Page 22 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
She pulled her tacn away. Then, humming dreamily to herself—Fairhrim never hummed dreamily to herself—she leaned over the edge of the water and peered into it. “There are other stars down there. And another moon, and another sky.”
“Are we the Up or are we the Down?” asked Osric.
“I don’t know,” said Fairhrim.
They leaned over the water’s glassy black depths. The oak tree’s leaves trembled restively; the chimes were alarmed. Osric felt compelled to fall into the pond; he was possessed by a sense of something everlasting awaiting him there, of a beautiful finality. Fairhrim looked down, equally entranced.
The oak tree and its bells rustled again; it was no longer a song but a warning.
Then—the strangeness of it stretched Osric’s brain to the utmost—the tree spoke.
“Don’t do it,” said the tree.
“I want to do it,” said Fairhrim.
“Have you heard of the Threefold Death?” asked the tree.
“Yes,” said Osric. “But there aren’t any Druids in here, so we’ve escaped that difficulty.”
“Poor creature,” said the tree. “You haven’t escaped it.”
“What?”
“You’re in it.”
5
The Hollow Tree
Osric
Osric liked to be aware that he was dying, as a general rule.
“How are weinthe Threefold Death?” he asked around an uncooperative tongue.
That was what he was doing now: arguing with trees.
The tree rustled its answer. “You have been impaled. That’s why you can’t move. You are stoned. It’s why you can’t think. And you nearly drowned and finished the job.”
“Oh,” said Osric.
Fairhrim, with her eyes out of focus, remarked, “The Druids built the Threefold Death into the place.”
“That is correct,” said the oak.
“Clever,” said Fairhrim. “Lucky you stopped us.”
“There is purpose in the accidental,” said the tree.
Osric, concerned that he and Fairhrim had simultaneously gone insane, asked the tree, “How are you talking?”
“I’m not talking,” said the tree. “You are in an altered state. You’re able to interpret things your sort normally can’t.”
Fairhrim wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She looked at the tree with a soft wondering gaze, as a child lost in a daydream. “Are you the Green Man?”
“Do I look like a man?” asked the tree, in a tone that could only be described as leafy annoyance. “I am an oak from the Dodona grove.”
“That’s in Greece,” said Fairhrim.
