“Soon,” she said comfortingly. “Soon.” Almost unwillingly she added, “There will be some pain. But fix your mind on the thought that, no matter how bad it is, it does not last. But we will. Our trees are young. And I can feel the magic, flowing like a wild river, no longer dammed.”

“I did it, then?”

I could hear the voices of others, speaking of me, of what they had known of me. Olikea’s voice was gone; it was Kinrove who chanted now. I paid little attention to his words. I cared for nothing they might say, while Lisana, she who knew me best, stood before me, waiting. I felt a shiver up my back when I thought of the pain to come and then reined my thoughts away from it. Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?

Lisana’s smile widened. “Could not you tell that you’d done it? I could feel it, even at this distance. I think all of us who have served the magic knew; it was like a fresh wind blowing in the evening after a long hot day. Change is coming.”

“Then you are safe. And all will be well.”

Her smile became more tenuous. “It is to be hoped. And in the meanwhile, we shall have what we shall have.”

A second chill down my spine. “To be hoped?”

“It is as you have seen. Magic is not a single event, a snap of the fingers. It is not a matter of ‘do this and that will always happen.’ It is a cascade of actions, teetering on coincidences and luck, rattling to a conclusion that always astonishes us all. Yet there is a linked chain that goes back. When one follows it, if one is cynical, one says, ‘Oh, that was not magic at all, but merely happenstance.’” She smiled. “But to those who hold the magic, the truth is plain. Magic happens.”

“But you said, ‘to be hoped.’ Does that mean it isn’t certain?” The tingle down my spine became an itch and then something even more unpleasant. Don’t think about it. Don’t imagine the tiny rootlets growing suddenly against the sweaty skin of my back. Don’t imagine them spreading, probing, seeking for the easiest place to penetrate. A scratch, a bruise. It wasn’t an itch anymore. It stung. It would pass, it would end, soon, but I suddenly feared that this was only the beginning.

Time runs differently when pain counts out the slow seconds.

“Look at me, Nevare. Don’t focus on it.”

“To be hoped?” I demanded again, trying to distract myself.

“Those cascading events take time. The Gernians will not go away instantly. Their anger still seethes, and their axes still swing.”

“No.”

“Yes. Some will fall. How many, we cannot know. It is all a part of the slow working of the magic, Nevare. All a part of—”

The pain began. What had come before was not even discomfort compared to this. I felt the jabbing of dozens, no, hundreds of roots. They were greedy and seeking. They shot into me, ran up alongside my spine like a new system of nerves, ricocheted down the bones of my arms and legs. I felt my limbs twitch and flail, and heard the happy cries of those who witnessed the tree taking me. Inside me, like spilling acid, the roots flung out a network.

I was dead. I no longer breathed, my heart did not beat. Roots were spilling into my bowels and spreading, rasping through the meat of my body. I was dead. I should not be feeling this. I should not be aware of the ball of roots that boiled into the cavity of my mouth. Someone was shouting at me. “It does not last forever!” she cried. I wanted to scream back that this was forever, that this pain was all I could now remember, that a dozen forevers had passed since it began.

It was changing now, that was true. I was going into the tree, as much as the tree was coming into me. It did not feel any gentler. It felt as if the nerves that had once webbed through my hands and feet were now being forced throughout the stiffness of the tree. Little ripped bits of me were being torn away from their old places and forced into new and foreign locations. In the most fitting of reversals, I felt I was being torn down into a sort of lumber and rebuilt as a tree.

“Let go of your old body,” Lisana was urging me. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t know how but I no longer knew how to speak to her. I was starting to feel new sensations but I was not sure how to interpret any of them. Was that wind? Sunlight? Was that the comforting grip of soil upon my roots? Or was it sandpaper against my flesh, light shining in my eyes, a terrible shrilling in my ears? This body didn’t fit my senses or my senses didn’t fit this body. It was all a mistake, a terrible mistake. I wanted it to stop, wanted to simply be dead, but there was nowhere I could turn for help.