The Tree's Choice

The wolf did not come that night.

It did not come the next, either. The howl rose and fell, rose and fell, out beyond the eastern mountains, but the plain below the roots lay empty, the great pale bodies of the giants slowly sinking into the mud. The sky dimmed. It did not darken. A sullen copper light lay over the world, like the last glow of a banked fire, and the tree stood in it, gray and enormous and silent, holding up the dying heavens.

Yggdrasheim took the pause as a gift.

They buried the dead on the second morning, in long shallow graves along the root line, and sang the old songs over them. The skald's voice rose in the still air, cracked and sweet, and the soldiers stood with their helms in their hands. Women went from fire to fire with bread and broth. A child ran laughing through the camps with a wooden sword and was chased by her mother. Two dwarves, still arguing, mended the cart wheel. Brynja rode the lines at dawn and dusk on her white mare, silent and fierce, and where she passed the men straightened their backs.

"They look happy," said Venn.

He was sitting on a stump with a bowl of broth in his hands and his hammer propped beside him. He looked a good deal thinner than he had on the plain, and his skin had a faint grayish undertone, though he laughed as easily as ever. "It's weird, isn't it? The world's ending and they're braiding each other's hair."

"What else should they do?" said Zoe.

"I don't know. Panic. Cry."

"They did that already." She poked the fire. "It doesn't last."

"Doesn't it?"

"No." She smiled crookedly. "That's the secret nobody tells you. Terror gets boring. After a while, you just want your supper."

Venn laughed so hard he nearly spilled the broth.

…

Sera spoke to Archie on the third night.

She found him under the roots, sitting alone on a flat stone with his sketching pencil in his hand and a scrap of birch bark across his knee. He'd been drawing without noticing. It was a rough sketch of the tree, the great gray column and the arching roots, with the camps nestled underneath like children under a coat. She sat down beside him, a little way off, and watched his pencil move.

"You draw," she said.

"I used to."

"You are drawing now."

"Am I?" He looked down. He had been. "Habit."

"Show me."

He passed her the bark. She held it in both hands, turning it to the light, studying it with a long grave attention. Her lips parted a little. "It is exact," she said at last. "You have drawn the load. Here. And here. Where the weight falls on the root." She traced the lines with a fingertip. "You see the tree as a house."

"It's what I do."

"It is a good way to see." She handed it back. "The tree has not been seen so in a long time. They see it as a god, or a monster, or a wall. Never as a thing that is built." She smiled. "That is why it listens to you."

"Does it?"

"It has told me so." Her face grew serious. "Archie. I have thought about what you said, the first night. I have turned it over many times. I want to answer it properly."

"You don't have to."

"I do." She folded her hands in her lap. "You want me to leave. You do not say it. But it is in your face when you look at me. You think I should walk through the door and return to the other place, the place I came from, and live."

"I don't—" Archie stopped. "Yes. I do."

"Why?"

"Because you deserve to."

"Everyone deserves to," said Sera gently. "That is not a reason."

He was quiet a while. The little blue lights drifted through the gloom. Far off, a child was singing.

"I don't think I can give you a good one," he said at last. "I've been trying. I've been trying for three days."

"Try anyway."

"All right." He wiped his hands on his knees. "Here's the truth. When I came in, I didn't want to live. I'd decided I was done. I'd looked at the numbers, the scans, and I thought: it's over. I thought I'd arrange my affairs and do it quietly and nobody would mind." He swallowed. "And then I met three people. And it turned out that it mattered. To them. Whether I walked into a room or not. And that wasn't something I'd ever had."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I have been watching you." She smiled. "I have a great deal of time to watch."

"What I'm saying is that you're not going back to nothing. You think you are. You think there's a hospital bed and a diagnosis and no one in the chair beside you." His voice was low and rough. "I thought so too. I thought it right up to the day I stepped on the Gate. But I was wrong. I'm not alone, Sera. I have a girl who's reckless and a boy who's brave and a man who can't tell a joke to save his life. And I have them because I went. Because I let myself be seen."

Sera listened with her head bent.

"You have no family?" she said.

"No."

"No friends?"

"I didn't. I do now." He gave a crooked smile. "Funny how fast it happens, once you stop hiding."

"And if I do not?" She did not look at him. "If I have no one waiting? No one at all? If the place I would go back to is a white room and a machine and a final hour?"

He did not answer at once. He was not a man who lied, even to be kind.

"Then you'd have us," he said.

She went very still.

"I mean it. You'd have us. Me and Zoe and Jin and Venn. You'd have a seat at the table. I'd draw you a house, if you wanted one, with a window that faced the sun." He laughed shakily. "I'm a terrible housemate. I leave pencils everywhere. But I'd make room."

For a long time, Sera said nothing.

The child's song faded. The wind moved in the dead branches overhead, and a single leaf came down between them and lay on the stone.

"I have not been offered a seat," she said at last, in a very low voice, "for a long time."

…

She opened the door the next morning.

It stood where it had always stood, at the base of the trunk, between two great roots: a narrow arch of pale wood, grown into the bark itself, so old that moss covered it. Sera laid her hand against it and said a word in a tongue Archie did not know, and the wood stirred. It breathed. A seam of pale light split down the middle, and the two halves swung slowly inward.

