“How’s the writing?” Tara asks.
“I can’t seem to stop,” I confess. “There’s just so much.”
“I don’t doubt it. The memoirs of one person can fill a book. You’ve got several dozen.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” I say. “It covers the same span of time as a single individual. But I hadn’t realized how much has happened. There’s so much more to go.” Without being asked, I help Tara to undo her pendant. Of course, she could have a servant do it, but why waste an opportunity to touch the back of her neck? “Can I ask you something? Two questions, actually.”
“Of course. You don’t have to be so formal, Patrick.”
“The first question is about that fertility rite the night before our marriage.”
“Fertility rite?”
“Yes, where the ballet dancer comes out of a cake and sits on the groom’s lap. I was wondering why the bride didn’t do it. Wouldn’t it make more sense?”
Tara is pressing her lips together in that way she does when she’s trying not to make me feel like I’m an idiot by laughing in my face. “Do you remember Tarlach’s explanation of human sexuality? It’s a fertility ritual for the groom, not the bride. It’s a chance for the groom to increase genetic diversity before a period of enforced fidelity to a particular partner.”
I’m aghast. “You mean I was expected to impregnate that girl?”
“Not exactly. Close enough, I suppose.”
“Do married couples ever do this Canadian Ballet, or is it strictly ceremonial?”
“Oh my god, where did you hear that term?” She’s given up; she’s really giggling. “It’s archaic. I think it’s from Chaucer. It sounds Chaucerian, at least.”
“I couldn’t find it in any of the dance references.”
“Try the erotica database.”
“Why is this so funny?”
“I just remembered something else. Do you remember the first night we slept together?”
“Is that a real question?”
“Do you remember at dawn when I said, “I love to wake up to morning wood”?
“Yes! I was terrified. I was certain that you knew the truth about me. But you seemed so casual, I started to wonder if I misheard, or maybe you were referring to something else. A scent perhaps, or a type of tea.”
Now she’s laughing hard. “Oh, Ash. You looked so mortified, I thought I’d offended your delicate sensibilities and dropped it. I had no idea why you were so upset.”
“What did it mean?”
“Morning wood is slang for men who wake up with an erection. I was hoping to have another go at you.”
“Oh. Not only do I feel stupid, but singularly unlucky.”
“I suppose I’ll owe you one tomorrow morning then. What was your second question?”
“My what?” I’m thinking about tomorrow morning. It’s made me lose focus.
“For your book.”
“Oh. I was going to ask you what you think the most important part of our story is. From your perspective.”
“That’s easy. When I finally figured out the truth about you.”
“That’s not easy. I wasn’t there.”
“I’ve told you about it often enough.”
“I’m going to have to be imaginative, though, and I lack imagination.”
“You must be kidding. The creator of the firebird and “The Apotheosis of Daphne” lacks imagination? How many hit singles have the Jacks written?”
“I didn’t do those things, though.”
“But you’re writing.”
“Ailann kind of gave up on it.”
“Ailann gives up on a lot.”
“Why are you so hard on him?”
“Because I can be. I could never be that hard on any of the others.”
“Not even Cillian?”
“Especially not Cillian.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Cillian needs so much love. He makes a show of strength because he’s so vulnerable.”
“Then who do you think is the strongest?”
“Jamey.”
“Jamey?!?”
“Jamey can take about anything. And don’t forget the reason I gave Jamey that knighthood – he protected me during that skirmish at Albion Port-of-Call. But Jamey has enough to bear without the weight of my expectations.”
“What about Tarlach?”
“Tarlach wants people to like him. So does Blackjack. It’s funny – Jack used to be like that, but now, I don’t think he cares. I think that neediness all came down on BJ’s side.”
“Driscoll?”
“Completely insecure. Desperate for love.”
“Well, we’re all desperate for your love.”
“Some of you wear it better than others. Like Sloane. When I need to feel protected, I want Sloane. But I owe him too much to make demands. And so it’s Ailann. I expect him to make it right, to always be a little better than he is.”
“And how about me? What do you expect of me?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. Ash, you don’t play fair.”
“I can’t. The stakes are too high.”
“When will you realize that you’ve already won?”
“When did this happen?”
“Over three decades ago, when I wrote a letter to the Atlas Tree. You’ve just taken quite some time to claim your prize.”
She wants us to take her for granted, says Ailann. We just can’t do that.
No, that isn’t quite it, says Tarlach. But I’m not sure what is.
