tree,' she announced. 'I fear this plant is not entirely what it appears.'
Fireoak approached it. 'Let me check. I'm good with trees.' She was showing no sign of the agony of her separation from her tree, but Smash knew it remained. Her night in a tree must have restored her somewhat, though of course it wasn't her tree.
The hamadryad stood close to the vegetable tree. Slowly she touched a leaf. 'This is a normal leaf,' she said. Then she touched a potato-and one of its eyes blinked. 'Get away from here!' Fireoak screamed.
'It's a rat!'
Then the fruits and vegetables exploded into action. Each one sprouted legs, tail, and snout and dropped to the ground. A major swarm of rats had camouflaged itself by masquerading as vegetables, luring the unwary into contact-but the smell had given them away. Once a rat, always a rat, by the smell of it.
The Siren, Tandy, and John scurried back in time to avoid the first surge of the rat-race. But Fireoak stood too close. The beasties swarmed around her, biting at her legs, causing her to trip and fall.
Smash leaped across, swooping down with one hand to lift the hamadryad clear of the ground. Several rats came up with her, chewing savagely at her barklike skin. She screamed and tried to brush them off, but they clung tenaciously and bit at her hands.
Smash shook her, but hesitated to do it vigorously enough to fling away the rats, lest it hurt her. As it was, bits of bark and leaf were flying off. Smash had to pinch the rats off one by one, and their claws and teeth left scratches on the 'dryad's body. By the time the last was gone, she was in an awful state, oozing sap from several scrapes. The swarm of rats surrounded Smash and tried to bite his feet and climb his hairy legs.
Smash stomped ferociously, shaking the glade and crushing several rats with each stomp. But there were hundreds of the little monsters, coming at him from every direction, moving rapidly. They threatened to get on him no matter how fast he stomped. He didn't dare set the dryad down, lest the same fate befall her. His great strength hardly availed against these relatively puny enemies.
'Get away from him!' Tandy screamed from a safe distance. 'Leave him alone, you rats!' She seemed really angry. It was almost as if she were trying to defend him from the enemy; that, of course, was a ludicrous reversal of their situation, yet it touched him oddly.
Smash stomped away from the tree, but the rats stayed with him. In order to run he would have to do two things: move the dryad back and forth as his arms pumped and flee a known danger. The one seemed physically hazardous to another person, while the other was emotionally distasteful. So he moved slowly, stamping, while the rats began climbing his legs.
Then Tandy's arm shot out as if hurling a rock. Her face was red, her teeth bared, her body rigid, as if she were in a state of absolute fury-but there was no rock in her hand. She was throwing nothing.
Something exploded at Smash's feet. He was knocked off them, barely catching his balance. All around him the rats turned belly-up, stunned.
He stared at the carnage, standing still because his legs were numb. He set down the hamadryad, who stepped daintily over the bodies. 'What happened?'
Tandy sounded abashed. 'I threw a tantrum.'
