“I’ve loved this tree?”
Artemus stepped from the tree. It was the same as when Aurora had stepped out of the rock back in Cabeswater. There was tree, and then man-and-tree, and then just man. Artemus held out his hands for the puzzle box, and she put it in them. He sank to the ground with the box in his lap, folding his long limbs around it, turning the dials slowly and looking at each side. Watching his long face and tired mouth and slumped shoulders, Blue was amazed by how differently Artemus and Gwenllian wore their age. Gwenllian had been made young and angry by six hundred years of marking time. Artemus looked defeated. She wondered if that was from the six hundred years in total, or only the past seventeen.
She simply said it: “You look tired.”
He peered up at her, small eyes bright in his long face, wrinkles deep-set around them. “I am tired.”
Blue sat down opposite him. She didn’t say anything at all as he continued testing the box. It was strange to be able to identify the origin of her hands in his hands, though his fingers were longer and knobbier.
“I am one of the tir e e’lintes,” Artemus said finally. “This is my language.”
He turned the dials on the unknown language side to spell tir e e’lintes. The translation shifted on the English side, which he showed to her.
“ ‘Tree-lights,’ ” she read. “Because you can hide in trees?”
“They are our …” He faltered. Then he turned the dials and showed her the box again. Skin-house.
“You live in trees?”
“In? With.” He considered. “I was a tree when Maura and the other two women pulled me out of it years ago.”
“I don’t understand,” Blue said, but kindly. She was not uncomfortable because of the truth of him. She was uncomfortable because the truth of him suggested a truth in her. “You were a tree, or you were in a tree?”
He looked at her, doleful, tired, strange, and then he spread his hand for her. With the fingers of his other hand, he traced the lines in his palm. “These remind me of my roots.” He took her hand and placed it flat on the skin of the beech. His long, knobby fingers entirely eclipsed her small hand. “My roots are yours, too. Do you miss your home?”
She closed her eyes. She could feel the familiar cool bark beneath her skin, and felt once again the comfort of being under its branches, on top of its roots, pressed to its trunk.
“You loved this tree,” Artemus said. “You already told me.”
She opened her eyes. She nodded.
“Sometimes we tir e e’lintes wear this,” he continued, dropping her hand so he could gesture to himself. Then he touched the tree again. “Sometimes we wear this.”
“I wish,” Blue said, then stopped. She didn’t have to finish the sentence anyway.
He nodded once. He said, “Here is how it began.”
He told the story just as a tree grows, beginning with a seed. Then he dug in fine roots to support it as the main trunk began to stretch upward.
“When Wales was young,” Artemus told Blue, “there were trees. It is no longer all trees, or it wasn’t when I left. At first, it was all right. There were more trees than there were tir e e’lintes. Some trees cannot hold a tir e e’lintes. You know these trees; even the dullest man knows these trees. They are —” He glanced around. His eyes found the weedy, fast-growing locusts on the other side of the fence and the decorative plum tree in a neighbour’s yard. “They do not have a soul of their own, and they aren’t built to hold anyone else’s.”
Blue ran her fingers over an exposed beech root next to her leg. Yes, she knew.
Artemus spread more roots for his story: “There were enough trees that could hold us in Wales. But as the years went by, Wales turned from a place of forests to a place of fires and ploughs and boats and houses; it became a place for all the things that trees could be except for alive.”
The roots were dug in; he began on the trunk. “The amae vias were failing. The tir e e’lintes can only exist in trees near them, but we feed the amae vias too. We are oce iteres. Like the sky, and the water. Mirrors.”
Despite the heat, Blue put her arms around herself, as chilled as she would have been by Noah’s presence.
Artemus looked wistfully at the beech tree, or at something past it, something older. “A forest of tir e e’lintes is something, indeed, mirrors pointed to mirrors pointed to mirrors, the amae vias churning up below us, dreams held between us.”
Blue asked, “What about one of them? What is one of them?”
He regarded his hands ruefully. “Tired.” He regarded hers. “Other.”
“And the demon?”
But this was skipping ahead. He shook his head, backed up.
“Owain was not like common men,” he said. “He could speak to the birds. He could speak to us. He wanted his country to be a wild place of magic, a place of dreams and songs, crossed by powerful amae vias. So we fought for him. We all lost everything. He lost everything.”