Page 85 of A Divided Duty

They came charging out of the dark only a few seconds later, pulling up short of trampling me where I stood. I didn’t recognize any of them, and at the same time, I recognized them all, because they were the Riders of Blind Michael’s Hunt, twisted, faceless, and familiar. Several of them were laughing, the sound deep and low in their chests, rattling there as they advanced on me.

“Could have walked away,” said one of them. “Could have been grateful for the Lady’s hospitality, and gone in peace and on an open road. But you had to come back here, by the light of a candle.”

“Now you get to stay,” said another. “Stay forever, as you should have all along. Stay silent and strong and not putting your little fingers where they aren’t desired, where they don’t belong. Now you get to rest. Don’t you want to rest?”

“Go to hell,” I snarled, slashing at the air with my knife. I couldn’t reach very far, couldn’t reach them, not without the ability to move my legs. My feet were entirely numb, and the numbness was spreading rapidly up my legs, far more rapidly than it had the last time I’d fallen afoul of what felt like Acacia’s magic. She wasn’t our enemy, was she? Things hadn’t changed that much while I’d been trying to find the answers to Raysel’s disappearance?

The numbness spread past my knees, and the normal flex and adjustment of being a standing biped was suddenly gone, leaving me rooted firm and rigid where I stood. It kept spreading. It would pass my hips soon. I glanced down. My jeans were vanishing as the numbness spread, replaced by rough brown bark.

My descendant line was always going to be easy to transform, according to the Luidaeg, who was one of the only people truly in a position to know. Maybe that was why this was happening so much faster than it had before: I was more fae now than I’d been the last time I was in Blind Michael’s lands. In this specific way, I was more vulnerable.

But these weren’t Blind Michael’s lands. I was still on the Thorn Road, and Acacia didn’t have access to this route: only children of Maeve and those who had been specifically granted access by a child of Maeve could walk here. If the Riders were in this space, they must have found someone who would open the door for them.

If they’d gone to the Luidaeg, she wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter. Anyone who could pay her could command her magic. But she was my daughter’s godmother, and she didn’t want to raise my child herself. She would have found a way to warn me. She would have—

The numbness hit my middle, cresting over my hips and into my abdomen. The pain was sudden and intense. I moaned involuntarily, glaring at the Riders as I did.

“That will be your organs beginning to turn,” said one of them, in a tone that sounded almost like an attempt to be helpful. “It should only hurt for as long as there’s flesh to change.”

“Not the reassurance you think it is,” I said. I could feel the numbness creeping toward my lungs.

For the fae, turning enemies into trees is a time-honored tradition, and one that we’ve had plenty of time to practice on. I was certain I could survive it and be turned back. It had happened to other people I knew, and they didn’t heal like I did; even if the interruption in the beating of my heart technically killed me before I switched over to a tree’s circulatory system, I would be able to recover. It didn’t make the sensation any more pleasant, or the prospect of becoming fully wooden any better.

“Can you stop this?” I asked.

The nearest Rider pulled hard on the reins of their horse, causing it to dance in place before starting to turn. “We could,” they said. “But we won’t. Enjoy your rest, traitor.”

Then the whole company of them turned, cantering off down the path and into the trees. Silence followed their departure.

I looked down at my body, or as much of it as I could see. The bark was spreading, smoothing out my curves and crevices and replacing them with rounded, unyielding wood. I bit the inside of my cheek, sucking hard to draw every drop of blood from the wound that I could get, then looked again.

Thin green and golden lines ran through my transformed flesh, Acacia’s spell taking hold. They were delicate and lacy, and spreading rapidly, multiplying in a way that made it clear I wouldn’t be able to outpace them. If I started snapping threads, the remainder would just continue to spread. I had to hope that I would still be aware of myself as a tree, even if it was a different form of awareness, and could start plucking the threads away in my own time. If not …

The sun never rose on the Thorn Road, and sunlight is one of the few things that can break down and dismantle transformations. The sunrise was how I’d been able to come back from my time in the pond. Without it, I could very well be trapped. There might be no getting out of this.

The lines spread higher, the numbness traveling with them, until it felt like a fist was compressing my chest, squeezing all the air out of me. I tried to catch my breath, struggling against the transformation for just a little more time.

But there wasn’t any more time. The numbness surged again, and the last of the air was crushed out of me, and my thoughts tumbled down into the dark, into the soft, silent place where the dreams of trees are dreamt.

EIGHTEEN

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I spent dreaming the dreams of the arbor, of leaf and root and sap, moving slowly through flesh like softened stone. The blood of trees is their sap, and it flows through veins, just like it does for mammals, moving through the flesh of the tree according to existing channels. As a tree, I didn’t have a mouth, but I did have veins, and the sap that moved through them was tantalizingly close to my awareness, so close that I could almost reach out and touch it.

If I’d been capable of reaching for anything. The sap moved, and I slept, only partially aware of my own existence, frozen and vital at the same time. It would have been a fascinating contradiction if I’d been fully capable of understanding it. As it was, it was just the world. My roots dug deep, my branches reached high, and I slept, skating across the surface of my own thoughts like I couldn’t break the barrier keeping me from immersing myself in them.

Then there was pain, sudden and shockingly sharp, more intense than I would have thought possible if it hadn’t been there, slashing down the front of me, four hot lines of agony drawn in an almost straight downward line. Sap welled up in the slashes, and that was a secondary pain, the feeling of something that was mine, that had always belonged inside of me, suddenly flowing out into the world where I was not.

Someone was speaking. I didn’t have ears, didn’t have the ability to hear, but I could feel the sound vibrating across my skin, even if I didn’t have the experience I’d need to decode and comprehend it. The speech continued, and then there was another lashing slash of pain along the front of me, cutting downward. I would have screamed, if I’d had the capability. What was this pain? What was the purpose of it?

Straining myself as hard as I could, I grabbed for the sap dripping down the front of me, trying to draw it back into my torn tissues. But the barrier of my bark had already healed up behind the escaped droplets, leaving the sap with no way back inside. It was lost. It was gone.

I was lost.

The pain had served one purpose, at the very least: I was awake now, still wooden, but no longer skating across quiet vegetable dreams, no longer drifting within the prison of my own body. I strained for the sap, and nothing changed. I didn’t have a mouth, but I could taste the sugary sweetness of the sap where I’d been cut, sunk into the healed tissues of my injury.

For a tree, the whole body is the mouth, in a way. By cutting me, whoever was out there had freed my sap from my vascular system, allowing me to “taste” it. I just hadn’t been awake enough to do anything about it.

Please, I thought. Do it again.