"You move through the two worlds like water, Jack Derry," Vertumnus scolded indulgently. 'You know nothing of the divided heart."

"It appears that this… arboreal monster nearly divided his heart for him," Jack observed dryly, touching the wound at Sturm's shoulder.

'The treant knows neither good intent nor evil, neither human nor elf nor ogre, neither friend nor trespasser," Vertumnus explained impatiently. "And yet it is one of us, no monster. You have known that since your infancy, Jack. It has not changed since you left."

Vertumnus said nothing more. While he watched as Jack lifted Sturm from the charred ground, he gestured idly, almost absently, and the flute reappeared in his hand.

"I suppose," Jack said, hoisting the Solamnic lad to his shoulders, "it would not be too bad having Sturm here among us. There would be much I would have to teach him, though."

Vertumnus snorted. "And much he could teach you, Jack Derry, of things formal and stately and abstruse. You've grown like a weed, boy, but five summers in the growing makes for a green tree and a green lad."

"At five years old in the court of Solamnia," Jack teased, "I would be toddling and toying and weeping at slights, like this one did, no doubt."

"He did no such things," Vertumnus said quietly. "Even at five years old."

"Even then you knew him?" Jack asked. "Then no doubt you knew this… celebrated father of his."

"It was another life, another country," Vertumnus replied dreamily, twirling the flute on his finger. The ravens alighted at his feet, hopping alertly and staring curiously at the bright glittering thing in the Green Man's hand. "But I knew Angriff Brightblade. Served under him in Neraka, all the way up to the siege of his castle."

"What happened to Angriff Brightblade?" Jack Derry asked. "Has the boy a prayer of finding him?"

"I don't know and I don't know," Vertumnus said, lifting the flute.

"Then why bring him among us, tugging him by his green wound?" Jack asked in exasperation. "You've no news of his father, and-"

"But news of his father's undoing I do have," Vertumnus said. "Why Agion Pathwarden and the reinforcing army never reached Castle Brightblade is old history to the Solamnics, but who it was that arranged the ambush…"

"And you'll help Brightblade plan revenge?" Jack exclaimed.

"Nothing could be further from my intentions," Lord Wilderness replied gravely. And he lifted the flute and played and remembered.

As Vertumnus played, the waters stirred before him. Lost in his thoughts and memories, he recalled a distant winter, a time of arrivals, when Lady Hollis had brought him back from a murky sleep.

He had never been sure what had happened. He remembered the midnight assignation that he and Lord Boniface had kept with the bandits, remembered his shock as money and conspiracy had passed from Knight to brigand. He remembered the aftermath, being accused of betraying the Order, slipping his guard at night, and the winter and the walking. The safety of the walls dwindled behind him and the snow was a curtain ahead of him as, blindly and foolishly, he sought a path to the east, a clear road to Lemish and home.

All about, it was cold, and the snow was relentless and the wind so loud that soon he lost all bearing, all sight and reason.

He remembered the torchlight in the far encampment and how that light swelled in the darkness and snow until it seemed like a moon or a sun ahead of him, instead of the death he feared it was. He remembered stepping into that light, the ragged men on all sides of him, and the curses and the blows to his head, punctuated by the fierce vowels of his native language. He tried to answer amid the battering rain of stick and club and knotty fist, and then there had been the sudden blow to his left shoulder, the sharp black dagger of pain above the heart. The world went suddenly white, then dark. Then away.

Finally he remembered this place. He awoke with an old hag over him, singing a long restorative verse. He remembered all of those many words, for each of them, in the way she sang them, spread warmth through his extremities and breath through his paralyzed body. And with each word, age slipped from the singer's face, and she recovered a lost and incomparable beauty-almond eyes, brown skin, and dark hair shining like the winter sky.

Slowly and painfully he had begun to move-first a finger, then a hand. He clutched at the grass beneath him, plucked a blade, then another. But he was still too weak-he couldn't raise his hand. So he closed his eyes and rested, secure in the woman's song and care. He saw nothing but green, green, and he slept and dreamt of leaves and of springtime and of roots deep in the soil.

It seemed like a hundred years. It seemed like time immemorial. And yet he was here, in the Southern Darkwoods, companion of dryads and owls and of this beautiful, mysterious woman. She had given him life, had made him blossom. She had given him the flute and the knowledge of the modes.

And now there were others-others who threatened his life and his kingdom. He had come to know them all, and he had come to forgive them. But forgiveness was not surrender: The Darkwoods grew in his blood and were irrevocably his.

His song was over, rising through the moonlit branches of the vallenwoods. Slowly, almost lovingly, Vertumnus leaned over the lad in the bed of the wagon, whispering something to Sturm that nobody, not even the dryads, ever heard.

Years later, in the High Clerist's Tower, in the cold of a late February, those words would return to Sturm while he slept. Waking, he would not be able to call them out of the murky country of his dreams, nor would he pause too long in the recollection, for Derek would have led scores of Knights to the slaughter in the dark day before, and the morning would be a rush of arms and preparation.

But the words were simple. "You can choose," Vertumnus said. "To the last of this and anything, you can choose."

"He will live, won't he, Father?" Jack asked anxiously. Evanthe snaked her arm through his and kissed him mischievously, her small lips poised behind his ear.

"One way or the other, he will live," Vertumnus declared. "If all goes well in the Lady's care. Now sing, Evanthe. Diona, sing with your sister. While we carry the lad to Hollis, sing the song of the forest."

He turned to Jack with a sudden, wild-eyed roguishness. "You sing, too, Jack. You have your father's fine tenor voice as well as his sword hand. Or so you must, for his are on the wane."

Jack smiled and scrambled onto the driver's seat of the wagon, leaving his worries at the blackened foot of the oak. It was a fine tenor voice indeed with which he began the song. The wagon began to move, with Jack at the reins, and the dryads, each astraddle the neck of one of the horses, joined in sweetly and quietly, letting Jack carry the burden of the song.

Jack Derry sang, and his father accompanied him, the flute flashing over the notes and over the silences between notes. Had Mara been there, at once she would have recognized Vertumnus's playing for the magic it was by the elaborate technique that filled the pauses in the music, the spaces between words. The wagon departed the clearing, the foliage closed around it, and soon all was silent by the clearing and pool except for the fading singing and the brisk and imaginative sound of the flute.

In one of the silences between verses, Sturm's sword dislodged from the tree and tumbled to earth. The scar it had made in the wood healed instantly, and leaves sprouted in wonderful profusion upon its branches. When the music resumed, this time only faint and at the edge of hearing, two knots on the trunk of the tree darkened, then moistened and glistened as the treant wakened, once again opening its ageless eyes.