Changer's Daughter (66 page)

As time has passed, Demetrios and his fellow fauns have become more comfortable with letting her wander unsupervised. Shahrazad senses that their assurance regarding her ability to behave herself and the dormancy of the trees have something in common.

Pleased as she is to be permitted to roam, Shahrazad remains a touch offended by the assumption that she would harm the trees—or that the trees could harm her. After all, what could a tree do? Trees just root down and grow. What are they going to do—drop leaves on her?

Grinning broadly, tongue lolling, shining young teeth sparkling white, Shahrazad bolts after a rabbit. When it dives into a burrow beneath one of the oaks Demetrios had warned her to be careful around, Shahrazad doesn’t dig the rabbit out.

Kindness to her host, she thinks, not admitting she feels an element of apprehension as well. There is something about the way the oak dominates the land, a quiet power shared by other trees scattered throughout the acres the fauns tend. Even if Demetrios hadn’t told Shahrazad what trees she was by no means to disturb Shahrazad would have learned to detect them on her own.

Then she catches a new scent on the wind and all thoughts of oaks flee—as forgotten as the rabbit.

Johanna drags the back of her hand across her forehead. It might be winter, but without the screening canopy of foliage, she’s suddenly hot. Certainly the heavy jacket she’d put on when dressing against the morning’s chill is to blame. She stops to take it off, squeezing the down coat until she can fit it into a small bag that she hangs from the side of her pack frame.

When she shoulders her pack again, she reluctantly admits that more than the coat might be to blame for her exhaustion. She’s let herself get out of shape—not so anyone could tell, looking from the outside. It helps to be sort of husky to start with, but from the inside she can feel the difference. She doesn’t like how her heart keeps hammering even after she’s stopped for a rest or how heavy the pack feels.

It’s gonna get heavier if you find what you’re looking for, girl,
she reminds herself, and gets moving again. The going seems easier without the stifling warmth of the down jacket. Johanna inspects the surrounding growth, hoping to catch a glimpse of a thick, twiggy mass of growth nestling among the more normal limbs.

Witches’-brooms,
she thinks, then smiles to herself. She likes the fanciful name, but what she is searching for is in no sense supernatural. The witches’-brooms she is looking for are natural mutations that some trees develop. There are various theories as to why they occur. Most theories favor a virus or fungus of some sort as the instigating agent. Others argue for damage to the parent tree that causes a mutation.

Johanna doesn’t really care what causes witches’-brooms to form. When she is honest with herself—which she is from time to time—she’ll admit that she doesn’t really want to know. A neat scientific explanation would take some of the thrill from the search.

And would make it easier for others to do what I do,
she thinks, leaning against a gnarled oak to catch her breath. The frame pack she’s wearing makes her feel like she has a hunchback.

Another reason to start taking better care of myself,
Johanna thinks.
Doesn’t exercise help prevent osteoporosis?

She scans the trees as she rests, thinking how ironic it would be if she makes another really good find today. Her current lack of conditioning is a direct result of her last big find, the profits from which she had invested in a partnership in one of those sprawling home garden centers. It had seemed a good decision, but it had led to her spending more time on her butt reviewing inventories and other records than getting out in the fresh air.

Several years ago Johanna had located a witches’-broom growing among the boughs of an apple tree in the remnants of an old orchard. She’d cut it away and vegetatively propagated it, tending the grafts with immense care. The best she’d hoped for had been a new variant of dwarf apple. What she’d gotten was something nursery catalogs are now calling a fairy apple.

The shining red skins of the fairy apples are delicately overlaid with pale white dappling, an accent that makes the whole apple seem to glow. A full-grown fairy apple is shaped like a Red Delicious, but grows only about as large as an apricot. Now that the first real crops are coming on, the fairy apple is the delight of haute cuisine. The young trees are selling for astronomical amounts.

But Johanna isn’t coming in for any of this wealth. She’d accepted what had then seemed to her like an astonishing offer for her find—ten times what she’d ever been paid before, and she’d been offered a lot for the Blue Dust Spruce. Even better, the offer had come years before her infant trees would bear their first fruits, so she hadn’t needed to spend years tending her young trees to their maturity only to discover, as she had several times before, that while she had indeed discovered a new strain it would be mostly useful as rootstock for grafting.

The man who had bought the young fairy apple trees must have been prescient. Later, when the first fairy apples were already a sensation, Johanna had gone back to the old orchard, hoping to find something that would give her a clue to how Demetrios Stangos could have known the potential of the fairy apple. The orchard was gone, a subdivision rising in its place, and no one there had the least idea what she was talking about.

But Johanna feels that Mr. Stangos owes her something, and when the garden center runs through her money without giving much back, and she has to go back to prospecting for new specimens Johanna remembers how she’d read that Stangos was a recluse who owned vast forested acreage in several climate zones. This wasn’t the first new tree variant he’d introduced to the market, but he remains remarkably secretive about his techniques, never attends any workshops or accepts speaking invitations.

Selfish old bastard,
Johanna thinks, burning as she always does when she recalls those interviews. Mr. Stangos always makes clear he had not been the original finder of the fairy apple. He even names her.

