Longeye Read Free

kest soon rise."
    "Thank you. We all hope for her recovery."
    "No more'n I do," the elder Jack Wood said in a voice like the wind blowing through reeds. "Just her an' me left o' those who walked the hellroad. Stubbornest woman I ever known, that side er this, and I don't think we woulda won through, if not for the tongue in her head, and the wit that drove it."
    Meri turned to him. The elder Newman's aura was a complex weave of silvers and blues, as vivid and as dangerous as glass.
    "You crossed the keleigh ?"
    The old one laughed, his aura shimmering, and shook his head. "Some long seasons ago, that was! Eliza there was a babe in arms—slept through the whole passage, for all the sound she ever made. Sam, now, he was born this side, same as Gracie an' Thomas an'—"
    "And me!" Jamie piped up from Meri's side.
    "You!" Another laugh, warm and welcome as new bread. "Ain't no doubt regarding you , Sprout."
    "No doubt at all," Elizabeth said, with a calmness at odds with the brilliance of her aura. "But the Ranger hasn't come to hear our lineage. His concern is to hear what ails our good friends, the trees."
    "Aye, aye!" Jack Wood raised a hand gnarled and spotted like an old branch. "Mind you, now, it was Lucy give the trees our parole back when we first found this spot. And 'twas the trees sent young Palin along to have a look at us. I put myself forward as caretaker, for I'd been a woodsman, back there, and fancied I knew something of trees." He chuckled. "They soon learned me different, and Palin, too, after he brung Lucy back from swearing us to the good lady of Sea Fort."
    "So," Meri said carefully, into the silence that followed this declaration. "You have been caring for the trees. The Engenium—the good lady of Sea Fort—had given me to understand that your folk were . . . not tree-wise."
    "Nor are we," Jack Wood told him. "I'm no Ranger, young master—far from it! Oh, I'm canny enough to take off a sick limb, and to keep the burrowers away from new roots. But there's a need in the forest of late that I'm not understanding, a—" He moved his hand again, as if fingering the word from the passing breeze. "A— mistiness . My lore tells me the stand's old; and in the natural way of things some o' the elders'll be fallin', the same as with Lucy, and—soon enough—myself. This though—I'm thinking this is something different, something . . . not of root nor branch." He sighed and shook his head, sending Meri a rueful grin.
    "You'll see why we asked our good lady for a Ranger, eh? It goes far beyond me, and this one—" He jerked his head at Jamie.
    "The trees talk to me!" the boy said hotly and the old man chuckled.
    "Who said they didn't, eh? But are they speakin' of their affliction?"
    There was a pause. Jamie sighed, visibly wilting on the bench, and shook his tumbled head.
    "No."
    "Nor would they," Meri said briskly, "burden a sprout. We are all as children to the elder trees, and in truth there are those whose thought is strange, even to we who are Rangers." He looked again to Jack Wood. "Surely, though, the trees would speak to their own."
    The old man blinked. "Eh?"
    "The Ranger means Palin, I think," Elizabeth Moore said from her comfortable recline on the grass, and gave Meri another of her smiles. "Palin wanders," she said softly. "He does errands, for the trees, for the Engenium at Sea Hold, for us, for other Wood Wise—for the Hobs, too, when they ask him. He belongs to the trees, certain enough, Master Vanglelauf, but less to these trees than we do." She moved her shoulders in an easy shrug. "We had thought perhaps someone who was tied to the Engenium's lands, as we are . . ."
    "Which I am not," Meri said softly.
    "But the trees like you!" Jamie said exuberantly. "They're pleased you've come!"
    "And so I am pleased to have come," Meri said firmly. He looked, first to Elizabeth Moore, then to Jack Wood.
    "I will undertake to identify the problem," he said slowly. "You understand that this will