Unrooted
For a long while, all Hemlock knew was peaceful, blue-green light, and music—music of crickets and katydids, songbirds and tree frogs, wind and waterfalls, flutes, gongs, and ringing bells.
Then one day, the music stopped.
Time to be something new. The strange idea blossomed from the blue-green light—from Mother Tree.
With sudden discomfort, Hemlock became aware of his human body. He flexed his jaw to part a film of sap covering his face and drew his first breath, and then another, and another. Discovering one of his hands, he pushed a bony knuckle through a flaky layer of bark and brought his fingers up to touch his lips, his teeth, his tongue.
He forced his other hand through the bark, then a knee, and a foot, and he stepped out onto solid earth. As his toes pressed into the soil, a flood of Greater Awareness exploded in his mind. The dirt was part of a hill, which was part of a forest, which was part of a continent, which was part of a whole planet! Oh, the wonder!
Impatiently, he struggled to squeeze the rest of his body out into the crisp air, and opened his eyes. Rays of morning sunlight filtered through a canopy of tall trees and seeped into his flesh. Just as Mother’s needle-leaf-fingers turned light into living energy, so too did Hemlock’s greenish-brown skin.
Suddenly, Hemlock slapped his hand onto the bark behind him and cried out in his thoughts. I’m unrooted! Please, Mother! Take me back!
Time for new growth, she replied.
What do you mean? What will grow?
You will grow, child. Don’t be afraid.
Hemlock tried to burrow back into the great, sticky wound in the side of Mother Tree. But the hollow in her trunk already seemed too small for him, as if in those few moments the wood had grown in, or his strange human body had grown out.
Let go, Hemlock. Time to be something new. I love you. LET GO.
The command washed through Hemlock like a wave and he lurched away from Mother Tree. As his long, sap-covered hair pulled free of her trunk, she gave him another command--Protect the Eldarwood, child.
Chapter 1
Hemlock
The Nowid legend of the Unrooted Child tells of a human born from a tree. This is no legend, I tell you—the Unrooted Child is real.
- Gift of the Mother Tree
The slow-moving stream, Contentment, lured Hemlock to her banks to tease the stringy roots of a pink flower out of the mud. He didn’t know what the roots were good for, but it was always sensible to follow a stream’s guidance. He squeezed the moisture from the roots, stashed them in one of the many pockets of his brown cloak, then crouched to stare at his reflection in the water’s mirror. Hemlock’s bark-brown cheeks, tinged slightly green, had barely changed in the thirteen years since he emerged from Mother Tree. He’d finally caught up to the age he looked! Now he wore a huge acorn cap, from an even huger oak tree, atop his tangled brown hair. He thought the conical helmet made him look like a Queensknight—the most respected and intimidating people in Woodmoot. He scowled and bared his teeth at his reflection, trying to look as fierce as possible. “Grrr!” he growled at himself.
Abruptly, Hemlock rolled to the side as an avalanche of black fur crashed into him, sending the acorn helmet flying. Desperately, he grappled onto the fur as he and the avalanche thrashed through Contentment’s shallow water. An instant later he lay on his back in the stream with a bear cub atop his belly, her front paws pressed painfully on his chest, her brown nose almost touching his.
“Huff!” he grunted. “Get off!”
She licked his face sloppily before splashing in a happy circle around him.
Hemlock rose to his knees in the cold water and snatched up the acorn cap before it floated away. More water poured down his face as he squished the helmet back over his already wet hair.
“Argh!” he groaned. “I’m soaked!” Then, with alarm, he unclasped a hidden pocket at the waist of his cloak. “Oh no,” he said, pulling free a dripping, cedar-bound book. “Huff! Books can’t get wet! It might be ruined!”
The small bear stopped splashing around to sniff at the sodden tome. Hemlock carefully opened the wet pages to find, with relief, that the writing inside was still readable.
“Phew!” he sighed. “You’re lucky, Huff. It’s not even my book. But it’s a really good one! I would’ve been really mad if you ruined it.”
“Huff!” said the bear, clearly unimpressed.
A long howl sounded through the forest, followed by a cacophony of barking.
