November 24
Word Count: 2724
They walked only a short ways into the wood before Iber noticed the little white pebbles on the ground. The closer they drew to their destination, the thicker they lay on the ground. Iber looked up and saw heavy tree limbs laden with white like snow. All of the branches seemed to be connecting in the same direction, to one solitary tree. Iber didn’t have much experience with trees, but it was the largest tree he’d ever seen.
“I didn’t know trees grew that big,” Iber said staring . Iber doubted twenty men with their arms outstretched could have run the entire perimeter.
“This is the calca tree. It is the only tree like it. None of the others in the forest grow the calca, and all other attempts to grow more saplings result in nothing more than ordinary trees. We’ve tried for hundreds of years, as our village needs calca to survive. Once eaten, calca keeps you young and strong indefinitely, but you have to keep eating it. If you stop, you rather wither and die.” The elder walked further around the perimeter of the tree. Iber followed.
“Then why start?”
“Can you imagine your children growing old and dying before you look twenty? When calca was plentiful, it wasn’t a problem. There was more than enough to go around. Then suddenly the calca stopped growing and the tree began to die. We tried to mine deeper into the calca tree, but that only made it worse.”
“Mine?”
“Yes, we discovered that by making a hole in the tree, we could remove the calca from inside. It sort of pearls out of the hole and we can scrape it off.” They rounded a lump in the tree and Iber saw the mine. It was a man sized spot on the trunk of the tree where the edge of the bark had folded over and over itself as if trying to hide its flesh. Iber laid his hand on the bare wood. He nearly fell over with the force of the scream. He withdrew his hand but he could still hear its pain echoing through the other trees, as if they were picking up the cry and carrying it to all parts of the forest.
“What’s wrong?” the elder asked, laying a hand on Iber’s shoulder.
“Didn’t you hear that? Can’t you still hear it?”
“Hear what?”
Iber tentatively placed his hand on the tree again, this time on the bark, away from the bare wood.
Sadness. Betrayal. Tears. Death. Pain. More feelings than words they rippled through him. The tree was talking to him.
“Tell me,” Iber said, the tears beginning to leak down his face. Images began, brief flashes of Iber’s life, but they were being used in a distorted context. They were the images Iber associated most with the words the tree wanted to express.
Love. Children. Love. Joy.
Watchfulness. Happiness. Serenity. Gifts. Love.
Greed. Pain. Greed. Tears. Betrayal.
Children. Lost. Pain. Death. Death.
Death. Death.
“What do you hear,” the elder asked impatiently.
Iber removed his hand when the tree’s cries subsided. Somehow, he knew exactly what the tree was trying to tell him. Deep inside of him it was as if she’d spoken in the length of novel.
“We’re all responsible,” Iber said softly to himself.
“Responsible for what?” the elder asked.
“The death of magic. You were killing her mining into the tree. The only way she could survive was to go into hibernation, to shut off the calca until you went away. It was like having a sore on your arm and having someone constantly digging into it, until it covers your whole arm, reaching and deepening down to the bone.” Iber grabbed his arm. He could still feel her pain. “But it’s worse. She thinks of us as her children, somehow. She feels betrayed, because we didn’t keep her safe. In her eyes, it was like the children eating the mother while she pleaded for them not to bite into her.”
“So the tree is linked to the magic?”
“She is the magic. She nearly died to cut herself off. It’s been a hundred years and she’s still not healed. How far did that mine go?”
“Three or four feet or so.” Iber shuddered at the thought of so much pain.
“You mustn’t touch her. You must protect her. The calca on the ground. That’s a gift for her children. That you can gather as you please, but no more mining.”
“I can’t guarantee we can pay the debt without mining.”
“There is no debt. Without the tree, there is no Great Mages. Without the tree there is no village. Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Walking back to the village, Iber truly felt like a Great Mage for the first time. It was if until now, he had been just playing a part. Now, he not only knew the power lay within him, he could feel it swelling, and living within him. It wasn’t turmoil, either. It was a sense of peace that he could do the right thing.
The peace didn’t last very long.
“Iber. We’re leaving now, aren’t we?” Vyna asked, standing on the porch. Stalling, Iber said, “You probably want to have breakfast first.”
“Oh I found breakfast. In fact, the horses are packed and ready to go,” Vyna said, holding out his swordbelt he had neglected to put on.
“I still have a few things to do here,” Iber said. He still didn’t know why Lynah wanted the calca. The only way to find out was to stick around until she came demanding it.
“You promised.”
