“Welp,” Cassie said, approaching the blackberry bramble, “Tyler’s uppance has well and truly come.”

There was no answer except for a slight breeze, but Cassie was still buoyed by the dark glow of schadenfreude. She picked her way carefully through the low thorny shrubs and crouched into the center of the trellis. There was only enough room for her to sit straddling the gnome, knees around its head, and the trellis was still open to the sky, but the tiny patch of ground on which she sat was dry and clear. She eased her pack into her hands and pulled out her sketchpad, then rested it on the gnome’s hat to draw as she talked.

“He still doesn’t have his big ol’ dick-swinging car back from the ‘shop’—I think it must have been leased, and he had to give it up. Pretty sure the beater he’s driving now is a hand-me-down from his father-in-law. I mean, it’s about ten times nicer than my car, but I bet it just eats at him.”

The outline of a tree began to form under her pencil; she was drawing the view of the clearing she could see through the leaves. “I do hope his wife and kids will be okay without the house sale money. It’s not their fault their dad is a prick whose tastes exceed his finances. Matt thinks it’s not dire, no gambling debts to a loan shark threatening to break his knees or anything, just… he was expecting some big promotion and didn’t get it. Due to the aforementioned prickishness. His wife might make him sleep on the couch for a few days, though,” Cassie added hopefully, as she sketched the outlines of the distant hills.

She lapsed into silence for a while as she continued her drawing. She wasn’t as good at landscapes, but it was good practice. A leaf brushed at the back of her neck; she leaned into it as she shaded a tree trunk.

“I have to go away for a while,” Cassie said, when the shadows grew too deep to draw well and she couldn’t put the words off any longer. “My fieldwork starts next week, and I’ll be gone for a few months. Matt asked if he should come check on you, but we decided to just let you… rest. Recuperate. But I will be back. I promise. I won’t forget.” Cassie tore her sketch free and tucked it between two close canes, then leaned forward and pressed her mouth to a leaf. “I promise.”

She winced with the effort of crawling back out, joints stiff, and tried her best not to crush anything as she tottered her way out into the dusk. She didn’t see that the leaf that had touched her neck had grown in the shape of a heart.

⥈

The maples were vibrant with gold and orange, and Rubus still had not returned.

Cassie stood in the clearing, tears leaving tracks of dirt and salt on her cheeks, and looked sightlessly at the bramble. She hadn’t even stopped at Mom’s new apartment yet; weeks of grime, barely tamed via a series of hasty sponge-baths, coated her neck and highlighted the lines of despair crinkled in her brow. The bramble was taller than ever, with a healthy, glossy green on every leaf.

Where, then, was the dryad?

Cassie couldn’t bear to stay longer than the time it took to tuck a series of series of sketches she’d made in the field under the base of the gnome: serviceberries (Amelanchier alnifolia) and salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis)--not the fruit, of course, nor the flowers, not at this time of year, but the leaves and stems. She nearly twisted her ankle again on the way back to the car, blinded by tears.

Recriminations plagued her endlessly; through the drive, and dinner at the new apartment, and the long shower that followed, and on into a night on the pull-out couch that should have been a luxury after weeks in the sleeping bag but instead was spent staring at the blinking blue-edged shadows from the router light on the ceiling. She should have had Rubus re-root himself progressively further and further off the property and into the parkland while she stalled the hardscapers. She should have canceled the new fence build entirely. She should have told Mom the truth, and Tyler too, and presented Rubus as proof. She would have found a way to convince them somehow, with Matt to back her up, not to mention the dryad himself. Or at least just Mom, since Tyler might’ve gone in some godawful destructive—or exploitative—direction with that. Though Mom couldn’t keep a secret for shit; Cassie had visions of the entire church congregation crowding into the backyard, gawking and praying and trampling the zucchini. Only a matter of time until one of them set it on fire, taking the house and neighborhood with it. But still—surely, there was something she could have done. Something other than what she had done.

She returned the next day, but was too agitated to hold still. Instead of going in, she paced around the border of the bramble patch, reaching out to brush her fingers against a leaf every so often and talking about whatever came to mind: Mom’s new apartment. The plants growing on Dad’s grave. Tyler’s imminent twins. Matt’s latest date. The next step in her research.

“It may start snowing eventually, at some of my potential sample sites,” Cassie said. She stepped carefully over a rut to keep from rolling her ankle. “Most of the sites should be too low-altitude or water-adjacent to get much real snow, but the ice and slush might make it a bit miserable. I’m going to try and hit those up first and then retreat to the warmer areas after.” She paused to pull her hair out of her face, then resumed her pacing. “I should stock up on those water-reheatable handwarmers.” She hated how inane she sounded. What even was the point? Who was she talking to?

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“I’ll be away again for a while. You should be all right; it won’t get any colder here than it did back at the house. Just… let me know if you need anything.” She couldn’t possibly have said anything more stupid, so she took a deep breath, cracked her knuckles, and turned away. “See you soon.”