"I am not going," she said. "I want that understood."

"Understood."

"I will hold this door open for you, and I will hold the tree. But I am not going." She turned, and in the half light her face was grave and clear and lovely. "I am only saying it was a good offer."

"It still is."

"I know." She smiled, and her eyes were bright. "That is why it was hard to refuse."

Behind her, through the open arch, a clean white passage stretched away. The smell of snow had gone. In its place was something cold and faintly metallic, the smell of glass and silver. Archie knew that smell. It was the smell of a mirror.

"Space Five," said Jin quietly.

"Yes."

"We should go."

"Yes." Archie did not move.

Zoe took his hand. Venn shouldered his hammer. They stood together at the edge of the white, four small figures under an enormous tree, and for the first time since Meridian-7, none of them was afraid.

The ground shook.

…

It was not like the giants.

The giants had been a rumble, a footfall, a thud. This was something else: a pulse. A sudden dull silent thump that went through the air like a blow to the stomach. Archie felt it in his bones, in the back of his skull, in the soles of his feet. It rolled outward from some point above them. The leaves in the branches shuddered. The blue lights went out. The little camps along the roots went still, all at once, like a flock of birds that has seen a hawk.

"What was that?" said Zoe.

"I don't know."

"Jin?"

"It wasn't the wolf." Jin's face had gone gray. He had his hand pressed to his temple. "That was a signal. It came from outside."

The pulse came again.

It was stronger. This time the whole tree trembled, from root to crown, and a long dry groan of splitting wood ran through the trunk. The dead leaves came down in a gray avalanche. A branch the size of a ship's mast broke off and fell, and the soldiers below ran screaming. Archie flung up his shield. Sera cried out. She had both hands on the trunk, and her head thrown back, and her face was twisted with an agony he had not seen before.

"It is hurting her," said Jin, hoarsely. "The tree. It's feeding back. Someone's hammering the Dimension from the other side, and the tree is taking the blow."

"William."

"Who else?"

"He's pushing us," said Zoe. She was staring up at the sky, where the copper glow had begun to roil and darken. "He knows we've found him out. He's trying to make us go faster."

"Or die trying."

"Archie."

It was Venn.

He was standing by the stump where he had been sitting, with the hammer in his hand. He wasn't moving. He was looking at his own palm, with a puzzled expression, as though he'd found a coin in it. The color had drained out of his face. His lips were blue.

"Venn?" said Archie.

"I'm okay." His voice was strangely light. "I'm okay, man, it's just. I feel kind of funny. Like I just stood up too fast."

"Sit down."

"I'm fine. I'm just—"

The third pulse hit.

It struck him full, from nowhere, like a thrown stone. He didn't cry out. He only looked up, with wide surprised eyes, and said "Oh," quietly, and then the hammer slid from his fingers, and his knees buckled, and he went down on the wet grass like a felled tree.

"Venn!"

…

They had him on the moss in seconds.

Zoe was on her knees beside him, with her hands under his head, saying his name over and over. Jin had his wrist. Archie knelt on the other side and put his palm flat on the thin chest, and felt it rise, and fall, and rise again, fluttering like a trapped bird.

"He's breathing," Jin said. His voice was shaking. "Pulse is fast. Thready. He's, he's alive. But he's unresponsive. It's the lungs. It's the metastasis. The pulse hit the tumors in his body."

"His body? We're not in our bodies."

"We're linked. The Dimension mirrors the damage." Jin looked up, white-faced. "Whatever William's doing, it's reaching through. It's going straight to the weakest place in each of us. For Venn, that's the chest."

"And for me?" Archie whispered.

Nobody answered.

Sera knelt beside them. She laid both hands on Venn's chest, and the green-gold light rose between her fingers, but it was thin and flickering, and she was breathing hard. "I can hold him," she said. "For now. Not for long. The tree is fighting for its own life."

"Can you wake him?"

"I do not know."

Archie sat back on his heels.

He looked at the door, still glowing faintly in the trunk. He looked at the sky, where the copper had turned to a sullen purple. He looked at the face on the moss, so young, so still, with its absurd long lashes and its slack, gentle mouth. And he felt the knowledge settle on him, cold and clear, the way a load settles on a beam.

He did this.

William did this. And I know it. And I'm the only one who's in a position to do something about it.

He could keep silent. That was the first thing that came to him, with terrible quickness, and he recognized it: the old reflex, the shrug, the lowering of the head. He could say nothing, and press on, and hope that Otis had read the message. Hope that the boy had the courage to act. Hope that someone else would deal with it, as someone else always did. Say nothing, and walk through the door with Venn in his arms, and trust that the dark would not follow.

It's what I've always done.

Or he could do the other thing. He could stand up and use the one weapon he had left: the strange, half-understood link the Guardians kept to the Gate, the channel by which a message might be flung across the gap between the worlds. Sera could do it. She had said so. He could speak to Luca himself, openly, and tell him everything, at the risk of showing William his hand. He could bring the war into the light.

It would be dangerous. It could cost them the Gate. It could cost them everything.

Beneath his hands, Venn's chest fluttered, and was still, and fluttered again.

"Archie," said Zoe, very quietly. She wasn't pleading. She was only saying his name. "Whatever you decide."

He lifted his head.

"I know," he said.