Hot, salty liquid runs over his tongue.

Savory. Warm.

The broth is light and flavorful. He opens his mouth a little wider.

A rubbery chunk slides between his teeth. Mushroom cap.

He pauses for a moment, then chews, silently grateful to the network for the nourishment. Each soothing swallow makes his confinement a little less horrific, a little more bearable.

There’s weight in his lap. His hands are cupped around a small, scaly lump there. He’s sitting and his eyes are open, but he hasn’t focused them. There’s a warm blanket around his shoulders. A stool underneath him. A stone bowl at his mouth.

Blinking several times, he jerks his head back. The bowl drips hot soup onto the lap lump—which gives an angry yell—then tilts back to level in the hand that holds it. It is dark, but dim light swirls inside the bowl and a candle burns nearby.

A hand holds the bowl. That hand sheds muted blue light. He follows that hand up the arm, tilting his head back until he finds the owner’s face—creased with concern—watching him.

It’s a feminine face, devoid of hair and with large eyes as black as pitch. She watches him, the wrinkle in the middle of her high browline melting as a smile takes up the rest of her gleaming blue face.

“There you are. Your friend said feeding you would fix it, or start fixing.” She pauses. “You hear me? Understand me?”

He opens his mouth, but his vocal cords only rattle in his throat. Frustrated, he shuts his mouth and nods once.

Na’Stra wriggles around on his lap, rubbing wet scales on his tunic. “S’okay glowy lady. He be like that sometime. Got a little stuck outside’a self. Is hard bein’ back inside an’ make it all work.”

The woman frowns again. “Stuck… outside?”

He hears Na’Stra flicking her tongue out. “Phlagh. Is how he say it. Stuck outside’a self. Can ask him more later. Hey, idiot-face, down here.”

He’s too miserable to glare as he tilts his head down to look at her. She can’t glare the same as him, but her earfins are pinned down and flat. “We be havin’ long talk later, but am hungry. Stuck down here too long an’ these cavers got no sundots.”

She tilts her head to the side. “I gots to go up’n’out. You be okay?”

He nods once.

She stares hard at him, lifting her lips away from her teeth. “Promise that?”

He jerks his head in a harder nod.

“M’kay.” She turns back to the woman. “Thanking lady and man and muddy scoopclaws for watching idiot treechild. No let stand still too long, m’kay? Sleeping on metal is best. Dry stone, next best. I give you… I… I give…”

She grunts a pained sound as she rummages in her pouch and produces a small, thin book. Flipping to the center, she displays a pressed flower with rounded, bloodred petals and a clump of flattened gold stamens. “Give… this. Is… is… verygood. Pretty. Still smells.” She snaps the book shut, snarling, “Only giving if he not tree when I back!”

The lady kneels, giving Na’Stra a warm smile. “Kind of you, but we wouldn’t ask after your hoard. This is no trouble. We’ve plenty of food.”

Na’Stra’s earfins lift up and her body relaxes as she stuffs the book back into her pouch. “Oh. Oh. Well. Well good then.” She hesitates, the book only halfway in. “Muddy scoopclaws hoard is…?”

“Not pressed flowers,” the woman answers.

“Oh. Well he stupid, then. But is all good.” Na’Stra finishes repacking, a cheerful note in her voice. “No want his, he no want mine. Hurray. I be back.” With that, she dives off Naeed’s lap and into a shadow covering most of the floor.

The woman pulls the blanket aside and swabs the spill on his chest and lap with a cloth. “More soup?”

He nods, lifting his hands for the bowl. His arms are heavy as stone and shake like branches in a gale. Sighing, he drops them to his sides and opens his mouth. She says nothing as she lifts the bowl and steadily pours the soup into his mouth.

Definitely mushroom. Salt. A little something sour. He drinks it to the last drop and manages a smile when she removes the bowl.

For the first time, he notices the rectangular tabletop he sits at. It stretches far enough to accommodate a boisterous gathering, but its only setting is a small lit candle stub.

His hostess scoops the candle up. “It’s late. Rest. We don’t have a metal bed, but the table’s stone. Sleep and good breakfast should loosen your tongue.”