The paper airplane crafted from her serviceberry sketch sat, unseen and forlorn, at the feet of the gnome.

⥈

Cassie was halfway to her next sample site when it began to snow.

It wasn’t much, fortunately; just a light dusting. It melted as soon as it touched the ground. She tugged her hat down over her ears and resettled her rucksack, gazing across the valley towards her destination. It looked like it wasn’t snowing there, fortunately; only up here, on the crest of a ridge, at an elevation too high to be attractive to her target subjects. Just a couple more hours and she should be there.

A grove of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) spread across the descending slope, round golden leaves half-fallen to the ground below. The deer track Cassie was following threaded through the dense stand of trees, pale and identical. She paused and turned in a slow appreciative circle. This was a clone-grove, each tree a shoot from the same root system. She was standing within a single organism. Any one tree might only be a few years old, but the aggregate plant might have lived for centuries. Millenia, even. There was a clone-grove in Utah estimated to be eighty thousand years old. Like all sufficiently remarkable plants, it–he, actually since it was a hundred-acre stand of male aspen–had a name: Pando, Latin for I spread. Pando the Quaking Giant. One of the greats, alongside the ancient bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) Prometheus and Methuselah, the gargantuan Bennett and Scofield junipers (Juniperus grandis), the towering coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) Hyperion, Helios, and Icarus.

I have a name.

Cassie shivered. The snow flurry had ceased, but the wind had picked up, inducing the eponymous quake among the leaves that remained on the branches. The rush of a billion beatnik mice snapping their applause filled her ears. She slid her hat off to hear it better, even though her ears ached with cold.

She was being watched.

Cassie turned in another slow circle, peering intently into the grove. Other than the scintillating leaves, nothing moved. No birds, no creatures in the underbrush. She was totally alone—but the sensation persisted. She had felt it before. Either she was being watched or she was losing her mind.

Cassie cleared her throat, then called softly: “Hello?”

There was no answer, but the wind died down. In the stillness that followed, Cassie felt like she could hear her own heartbeat.

“My name is Cassandra Nicole Harris. I am a botanist—a scientist who studies plants.” She gazed vaguely into the middle distance, towards what she guessed was the center of the stand. “Are you the dryad of this aspen grove?”

Silence. The crunch of Cassie’s feet on the fallen leaves as she shifted her weight was deafening.

“I don’t know if I am the first human you have seen,” Cassie said, “but you are not the first dryad I have seen. I know another; Rubus armeniacus, a blackberry.” Cassie swallowed. “We are lovers.”

A slight wind stirred the leaves, then stilled again. Coincidence? Or an intake of breath in surprise?

“He was going to be destroyed,” Cassie continued, “dug up and poisoned like a weed. So we transplanted him, my brother and I. Months ago now. The bramble looks healthy, but his person—” Cassie’s voice hitched. “He has not returned.”

Another rustle of leaves. Sympathy? Horror? An inanimate shift of air pressure that indicated nothing beyond Cassie’s own desperation?

“I don’t know what to do. He has water, he has sun. The soil is good, and the weather is mild. He has a trellis, and his vines are growing on it. I talk to him, I bring him snacks and pictures, but he hasn’t come back. I don’t know what else to do. Can you help me?”

More silence.

“Please…” Tears abruptly spilled from Cassie’s eyes, but she forced herself not to crumple. “Please. Help me. Tell me what to do.”

They had tried to do so much for Dad. None of it had worked, but they had tried. Tried until it became clear that trying was worse than dying. And even then, dying took a long time. Longer than expected. He had the right to end it sooner, but they all knew that would break Mom’s heart, so he hadn't even considered it. Closed his eyes and looked away, half a head-shake, when Cassie had asked. But this wasn't the same.

“Please,” she begged, voice a strangled whisper. “I love him.”

Cassie stood there a long time, tears cooling on her cheeks, listening to the breeze come and go. A bird twittered somewhere in the grove. Finally, when she could bear the ache in her ears no longer, Cassie moved. She put her hat back on and crunched away on numb feet, feeling insane. Out here talking at trees in the snow. She felt her face begin to flush. Even if there were any dryads in the vicinity, how and why would they understand any human languages, let alone English? And even if they did, how could they possibly know what intervention Rubus required? If some stranger ran up to her on the street begging for medical assistance for their boyfriend hundreds of miles away, she wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to help.

She did love him. Only love could make her this stupid.

Cassie fixated on that as she stumped along, chanting silently to herself as she went: stupid love, stupid love, stupid love. Thank god nobody was here to see how red she was. She emerged from the grove and kept plodding grimly on as the wind picked up again, without looking back, until the deer track turned back on itself at the crest of another small rise and something caught her eye.

Cassie looked up. At the edge of the grove stood a figure, tall and pale. The wind whipped a shapeless white cloak about her thin body; other than that, she was as still as the mountain beneath her roots. Cassie stared, then raised her arm in greeting. The dryad did not move. Cassie took a hesitant step forward—and quick as a flicker of an aspen leaf, the dryad disappeared, no more than the play of shadows in the wind.