“What do you want from us?” Lisana demanded of him.
“Only what I’m owed. And I’ll even give you, one last time, the choice. Choose now, Nevare Burvelle. Choose what you give me. Or I’ll take what I please.”
“What does he mean, a life or a death?” she cried to me.
“I don’t know. I think he finds it funny to play with the words. Gernians speak of him as an old god, one most of them have set aside. Few worship him anymore. When he is worshipped, he is the god of death. But also of balances.”
“It makes great sense,” Orandula interrupted. “How can one be the god of death without also being a god of life? It isn’t as if they are two separate things. One is the discontinuation of the other, don’t you see? Whenever one stops, the other begins.” He shifted on my branch. “They balance.”
“So if he asks you for your life, then you are giving it to him and choosing death?” Lisana spoke only to me.
“So I’ve supposed. I don’t really know and he won’t explain.”
The god laughed. “Explaining would take all the fun out of it. Besides, even if I explained, you still wouldn’t understand.”
Lisana was beginning to be frightened. We had just thought that we were finally safe. “What if you offer him your death? What happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you just ask him?” Lisana sounded amazed that I would not have done so long ago.
“I don’t think he would answer that question. I think he finds it amusing to demand a price of me when I do not know what I am agreeing to give him.”
With a sigh like wind through new leaves, she brushed past me to confront him. “If he offers you his death, what do you take?”
“Why, his death, of course.”
“So you would kill his tree, then?”
I felt him shift his weight and suddenly I could see him. It was a different way of seeing. I knew the shape of him and how he blocked the light from my leaves. He’d cocked his head at Lisana’s tree. “No. Of course I wouldn’t kill him. That would be giving him death rather than taking death from him.” The bird puffed his feathers with a shiver, then settled them and began grooming them again. “I’m not going to wait much longer,” he warned us.
“Tell him to take your death,” Lisana said decisively.
“How can you be sure?”
“The only other option is offering him your life. We know how that would end. He says you must decide quickly, before he does. So. We have two choices. One we know is bad. Take the other. It may also be bad, but at least there is a chance it is good.”
“Not with this bird,” I said sourly.
Orandula cawed out a loud laugh. “So. What do you choose?”
I steeled myself. “Orandula. Let it be finished between us. Take my death, to pay for what I took from you.”
“Very good,” he said approvingly. “Very good indeed.”
He spread his wings and leapt from my branch. Before he touched the ground, he was flapping heavily. Slowly he gained altitude. When he was so high I could scarcely feel his shadow as it passed over my leaves, he cawed again. Once, twice, three times.
“Is he gone?” Lisana asked me.
“I don’t know.”
In the distance, I suddenly heard answering caws. They came from far away, but when they were repeated a few moments later, they seemed much closer. Lisana held tightly to our shared awareness, as if she were gripping my hand. “He called other birds,” she said.
“I’ve seen croakers do that, when they find something dead. They call the rest of their flock to share it.”
“Something dead?”
“My old body, I suppose.” I could sense it down there. It was a weight on the trunk of Lisana’s tree. My roots were firmly in it. Some nutrients had leaked out of it like water from a leaky skin. No matter. They would go into the soil at the base of the fallen trunk. Eventually I would have them. The thought gave me pause. “How long has it been?” I asked Lisana.
“What?”
“How long has that body down there been dead?”
She was unconcerned. “I didn’t keep track. It seemed to take a long time for you to come into your tree, longer than it took me. But that all happened so very long ago.”
I reached for her and effortlessly felt our communion, searingly sweet, true and ever fresh. I had never imagined such a connection. She laughed low, delighted at my gladness. I sensed something else. If I extended my awareness further, I could sense all the other kaembra trees that held the ancestral wisdom of the Specks. It was a community in a sense I’d never imagined it. I could find Buel Hitch if I wished, just by thinking of him. I could also, I suddenly discovered, feel the fear and injury of the kaembra trees closest to the end of the King’s Road. I pulled back from their misery and despair. It was a dark edge to what had been, until now, the purest pleasure to explore.