“Hounds,” Hemlock whispered as Huff’s eyes grew wide with fear. “That means hunters.Run Huff! They’re after you! Find Mama Bear Snort!”
“Huff!” she said.
“I have to run too. I’m scared, Huff. Let’s find each other when it’s safe.”
“Huff,” said the young bear, and sped off at a gallop in the direction of her den.
Hemlock started toward Mother Tree—toward safety—but after a few strides he skidded to a halt. “Crap,” he said, looking down at a pile of bear scat Huff had dropped. “Those hounds are going to find her.” The barking drew closer.
Protect the Eldarwood, child, Mother had told him.
Running back to Contentment, Hemlock plucked a pair of skunk cabbage leaves growing at the water’s edge. He returned to swipe the leaves across the bear scat, then sprinted off in a new direction. His damp cloak flapped around his bare legs as he sped through stands of giant chestnut, oak, and cedar. He jumped onto the limb of a majestic oak whose mossy branches reached all the way to the ground on all sides and ran up the living roadway. He dodged a fist-sized honeybee that whizzed by his helmeted head, then skidded down the other end of the branch.
Now and then, Hemlock smeared a bit of bear scat onto a rock or tree as he passed. Making a wide circle, he intercepted the dogs at Blackberry Glen. Soon, three barking hounds rushed into the glen, surrounding him. “Hello dogs,” Hemlock said warily, looking into their droopy blue eyes. “Why don’t you smell this?”
The hounds continued to bark, tongues hanging out of their goofy smiles, ears pricked at the aroma of skunk cabbage mixed with bear scat. Hemlock let them each get a good nose full, then said, “Go find the rest of it!” and threw the leaves in the direction he’d come from.
And off they went, still howling—away from the bear den.
But Hemlock was always curious about other humans, even if he feared them a bit, too. Crouching by a large cedar tree at the edge of the glen, he said, “Let’s see these hunters.”
He pulled his cloak hood up over his helmet and merged with the forest. As natural as breathing, Hemlock just imagined he was a part of the Eldarwood, and so it was.
A lone hunter stalked into Blackberry Glen, lean and muscular despite his gray hair. He carried a heavy crossbow bristling with three razor-tipped bolts. Strapped across his back, the twin crescent blades of a giant axe gleamed sharply in the sunlight. Why do hunters always seem to be men, Hemlock wondered, when everyone knows that women are the most skilled warriors?
The man bent to examine the skunk cabbage leaves where they had fallen. Suddenly, he looked up, steely eyes peering out into the forest. His searching gaze swept over Hemlock three times without recognition. Finally, the hunter stood, and loped out of the glen after the still-barking dogs.
Hemlock released a breath as his mind separated from the forest’s embrace, allowing him to move again.
“No killing today,” he told the towering cedar tree.
But still … the hunter could find someone besides Huff to kill with those nasty weapons. So, Hemlock followed behind. Flitting from tree to tree, he pursued the hunter back to the first rock he’d smeared with bear scat.
Abruptly, one of the dogs caught Hemlock’s scent and then all three hounds came bounding and howling toward him again. Thinking fast, Hemlock clambered up a tall chestnut tree, fingers and toes gripping her broad wall of bark. Reaching the lowest branch, he peeked through a kaleidoscope of leaves to view the top of the hunter’s gray head swinging from side to side, searching.
“Who’s there?” the man called in a gravelly voice.
Hemlock put his ear against the chestnut’s bark, listening for her thoughts.
I am Surrender, the tree said.
Greetings Surrender, he said in his mind. I ‘m Hemlock. Thank you for hiding me.
Overcome fear, she told him.
I’m not afraid, he thought, knowing he lied.
Down below, the hunter grunted in annoyance. “It’s nothing.Lord Knox would say I’m getting too jumpy in my old age. And he’d be right!”
Up on his branch, Hemlock caught his breath. Lord Knox was a name he feared. The one time Hemlock had experienced true terror was because of Lord Knox.
One of the hounds began to whine with impatience. Without warning, the man pulled the great axe over his shoulder and slashed into Surrender’s bark with two swift strokes. Hemlock felt the tree shudder beneath him. Worse, he heard Surrender wail in his mind. Hemlock clapped his hand over his mouth to keep from crying out himself.
