As the aching in his hands had prophesied, the clouds darkened overhead and the smell of rain filled the air. Charlot made for an elder sapwine tree with wide spreading branches that hung over a stony rise at the river’s edge. He was glad for an excuse to be off his feet. The land rose along the riverbank. He had to stop often to catch his breath and rub the wound on his shoulder.

Judging by the width of its trunk, the sapwine had to be better than a thousand years old. It was a good spot. The stony rise it commanded would have precluded many rivals as the sapwine grew and now protected it against many sorts of parasitic vines.

Charlot was surprised to see no signs anyone had ever tapped the tree. It was just shy of a league’s walk downriver to the settlement. A tree this size was worth a fortune. Perhaps the locals didn’t know how to make sapwine, or else they were religious dolts who were forbidden intoxicants. In either case, they were suffering for their ignorance. There was nothing so fine as mulled sapwine on a snowbound winter’s eve.

The rain fell with a hushed, whispered pace, as if it didn’t want to wake the land. Charlot sat in comfort beneath the thick vermillion foliage of the elder sapwine and gazed out over the river, thinking that ripples would be spreading across the surface of the Cormorbo now, though he could not see them. The river was just beginning to narrow here, and the black water ambled by at a leisurely pace. How fine it would be to go sailing! He resolved to buy another boat. It had been too long since he’d ridden the river.

Idly, he wondered if he might craft his own, and his imagination ran wild with ideas for enchantments, designs, and experiments. Would a coating of slime make the hull as slippery as an eel in the water? What if he could forge the hull casing from a single seamless piece of thin copper, polished as flat and perfect as a mirror? He would make the interior of red cedar, which would never rot, and mount a golden firebird as the figurehead with a trail of golden inlay feathers fluttering down the bow. Perhaps a little mast, and a velvet-black sail with his insignia in brilliant crimson.

Charlot smiled and pushed the idea to the back of his mind. Ostentation brought conflict. He might as well sail down the river upon a great sign that said, “ROB ME.” Once, he would have welcomed the strife, but now he merely wished to make it through the day without killing anyone. He’d been successful thus far, but only just.

“I should have killed that man,” Charlot told the sapwine tree. He took its silence for agreement. It was surely folly to wound a man so gravely and not finish the task. Who wouldn’t want revenge for a lost hand? It had just been a long time since he’d killed anyone, and he’d never had much of a taste for it. Glory fled, and ghosts lingered.

There was a brilliant burst of color over the river, and he froze, wondering if some magician was after him. A moment later, he saw a dwarf kingfisher dart over the rise and land on an outcropping of stone with three minnows in its beak. Charlot didn’t even draw a breath–the marvelous bird was just six paces away from him. Its beak was a brilliant orange, and its plumage was a lustrous jangle of violets and pinks. It flew toward him and, for an instant, he could see it perfectly before it darted up between the sapwine’s branches and vanished. Charlot peered into the leaves, thinking it must have a nest in a boll further up the trunk. He was touched by the bird’s beauty and, at once, he cursed his failing eyes, wishing he could have seen it more clearly.

“Soon! My work shall be a success. I will see again,” Charlot muttered, not quite fully believing it. Eyesight was such a complex thing, and there was so much he did not understand.

As he stared upward, Charlot saw that the tree’s vermillion leaves had specks of yellow, even though it was far too early in the year. At once, he guessed the culprit.

“Balch beetles,” Charlot said with distaste.

Charlot set Flaccaro standing and walked around the tree, looking for signs of the beetle queen. The rain’s pace quickened to a steady and insistent drumming as he scanned the trunk, straining his eyes for the source of the infestation. At last, he found a raised section of the trunk with telltale bore-holes that blackened the bark around them.

He looked up at the huge tree. A millennium or more on the bank of the Cormorbo, but this would be its last year on the Arc if he did not interfere. Balch beetles were a death sentence for a tree of any size or age. Yet, they were not without function. They aggressively attacked a few quite undesirable plants; hellrope, poison larch, and king’s folly among others. If they were infesting this tree, there was a good chance it was already sick.

“Is it your time, old man? Or is there still fight left in you?” He did not want to prolong the tree’s agony if it was dying anyway.

Charlot pointed up at a leaf, focusing his will until it was as sharp as a blade. He clicked his tongue, and the leaf snipped off and fluttered down into his outstretched hand. A red deeper than blood, the three-pointed leaf had a cluster of yellow-ringed holes in it, and he inhaled deeply. Not even a whiff of rot, just a flat, earthy scent associated with a plant’s distress and the acrid smell of the beetle larvae. His eyes might be going, but his sense of smell was as fine as it had ever been. He set his hand on the trunk, closed his eyes, and then rapped on it. It felt sound. The old tree was putting up a fight. Perhaps the infestation was not too far along.