With some effort, Naeed manages to lift his hands enough to place them on the table, but he is unable to push himself up to his feet.

The woman sets the candle and bowl aside, then hooks her arms under one of his. At his other side, another pair of arms lifts as well, and between the two people he is lifted onto the table and laid on his side. Blankets are tucked around him and a pillow slides beneath his head.

He wonders who the second person is as he shuts his eyes and lets himself rest.

Resting is not sleep. He remembers sleep, faintly, though it grows harder to describe the act and sensations surrounding it as the years go on. He has tried to explain to Na’Stra what resting is, but she always dismisses it as a different kind of sleep. Even though she eats and drinks like him and every other tree in the woods, she sleeps and dreams like humans and animals, so he can’t make her understand resting.

It largely concerns ceasing. Ceasing to move. Ceasing to take in the air, either the exhalations of creatures through the leaves and thick moss on his head or the exhalations of the plants through his lungs. Ceasing to absorb sunlight. Ceasing to swallow food or pull nutrients from soil or rock surfaces. Ceasing to think, fast or slow. Ceasing to connect to any of his senses.

The only thing that doesn’t cease is memory.

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He was nine, perhaps ten, and the first sense his body had in over a year was pain.

His feet were stuck to the ground, rooted a bit deeper than the topsoil. Because of this, he couldn’t lift them to catch himself as he went tumbling backward to get away from the thing that smacked into his chest. Burnt wood and scorched flesh smells hit his nostrils and his eyes watered from the stench and pain.

Something slid off his chest, falling to the ground at his side. It carved a charred trail through his skin. He croaked, using his mouth even as his distress radiated through the forest’s network of roots. “Yettle… Yettle!”

“Yettle what is a Yettle and you are a something a very big something could you please explain yourself to me hello I am Remara.”

He didn’t want to use his eyes. He had ignored vision and hearing for a season and a half. He desperately wanted to sink back into unawareness, the place where he was not himself alone but a small part of a peaceful, curious whole. They were still getting to know him, and now he had interrupted it all. It might be another season before he could get back to properly forgetting that he was just a lone boy in a forest.

Again, the pain hit. Burning touched his upper arm. Rolling aside, he twisted his legs and yanked. The roots along his feet and ankles groaned and several thin ones snapped, but a couple thicker ones held firm.

“G-go. Aw-away!” he rasped, his throat unused to making these sounds that, nonetheless, came naturally when he needed them. “I need… need Yettle.”

His distress had already reached the far edges of the forest. With only a couple of roots in place, his connection was tenuous, but reassurance echoed back to him.

Yettle was coming.

“What is Yettle please tell me about Yettle and I can find the Yettle for you and then you can explain yourself.”

He gritted his teeth, refusing to open his eyes. “Who are you? Why are you hurting me?”

“I am Remara that is what I said and what is hurting?”

“Me! I am hurting! My chest, my arm!”

“Hello hurting what is my chest and my arm?”

None of the trees were on fire, but some of the ground growth—creepers, tiny grass blades, and lichens—winked out nearby, their last impressions of walking flames adding to his mounting fear. Anxious to avoid their fate, he cracked open his eyelids.

Light lanced his eyes, sending fresh agony ricocheting through his head. Squinting, he pushed through, waiting until his eyes adjusted.

Lush, wild greens and earth surrounded him. A flash of red winged past, singing a challenge to any competitor in earshot. Faint gray traces of smoke rose from his chest and somewhere else nearby. He didn’t want to look at his chest, so he turned his head to the voice, the source of pain.

A vivid orange and yellow… something… stood there. It brought to mind a triangle with a melted bottom that had a large gloppy marble stuck to the top. The circle had two indentations where there might be eyes and a flat, thin line engraved across it. The whole thing was about the size of his father’s carpentry hammer stood on one end.

The ground all around its base was black with smaller plants wilting and smoking in its vicinity.

With a violent jerk, he snapped the root holding his right foot down, gasping at the pain and loss of connection. “Go away! Get away! You’ll burn me up!”

Those terrible little dot-eyes fixed on him for a long time as he struggled with his left leg. Then the creature turned and glided away, sliding across the decayed-leaf layer of the forest floor and leaving a trail of small flames to flare up and die in its wake.

