Page 136 of Time's Fool

“Your wife! I saw what you want when I was inside your mind on the bridge. I saw what you need.

“To put your family back together, to right what went wrong. A need so strong, so overpowering, that it lingered within me, that picture of a different time and place. I took us there unthinking when we shifted, but I didn’t go far enough.

“But I can. It will take a great deal of power, but I can do it. Help me regain my strength and I can give you what you most desire—”

“Just as you did for the witch?” Mircea said. “Your words are lies and your promises empty. And I am not a desperate woman, torn and bleeding; I am a Basarab—”

“But I can give you—”

“—and we take what we want! We do not wait to be given, or to be commanded or tricked by one such as you. Dory.”

He rose to his feet and stepped back.

“No!” the demon tried to get up, found that it could not, and looked at me. “No, wait. I can help you. I can give you everything you want—”

“I already have that,” I said, looking from my father to my future husband. “You were trying to take it away.”

“No, no! Please,” it fell to its knees. “Have pity!”

I smiled. “Basarab,” I reminded it. And brought down the skies.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The tree felt something spill around its roots that wasn’t water, felt the man stepping into its form, felt his arms stretch like branches toward the sky and his toes seek the earth like roots, and didn’t understand.

Until it looked up once more. And found the crowd of people gone, and summer along with them, with autumn leaves blowing across the scene. And the man’s discarded bones ringing its trunk like mushrooms.

But it scarce had time to notice them, or much else of its usual pastimes. Because the world—oh, the world! It exploded around the sapling in colors and sounds and sights such as it had never known before!

It soared with the birds in its branches, high into the sky, sending its consciousness far out over the landscape. It communed with the roots, which it now grasped as friends, holding hands under the soil for long distances. It sent the old one’s spirit off into the next world, with hushed assurances that the people would be all right. That it—that they, for it was alone no longer—would guard them as she had done.

Together, it and its new spirit grew tall, enough to see the moon on the water all on their own. And spoke with many people who came to learn from them and the secrets they had acquired. And those not merely from their own explorations.

For they could see this time, yes, and far across this great land, wherever their flying emissaries could go. And connect with others such as them both here and beyond distant waters. But there was far more knowledge available to them than that.

For they could see everything that the guardians who had gone before them had, for centuries before they came into existence, through the root system that never died.

They realized now that the roots that had always murmured strange things under the soil scaffolded this entire land, like a great spider’s web running below every lake, meadow and stream. To the point that it was impossible to say anymore where they began and ended. For they never really did end, absorbing new members all the time to preserve the knowledge of old ones, and presenting each new guardian with a wealth of wisdom from which to draw.

“Who was the first?” Gillian asked, too amazed to realize that she was talking to a tree.

“We have to go back far for that,” a rich, mellow voice said, and Gillian’s mind was suddenly filled with faces, so many and so different.

But they were all green, with branches for hair and eyes the color of spring grasses. Some had flowers ringing their necks, others had moss for eyebrows or their long, trailing beards. And a few of the most disturbing had vines and leaves coming out of the areas where eyes or mouth or ears had been.

But even the last didn’t scare her, perhaps because it didn’t look like it bothered them. Some were smiling, others were lost in thought, seeing things far distant, and still more were chatting to the birds and animals and roots surrounding them. They appeared at peace.

“When you find your place in this world, peace comes easily,” the tree informed her.

The images flowed past, so many and so quickly that Gillian couldn’t count them all, and finally stopped on one who was even less human looking than the others. He had the vague form of a man, but leaves and moss for hair and curled antlers coming out of his head, like those of a ram. And wherever he stepped, flowers sprang up in the shape of his footprints.

“Cernunnos,” she was told. “A minor god in an age of giants, who didn’t really want to be a god at all. He was a farmer before his kind came to this realm, and found themselves elevated to something more. But he never changed from the simple man he had always been. Unlike the others, he craved neither power nor wealth. He simply wanted to help things grow, and enjoyed the world for what it was.

“He spent long years away from his fellow gods. I do not think he liked them much, nor they him. He was an embarrassment, someone who frequently could be found tending to a sick deer or sitting around a fire, chatting to the humans as if they were his equals.

“The great Goddess Artemis did not like her fellow gods, either, although for different reasons. She waged war to eject them from the Earth, and her power was such that it was impossible to overcome, even for the mightiest. One who was not so mighty had no chance at all.”

Gillian watched the god who did not want to be one sitting on a hill, singing to a spring to coax it from a rock, when the skies split open and he stared about in fear and confusion. And then clutched at the Earth as an unseen force tried to tear him away from it, whilst it clasped him back. It did not want to let him go.

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