She wants me to write her part of the story, I say. I don’t know how. But if she wants it, I have to try.
For the first time in years, Tara has opened the curtain that hangs across the great picture window. It still hurts like hell to think of Daniel. But she owes that tree – the whole planet owes that tree. She won’t allow it to die alone. “My destiny,” she says. “My tree.”
If the Atlas Tree dies, she’ll be the one alone. But if the Atlas Tree dies, she can’t see a future anymore. It’s all gone to hell anyway; refugees fleeing in the wake of Guinnebar’s army, the reports of torture and the burning of forests. The people are divided. They’re in shock. Although it’s surprising how many accepted the Great Reveal without question. The ones whose eyes replied silently that they had always known the spirits were real. The old aristocratic families, the farmers, and the crafters, they knew the truth in their bones and blood. The truth was in their bones and blood. They loved the nau’gsh wine, the drumming in the woods. They never ate nuts nor drank coffee. When tragedy struck, they prayed to the trees.
It’s the recent immigrants, the Skarsians who had come here for the weather, who are panicked. It’s they who are following Guinnebar now to “eradicate the nau’gsh menace.” Did they somehow miss the insect-angel who came out of the Atlas Tree to save their fucking skins? Did they miss how gravely he was injured for their sakes? Maybe they’d prefer being CenGov citizens. Maybe they’d like to shave their heads and be assigned mandatory work.
Tara wishes there was someone she could talk to. There’s Lady Madonna, who is sweet, but incapable of understanding the nuances of anything. Sometimes Lady Madonna reminds her of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights. Tara hates that novel. She thinks Cathy is the stupidest character ever written.
There’s Lord Danak and the Vizier, whom she trusts in the worldly sphere but could never confide in. There’s Clive. She could never talk to Clive.
There’s Tommy, who stopped answering her calls. It’s been over a month since she last spoke to him. It’s unlike him, and she’s starting to worry.
There’s Patrick, but she sent him away.
Suddenly there is an enormous noise, like the snapping of rock. Tara dives for the floor, grabbing the gun from the secret compartment in her desk as she rolls.
It’s a false alarm. The workmen outside, reconstructing her ruined garden, have dropped something. It’s not another bomb.
But when she sees what they have dropped, she flies into a rage. She’s quite a sight, with the gun still in her hand. The poor workmen must lose years off their lives.
They have dropped the effigy of Sloane Redmond, and now it’s cracked open. For a moment, Tara is too busy screaming at them to notice. Then she notices. It’s empty. Her hot rage turns to cold fury.
“What did you do with it?”
The men look at each other uncertainly. “With what, Highness?” one ventures timidly.
“The body. The body. The fucking corpse of Sloane Lord Redmond!”
“B-but that’s how it was. It was empty.”
“It can’t be empty. I buried him myself!”
She calls for her police. A forensic expert examines the site. There’s no evidence of vandalism, or any damage before the bombing, nor any damage to the sarcophagus before it was dropped. It was sealed. There’s nothing inside of it. Not a hair, a fingernail clipping. Not a fleck of skin.
“There are no such things as vampires,” says Tara. “Corpses do not just rise up from their graves and walk away.”
Except that this is Dolparessa. On Dolparessa, they do. They do if they’re…
Tara wheels and marches up the stairs, briskly and silently. She can’t let them see her flushed face. She places her hand upon her chest, trying to control her breathing. What if Sloane Slone is a what if Sloane…
“I need to talk to someone,” says Tara, to no one.
Jack? Where the hell is Jack? He’s always travelling, and then shows up when you least expect it.
“Cuinn,” she says. She relaxes. Cuinn is perfect. He’s sympathetic, he’s kind, he’s got a thing for her. He’s also brilliant and logical. He’d listen sympathetically, and give her a straight and informed opinion, and tell it to her gently. And probably make her laugh.
She thinks of his smile and his hands and his eyes. She thinks of the day she told him, “When I’m ready, you’re first in line.”
She’s ready.
She’d been too wrapped up in politics to even think about her side business. So when she goes to the RR-2 factory, she’s surprised to find out that the labs aren’t there anymore. “It was one of the first targets,” says the production director. “I think CenGov suspected how the lab was being used…”
“Cuinn Cleary,” she says. “Where’s…”
The director is silent, but she reads the look on his face. “No!” she screams at him. “He wasn’t in there! Tell me you’re certain he was there.”
