Rootsong

Her name had been Serafina Marlowe, and she had been a tree surgeon.

She told it to him on the root, in the small hours, while the stars wheeled slowly over the burning plain, in the slow warm voice of someone turning over old stones. She did not look at him as she spoke. She looked at the east. Her harp lay across her knees, and her long fingers moved on the strings without plucking them, as if she were reading a book in braille.

"I was thirty-one," said Sera. "It was in Oregon. I climbed old growth for the forest service. Douglas fir, some of them four hundred years old. Two hundred feet straight up, with a rope and a saw." She smiled. "People thought it was dangerous. It was not. It was the only time I felt safe."

"Safe?"

"Up there, there is nobody. There is wind. There is the creak of the trunk. You hang in the crown of a tree that was a seedling when Shakespeare was alive, and you think: I am a very small thing. It is a relief."

Archie nodded slowly. He understood that. He had felt it, once, standing at the foot of a mountain in New Hampshire, with his father's hand on his shoulder.

"And then?"

"And then I got sick." Her voice was matter-of-fact. "A stomach pain that would not stop. Then a scan. Ovarian, stage four. They said a year, perhaps eighteen months with treatment. I had no family left. My mother was dead. My sister was in Lagos, and we did not speak. I tried the chemotherapy. It made me sicker than the cancer." She gave a small shrug. "One day I stopped. I drove out into the forest and I climbed a tree, my favorite, a great gray fir by the river, and sat in the crown for two days. I thought that I would simply stay there. Until it ended."

"What happened?"

"A ranger found me. He talked me down. He was a kind man. He drove me to the hospital, and on the way he said, There's a doctor in New Hampshire, a Dr. Ferrara, looking for volunteers. People with nothing to lose." Her mouth curved. "He had read about it in a magazine. He said he had thought of me."

"Luca recruited you?"

"No. He did not know I had come." She laughed softly. "I was not part of the experiment. I was a late addition. A woman in a hurry. They had an empty chair."

…

The Tree had chosen her.

She did not say it in so many words. She said that she had come out of the white on the edge of the plain, fifteen winters ago, in a gray tunic and bare feet, and the sky had been burning, and the Tree had been dying even then. A hundred refugees camped under its roots. A few old soldiers. A Valkyrie with a broken arm. Nobody spoke to her. She had simply walked to the trunk, and laid her palm against it, and felt it hum.

"It was like a language," she said. "I could not understand it. But I knew it was speaking. It said: Stay."

"And you did."

"I did. I had nothing else to do." She turned the harp over. "I had been trained to listen to trees, you understand. It is half of what the work is. You learn to feel the sap rising and falling. You learn the sound of a split limb. I sat at the base of this one for a day and a night, and at the end of it I knew every root. Every ring. Every old wound." She smiled. "I have been tending it since."

"For fifteen years."

"Yes."

"And you were happy."

"I was useful," said Sera. "It is not quite the same." She looked down at her hands. "I told myself it was enough. And for a long time it was."

The wind stirred the dead branches above them.

"Archie," she said, "there is something I have not told anyone."

"You don't have to."

"I want to. Will you listen?"

He nodded.

"There was another," said Sera. "Not long after I came. A young man. He came out of the white, not far from where I sat, and ran past me, and did not stop. He was thin, and pale, and he carried a notebook in both hands, pressed to his chest like a child." Her voice softened. "I called out to him. He did not turn. He went straight to the Tree. And he knelt, and drew something on the bark with a small stone, very fast, with his whole arm shaking. And then he ran on, and was gone."

Archie's heart stopped.

"A notebook," he said.

"Yes."

"Dark hair? Glasses? A, a scar on the chin?"

"I do not remember a scar." She frowned. "But the glasses, yes. A wire pair. Round."

"Matteo," said Archie, in a whisper.

"Is that his name?"

"Matteo Ferrara. He's Luca's brother."

"Ah." Sera closed her eyes. "I see. I had wondered." She opened them again. "Would you like to see what he drew?"

…

She took him down the trunk by lamplight.

It was a long climb, slippery with sap, and halfway down they came to a place where the bark curled away in a hollow, deep as a cave, and in the hollow, small and almost invisible beneath a mat of moss, was a mark.

It was not a drawing. It was a sequence. A short line of symbols, scratched into the wood with a sharp stone, in an angular, hurried hand. Some of them were letters. Some were numbers. Some were little diagrams of circles, nested one within another, with arrows. A few were just scratches. And at the bottom, beneath them, in a clearer script, were two words.

NOT BROKEN.

Archie stared at it.

"I have looked at it every day for fifteen years," said Sera. "I do not know what it means."

"I think it's a message."

"For whom?"

"Whoever came next." He drew the folded paper from his coat. Matteo's note, creased and yellowed, with its crabbed handwriting and its arrows. He spread it against the bark and held the lamp beside it, and the two scripts lay side by side in the light: the same hand, the same slanted capitals, the same peculiar angular g. "It's him. It's the same writing."

"What does yours say?"

"The lock is not the key. Find who has been holding the door."

Sera went very still.

"I do not understand it," Archie said. "I've looked at it a hundred times. I think it's a clue to something. To how the Guardian system works. To how we get out. But I can't read it."

"Perhaps it is not meant to be read." Sera put her fingers to the bark. "Perhaps it is meant to be understood at the right moment."

