Chapter 9

Roots

Aliya wasn’t sure where to search for Azak, but heading towards the capital seemed the most sensible choice: surely, he would have gone there to confer with other shamans. She wasn’t sure how to find Jacinth, either, but she knew it lay somewhere to the west of Wacarta. So, for the last three days, she had been keeping the rising sun behind her and following it as it sank towards the horizon.

So far, her journey had been easy. Enjoyable, when she could forget the reason behind it. The spring weather was warm and dry, and sleeping curled against Meera’s back kept her warm at night. No younger siblings squabbling, no noise from families in the surrounding huts. Just the wind in the grass and bees buzzing amongst the meadow flowers, kestrels calling as they swept high across the sky. Every so often the rolling plain of tall grass was interrupted by a trickling rivulet, small enough for Meera to step across but deep enough for them both to drink and for Aliya to refill her water skin.

It was only at night, when she lay sleeplessly watching the stars, that she was forced to remember. Every time she closed her eyes and tried to sleep, Juna’s face, slack and empty, rose before her like an accusation. Was she running towards a solution, or just running away from her guilt?

The sun was setting on the third day when she reached a large stream bordered by trees. Meera meandered downstream a little way until they came to a grassy clearing by a deep pool—a perfect place to camp. While there was still light to see by, Aliya collected some fallen branches and made a fire, then mixed some cornmeal with water and set it out in patties to bake on a flat rock by the fire.

The water looked inviting, so she pulled off her boots and sat down on the grassy bank to swing her legs into the water. Azak would scold her not to risk offending the local spirits. She wasn’t Azak, though. She didn’t have to worry about those kinds of things.

With a sigh, Aliya muttered a traditional blessing. ‘Hail, spirit of the waters. Please share with me the bounty of your nature.’ Rolling her eyes, she added a defiant postscript: ‘I hope my feet don’t offend you.’ With a sigh of relief, she lowered her feet into the pool.

‘Your feet are a bit offensive.’

Aliya nearly fell right into the stream. The head and torso of a beautiful girl had risen out of the water in front of her—but she hadn’t come from the water, she was made of water. Semi-transparent and a shifting blue-green, she shimmered and rippled as the stream’s current flowed through her. A water spirit had actually been listening to Aliya’s request. Her very half-hearted request.

Belatedly, Aliya drew her feet up onto the bank. ‘Sorry.’

The water-girl laughed. ‘I was only joking; you’re welcome to use my pool. It’s nice to have someone to talk to—someone that can actually see me, I mean. I talk to all the travellers who come past, but since they can’t hear me it doesn’t make for much of a conversation.’

She floated towards Aliya. Watching her move was disconcerting. Was she moving through the water, or was the water moving through her? She held a fixed shape, yet was constantly changing, slight shifts of colour and internal motion making her hard to focus on.

Aliya scrambled back from the river bank.

‘Oh, don’t go,’ the strange girl exclaimed. ‘Then I would have to go back to talking to the fish, and they are so boring. I tell them gossip from all over the country, but all they care about is what’s around the next bend. And fish have such silly names, like Weed-gobbler and Minnow-eater…I’m Ripple, by the way.’

The water-girl’s endless chatter washed over Aliya. So surreal. It wasn’t that she had exactly disbelieved all the bedtime stories about elemental beings—and, she remembered uncomfortably, the shamans who had been able to communicate with or even command them—but, she had never expected one of those stories to come alive right in front of her. She certainly hadn’t expected a magical being to want nothing more than to natter with her like her little sister.

‘…and I think even the Sea would have thought that was a nasty thing to say. Are you alright? You’re very pale.’

Her vision was going spotty around the edges. Her chest tight, gasping in a frantic breath, she said, ‘I’m not talking to you. I shouldn’t even be able to see you.’

Ripple came and rested with her folded arms on the riverbank. In the deepening twilight, the firelight reflected strangely off the ever-shifting liquid of her body.