The hunter slung the crossbow across his back and continued through the forest, now holding the nasty axe before him. The hounds bounded happily ahead.
Slowly, Hemlock climbed down Surrender’s trunk. When he reached the ground, he ran his fingers over the big ‘X’ the axe had made in her bark.
“Why did he do that?” he asked the chestnut, but Surrender had nothing more to say. More cautious than ever, Hemlock continued after the hunter, never straying far from the safety of a tree trunk.
Miles later, the grizzled hunter arrived at the Mill Trail, near the city of Locksby—the only scrap of civilization anywhere close to the Eldarwood.
As Hemlock crept silently through the underbrush, he encountered a wasteland. Hundreds of giant chestnut stumps dotted the landscape on either side of the trail, many of them seven or eight paces across.
“Where did they all go?” Hemlock whispered. “These chestnut queens were alive just two weeks ago!”
A twig snapped behind him and he whirled to find Huff creeping—somewhat less silently—after him.
“What are you doing!” Hemlock hissed. “You were supposed to go to the den.”
The bear cub crouched next to him, pressing her damp fur against his still-damp cloak. “Huff,” she said, eying the chestnut stumps with disgust.
Together, they watched each of the dog’s tails, then the hunter’s gray head, and finally the silver blade of the axe disappear over the slope of the trail.
“We’d better get back to our part of the Eldarwood,” Hemlock said. “It’s a new moon tonight. I only go to Locksby on the full moon, so I can find my way back at night.”
Huff rose and approached the nearest stump. She climbed on top of it, sniffing the jagged saw marks on it’s surface. “Huff!” she said, looking back at him.
“It’s horrible,” he said. “But what we can do?”
“Huff!” said the bear again.
“But I’m afraid.”
“Huff.”
“Right,” Hemlock sighed. “Overcome fear. Okay, I’ll see what I can find out. But you really can’t follow me this time. No bears in the city!”
“Grmph,” said Huff
Hemlock pulled up his hood, gritted his teeth, and started down the Mill Trail, through the clearcut wasteland.
For a long while, all Hemlock knew was peaceful, blue-green light, and music—music of crickets and katydids, songbirds and tree frogs, wind and waterfalls, flutes, gongs, and ringing bells.
Then one day, the music stopped.
Time to be something new. The strange idea blossomed from the blue-green light—from Mother Tree.
With sudden discomfort, Hemlock became aware of his human body. He flexed his jaw to part a film of sap covering his face and drew his first breath, and then another, and another. Discovering one of his hands, he pushed a bony knuckle through a flaky layer of bark and brought his fingers up to touch his lips, his teeth, his tongue.
He forced his other hand through the bark, then a knee, and a foot, and he stepped out onto solid earth. As his toes pressed into the soil, a flood of Greater Awareness exploded in his mind. The dirt was part of a hill, which was part of a forest, which was part of a continent, which was part of a whole planet! Oh, the wonder!
Impatiently, he struggled to squeeze the rest of his body out into the crisp air, and opened his eyes. Rays of morning sunlight filtered through a canopy of tall trees and seeped into his flesh. Just as Mother’s needle-leaf-fingers turned light into living energy, so too did Hemlock’s greenish-brown skin.
Suddenly, Hemlock slapped his hand onto the bark behind him and cried out in his thoughts. I’m unrooted! Please, Mother! Take me back!
Time for new growth, she replied.
What do you mean? What will grow?
You will grow, child. Don’t be afraid.
Hemlock tried to burrow back into the great, sticky wound in the side of Mother Tree. But the hollow in her trunk already seemed too small for him, as if in those few moments the wood had grown in, or his strange human body had grown out.
Let go, Hemlock. Time to be something new. I love you. LET GO.
The command washed through Hemlock like a wave and he lurched away from Mother Tree. As his long, sap-covered hair pulled free of her trunk, she gave him another command--Protect the Eldarwood, child.
Chapter 1
Hemlock
The Nowid legend of the Unrooted Child tells of a human born from a tree. This is no legend, I tell you—the Unrooted Child is real.
