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Blake and Sano listened intently to Lars as he related the adventure of the helicopter, showing only slight annoyance with Jason and Abe as they interrupted with what they thought were pertinent details. After Lars completed his tale, and Jason and Abe had exhausted their punctuations, Blake said, “I wish we knew who ‘they’ were.”

James Thurgerson said, “So do I.”

The party as one stared at James Thurgerson. Jason said, “But I thought you knew who your adversaries are.”

“Not a clue, not really,” said James. “I mean, I know some names and faces. I could take you to several commercial parks throughout North America, one in the suburbs of Minneapolis, for example, and show you where I went in some doors, but from there I was lowered underground, whisked through windowless corridors for absolute miles at speeds I could never quite calculate, where I would be escorted by badged guards into one of a series of receiving areas, depending on what they needed to do: implants, data mining, firmware updates, the usual.”

“The usual,” said Lars.

“There were a few people I saw more than once, but they had had plastic surgery to make their faces absolutely vanilla, you know.”

“Vanilla?”

“Perfectly proportioned, perfectly complected, utterly devoid of distinction. All of them were race-generic. Those people didn’t even wear badges. They also were implants, like me.”

“Well, anyway,” said Lars, gesturing to the pile of aluminum and copper, “we have the makings for ears now. All I have to do is…uh…make them.” He grunted as he got his feet beneath himself to stand. “Gettin’ old…” He looked at Sano. She did not acknowledge his gaze. He bundled up and went outside.

A few minutes later he returned, but when he returned, the bower did not acknowledge him. They heard his muffled voice calling from outside. “Hey, come on! This is not funny! It’s dark out!” After a pause, they heard him giggle. “It’s cold and there’s wolves after me!”

Abe spoke up: “The bower is angry with you, Lars.”

There was a moment of silence. Lars said, sheepishly, “Uh oh.”

“What did you do?!?”

“Well, look, I uh..” Lars began. “…I have made an egregious error. Tell the bower I’m very sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO?!?”

“I sawed down a sapling.”

The party stood still. The bower seemed to be growing closer. The fire definitely fluttered in a breeze, and the temperature suddenly dropped.

Abe puzzled, looking into the air ahead of him for any idea. He gritted his teeth, thinking. “What kind of sapling?”

“I believe it is a birch sapling, tall and straight. Tell them what it’s for.”

“Just shut up. Shut up,” said Abe. “This is a real problem. They’ve been providing for us for all our needs. This is actually bad.” The cold grew painful. The fire was extinguished by a directed puff of frigid air. The party shivered as one, pulling their puffy clothing close.

“Come on, Abe,” muttered Jason. “Fix this.”

“Ume, can you heal it?” Abe asked. Umezawa shook his head. “Dead, huh?” Umezawa nodded. Abe felt his breathing get shallower.

“Stay cool, Abe,” said Blake. “Just stay cool. Explain to them we’ll make it up to them somehow. How can we make it up to them?”

“Plant a birch tree in the spring?” James Thurgerson suggested.

The bower was squeezing tighter, and the trees were funneling cold air onto each member of the party individually.

“We’ll use the broken spruce!” Abe said to the bower. The trees of the bower shuddered, ceasing their encroachment. The cold air remained ducted upon the party in steady cold blasts. “What else?” Abe thought aloud. “Some sort of retribution, I should think.”

“Why the broken spruce?” Blake asked.

“To put his sacrifice to good use, remember?” Abe said. Blake nodded in recognition.

“Why are they so upset?” Sano asked.

“The sapling—cut down so young, and cut down thoughtlessly. I think if we’d have asked, they would have provided.” Abe turned his attention to the bower. “And Lars will sleep outside tonight.”

The bower shook, and there was a mighty creak, a cacophony of creaking, the sound of so many roots and branches coming unbound and tree trunks straightening themselves. The party was in a grove again, naked against the wind, with only some puffy layers between them and a merciless great dark mountain.

“Insufficient, I should say,” said James Thurgerson.

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“I command you!” Abe shouted. “I command you to re-form the bower!” He stomped his foot. “This is outrageous! We have shown nothing but utter concern for you, and constant gratitude, and one of our party made a thoughtless mistake! We will make recompense for your loss, but you must forgive! You are under my command to re-form the bower, and you shall, but I merely appeal to you to forgive us for Lars’s wrongdoing. He will sleep in the cold tonight, as a first compensation. This entire endeavor is in innocence, my dearest grove, and we need your mercy! We survived by magic, and as much as I can command your obedience, we here still need your kindness, despite our wrong. By the Great Elm, please!”

