“And you stay here?”
“Yes, for the Worm knows we must pass unto his barren soil to make good our escape. Some have tried this passage and none returned.”
“Maybe they made it to safety.”
“Perhaps, but none other has dared leave in many lifetimes of great trees. And so we stay here. Arriving by folly, we are contained now by fear.”
Ara responded, “Do you not think that this, too, is folly, for in time you will lose all by your fear?”
“As have you. You left with a mistaken heart and now are as lost to your loved one as we to ours.”
“No,” said Ara, “for with your leave, I am departing this valley to find him. Now! “
He watched her finish reading, then said, “OK, enough of dragons. Here is something more recent.” He handed Cadence fresh pages of ink-covered Algonquin stationary.
It is said by a few bards, though vigorously disputed by the dwindling guild of Scholars of the Red Book, that the famous halfling traveler Aragranessa learned much of the secret lore of trees. Of her wisdom the details are all but lost. Only the dimmest reference to the Lost Vale survives as a lyric in nursery rhyme.
One surviving fragment, however — attributable to students of the self-proclaimed wizard Colorfall — tells of the orphans of the wisest and most agile trees, the Treoheord. As these “keepers of the forest” became indistinguishable from old and surly trees, and their mates were lost in time, so their last offspring, perhaps never more than a few in number, wandered the forests as unlearned orphans.
In time, some of these tree-orphans longed for discourse and company, and so grew closer to men. They attended men’s parleys and the tellings of sagas. They put down deep roots and spread immense sheltering canopies. In time they became known as “council trees.” They hosted many momentous meetings and came to have esteemed names. Some were ascribed a spirit of their own.
Should you or your heirs visit one of these last sentinels, perhaps ravaged and cracked by long years, honor them as venerable orphans that chose their own destiny.
From an account in 1720:
After the Scattering of the Halflings some centuries ago, and the recent opening of the Froelboc Mine, there remains in this area, in a park surrounded by low hills of coal and hardscrabble mine tenements, a single, immense ash tree. It is gnarled and oddly shaped where predominant limbs have cracked and fallen. It bears its leaves late, and old men wager as to whom, it or they, will survive another year. But every year, like the sluggish steam engines working nearby, it finally warms to its job. It slowly drives sap to the highest branches and a nimbus aura of green emerges. By late summer it bears a rich canopy of leaves. By the second week of frost, it is the first to go scarlet and drop them all.
It stands in the unmarked park known locally as Shirecommon, and is called, for reasons unknown, the Party Tree.
Osley held up the original document, which had angry smears across it. “It isn’t just cut off here. It’s obliterated by black dye. Maybe we’ll catch up with it later, but this part is lost.”
Cadence babysat Osley the rest of the day.
He had shed his coat, and his stink was only slightly muffled by the new long-sleeved T-shirt he was wearing, as if he dressed up for the occasion. He was in a zone of intense concentration.
Looking at him, she could see remnants of the young chemist focusing on his lab work, developing techniques. Yes, the spark, so long diluted with psychedelics and God knows what else was still there.
There was more, too, a heavy pall of sadness, but this was well hidden. She wondered how many different lives one old man could hold. She decided to quit hovering.
“Os, I’ll be back in a little while. You all right?”
He turned and smiled, saying, “Yeah, I’m great,” and then turned back to the papers. Scratch, think, write, his free hand pumping out some long ago rock and roll rhythm on the desk.
As she left, Cadence felt good. There was progress. In the quiet lobby, she took a bouncing skip and step and edged through the ponderously closing brass doors of the Algonquin. The doorman fussed belatedly to help, but she was gone.
Outside, she inhaled the city smells and heard the city noises and saw the city bustle all around her. Horns honked. A siren wailed a few blocks away.
At that moment, several things happened.
Across the street, a dented and city-worn delivery van was pulled up. It was going to double park. Its color was some faded and lesser version of green. On its side it bore what had once been an extravagant image of a sunlit garden, overlaid with arching, three-dimensional letters that read “SANTI’S VEGE’S”.
Cadence’s mental sketchpad took in these details, adding verisimilitude to the scene that was about to unfold.
The van slowed. The street was otherwise surprisingly empty. Down at the corner, two taxis were laboring around the turn from 6th Avenue. Before them lay the wonder of an entire block of empty Manhattan cross street.
Taxis in such a situation could proceed with caution, or they could proceed at the posted speed, or they could take the imperative third choice: Gun it! Both taxis complied fully. They simultaneously jammed accelerators and jockeyed for position.
Meanwhile, a kid, skinny and good-looking — he could easily be one of Cadence’s fifth-graders — stepped toward the slowing van. He was silky smooth and confident in his motocross jacket. He casually moved in front of the van. He collided with the last bit of its momentum, tumbled head over heels, rolled once, and lay dramatically still. The van nose-dived and screeched as the driver stood on the brake pedal and the tires skidded the last foot before stopping. The driver was a balding man in his fifties. He jumped out, his arms making hysterical waving motions. A terrified and somehow sad “AAAaahh!” cycled from his open mouth.
The van door was open. Quick as a shadow, another kid appeared at the open door, reached in, and grabbed a small leather bag from the front seat. The size and shape suggested it might hold cash receipts. He fled down the sidewalk.
The taxis were oncoming.
The fallen boy got up, seemingly fit and healthy. The van driver grabbed the kid’s jacket with one hand, pointing in the direction of his moneybag evaporating into a crowd of pedestrians. He yelled a futile, “Hey. Hey!”
The boy was trying to slip the driver’s grasp as he sized up his escape route. Cadence knew fifth graders. She could read his eyes. She saw that at any moment he was going to bolt out into the street in front of her.
The taxis were hurtling toward them.
Cadence didn’t think. She ran. She flashed in front of the first taxi and collided with the kid. This time, his backwards flip was unpracticed. They both rolled clear as the taxis slammed on their brakes and skidded and fish- tailed and swerved past them, tires screaming, white smoke boiling, the air filling with the tang of hot, abraded brake pads. The long teeth-grinding, shoulder-wincing sentence stopped. There was a void. The inevitable punctuation mark — the hollow whomp and glassy jingle of impact — didn’t happen.
On the pavement, the kid looked at Cadence. His eyes were saucers overflowing with fear and, that most fleeting thing, kid gratitude. He scrambled up and was gone.
She pulled herself up, slowly, legs like rubber. She brushed herself off and reached down to pick up her Borunda bag, surveying the deep scrapes along the sides. The driver scurried around her. A cluster of passerby milled for a moment, but the event was just a close call, not even meriting a decent gawk. She stood there, received five, maybe ten seconds of New York accolades— the maximum allowed in this City of Haste — and it was all over. The taxis moved on. The van driver had gone somewhere. The Algonquin doorman, fussing and faithful, stayed with her.
It dawned on her, as she replayed the high-def tape of what just happened, that she probably saved a life. She was wrong. She had saved two.
Thirty feet away, Barren milled with the crowd. He had seen it all unfold. The kid with his accomplice, practicing the bump and roll to fake an accident. The stuntman’s art of timing a slowing vehicle, bouncing with it, and topping the move with a fine comic book death sprawl. Then the playing-for-gold part, his buddy’s quick reach and grab heist. They were pretty good!
Just like he had been at that age.
