Robin Hobb: Renegade's Magic

When I’d first encountered Tree Woman in Dewara’s spirit world I saw a fat old woman with gray hair leaning up against a tree instead of the warrior-guardian I’d expected to battle. Challenging her would have gone against everything my father had ever taught his soldier son about chivalry. And so I had hesitated and spoken to her, and before I recognized her power, she had defeated me and made me hers.

I became her apprentice mage. And then her lover.

My heart remembered those days with her. My head did not. My head had gone to the Cavalla Academy, taken courses, made friends, and done all that a loyal soldier son should. And when the opportunity came for me to challenge Tree Woman as an adversary, I had not hesitated. I’d destroyed that other self who had been her acolyte, taking him back inside me. And then I’d done my best to kill her as well.

Yet at both those tasks, I’d failed. The Speck self I’d taken back inside me lurked there still, like a speckled trout in the deep shade under a grassy riverbank. From time to time I glimpsed him, but never could I seize and hold him. And the Tree Woman I’d slain? I’d only partially severed her trunk with a cavalla sword. That deed, impossible in what I considered the real world, had left its evidence here. Upon the ridge ahead of me was the stump of her tree. The rusting blade of my sword was still embedded in it. I’d toppled her. But I had not severed her trunk completely. The ruin of her tree sprawled on the mossy hillside, in the swathe of sunlight that now broke through the canopy of the forest there.

But she was not dead. From the fallen trunk, a new young tree was rising. And near her stump, I’d encountered her ghostly form. My adversary was still as alive as I was and the hidden Speck self inside me loved her still.

As Tree Woman, she was an enemy to my people. She was frank in her hope that something I would do would turn back the tide of “intruders” and send the Gernians away forever from the forest and mountain world of the Specks. At her behest, Speck plague had been spread throughout Gernia and still continued to afflict my country. Thousands had sickened and died. The King’s great project, his road to the east, had come to a standstill. By all I had ever been taught, I should hate her as my enemy.

But I loved her. And I knew that I loved her with a fierce tenderness unlike anything I’d ever felt for any other woman. I had no conscious reason to feel that passion toward her, but feel it I did.

I toiled up the last steep stretch and reached the ridge. I hurried toward her, the anticipation of my hidden self rising with every step I took. But as I approached her stump, I halted, dismayed.

The stump of her tree had silvered and deadened. Even the unsevered piece that had bent with her falling trunk and kept the branches of it alive had gone gray and dull. I could not see her; I could not feel her. The young tree, a branch that had begun to grow upright after her trunk had fallen, still stood, but barely.

I waded through her fallen and dead branches to reach the supine trunk and the small tree that grew from it. When Tree Woman had crashed to the earth, her passing had torn a rent in the canopy overhead. Light poured down in straight yellow shafts, piercing the usual dimness of the forest and illuminating the small tree. When I fingered the little tree’s green leaves, they were flaccid and limp. A few leaves at the ends of the branches had begun to brown at the edges. The little tree was dying. I put my hands on her trunk. My two hands could just span its diameter. Once before, in a dream, I had touched this little tree and felt how it surged with her life and being. Now I felt only dry, sun-warmed bark under my hands.

“Lisana,” I prayed softly. I called her by her true name and held my breath waiting for some response. I felt nothing.

A wandering breeze ventured in through the hole in the forest’s roof. It stirred my hair and made pollen dance in the shaft of light where I stood.

“Lisana, please,” I begged. “What happened? Why is your tree dying?”

The answer came to me as clearly as if she had spoken. Last night, I’d been able to escape my cell because the roots of a tree had broken through the mortar and stones. As I’d climbed those roots to escape, I’d felt Lisana’s presence there. Had the roots of her tree grown all that way, from here to Gettys, and then torn down the walls to free me? It was impossible.

All magic was impossible.

And all magic had a price. Only a few days ago, Epiny had stood here by Lisana’s stump, and they had summoned me in a dream to join them. In hindsight, Lisana had been more ephemeral than usual. And more irritable. She’d been spiteful toward Epiny and merciless toward me. I tried to recall how her little tree had looked then. The leaves had been drooping, but not alarmingly so. It had been a hot day.

Even then, her roots must have been working their way, through clay and sand, rock and soil, to reach Gettys and the prison where I was held. Even then, she had been employing all the magic at her command and all her physical resources to reach me. I should have guessed that something of that sort was happening when I could barely perceive her in my cell. Why had she done it? Had the magic forced her to sacrifice her life to save mine? Or had that offering been her own?

I pressed my brow against the slender trunk. I could not feel her at all and suspected that the amount of life remaining in this little tree was not enough to sustain her being. She was gone, and it tormented me that I could remember we had shared a love but could recall no specific memory, no detail of how it had begun. I had dreamed of our trysts together, but like most dreams, I awoke grasping only bright fragments of memory. Such gossamer glimpses were too frail to survive harsh daylight. They did not feel like true memories to me, yet the emotions I felt were unequivocally mine. I closed my eyes and tried to will those memories to the forefront of my mind. I wanted at least to recall the love we had shared. It had cost her dearly.

In that focused contact, I felt a wisp of her being brush mine. She was feeble, a moon waning away to nothing. She gestured weakly at me, warning me back. Instead, I pressed closer. “Lisana? Is there no way I can help you? Without your intervention, I would have died.”

Her bark was rough against my forehead. I clasped the trunk of the small tree so tightly that it stung the palms of my hands. Abruptly, her image came more clearly to me. “Go away, Soldier’s Boy! While you can. I gave my being to this tree. It consumed me and became me. That does not mean I can control its appetite. All things desire to live, and my tree desires life fiercely. Get away!”

“Lisana, please, I—” And then a red pain pierced my palm and shot up into my wrist.

“Get back!” she shrieked at me, and with a sudden burst of strength, she pushed me away.

I did not fall. The tree already gripped me too strongly for that. My forehead ripped free of the questing rootlets that had penetrated my brow. Blood ran bright red before my opened eyes. I bellowed in terror and with inhuman strength pulled my hands free. Dangling rootlets, red with my blood, pulled from my palms as I jerked my hands back. The tendrils dripped and twitched after me like hungrily seeking worms. I staggered back from the tree. With the back of my sleeve, I wiped blood away from my brow and eyes and then stared in horror at my wounded hands. Blood trickled from half a dozen holes in my flesh and dripped from my palms. As the drops fell to the forest floor, the moss at my feet hummocked and quivered. Tiny tree roots wormed up from the soil and moss, squirming toward the red drops that glistened like red berries. I pressed my bleeding palms to my shirtfront and staggered backward.