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Charlot made up his mind, and he drew Vitserpadag. The blade slipped eagerly into the tree, sinking through bark and into wood like soft cheese. The balch queen’s lair was no bigger than a turnip, and he slid the knife carefully around, leaving a conic crater. When he was through, he wrenched the dense plug of wood free and hurled it into the river. Sap bled from the cut, but swiftly hardened. He could smell the faint sweet scent, and his mouth grew wet remembering the taste of sapwine. It was undrinkable at the moment, of course. To make real sapwine was a three-month process of boiling off, mixing in a spiced punch, boiling off again, and then fermenting in special weighted casks that were left beneath the river so that they did not overheat and spoil.

Now, beetles poured out of their little tunnels, agitated and looking for their queen. They were no bigger than peas, but there were hordes of them. Without the queen, they were all doomed, and he looked with concern at the depth they’d penetrated. If they’d reached the heartwood, then he had killed their queen for nothing and the tree would die as well. There was no way to tell without doing more damage. If the ancient tree still stood next season, then it might stand another thousand years.

Had he done the right thing? Should a million beetles die so that one old tree might live? He looked up at the dripping leaves. That was a key difference. The beetles had never kept rain off his head.

“What have you seen, standing guard over this river, old one?” Charlot asked the tree, quite seriously. He waited for an answer, and then spoke only when he was certain none was forthcoming.

“When I came here to build, there was nothing for a hundred leagues in either direction. There were no men at all, and I liked that just fine.” Charlot’s eyes grew distant with memory.

“Do you remember when the brush ran wild with deer and boar? When the shadowcats padded along the ridge and tangled with the great silverpaw bears? I haven’t seen a deer all day. The hunters must have taken a great many of them. The cats, too, as their pelts fetch a handsome price in the south. You will see them perish from this land, if you survive.”

Charlot looked out over the river, trying to think how it all might look in another thousand years.

“Even the great silverpaw bears are not safe. Their hides are too thick for arrows to pierce, so men wait until they are slumbering in the winter, and then they build bonfires at the entrances of their lairs and suffocate them. How clever, and how cowardly! Men are never sated. They’re forever getting chased out of one land and ruining another, multiplying as they go. They won’t be satisfied until the whole of the Arc is one unending dung-reeking slum.”

The tree sat in reflective silence. It was a good listener.

“There is even a settlement not a league south of here, surely her hunters have passed you by. Maybe others have sheltered beneath you as I do now. I ought to have wiped them out, you know, but they were only a sorry looking bunch of farmers. I didn’t have the heart to eradicate them.” Charlot paused, not adding that he hadn’t closed the door on that idea. The wound on his shoulder still throbbed.

“I am bound for there now. It’s so queer to have people living within a day’s walk of the tower. When I raised the citadel, the closest thing to civilization was Old Birschman at Serpentine Bend. That’s twenty-eight leagues to the south. Perhaps a few of your seeds have drifted that far down the river. You may even have children down that way. I used to canoe down there once a season to trade for supplies. I suppose I must have passed you a hundred times. Birschman had three daughters, each uglier than the last, but that didn’t stop him from whoring them out. It mattered not, trappers are not discriminating…”

Charlot trailed off. There were some things he didn’t want to tell, even if it was only to a tree. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t mind telling you I considered blowing his whole rickety homestead to smithereens more than once when he tried to swindle me. I suppose he’s long dead now.”

Charlot grew quiet. The weight of the way the world was falling on him, just as the rain was. Everything kept moving ahead, pulling him forward, no matter how much he wished he could dig in his heels and remain.

The rain let up, the sun slipping dazzling fingers through the clouds, and everything gleamed golden like it had been lacquered. He could not help but wish for his former sight, to watch the rain-ripples on the river’s surface die down until it was as flat and still as a sheet of obsidian. To have seen the kingfisher fully, in all its brilliant glory!

“Well, I suppose I must be on my way. Good luck, old man. Long may you reign on the riverbank.”

Charlot set a hand on the trunk in passing. For the second time that day, he realized anyone observing him would think him mad, a cracked old man chatting up a tree. He couldn’t help but look around to see if anyone was watching him. Then, at last, he shrugged. All his life he’d talked to trees.

He was convinced that it did some good, both for the plant and the person. It unburdened the mind, and plants did seem to grow better if they got a little conversation from time to time. Let the doubters try and raise silver pears in the north, thousands of leagues away from the secret groves of the farthest east. Perhaps some fragment of what he’d said might linger on, as the unending green dream of the grand old sapwine.

As he rose to leave, Charlot spoke a bane against pestilence, just as he had against the wasp’s nest. The beetles swarming the trunk smoldered, and soon, the air was full of the smell of scorched insects. Now that they were friends, he might as well offer the old man all the help he could.