would; that much, he’d gleaned in the last week, working in secrecy on the borders of the Terrean.
But Meralonne had reached the tree’s trunk. The roots that Kallandras severed barely troubled the mage; they did not attempt to pierce, but rather to ensnare. He had gathered them loosely as he moved, and they pooled around his ankles, obscuring his boots, as if the tree were trying to absorb him, to make him some part of its essential self.
Meralonne did not speak. Kallandras knew why: in this place, at this time, he could no longer guard his voice; every word contained the pain of loss and the slow, steady death of hope. The mage reached out with both hands; his palms touched the ice of bark and light shone where they connected; it was bright and piercing to the eye, as the roots meant to be to the heart. The momentary dimming of vision did not impede the bard’s weapons; they were meant for this fight, and they moved almost with a will of their own.
The light that was pale and even platinum began to shift and change; what remained beneath the palms of the mage was a red-copper that pulsed. Kallandras had seen that steady transformation every time Meralonne’s hands had finally touched bark; he expected no different, and was not therefore disappointed. The mage’s hands stiffened, his fingers trembling in place. He whispered a word, and if the word did not carry to the bard’s ears over the clash of blade against armored root, what lay beneath the utterance did.
In the clearing made by a hunger that could never be satisfied, even if the whole forest should be devoured, light broke the cover of night, falling in sharp, defined spokes. Meralonne APhaniel invoked the ancient magics of Summer as if Summer would never again be seen in this world. He turned his face away from the bard’s view; he could do this much, but not more, for the tree’s sudden scream of fury meant the safety of distant kinship was at an end.
Winter rose as roots thinned and sharpened at the ankles of the mage; he did not even gesture before they fell away, melting beneath the sudden heat of Summer, the scorching light of a different desert. He flinched as the tree’s screams transcended rage and fury for the territory of pain. Had Kallandras not now been fighting for his life, he might have sung—but his song did not reach the heart of the tree the way the Serra Diora’s once had; he had tried.
Summer flames burned; bark melted, roots withered. Only bark and root; the flames did not catch cloth or hair, and where it touched the edge of growth not yet devoured in the spread of this single tree’s roots, it burned nothing—but the leaves of undergrowth leaned inward toward that light, and the flats of those leaves brightened in color, the small branches lengthening. These lesser plants lacked the sentience of the Winter tree; they could not and did not speak. Nothing in their welcome dimmed the horror and the loss of the single tree’s death, and even as the tree withered, small shoots of pale, pale green could be seen in the troughs and furrows made by the passage of Winter roots.
Meralonne’s hands fell to his sides; what remained of the tree was now silent. It would crumble if Kallandras touched it; it would crumble if anything did. Anything, or anyone, but Meralonne APhaniel.
“Come.” He bowed head a moment; his forehead grazed what remained of standing ash. “We are almost done.”
His voice was the voice of the desert.
* * *
Meralonne was wrong. The quiet, grim march across the slender and invisible border of the Terrean came to an abrupt end in an unexpected way. They heard the sounds of fighting. Kallandras spoke softly, as was his wont, and the mage had become so taciturn in his work that words were harder to pry from him than blood. Even in their combat against these unnatural trees—and there had been many, each dissolved, in the end, by the harshest of Summer light—their conversation had dwindled to the wordless syllabus of blades, air, and fire.
Not so the combatant in the distance: he roared. It was a harsh, almost guttural cry, in a language unknown—but not unfamiliar—to Kallandras. The bard’s blades rose in an instant, and he forced them down as he glanced at his companion; Meralonne’s robes shifted as he nodded, becoming a fine, heavy mesh of