“Mighty big words, there,” said Lars, who was essentially face-to-face with the party now. But not for long! For the bower was re-forming! As great a cacophony of unwinding and untwisting as it was to discombobulate the bower, it was answered by an even greater symphony of twig and branch, frond and trunk, the soft percussion of knots aligning themselves as decoration for a great weaving around a great space, doing so as a rhythm for the humming resonance of stretching limbs and roots. Arising around them all was a massive citadel, and up from the ground came hallways and rooms, some furnished with living tables and sitting places, benches and backed chairs, others furnished with beds lined with the softest spruce needles covered by fine, and very rare, beech twigs as coverlets, enviable in their finery.

A birch tree leaned with an extended branch and lifted Sano off the ground. She squealed, but remained unafraid, while the men looked on with star-filled eyes. A luminescence was in the bocage of the leafy walls, not a bright light to work or read by, but enough that they could follow Sano as she was lofted to her private bower. She was laid in her own place upon a large bed whose coverlet had been decorated by rosehips, red as blood, and juniper berries, blue as the western sky at dawn. Jason look at Sano as she lay comfortable upon the bed, then he looked up and around at the new arrangements. He departed. Abe followed him.

There, in the place where they had kept the fire, which had been the narrow end of the egg, was now no longer a charred pit but a fireplace, not with brick or mud, but a wide place outlined, as it were, with a chimney above. Indeed, Jason knelt and found a living coal beneath a recently extinguished stick. He blew on it, and it leapt into flame, whereupon he fed it some kindling. In a matter of moments, a warm fire was making the citadel a home, and an improved ventilation system of leaf and bough brought warm air throughout the space. Returning to Sano’s bower, Abe and Jason found all the men surrounding her.

Lars was holding one of her boots, and James Thurgerson was holding the other. There was Sano, writhing to take off her stuffed overcoat because it was so instantly warm and close. No one said a word.

The same birch tree which had served as chambermaid to Sano suddenly became bouncer to Lars. With a merciless snap and whip, Lars was taken off his feet, bound entirely by the birch branch itself, and he was made to drop the boot, which a spruce branch caught before it hit the ground. That one took the other boot from James Thurgerson, who stood, gaping, and laid the pair of boots in order on the straw-covered ground at the foot of the bed.

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“Ouch!” said Lars, the first human sound the party had heard in a few minutes, and a little trickle of blood appeared at the top of his cheekbone just below his right eye.

“Careful,” Abe said, warning the bower. “Bear in mind he is not a tree himself. The same life in you and in us is expressed by different ends. Lars is truly sorry.”

The birch branch spun Lars, speeding him away from Sano’s bower, through the hallway, and out the open entryway. It whipped Lars around in mid-air, and the entryway closed before Lars hit the ground with another “Ouch!”

The birch branch, if it really could express in the way people do, returned to its place with a cold indignance.

From outside, they heard the muffled voice of Lars. “It looks like a thicket from out here. It’s even better-disguised than the smaller one!”

Sano was in their midst again, tying her boots. “He’ll freeze to death,” she said. “I’m going outside to keep him warm.”

Jason gave voice to the objection felt also by James Thurgerson and Abe, saying, “Oh, no you don’t!”

“I’ll go!” Abe said. “I’ll keep him warm.”

Sano objected in return. “Stop being such gentlemen. After all, we are still refugees in the wilderness of Idaho.”

“No,” said Abe. “I’m no gentleman. But I’ll say this: the bower has continually set you apart. In this magical world we’re in—”

“—technological,” James Thurgerson interjected.

“You know,” said Abe, annoyed, “in the olden days it was often believed that spontaneous telepathy and clairvoyance was magic, but here we are now.”

“Abe,” said Umezawa, “those aren’t in the realm of science.”

“Huh? Well, they will be,” Abe said. “As I was saying! The bower must know something about you to be keeping you…uh…keeping you…less wilderness.” Abe trailed off in his frayed argument.

“I think the bower is just being gentlemanly,” said James Thurgerson.

From outside, the muffled voice of Lars came through, “And there’s nothing wrong with gentlemanliness!”

“Seriously,” Abe said, reaching out to touch Sano’s hand. Jason interceded and held her hand instead.