‘You’re even more grumpy and boring than Azak,’ Ripple said.

Denial fought a brief war with responsibility.

‘Have you seen Azak recently?’ she asked. ‘Which way did he go?’

‘Oh, now you want to talk to me,’ Ripple said, tossing her hair and spraying Aliya with cold droplets.

‘I’m not planning to make a habit of it,’ Aliya snapped, ‘but this is an emergency. Do you know where he is?’

‘You are a cold fish, aren’t you?’ Ripple replied. ‘But I suppose Azak would want me to help. I saw him a few weeks ago. He went downstream, but I don’t know how far—I know someone who can find him, though. I’ll show you the way in the morning.’

Early sunlight was slanting through the trees when Aliya woke the next day, and when Ripple shook out her hair it was like a cascade of diamonds. Aliya covered the remains of last night’s fire and got some dried fruit out of her bag to eat on the way. Then, throwing the halter over Meera’s head, she took two running steps and vaulted onto the mare’s back. She left the reins lying against Meera’s neck; she rarely needed to use them, preferring to give direction by speaking or a gentle pressure of her heels. She called out ‘Amiral,’ and Meera perked up her ears and set out along the river at a gentle walk. The water elemental moved through the river beside them. She didn’t need to swim, she just bubbled downstream with the flow of the water, her friendly chatter mixing with the burbling of the water over rocks. After a while, Aliya found herself responding naturally to the girl’s questions as if she were having a conversation with Juna. The very normality of the feeling made her palms sweat.

After they had travelled about ten kilometres, Ripple halted at a bend in the river. ‘Go to that oak tree on the horizon,’ she said, pointing westward. ‘He’s good at finding things.’ Ripple dissolved back into the river and was gone.

‘Thanks,’ Aliya murmured to the empty water which had upended her life. An actual elemental… Thank goodness that was over.

Aliya turned Meera’s head and they struck off across the featureless plain, the single tree growing gradually larger against the sky. As they crested the slight hill it stood on, the oak towered over them, casting a welcome dappled shade over the whole hilltop. The ground was hummocky where big twisty roots had pushed up the soil, so Aliya dismounted and let Meera pick her way through, nose down to search out the tenderest grass.

There was no one there.

She knew there wouldn’t be. Ripple had sent her to another elemental, and if Aliya wanted help this time, she would have to ask for it. It felt inevitable, not a choice at all. From the moment she’d seen Alaan’s empty eyes, she’d been hurtling towards this upside-down world.

Aliya unhooked the water skin from her belt and poured a mouthful of water onto the ground. She forced her voice out of a reluctant throat. ‘Hail, spirit of the earth. Please share with me the bounty of your nature.’

A great creaking voice said, ‘My roots appreciate that.’

The trunk of the oak began to writhe and a face emerged, lined and creased like bark but for two startling leaf-green eyes. Two arms followed, twisting their way out of the trunk like rapidly growing branches. Each limb was woven from many stems, twined around each other like bundles of nerves and tendons, tipped with thin twigs for fingers. Then the rest of the body pulled free with a fierce creaking until the incredible creature stood looking down at her from at least twice her height, separate from the tree but with his feet still firmly rooted in the ground.

‘Azak’s apprentice, I presume,’ he said. ‘Greetings, Aliya Dreamwalker.’

‘Azak talked about me?’ Aliya asked. ‘He had no right to give my name to a tree.’

‘Ah, a human who understands the power of names. Very wise. But I can’t use your name against you. Shamans are knotty creatures, more twisty than a yew. Now, I know better than to tell my true name to a shaman,’ the oak-man rumbled, his upper body swaying like a tree in the wind. ‘Some have tried to control us in the past, and we don’t want to go down that path again; no, that never ends well.’

‘Oh,’ Aliya replied, ‘Ripple—I met her in the river back there—didn’t seem to mind giving me her name.’