“Yes, but I need to fulfill my obligations here. It shouldn’t take but another day.” Vyna charged down the steps.
“I’ve had these people stuck in my head for a hundred years. Now that I don’t have to listen to them day in and day out, complaining and commenting and making everyone stare at me like I’m crazy, I want to leave. Now!”
Iber was a sucker for tears, but hers had only a slight twinge on him. His mind was still full of the tree’s pain to for her temporary discomfort to matter much.
“Why don’t you just leave by yourself?” a woman asked, coming out of her doorway.
“Surely you don’t think this has been a picnic for us. Always having a bit of input, but no ability to act.” Another woman shouted.
Wild eyed, Vyna turned on her. “Well, don’t you forget what that old woman said. One of you will die soon!”
“Vyna, that’s uncalled for,” her grandfather stated.
“Oh, you’re beyond chastising me, grandfather. I’m a hundred and eighteen years old, don’t you forget.”
“Okay,” Iber said, putting his arm around Vyna. “I’m willing to compromise. I’ll take you as far as the nearest village, but then I need to come back here and wait for Lynah.”
“She said she’d be back tomorrow,” the elder stated shaking his head.
“Good riddance,” one of the women said as she slammed her door shut.
Iber stopped Vyna from running after her. “Go get on your horse,” he said, turning her in the other direction. He turned to the elder. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If Lynah arrives, stall her until I get back.”
The elder nodded and Iber swung up onto his waiting horse. Iber waved a quick goodbye and the pair began their ride out of the forest.
The day had actually turned out to be quite productive. Trevelyn had learned a few bits of magic, they’d awakened Malek, and Lynah had been found… sort of. Trevelyn had no intention of letting her hopes for a peaceful existence from intruding on reality again. The last time she’d thought things were going well, they’d quickly turned on her. Pessimism was her new motto. Plan for bad things, and then they can’t disappoint you. Having Saratin standing in her quarters when she’d just finished making more jars in the infirmary simply confirmed her theory. He was also much too perky.
“What a great day!” he said, sinking into a chair. She’d not seen it before. He probably had zapped it into her apartment when he wanted to sit. She had noticed he did some of those things unconsciously now, much the way Malek had. It was a control he was developing that she was far from attaining. It took all her effort to simply focus on traveling from the infirmary to her quarters.
“Really,” Trevelyn said as she helped herself to a bunch of grapes from the fruit bowl on the table.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“You forget, we still don’t exactly know where Lynah is, or what she’s doing.”
“At least she’s not being held somewhere against her will by an evil nemesis. Really, Trevelyn, you have to look at the bright side of things or we’ll all go mad.”
“Okay. So where did she learn magic?” Saratin’s mood sobered a bit and Trevelyn felt bad for a moment. She really didn’t need to infect the others with her new theory. “Could she have just learned on her own?”
“We’re talking about Lynah here,” Saratin stated, raising an eyebrow. It was true that Lynah usually had fashion higher on her agenda than magic, but she wasn’t stupid. Lynah had pulled more schemes over on the king and the courtiers than Trevelyn could have thought up. She still remembered the time Lynah convinced her to throw buckets of water off the high tower to test for wind funnels. She’d managed to time it perfectly with Brother Valdin’s appearance.
“If she didn’t learn by herself, then who did she learn from?”
“Well, if it wasn’t one of us, there’s only one other person I can think of that she could have learned magic from, and that would be Nelyr.”
“But Lynah knows better than to trust Nelyr. She’d remember what he tried to do to Iber and me… unless she’s playing a game with him. Then who knows what she’s up to,” Trevelyn stated.
Saratin looked quite thoughtful in his sunken chair. “There’s something that just occurred to me,” he said after a moment. “If you were missing for more than a day, who would be the first one to report you gone?”
Trevelyn thought. “Brother Ettu, probably. I talk with him every morning. He’s my chief of staff.”
“Right,” Saratin added, “and so why didn’t Lynah’s chief of staff, Brother Ilden, ever report her missing, or even in the least seem concerned over her whereabouts, unless he knew where she was the whole time, and was lying.”
“I didn’t think brothers lied.”
“We’re human, and Brother Ilden never really liked me for some reason. I think he thought I was slightly too smart for my own good.”
“Then we need to put some questions to Brother Ilden.”
Mitty appeared suddenly, “Trevelyn, I just wanted to say… oh, hello Saratin. Was I interrupting something,” she asked.
“We were just hypothesizing… about Lynah.”