“Absolutely certain? No, but with Guinnebar on the march, we’ve been more concerned with an evacuation plan than sorting out casualties from the last attack. But no one has seen him in weeks.”
“In times like these, that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he went home to help his family. Where are his records? I want to know where he lived, next of kin, anything. I’m going to find him.”
The director shrugs. It is best not to argue with a hysterical, grief-stricken woman. It is best not to argue with a hysterical, grief-stricken woman when she is your employer. It is best not to argue with a hysterical, grief-stricken woman when she is your employer and your empress. It is best not to argue with a hysterical, grief-stricken woman when she is your employer and your empress and has a black belt in Skarsian dovoric’rhi and is packing a Glock Photon X95-B.
Tara goes alone to his apartment. He’ll be there. He’s not another Sloane. He’s not.
It is small and barren. He didn’t seem to keep a lot of possessions. His touchpad, a few specialized scanners, a holoplatform.
A frame displaying the image they had taken together on the midway.
Her lower lip trembles. She goes into his bedroom. The bed is perfectly made, and looks like it hadn’t been slept in for a while. There is a lamp, and a shelf with one book on it.
How peculiar. Almost no one bothered to keep books; those that did were fanatics.
She plucks the book off the shelf. It’s The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. A fine, antiquarian edition. Much like the one that she…
She opens the cover. It is inscribed: “For Sloane, whose wooden exterior conceals the heart of a poet.”
She sits on the bed, her hands shaking so hard that she can barely hold the heavy book.
There’s an envelope sticking out, being used as a bookmarker. She flips the book open and notes that there’s something in the envelope. A letter. A tanzaku.
It says: “I wish you were a man, so that I could marry you.”
She runs her shaking hands through her hair. Then she dials up the AI at RR-2, hoping it wasn’t obliterated in the bombing.
She’s in luck. It’s expensive hardware, and damn well-shielded. “I need you to examine a hypothesis for me,” she says. “Cuinn Cleary is the Atlas Tree.”
There is a pause. “It is entirely possible. I have verifiable data proving that Cuinn Cleary is Cu’enashti nau’gsh.”
“What? What data? Why didn’t you inform me?”
“I formulated a hypothesis when I noticed that Cleary was absorbing new information at a rate impossible for humans. My initial supposition was that he was an android, but I ran medical scans which showed his body to be entirely human. The medical scan also eliminated the second most likely possibility: he was illegally chipped. There was only one other logical supposition, and I confronted him with it. He admitted the truth, but asked me to keep that information confidential. I told him that since my primary function was to provide and interpret data, if asked directly, I would supply the information. I also said I would have no reason to share the information were it not specifically requested.”
“What impeccable reasoning.”
“I believed so. However, I am abashed that I did not consider the possibility that Cleary could be the Atlas Tree. Since I already knew the identity of the Atlas Tree, that data interfered with the obvious conclusion that a multi-trunked tree must have multiple personas. In short, just because I knew one identity, it didn’t preclude…”
“What the hell are you talking about? You know the identity of the Atlas Tree?”
“Please observe some data I obtained from the security terminal at Dalgherdia science station.”
An image forms on her pad. “What is this, some kind of securecam feed? Wait, that’s Mickey Riley. He saved my life once…”
“The security terminal processes thousands of hours of recorded data from all over the Domha’vei. I routinely scan the pre-classified feed to delete any data which might be used by CenGov to accuse RR-2 of contraband trafficking. I found this.”
“I knew there had to be a leak,” Johannon says. “Every move we made, Prince Patrick knew in advance. Someone here is working for Skarsian Secret Ops.”
General Panic shrugs. “Maybe it’s you,” she says.
“Me? I would never…”
“A dumb, pretty blond is the oldest trick in the book,” she replies. “Isn’t that right, Mickey?”
Suddenly she spins and fires. The impact from the shot is enough to knock Mickey back against the wall, spattering the room with the remains of his exploded heart.
“Looks like you got me,” Mickey gasps, smiling his beautiful smile. “But I’ve got one more surprise for you.”
General Panic jumps back against her desk, startled, dropping her suddenly red-hot pistol. Her fingernails dig into the wood as her eyes and mouth form three perfect circles. Mickey’s skin has turned to blue fire, and as the husk of his human body dissolves, he blossoms into a flower that is a moth that is an angel.
