CHAPTER 26

The water was cold and deep.

It had started off at his ankles, but soon was to his thighs and then his waist and then deeper.

The roots of the mangroves were giant fingers soaking in a bowl of pale-brown water. The thick fog of the flooded forest masked his view. A bird cried overhead.

He pushed aside a stick as it floated toward him. His foot slipped upon a rock and the water rose to his neck. His arms held his pack tightly upon his head as he looked up at the soft, twinkling lights radiating from the tops of the trees.

Faerie light.

Pixies congregated freely in this deep, hidden corner of the Wood. Their gentle pinpricks would dart together and then dart off again to another tree. Their musical speech floated down like tiny bells. Tiny bells that seemed to laugh…

The tiny foot hitting the earth…

His mind revolted and pushed the memory away.

“Woodcutter…”

The voice shot from tree to tree, echoing high in the branches.

“Woodcutter…”

He hated traveling at dusk, when the ordered magic of the day made way for the wild magic of night. His hand secretly gripped the handle of the Platinum Ax.

“Woodcutter…” came the voice again.

“Who calls my name?” he asked.

The tinkling of female laughter shook the leaves of the trees.

“Who?” he called.

The whole forest shook as the laughter seemed to gather in the arms of a giant mangrove tree before him. The sound wrapped from the base and climbed up the trunk, and as it touched the highest bough, a mighty cracking sound cut across the forest. Like a sleepy kitten uncurling in a sunbeam, the tree opened, revealing a radiant woman of glowing pink, ungarbed, but not indecent. The dryad was art and life. Her voice was deep and earthy as she reached an impossibly slender hand to him.

“Woodcutter, hast thou ever spilt the sap of an unwilling tree?” she asked.

The water flowing about him became warm and still. A sense of peace and contentment washed over the Woodcutter as he gazed upon her face.

The Woodcutter bowed his head.

“Never, Mother Dryad,” he said. “My ax remains virgin and true.”

She smiled quietly. “Word of thy deeds has reached our ears.”

The trunks of ten…twenty…thirty…mangroves opened, revealing their hidden, glowing mistresses.

The Mother Dryad motioned to her sisters. “We have heard of thy quest to find the Crone and will grant thee safe passage through our grove.”

“Sister,” whispered one of the creatures, “the pixies.”

The trees’ branches shook anxiously.

“The pixies…” they whispered urgently.

The Woodcutter offered, “Mother Dryad, I have heard of terrible deeds, of pixies touching the earth.”

The trees shook in horror, and the lights of the dryads dimmed sadly.

“They came to our grove,” said a green dryad as she pointed to the top of her tree. The top still sparkled, but not as brightly as the tree beside her.

“They came and…kidnapped…”

“They spilled innocent sap…”

“Stole the fae…”

The pink Mother Dryad held up a hand to silence them as the dryads spoke at once, but they would not be stilled and continued.

“We grow here, sisters of the Mother Dryad, and we may not leave. But our daughter pixies…”

“Robbed of their magic…”

“Touching the earth…”

The Mother Dryad’s face was haunted in pain as her sisters’ voices rose. Her eyes locked upon the Woodcutter. “Each atrocity reverberates to our very roots.”

“The stolen magic steals from us our strength…”

“Help us!”

“We cannot leave our trees…”

“But you can…”

The feminine voices climbed, pleading in chorus, “We shall aid your journey to the Crone if you will save our daughters.”

The Woodcutter held up his hand and the trees fell silent.

“I am your servant,” he said.

The Mother Dryad smiled hopefully as a single tear drifted down her pink cheek. She clasped her hands together and caught the tear as it fell. When she opened her hands, three round seeds glowed in her palm.

She tossed them gently to the Woodcutter, and they arced through the air, a trail of gold following them in the dark.

He caught them in his mighty fist.

“Thou shalt know what to do with them,” said the Mother Dryad.

You shall know, the trees spoke.

The Mother Dryad swept her hand before her, and a branch from her tree dipped into the water.

The Woodcutter felt the wood against his back and felt himself lifted from the flood.

“We grant thee safe passage,” said the Mother Dryad.

Another bough came forward, cradling him as the trees transferred his body from one to the next.

“Remember your promise.”

The trunks began closing behind him. The eyes of the pink dryad never left his face until the final moment of the bark’s embrace.

Swiftly the trees moved him through the swamp, high above the chill of the water.

A small light darted curiously to his face. The newborn pixie was the size of his thumb and as round as a baby chick. Its large black eyes studied the Woodcutter before laughing and darting away.

The pixie’s laugh tickled its way down the Woodcutter’s body, warming and wiggling as it went. It sloughed away all sorrow. It carried away all worry. The Woodcutter’s mouth spread into a wide grin, and he leaned his head back, laughing deep from his belly.

The lights in the trees glittered back in response, the tinkling sound of the fae filling the night.

The Woodcutter passed by another treetop. Tucked within the knots and indentations of the wood was a pixie nursery. Curled in blankets of leaves, snuggled into the gentle support of the wood like pussy willows, the pixies blossomed and grew. As the Woodcutter laughed, the baby pixies’ eyes opened and they were awake like Christmas morning.

They rose from their beds and brushed up against the Woodcutter, touching his hair and wondering at his buttons, even as the trees tried to shoo them back to bed.

And then he passed a tree of bleached-white wood, and all the pixies withdrew. A forgotten moth drifted through the empty branches. The nursery had been robbed, and the tree’s dryad was dead. The silence and emptiness of that tree burned itself into his mind.

He would not forget his promise to the trees.

He traveled for hours, finally falling asleep in the gentle movement, like a child cradled in a parent’s arms.

He woke as his feet touched the marshy ground at the edge of the Wood.

The sun was rising.