“Oh. She seems to have caught on to the magic rather quickly.”
“That was our concern. We think Brother Ilden knows where she is, and has been hiding that fact.”
“Then you should talk to him.”
Saratin laughed. “That’s what you interrupted.”
“Do you want me to go?” Mitty asked, pointing towards the door out of habit, even though she came through thin air.
“Actually, three of us might make a better impression on Ilden than two,” Trevelyn added. Mitty had just as much a right to interrogate him as they did, and if it was true that Ilden dislike Saratin, the more, the merrier.
“So let’s get him in here,” Saratin said. He closed his eyes and suddenly Brother Ilden was standing between them with a teapot in his hand.
“Is there something I can help you with?” His tone of voice was grim. “I doubt that you summoned me for a cup of tea.”
“Actually, we wanted to ask you a few questions,” Saratin said, without moving from his seat.
“I suppose you have my compulsory attention,” he stated, setting the teapot down on the table, “for the moment.”
“How dare you!” Lynah shouted, suddenly appearing. “He is mine. I don’t go about summoning your servants, now do I?”
“I don’t exactly regard Brother Chau as my servant,” Saratin replied calmly. It wasn’t the reaction Lynah was looking for. Trevelyn had seen it a million times. She was ready for a full on temper tantrum, which usually ended with her getting her complete way of things. Trevelyn knew she wasn’t going to win against Saratin, but she was going to put up one heck of a fight. Saratin was ready for her.
“How is Nelyr anyway,” he asked off hand. She glared at him.
“He isn’t Nelyr. You haven’t a clue of what he’s taught me.”
“Then who is he?”
“His name is not important. Let’s just say he’s more powerful than you’ll ever be.”
“You don’t know his name, do you?” Saratin asked. For all the excitement showed, he could have been enquiring politely after her health.
“I don’t need to know his name.”
“You do realize, Lynah,” Trevelyn added, copying Saratin’s laid back attitude, “that’s people don’t tell you their names for a reason… and it’s usually bad.”
“You think I would be stupid enough to talk with Nelyr? He was a stupid, ugly old man. My friend is not. He’s young, and very smart.”
“All great mages look young, Lynah, don’t you remember?” Mitty prompted. “The more power he had, the younger he got. Maybe you just didn’t recognize him because he was young again.”
“You too? I thought that maybe you would realize what a…” Lynah stumbled over her choice of words. “…a an incompetent meddler Saratin is!”
“Lynah, please,” Trevelyn started.
“No! You are worst of all! You turned on me the moment you thought he could give you power. Well, just think, if you would have stuck with me, then you wouldn’t be stuck with him right now.” Lynah’s face flashed a moment of indecision before her rage kicked back in. She took a deep breath and threw up her hands. Suddenly Trevelyn felt herself being scooted across the floor. She slammed into Saratin who had been pulled up out of his chair. A moment later, Mitty slammed into her other side.
Trevelyn put her hands up to steady herself and found them resting on some sort of invisible surface. The moment she touched them, it rippled in an opaque shimmer that showed the surface surrounded the three of them on all sides.
“What is this?” Saratin said, feeling around, trying to push through the barrier. Lynah smiled to herself.
“It’s a magic bubble… or should I say, anti magic magic bubble. You see, on the inside, there’s no magic. But you can only remove it by magic… which means you’re effectively stuck, until I change my mind and remove it. But don’t hold your breath. I don’t plan on changing my mind anytime soon. Bye bye” She laughed, and flashed Brother Ilden and herself out of sight.
There was hardly enough room for the three of them to stand on the bubble bottom without bumping into each other. It was a very close fit.
“So what do we do now?” Trevelyn said. Saratin was trying his hardest to magic himself out. After a moment, he gave up.
“We wait, I suppose.”
“For what?”
“For someone to come rescue us.”
Trevelyn’s pessimism kicked in. “Who? Lasser, who is far away and not expected back anytime soon? Iber, who knows no magic and is also far away? Or Malek, who knows magic, but probably won’t be out of bed anytime soon?”
“Malek will come looking for us.” Mitty said. Of course he would, but it would be sooner rather than later.
“And who’s to say that Lynah won’t trap them in the same way she’s trapped us?” Trevelyn added.
“Well, we just have to hope one of them is more prepared than us.” He leaned back against the edge of the bubble, seemingly resting in an impossible position in midair. “Better get comfortable. It might be a long night.”
Trevelyn closed her eyes, leaned back, and wished that her pessimism hadn’t been right.