Tara watches, stunned, as she witnesses the mothman using his alchemy to reduce the science station to chaos. “The energy signature of that being is the same as the apparition over Dolparessa the day the CenGov Fleet was defeated,” says the AI.
“It’s Mickey. Mickey’s the mothman. But you’re saying that Cuinn is too? And how about…”
She snaps off communication. “I’ve got to think,” she murmurs to herself, flopping back on the bed.
She doesn’t think. She falls asleep, exhausted by emotion. She dreams of a happier time. It is a beautiful Dolparessan day, and the sun shines through the picture window at Court Emmere. Lady Madonna brings Lemonzaid; the wind blows her hair gently in the direction of Starbright Mountain, where her tree is a silhouette against the sky.
She turns back to Evan. “Sing a song for me, cousin. Sing the one you sang when my heart was so low.”
“I’ll sing the other verse,” says Evan.
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Tara wakes up. The book has fallen loose from her hand. It has opened to the page where the envelope was inserted, to a poem called “The Two Trees.”
“It’s a coincidence,” she says. “I must’ve remembered that poem from when I read it, that’s how it was in my dream.” Except that the second verse is exactly the song that Evan sang that time at Court Emmere: “Gaze no more in the bitter glass.”
“Evan was, Evan, no that can’t be. I’m getting paranoid. Sloane and Evan and Mickey and Cuinn…”
The Atlas Tree has nine major branches.
She goes back to the palace, clutching the edition of Yeats. “I have to know the truth. But I can’t see the truth,” she rages. And she knows what Wyrd Elma would say: “There’s a use for Gyre.”
“No,” says Tara. “I can’t. Not now. I can’t afford to get lost in dreams now. It would be so easy…”
So easy to dream that Sloane and Mickey and Cuinn were still alive, that they were the same man, and Evan also, that they were her tree, that they had always been there to protect her, to watch her, that she was never alone.
“Gyre never lies,” said Wyrd Elma, but Gyre had lied to Tara. Or had it?
She has what it takes to synthesize it, including some white apples she has kept in cryo for research purposes. She tells Lady Madonna she’s retiring early and locks her chambers behind her. Then she begins the process. It’s been years, but it all comes back so easily.
The last thing is to extract the nau’gshtamine from the apple and combine it with the binder. She goes to her storage unit. She sees the white apple, but her eye falls on something else. A blue apple.
Blue apples are poison. She knows that.
The poison in every blue apple is different. This is a blue apple from the Atlas Tree. She never did get one the day she went up there with Edom St. John. But on a whim, she went back after the Nau’gsh Festival. Oddly, only the enormous central trunk had been heavy with fruit.
She takes the blue apple and puts it in the extractor. “This is either the best idea I’ve ever had, or the worst. Or the last,” she says, mixing the witches’ brew.
She puts a drop on her tongue and waits.
She braces for the familiar rush of ecstasy, but it doesn’t happen.
She waits for something all sorts of unpleasant, but it doesn’t happen.
She sits down at the old piano. She can see through the great picture window, see the Atlas Tree in the distance. Her fingers find the keys. As a child, she just made noise; it wasn’t until Evan taught her that she could actually make something like a melody. She had always loved music, though, even the stupid karaoke on Volparnu. Now she plays a song she half-remembers from childhood, a fragmented melody that is always in her dreams. She can’t play all that well. It sounds better than it should.
That’s because someone is singing. She didn’t know that song had words. She looks up to see that mute boy from the refugee camp at Albion Port-of-Call, the one she promised to knight. He looks a little strange. A little blue. He has beautiful eyes. “Hello, Sir James,” she says.
She closes her eyes and the song becomes a kind of vibration, a pattern of twisting roots and stems, of bursting buds and flowers. The trees are singing. Such a beautiful harmony. Such a beautiful harmony made between Jamey and Evan and Sloane and Mickey and Cuinn.
And as the song crescendos, the flowers on the tree open, and the greatest flower of all unfurls into an orchid that is a moth that is an angel, a faceless angel except it has Jamey’s face that melts into Cuinn’s face that melts into Patrick’s face that melts into Tommy’s face. It’s Mickey now, and it’s holding out something as its long hair billows behind it, it’s Whirljack’s hair, Whirljack’s face, and Evan extends his hand, Sloane is holding it, is handing it to her.
The mothman is gone now, and there is only a boy holding a flower. Daniel.
“Oh my god,” she sobs, tears loosed for the first time since she lost him. “How could I not have known?”