- Gift of the Mother Tree
The slow-moving stream, Contentment, lured Hemlock to her banks to tease the stringy roots of a pink flower out of the mud. He didn’t know what the roots were good for, but it was always sensible to follow a stream’s guidance. He squeezed the moisture from the roots, stashed them in one of the many pockets of his brown cloak, then crouched to stare at his reflection in the water’s mirror. Hemlock’s bark-brown cheeks, tinged slightly green, had barely changed in the thirteen years since he emerged from Mother Tree. He’d finally caught up to the age he looked! Now he wore a huge acorn cap, from an even huger oak tree, atop his tangled brown hair. He thought the conical helmet made him look like a Queensknight—the most respected and intimidating people in Woodmoot. He scowled and bared his teeth at his reflection, trying to look as fierce as possible. “Grrr!” he growled at himself.
Abruptly, Hemlock rolled to the side as an avalanche of black fur crashed into him, sending the acorn helmet flying. Desperately, he grappled onto the fur as he and the avalanche thrashed through Contentment’s shallow water. An instant later he lay on his back in the stream with a bear cub atop his belly, her front paws pressed painfully on his chest, her brown nose almost touching his.
“Huff!” he grunted. “Get off!”
She licked his face sloppily before splashing in a happy circle around him.
Hemlock rose to his knees in the cold water and snatched up the acorn cap before it floated away. More water poured down his face as he squished the helmet back over his already wet hair.
“Argh!” he groaned. “I’m soaked!” Then, with alarm, he unclasped a hidden pocket at the waist of his cloak. “Oh no,” he said, pulling free a dripping, cedar-bound book. “Huff! Books can’t get wet! It might be ruined!”
The small bear stopped splashing around to sniff at the sodden tome. Hemlock carefully opened the wet pages to find, with relief, that the writing inside was still readable.
“Phew!” he sighed. “You’re lucky, Huff. It’s not even my book. But it’s a really good one! I would’ve been really mad if you ruined it.”
“Huff!” said the bear, clearly unimpressed.
A long howl sounded through the forest, followed by a cacophony of barking.
“Hounds,” Hemlock whispered as Huff’s eyes grew wide with fear. “That means hunters.Run Huff! They’re after you! Find Mama Bear Snort!”
“Huff!” she said.
“I have to run too. I’m scared, Huff. Let’s find each other when it’s safe.”
“Huff,” said the young bear, and sped off at a gallop in the direction of her den.
Hemlock started toward Mother Tree—toward safety—but after a few strides he skidded to a halt. “Crap,” he said, looking down at a pile of bear scat Huff had dropped. “Those hounds are going to find her.” The barking drew closer.
Protect the Eldarwood, child, Mother had told him.
Running back to Contentment, Hemlock plucked a pair of skunk cabbage leaves growing at the water’s edge. He returned to swipe the leaves across the bear scat, then sprinted off in a new direction. His damp cloak flapped around his bare legs as he sped through stands of giant chestnut, oak, and cedar. He jumped onto the limb of a majestic oak whose mossy branches reached all the way to the ground on all sides and ran up the living roadway. He dodged a fist-sized honeybee that whizzed by his helmeted head, then skidded down the other end of the branch.
Now and then, Hemlock smeared a bit of bear scat onto a rock or tree as he passed. Making a wide circle, he intercepted the dogs at Blackberry Glen. Soon, three barking hounds rushed into the glen, surrounding him. “Hello dogs,” Hemlock said warily, looking into their droopy blue eyes. “Why don’t you smell this?”
The hounds continued to bark, tongues hanging out of their goofy smiles, ears pricked at the aroma of skunk cabbage mixed with bear scat. Hemlock let them each get a good nose full, then said, “Go find the rest of it!” and threw the leaves in the direction he’d come from.
And off they went, still howling—away from the bear den.
But Hemlock was always curious about other humans, even if he feared them a bit, too. Crouching by a large cedar tree at the edge of the glen, he said, “Let’s see these hunters.”
He pulled his cloak hood up over his helmet and merged with the forest. As natural as breathing, Hemlock just imagined he was a part of the Eldarwood, and so it was.