"Which is when?"

"I do not know." She smiled at him sidelong. "That is the trouble with messages. They are always written for a person who is not yet there."

…

They made the plan at dawn.

They did it round a table in the hall, with the dwarf Dagny's clay model of the ravine in the center and half the officers of the camp crowded round. Archie had drawn the field on a sheet of bark, and had run out of space, and had turned the sheet over and kept going on the back. Hrolf stood at his shoulder, chewing his mustache. Brynja leaned on the hilt of her spear. Zoe and Jin sat on the table's edge with their legs swinging, like two children listening to a story.

"The wolf is vast," Archie said. "That's the problem. We can't hurt it from outside. Its hide is too thick, and it heals too fast. Zoe's arrows go in and the wounds close. Jin's blades do the same. Venn's hammer..." He glanced at the pale figure on the litter. "It stings. That's all."

"Thanks, man."

"I'm just being honest."

"I know. It's awful."

"What we can do," said Archie, "is use its weight."

He put his finger on the model.

"This ravine," he said. "Here. It runs east to west under the main root. The ground is clay, loose, with a bed of rock beneath. Dagny says the water table is high." The dwarf nodded gravely. "If the wolf comes along the ravine, and the walls give, it'll be in a trap. Thirty feet deep. Narrow. It won't be able to turn."

"It'll climb out," said Hrolf.

"Not if the roots hold it."

"What roots?"

"The ones we're standing on." He looked up. "The tree is alive. It's the largest living thing in the world. It has a root system a mile across. And I think, if I understood Sera correctly, that it can move them."

Everyone looked at Sera.

She sat at the end of the table, quite still. She had not spoken since they sat down. Her harp lay on the wood before her. Her hands were folded on it.

"It can," she said slowly. "It has not been asked. The Tree does not move for fear. It moves for song."

"What kind of song?"

"The old one. The rootsong." She drew a breath. "It is the song the Tree sang when the worlds were new. My teacher taught me the first verse. I have never dared to sing the last."

"Why not?"

"Because it binds." She lifted her eyes to his. "It binds everything it touches. The wolf, the ravine, the singer. Whatever sings the last verse is bound too."

The silence stretched.

"You'd be held," said Jin quietly. "Wouldn't you? Part of the Tree. For good."

"Perhaps."

"Sera—" Archie began.

"It would not be so different from now." She smiled, gently. "It would be, I think, a very natural thing."

"No."

"Archie."

"No." He stood. The bark scraped on the table. "We're not doing that. I'll find another way. I won't ask you to do that."

"You are not asking."

"I'm not letting you."

"You cannot stop me." She said it without anger. "But you can help me. Which is a different thing entirely." She tilted her head. "Do you remember what you said? About a table. About a seat."

His throat closed.

"I would like to take it," said Sera. "When this is finished. I would like to find out what it is to sit down. But for that I must be free, Shieldbearer. Free of the Tree." She laid her hand on the harp. "The last verse binds the singer. But it also, I think, releases her. If the song is sung to its end, the binding passes to the thing that was bound."

"The wolf."

"The wolf."

"You think you could pass it on."

"I think there is a chance."

"A chance."

"It is all I have ever had," said Sera.

…

The litter creaked, and Venn's voice came from it, thin and clear.

"Hey, Architect."

Archie turned.

Venn had propped himself up on one elbow. He looked a good deal worse than he had the night before; the dark eyes were hollow, and his lips were pale. But his grin was a thing of astonishing brightness.

"I'll do it," he said.

"Do what?"

"Distract the wolf. Lead it down the ravine." He tapped his chest. "I'm the fastest. Or I used to be. If someone's got to run, it ought to be me."

"You can barely stand."

"I can run." Venn's grin widened. "That's the thing, man. I'm pretty sure I can. It's the one thing I can still do. Everything else, hammers, shields, the whole Viking thing, that's not me." He shrugged weakly. "But running. I can run for you."

"No," said Zoe.

"Zoe—"

"No. You'll collapse. You'll be torn apart. You said two swings, Venn. Two. That was the deal."

"I know. I'm not swinging." His eyes were bright. "I'm just. Running."

"It's the same thing."

"It's not."

"Let him," said Jin.

They all turned. Jin was standing at the edge of the table with his hands in his coat pockets. He was pale. He looked at Venn for a long moment, a steady, aching look, and something passed between the two men that Archie did not entirely understand.

"I'll go with him," said Jin. "I'll stay at his shoulder. I'll watch his back. If he falls, I'll carry him." He lifted his chin. "He's not going to run alone."

Venn stared. His mouth worked.

"You," he said. "You're going to run."

"I'm going to jog."

"Bro."

"Don't."

"You're going to jog, in public, for me."

"Don't read into it," said Jin, with great dignity, and the whole table burst out laughing.

It broke the tension. The officers shuffled their feet. Hrolf clapped Jin on the shoulder with a hand like a shovel. Brynja threw back her head and roared. And in the middle of it, with the clay model before him and the sun rising red over the wounded plain, Archie caught Zoe's eye across the table.

She was smiling. There were tears running down her face. She mouthed, very slowly, We can do this.

He nodded.

He didn't know if it was true. But he found that, for the first time in his life, he was willing to say it.