By the time Yettle reached him, shaking the ground with her tread, he was only himself inside his skin again. Just a little boy. A little boy with large patches of bark breaking through his skin and moss growing out with his hair.

Shivering, leaking from his eyes and nose, he raised his arms up to Yettle, the caretaker he hadn’t seen in several seasons. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I tried really hard. I was rooting, I was! For a long, long time. But a tiny monster came and burned me.”

Yettle crouched over him, much like she did when she first found him. With legs like two thick tree trunks and a torso to match, she leaned forward on all fours, her curled knuckles providing balance up front. Her eyes were two great hollows lit by small green lights, and her head was crowned with a glorious spread of leafy branches.

With exacting care, she dug her fingers under his body and scooped him up with one hand, curling it up to her chest as she loped through the forest on three limbs. With every jostle, he cried out and clung to her hand, the burned skin screaming for relief.

She stopped at the nearest stream. Lifting him up to her eyes, she opened her hand to inspect him.

“It will likely heal,” was her pronouncement. “But it might kill you. Open your mouth.”

It was of little consequence if a tree fell in the forest. Even the occasional felling of a few trees at the edge by humans was acceptable, as the collective experience was so much larger than anything the humans could disturb. However, he was an anomaly. He was adopted. Something to be protected. If he fell too soon, it would be different, because he had come to them by choice.

Ashamed, he opened his mouth.

Yettle brought up her other hand, placing the tip of her smallest finger up against his mouth. Even a fingertip was large and he had trouble putting his mouth in the right place, but he accepted it and within moments, a single drop of sap from her veins leaked into his mouth.

He swallowed. Centuries of sunlight entered his body and dispersed through every vein, invigorating each cell it touched. She lowered him into the water and scrubbed a pinch of dead leaves over his chest and side, but he felt nothing as burnt skin and charcoaled wood sloughed off. He was carried away by the taste of ageless experience. The small network he felt with Yettle through his skin was intensified by the fresh influx of her lifesap.

Her feelings were his, and his were her own. He felt that, to her, it was as if he had only appeared in the forest a few moments ago. Only a few moments ago, she had given this sad, fearful human child a few drops from her veins, that he might grow to become part of the forest if he chose. And she had left him to stand in one place to take root, for what seemed only two seconds, before hearing he was in distress. The tiny network between them resounded with her slow bewilderment and concern and the sense that everything about him changed so very, very fast. She was unsure she could keep up enough to protect the strange new sapling in her charge.

His own thoughts filled with the strange, tiny burning monster he encountered. A warning that, even now, Yettle received from the network he had thrashed free of.

Yettle saw it all, then brushed the concerns aside. She shared with the boy an understanding of how small the creature was, how it was unable to light more than the underbrush and dead leaves aflame, and how the recent rains were more than sufficient for the forest to resist disaster.

The boy worried that the creature might stay long in the forest. Long enough for a dry spell, when it might start a larger fire. Perhaps it would come back and hurt him again.

“If it becomes a problem,” Yettle rumbled thoughtfully, “I shall speak with it. Or ask the nearest skytes to guide it out.”

The boy fell silent in feeling and thought, unwilling to picture a skyte coming to help.

Gently, Yettle cradled him in one hand and lifted him up to her chest. It was understood between them that she would carry him, allowing him to safely rest, until he healed.

He shuddered, remembering how helpless he felt, unable to move from that one spot when the burning kept touching him. “Maybe… maybe when I am healed, I can walk with you awhile longer?”

Her great green eyes rolled down to him. “You wish to delay rooting?”

He held onto her fingers, more for comfort than stability. “Only a little while,” he said, but his heart spoke the truth to her.

He wasn’t as ready as he had thought. He couldn’t stand still while flames ate his body alive or a human came to cut him down or a burrower tore him up to clear a space for itself. The pain and fear hit him more quickly than it hit any tree. He wasn’t ready to be that helpless.

Yettle stroked his head with a craggy thumb and murmured, “Rest, then. Rest, then walk with me a little while.”

What a little while meant to a dryad, neither of them needed to say.