A lone hunter stalked into Blackberry Glen, lean and muscular despite his gray hair. He carried a heavy crossbow bristling with three razor-tipped bolts. Strapped across his back, the twin crescent blades of a giant axe gleamed sharply in the sunlight. Why do hunters always seem to be men, Hemlock wondered, when everyone knows that women are the most skilled warriors?
The man bent to examine the skunk cabbage leaves where they had fallen. Suddenly, he looked up, steely eyes peering out into the forest. His searching gaze swept over Hemlock three times without recognition. Finally, the hunter stood, and loped out of the glen after the still-barking dogs.
Hemlock released a breath as his mind separated from the forest’s embrace, allowing him to move again.
“No killing today,” he told the towering cedar tree.
But still … the hunter could find someone besides Huff to kill with those nasty weapons. So, Hemlock followed behind. Flitting from tree to tree, he pursued the hunter back to the first rock he’d smeared with bear scat.
Abruptly, one of the dogs caught Hemlock’s scent and then all three hounds came bounding and howling toward him again. Thinking fast, Hemlock clambered up a tall chestnut tree, fingers and toes gripping her broad wall of bark. Reaching the lowest branch, he peeked through a kaleidoscope of leaves to view the top of the hunter’s gray head swinging from side to side, searching.
“Who’s there?” the man called in a gravelly voice.
Hemlock put his ear against the chestnut’s bark, listening for her thoughts.
I am Surrender, the tree said.
Greetings Surrender, he said in his mind. I ‘m Hemlock. Thank you for hiding me.
Overcome fear, she told him.
I’m not afraid, he thought, knowing he lied.
Down below, the hunter grunted in annoyance. “It’s nothing.Lord Knox would say I’m getting too jumpy in my old age. And he’d be right!”
Up on his branch, Hemlock caught his breath. Lord Knox was a name he feared. The one time Hemlock had experienced true terror was because of Lord Knox.
One of the hounds began to whine with impatience. Without warning, the man pulled the great axe over his shoulder and slashed into Surrender’s bark with two swift strokes. Hemlock felt the tree shudder beneath him. Worse, he heard Surrender wail in his mind. Hemlock clapped his hand over his mouth to keep from crying out himself.
The hunter slung the crossbow across his back and continued through the forest, now holding the nasty axe before him. The hounds bounded happily ahead.
Slowly, Hemlock climbed down Surrender’s trunk. When he reached the ground, he ran his fingers over the big ‘X’ the axe had made in her bark.
“Why did he do that?” he asked the chestnut, but Surrender had nothing more to say. More cautious than ever, Hemlock continued after the hunter, never straying far from the safety of a tree trunk.
Miles later, the grizzled hunter arrived at the Mill Trail, near the city of Locksby—the only scrap of civilization anywhere close to the Eldarwood.
As Hemlock crept silently through the underbrush, he encountered a wasteland. Hundreds of giant chestnut stumps dotted the landscape on either side of the trail, many of them seven or eight paces across.
“Where did they all go?” Hemlock whispered. “These chestnut queens were alive just two weeks ago!”
A twig snapped behind him and he whirled to find Huff creeping—somewhat less silently—after him.
“What are you doing!” Hemlock hissed. “You were supposed to go to the den.”
The bear cub crouched next to him, pressing her damp fur against his still-damp cloak. “Huff,” she said, eying the chestnut stumps with disgust.
Together, they watched each of the dog’s tails, then the hunter’s gray head, and finally the silver blade of the axe disappear over the slope of the trail.
“We’d better get back to our part of the Eldarwood,” Hemlock said. “It’s a new moon tonight. I only go to Locksby on the full moon, so I can find my way back at night.”
Huff rose and approached the nearest stump. She climbed on top of it, sniffing the jagged saw marks on it’s surface. “Huff!” she said, looking back at him.
“It’s horrible,” he said. “But what we can do?”
“Huff!” said the bear again.
“But I’m afraid.”
“Huff.”
“Right,” Hemlock sighed. “Overcome fear. Okay, I’ll see what I can find out. But you really can’t follow me this time. No bears in the city!”
“Grmph,” said Huff
Hemlock pulled up his hood, gritted his teeth, and started down the Mill Trail, through the clearcut wasteland.