“Yes,” said Jason. “Abe is right. We keep discovering our powers in slow succession. So far, we know that Abe, Ume, and I have actual discernible powers. Is it because we’re Japanese? Because we’re young? Because we’re boys…uh…men…males? The bower must know. Let the bower care for you.”

Sano relented. Her eyes reflected fire, not with an angry heat, but with a lively recognition of the basic forces of survival. “Okay,” she said. “I will remain in the bower. But I will remain alone. The door of my bower will be sealed behind me.” The men nodded. “And stop leaving trinkets at my feet!”

Abe looked at Jason’s eyes. He saw a little hurt. He looked at James Thurgerson’s eyes. The same hurt was in them. Both of them? Also Lars? I’ll ask him when we’re shivering together tonight. Abe drew a deep breath. He exhaled, saying, “Well, I volunteered, didn’t I? Let me have all the puffy clothes, then.”

They gathered their coats and shells and loaded them in Abe’s arms. He approached the entryway. The bower opened it to him, and he entered into the black cold. A gust of wind took his breath away. He shivered.

A few yards away, he saw light, firelight. Lars had wasted no time. With a long folding saw he was working away at a large fallen log.

“Saw,” Lars said through chattering teeth. “I always pack a folding saw. Huge advantages over a hatchet. Go tend the fire while I do this.”

Lars had created a fire in a sheltered place behind a boulder. Nearby were plenty of dead sticks and twigs. Within a few minutes, Abe had a decent fire going. He laid out some of the coats to make a boundary between their bodies and the ground while Lars dragged his logs over to the fire. He laid the longest and thickest one perpendicular to Abe, on the other side of the fire. Then he laid another log atop that first one. “This is the bed log,” he said about the first log. “I’m going to make a fire lay with it.” He arranged the second log so that the very end of it was stretched over the fire, supported by the lay log. It was pointing directly at Abe.

Lars made four more short trips, returning each time with another log, laying it atop the lay log so that its end was touching the second log. “So all five of these logs on top of this lay log—they touch at their ends, forming a kind of slow-burning furnace that throws its heat horizontal, see?”

Abe admitted that it was actually quite warm, even sitting ten feet away from the fire.

“But you can’t have the logs parallel to each other. They’ll catch on fire and burn up in an hour. So you lay them at angles to each other.”

“Oh, I see,” said Abe. “It’s not like a lean-to at all. It’s more like…a…uh…more like an arrow pointing at us.”

“Yes, exactly. Five logs laid on top of the lay log. The lay log will become a giant coal, and the five ends, there, pointing at us, those will be the fuel for the fire. We’ll have to get up in shifts to move those logs forward when they start burning down to stubs. Watch me when I do it the first time.”

They sat together, quite warm, in fact, feeling the thrown heat completely overwhelming the biting wind. After an hour of quiet contemplation, Lars demonstrated. The fuel logs now looked to be giant pencils, their ends perfectly sharp, but white hot. He shoved each of those logs forward to hover over the fire again, and rolled them so their points were touching, returning to a single point.

“Fascinating,” said Abe.

“Yeah, I learned that on YouTube,” said Lars. “We won’t have to move those again for a few hours.”

After another long quiet spell, Lars said, “Thanks, Abe, for coming out.”

“You’re welcome.”

“We’re going to need each other tonight. The fire is good, but it isn’t enough. I wasn’t sure how to keep warm without a shelter.”

“Well, Sano volunteered first, but we talked her into staying in.”

“She did?”

“She did.”

“Wow, what a gal.”

Abe kept silent. Lars spoke again. “Yeah, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am I cut down that sapling. I plumb forgot the situation, with magical trees and such.”

“It’ll all be okay in the end.”

“In the end,” Lars said, chuckling. “Ha!”

“Hey, Lars?” Abe said.

“Yeah, Abe?”

“Are you making little tchotchke things for Sano each night?”

“Huh? No!”

Okay, yes. Yes, you are.

And with that, they spent the night keeping each other warm, as comfortable as circumstances would allow. Nothing otherwise notable happened.

When morning broke with the rising of the sun, Abe approached the bower citadel with Lars at hand. “Well?” he said.

The bower opened the entryway, and Lars stepped through. A root snapped up and caused Lars to trip. He fell, and the bower seemed to chuckle, if a sudden rumble of creaking and snapping could be interpreted as chuckling. Lars and Abe certainly thought so.

Abe said to the bower, “Don’t be childish.”

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