Just so everyone can know how stupid I was,
Johanna thinks resentfully.

After some careful reasoning, she decides that Stangos must have a technique for promoting witches’-brooms, and that for some obscure reason he’d chosen to use his technique on the fairy apple’s parent tree. Then when he’d come to collect, he’d found the witches’-broom gone and somehow found out who had taken it.

That means,
Johanna thinks,
that his own acreage should have a higher than usual proportion of witches’-brooms. I’ll just go there and find one or two. Then we’ll be even.

Now that she’s on Stangos’s land, that reasoning seems a little thin, but Johanna is nothing if not stubborn. She’s come this far, and she’s going to at least look. The winter days are short and if she doesn’t find anything...

She doesn’t complete that thought. All the while she’s been resting her gaze has been wandering through the lacework of naked branches. She has spotted clumps and breaks, but always a second inspection has revealed them as squirrel nests or clusters of unfallen leaves. Without letting her gaze leave the promising mass, she quests blindly with one hand for where her field glasses hang ready. They are small, efficient, high-powered things. She focuses and the tree branches race at her, so close she can see the pattern in the bark.

Perfect...
she thinks, feeling her exhaustion drain from her, the pack suddenly light. Not two hundred feet away is a cluster of apple trees growing in a rough oval around a meadow knee-deep in dry grass. One of these trees, almost directly across from her, slightly to the right, cradles a witches’-broom in its boughs.

Perfect!
Johanna silently exalts. An even trade, an apple tree for an apple tree.

Johanna moves forward, her tread swift in anticipation, weariness temporarily forgotten. All her attention is so tightly focused on the steps she will need to take to get her prize that she doesn’t realize that she is being watched.

From her first whiff, Shahrazad knew that the new scent did not belong to any of the fauns. Their scents mingle goat and human. This scent is wholly human. She doesn’t think that the human scent belongs to anyone she has met.

For a moment curiosity wars with caution, and the young coyote considers going and finding Demetrios. Then she remembers that the senior faun had left the property that morning. Although she is acquainted with the other fauns, Shahrazad does not accord them any authority over her—nor does she feel any great respect for them. They are skittish and shy by nature, a thing she regards as part of their essentially herbivorous nature.

Shahrazad is very young, possessed by the young’s tendency to oversimplify. She likes to divide the world between predators and prey—mostly because she considers herself a very superior predator. The problem with this oversimplification is that she tends to forget that the prey can be very clever and very dangerous indeed—precisely because if they are not, then they will most certainly become not the prey but the eaten.

So Shahrazad tells no one of her discovery, but puts her nose to the wind and begins to track. It’s an easy trail to follow. The human is hot, tired, and not in the best of health. By the time Shahrazad has homed in on her target and sneaked close, she doesn’t need her vision to confirm that this is no human she has ever met.

The human leaning back against a twisted old oak is a full-grown female, built around square-lines: big shoulders, short legs, short arms, her figure carrying just enough extra weight to fill in the curves without creating new ones. Her hair is the brown of a fallen leaf, her skin weathered, but only slightly lined. She’s wearing heavy trousers and a flannel shirt. Both are in browns and greys that blend nicely in with the surrounding forest. Shahrazad, used to animal camouflage patterns, figures this is probably deliberate.

Pleased with her discovery, Shahrazad beats the golden-brown plume of her tail against the leaf mold before remembering that she doesn’t want to give herself away, but the human hasn’t noticed anything unusual. The woman’s brown eyes are scanning the angular skeletons of the winter bare trees with a rhythmic intensity that Shahrazad recognizes. She’s used a similar method herself when hunting, checking for the thing that doesn’t fit the surroundings. A rabbit’s brown coat doesn’t hide it very well once you’ve spotted its heaving flanks.

Wondering what the woman is searching for, Shahrazad glances in the same direction. Nothing there but trees. Even the birds and squirrels have made themselves scarce in the face of this dual invasion by human and coyote.

What then is the stranger hunting?

Then the woman gives a start, a small, involuntary cry of pleasure breaking from her lips. She reaches for something hanging from the bundle on her back. Moments later, she puts binoculars up to her eyes.

Shahrazad knows what these are. Frank uses them a lot around the ranch. He’d explained that they allowed his human eyes to be as sharp as an eagle’s. Shahrazad hadn’t liked this much, especially when she realized that this meant she might be being watched when she thought she was on her own, but now she’s glad for the knowledge.

Once again, she directs her gaze to where the woman is looking. This time she sees something that makes her feel very apprehensive. The tree the woman is studying through the binoculars is one of those Demetrios had warned Shahrazad about— a dryad apple tree. However, this one is special beyond even the dryad trees that grow in the surrounding grove. Demetrios had visited it several times recently, and he never passed up an opportunity to teach his young charge.

“See that clump of branches up there, pup? That’s a baby dryad being formed. They don’t propagate through seeds, at least they don’t anymore. Stories say that they did once upon a time, but whenever, that time’s long past.”

Demetrios had seemed very pleased with this clump of skinny branches, and Shahrazad had caught his enthusiasm. Beating her tail on the ground she had prompted him to explain more.