Forest Mage

We dozed. After what seemed a very long time, she asked, “Are you hungry?”

I nearly laughed. “Of course I’m hungry. I’m always hungry.”

“Are you?” She sounded concerned. She set her hand on my side tenderly. “You should never be hungry. Not if you would allow me to care for you properly. Not if you allowed me to feed you as you should be fed. How can you do all that the magic wishes you to do if you do not eat as you should? You must pay attention when I call to you, and eat every night of the food I bring to you. You must stay close by me so that I can bring you to the peak of your powers.”

She stood up and stretched. “I’ll be right back.”

I lay where I was on the moss, trying to find thoughts that belonged to me. I hadn’t intended to come here. Yet here I was, enmeshed with Olikea again, and listening to her scold me for not letting the magic have its way with me. I knew it was a problem, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about it.

She returned and sat down in the angle of my body, her back against my belly. She leaned back on me a little and rummaged in her basket. Some of the fruit had been bruised in the fall. I could smell each separate one quite clearly. She offered me a lily leaf. “Eat this first. For your strength.”

I took it from her and ate a bite. “So. You anticipate I will need more strength tonight?”

I was surprised when she giggled. “You might. Just eat it.”

I obeyed and then asked, “Does each food you bring me have its own virtue?”

“Here, yes. On the other side, sometimes food is just food. To eat. Here each one is a piece of magic. What you eat here is far more potent than anything you eat on the other side. It is why it is so important that you come here every night.”

“What other side?”

“The other side of here,” she said impatiently. She took another lily leaf, put an orange section of root in its center, and rolled the fleshy leaf around it. “Like this. Eat it like this.”

I obeyed. The orange root was slightly sweet. Weariness fell away from me. I reached over and pulled her basket closer to me. “What is this one for?” I asked, taking a clump of pale yellow mushrooms.

“For walking the web more strongly.”

“I don’t understand.”

She puffed her lips at me, and then made a dismissive gesture with her fingers. “Just eat it. Trust me. I know these things.”

The mushrooms had an earthy flavor, rich and dark. She followed them with a double handful of berries so ripe and sweet that they burst in my hands before I could get them to my mouth. Each had a flat seed inside it, strongly piquant. As I chewed a mouthful, she said, “You should go now, so that you can come back to me on the other side before the light is too strong. You do not need to bring anything with you. Simply go and then come back to me.”

I didn’t understand, so I avoided the question. “The light doesn’t bother me.”

“It troubles me. And you need to be with me, so that I can show you the way to the deeper place. We think that one of the old ones will fall tomorrow. The magic will waken with great fury then. It would be better for us to be sheltered from that wrath.”

“I cannot go with you tomorrow, Olikea. I promised my friend that I would come to visit him in Gettys. I have to keep that promise.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Tomorrow death sweeps through that place. It will only make you sad to see it. Come away with me.”

Every word she spoke jabbed me like a small pin, awakening me to my other life and the dangers that threatened it. While I loitered here with her in satiation and contentment, my friends were in danger. The closeness I had felt to her was thinning like darkness before the dawn. “Were you there?” I asked her. “When your people danced the Dust Dance in Gettys, were you there, spreading disease with the dust?”

“Of course I was,” she answered promptly. There was no shame in her voice, no regret at all. “You saw me leave by the gate. I thought you would come with me, but then I saw that you had her with you. So I left you.”

I lifted her hand that rested against my ribs and looked at it. “With this hand, you threw the dust that will make all of them sicken with the plague?”

She twisted her hand from my grip, and then held it palm-up and fingers loose. She shook it like that. “It is the winnowing. The dust flies and blows and settles where it will. Some will walk the path of the winnowing and some will not. Of those who walk the path, some will cross the bridge and others will not. Some will serve the magic: they will cross, but come back to us, briefly, as messengers from that far place. Among our people, we honor those ones as worthy of a tree. They send down roots to one world and reach up branches to another. They stay among us then and grow, and wisdom grows with them. You, you bury your dead to rot, as if you care nothing for the wisdom of that world. The messengers who come back to you, you ignore and bury beneath the earth. We have tried to help you be wiser. We have tried to give some of your people trees so that they could grow in wisdom, but never does it work. The tree does not thrive, or one like you comes to tear them free from the tree and throw them back into a hole in the ground where they rot like bad seed.”