Диана Дуэйн - How Lovely Are Thy Branches

In the living room, Nita paused briefly, glancing around. The place looked tidy enough, so she didn’t have to worry about bringing anybody over if for some reason they needed to see something of hers. Fine, she thought. She headed into the kitchen, noted a few dishes in the sink, and stopped just long enough to wash the and put them in the rack. Then she grabbed her parka off the hook by the back door, threw it over the crazy Christmas sweater, and carefully headed out the back door, down the steps, and through the gate into the back yard.

The snow was deeper out here; she had to step carefully to keep the boots from getting wet. Nita looked around and saw that the silvery snow light was already getting a bit dimmer. Above that gray ceiling, sunset was already coming on. She paused by the tree growing out of the middle of the yard between house and the garden, and put a hand on its trunk. “You awake?” she said.

Liused’s answer took a few moments in coming. A little.

“Got a guest incoming,” she said. “Want to talk to him? Or if this is a bad time, he can stop by earlier tomorrow, when the light’s better.”

…Tomorrow might be best. In the morning?

Nita patted his trunk. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll talk to you then.”

She headed on down the garden—all the flower beds covered over with mulch or burlap bags this time of year, and those in turn covered with the new snow—and finally under the bare trees in the furthest part of the back yard, where the surface of the snow was patched and dappled with little lumps of it that had slid off the branches above. The stillness was very deep back here, and Nita just stood there a while, not caring how cold her feet were getting, and appreciated it.

Around her she thought she could almost see the sky’s light dimming moment by moment. Bobo, what time’s sunset?

Four thirty-one.

“I might not be imagining it, then,” she murmured. And then at the bottom of her vision, she caught sight of something unexpected: a glow under the snow, a sign of the embedded transit circle waking up. He’s early, she thought, stepping back.

A moment later a cold cinnamon-scented breeze blew in her face, and Filif was standing there, as suddenly as if a tree with its lowest branches demurely veiled in mist had suddenly grown on the spot.

He looked at Nita with all the berries on that side, while using the others to gaze up and around him. “Dai stiho, my cousin!”

“Dai, you,” Nita said, and stepped into the transit circle as soon as it had finished discharging, and buried her arms in among the fronds to give him a big hug.

It was at that moment that a light breeze sprang up. Nita felt the sparkle of breezeblown snowflakes on her cheek just a bare second before one of the trees above them let slip some loose snow on top of them.

They both laughed at that, and Nita reached up to brush Filif off a little. “I was early…” Filif said.

“I don’t care,” Nita said. “It’s so great to see you! This is going to be so much fun.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Over at his place helping keep his folks calm. This is their first time to have a bunch of non-Solars over…”

“And they’re so kind to have me! I can’t wait for this.” He shivered with excitement.

At least Nita hoped it was excitement. “You know, I’ve never even asked you. Does it snow where you are? Do you even get winter?”

“What? Of course it snows,” Filif said. “Demisiv has a fairly pronounced axial tilt. And a lot of highlands. The climate’s temperate most of the year, but in the depths of the cold season we get quite big storms, sometimes. Normally no one’s too bothered. In the dark season a lot of people elect to go dormant and just wait it out. Others… stay more active, like to get around then.” He fell silent for a moment. “A long story.”

“But you’re okay with this?”

“Yes, of course.” He ruffled out his branches. “This feels quite homelike, actually. The temperature range isn’t far off.”

Nita paused. “This is possibly the most idiotic time possible to be asking you this,” she said. “But… are you okay with all this? Because you understand about the normal Earth Christmas trees now, don’t you. And where they come from. And what happens to them.”

Filif paused too. “Life is life,” he said. “But I did do my research before I came. Those lives have been brought about just for this purpose, haven’t they?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, I can feel that. So can they.” Filif rustled his branches as a little more snow fell on him from the branches above. “That being the case, we should allow them all the dignity of accepting what they’ve been destined for. And of knowing that they’re making the best of it: in some cases, not just with acceptance, but great joy.”

Nita nodded. “It seems a lot to ask of them…” Nita said.

“It’s not what you’re asking,” Filif said. “It’s what they’re giving. Gift is a powerful state from which to approach the world…”

Again there was that sense of what Filif was saying having come up from some great depth. But even when he was at his goofiest and most excitable, Nita had never had trouble feeling, at a slight remove, the underlying strength from which sprang everything Filif did and said, and in which he was powerfully grounded. When that power revealed itself in the middle of a wizardry, sometimes it took you by surprise. Nita wasn’t going to push the issue at the moment; if Fil had something that needed saying, explanations would be forthcoming soon enough.

“Anyway,” Filif said, “ you should relax. I’m not a newbie here these days: you don’t have to hide the salad bar from me any more.”

Nita burst out laughing. “Good!”

“And after all this time, I’m finally here to get decorated. So let’s get on with it!”

“Right,” Nita said. “Sker’ret’s put a receptor site out in Kit’s back yard to make transiting in easier for people.”

“Shielded, I take it, so as not to discomfit the neighbors…”

“Absolutely.” Nita walked them both back a step or two into the center of the transit circle. “You set?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go!”

***

A heartbeat later, the two of them came out in Kit’s backyard. “It’s going to be a zoo in there,” Nita said. “Carmela’s mama decided all of a sudden that she was not going to let her daughter mess around with her best tableware. She was going to set up the buffet herself.”

“If I didn’t know better,” Filif said, “I would suspect Carmela planned it that way in order to get her mother to do the heavy lifting.”

Nita snickered as she reached down to her charm bracelet for the empty-ring charm that held the simplest of several invisibility spells. “You know her too well,” she said as she pulled the bright Speech-tracery of the spell out of the charm, expanded it into a broad faintly-glowing network, and threw it over the top of the two of them. “Not that there’s all that much to do. Sker’ret had Crossings Catering transit the food in about an hour ago. It’s all in disposable serving trays and bins and things…”

They headed up across the snow-covered lawn of Kit’s back hard toward the house. “There’s no rush about installing the puptents,” Nita said. “Sker’s put in a hub to make the installation easier. Just plug your wizardry in, and the hub’ll do the rest.”

“He seems to have thought of everything,” Filif said.

“Happiest when he’s organizing,” Nita said, “that’s our Sker’.”

They went in the back door, through the kitchen. There were four or five pots on the stove, from which wonderful smells were arising: mulled wine, hot chocolate, hot cider. Christmas music was floating out of the living room: as a song finished and Nita heard a veejay’s voice, she realized that the TV had one of the big music video channels on. “You are going to hear every Christmas carol ever written before this is over,” she said to Filif, flipping the invisibility spell off them and collapsing it again.