‘Pah, water elementals!’ the tree said. ‘Always rushing about and never learning from the past. They talk and talk, but they never say anything worth hearing. If you want to find some real wisdom, come and talk to a tree.’

With a sigh, Aliya said, ‘Well, I guess that’s why I’m here. Can you tell me where Azak’s gone?’

‘Surely, you can track him yourself,’ the tree spirit said. ‘Don’t they teach young shamans anything these days?’

‘I’m not a shaman,’ Aliya said, trying to forget what great lengths she had gone to over the last year to avoid learning such things.

‘Nonsense. You’re talking to me, aren’t you?’ he replied. ‘The ability to communicate with the spirits of nature is a special gift given only to those few humans who are tasked with maintaining the delicate balance between mankind and the natural world. You are blessed.’

The tree-man stretched, and there was such beauty and vitality in the very fact of his existence…but how could it be a blessing when it had brought her here, guilty and isolated?

‘You are young, so I will forgive your ignorance,’ the spirit said. ‘I will even do a little to alleviate it and help you grow into a fit guardian for the trees. To find another person, you first need to find your roots.’ He took a few steps away from the tree, roots writhing out of the ground as he lifted his feet and immediately burrowing back in again when he lowered them.

On the very edge of her awareness, Aliya could feel those roots: not quite a physical sensation, more like a flavour she could hear or a sound she could touch… She slammed a door on that awareness. ‘I’m not going to learn magic. I can’t. It’s too much. It’s not who I am.’

‘Of course it is who you are,’ he replied with a rustle of branches. ‘You only have to reach out for the connection.’

Every muscle in her body was clenched, on the edge of flight. ‘You can’t make me do this.’

‘Nor would I try,’ he said calmly. ‘It is always your choice. But, who is making that choice: the child you will not leave behind, or the woman you could become?’

‘It’s not fair,’ Aliya said, then immediately realised how childish that sentiment was. No one had made this unfair world. She could either choose to make it better, or walk away.

‘Show me how to find him,’ she said. ‘Please.’

The elemental smiled, his mossy beard parting to reveal blunt wooden teeth. ‘Turn your focus inwards,’ he told her, ‘and find your roots.’

‘I don’t have roots,’ Aliya said.

‘Of course you do,’ the tree-man said. ‘Everyone has roots. They are what you grew from. What nourishes you.’

Aliya didn’t have physical roots like a tree, but she had roots in her family, in the community, in the friends and traditions that nourished her heart.

‘That’s right,’ whispered the spirit. ‘Now, follow those roots into the earth; feel how they spread and connect you with all the people you know.’ Aliya followed the feeling down, the tendrils of hundreds of relationships spreading out through the soil. Honed in on Azak, the complex net of emotions around the man that she trusted, respected, feared, avoided. The roots connected and felt his presence in the earth. She knew where he had walked, as if a trail of footsteps were laid out before her through the grass.

She gasped and opened her eyes. She could no longer see Azak’s trail, but she knew where it was. ‘That’s amazing! Can I find anyone like that?’

‘Indeed you can,’ rumbled her unusual teacher. ‘It’s easier with someone you know, of course, but with enough practice, you can connect with the whole world. Then you will begin to know what it is like to be a tree.’

With a creak, the elemental bent down and stared deep into her eyes. ‘You have a hard path ahead of you, little shaman,’ he said. ‘I will give you one more gift beyond the gift of knowledge.’ He plucked an acorn from one of his branches—even though it was the wrong season for acorns—and pressed it into Aliya’s hand. ‘If you ever need to call on the strength of the earth, plant this seed, and wisdom will grow from it.’

‘Thanks,’ she said as the oak spirit lumbered back to the trunk of his tree.

The rhythms of the earth sung through her veins, intoxicating and grounding at once. This was so much more than her normal life. Stomach churning, she pushed down the excitement and replaced it with the familiar guilt. She would never call on the earth again.

But she pressed the acorn safely into the pocket that rested over her heart.