I swore under my breath.
“Justin!” Vala’s anxious voice came from somewhere in the woods. “Come on!”
I found her at the head of the trail near the cliff. Through a broken wall of scrawny, wind-twisted trees I could just make out the two remaining pines, and the bright yellow gash that was the stump of the one that had fallen. The sharp scent of pine resin and sawdust hung in the air, and the smell of exhaust fumes from the chain saw.
But there was no other sign of Lonnie, obviously, or of anyone else.
“Look,” said Vala in a hoarse whisper. She clutched me and pulled me towards her, her touch so cold it was like I’d been shot up with Novocain. My entire arm went numb. “There! The boat—”
She pointed down to the boulder-strewn beach where the dock thrust into the bay. At the end of the dock bobbed a small motorboat, a Boston Whaler. Farther out, the hulking form of the Ice Queen rose above the gray water, sails furled.
She was at anchor. Several small forms moved across the deck. I squinted, trying to see if I recognized any of them. A frigid spasm shot through my ribs as Vala nudged me, indicating the rocks below.
“Is that him?” she hissed. “This man Tierney?”
I saw Winter loping across the beach towards the dock, jumping from one boulder to the next. On the shore, right next to the end of the dock, stood two men. One was tall, wearing an orange life vest and a blaze-orange watch cap and high rubber boots. The other was shorter, white-haired, slightly heavyset, wearing sunglasses and a red-and-white windbreaker, striped like the Ice Queen’s sails.
“That’s him,” I said.
Vala fixed her intense sky-blue gaze on me. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen his picture in the newspaper. And online.”
She stood at the top of the trail and stared down. An angry voice rose from the rocks—Winter’s—then another voice joined in, calmer, and a third, calm at first, then laughing. I heard Winter curse, words I couldn’t believe he knew. The third man, Tierney, laughed even harder.
I glanced at Vala, still staring at what was below us. One of her hands grasped the branch of a birch tree beside the path. She seemed to be thinking; almost she might have been daydreaming, she looked so peaceful, like somehow she’d forgotten where she was and what was happening. Finally, she shook her head. Without looking back at me, she snapped the branch from the tree, dropped it, and started down the trail towards the beach.
I started after her, then hesitated.
The branch lay across the narrow path at my feet. Where Vala had touched them, the leaves had shriveled and faded, from yellow-green to the dull gray of lichen, and the white birch bark had blackened into tight, charred-looking curls.
I tried to lift the branch. It was too heavy to move.
“It’s my land now.” Thomas Tierney’s voice echoed from the cliff face. “So I suggest you get the hell off it!”
I looked down to see Vala’s small form at the bottom of the trail, hopping lightly from one boulder to the next as she headed for the dock. I scrambled down the path after her.
But I couldn’t go as fast. For some reason, maybe because first Winter, then Vala had raced down before me, rocks had tumbled across the narrow trail. Not big rocks, but enough of them that I had to pick my way carefully to keep from falling.
Not only that: in spots a white slick of frost covered the ground, so that my feet slipped, and once I almost fell and cracked my head. I stopped for a minute, panting. As I caught my breath, I looked away from the beach, to where the cliff plunged into a deep crevice in the granite.
There, caught in the gigantic crack so that it looked as though it had grown up from the rocks, was the fallen pine. It tilted over the water, black in the shadow of the cliff, its great branches still green and strong-looking, the smell of pine sap overpowering the smell of the sea. In its uppermost branches something moved, then lifted from the tree and flew out above the bay—a bald eagle, still mottled brown and black with its young plumage.
I couldn’t help it. I began to cry. Because no matter how strong and alive the tree looked, I knew it was dead. Nothing would bring it back again. It had been green when no one lived here but the Passamaquoddy, it had seen sailors come from far across the sea, and tourists in boats from Paswegas Harbor, and maybe it had even seen the Ice Queen earlier that morning with her red-and-white-striped mainsail and Thomas Tierney on the deck, watching as Lonnie Packard took a chain saw to its great trunk, and the tree finally fell, a crash that I hadn’t heard.
But Vala had.
You stay with her, Justin, you understand me?
I took a deep breath and wiped my eyes, checked to make sure I could still see Vala on the rocks below, then continued my climb down. When I finally reached the bottom, I still had to be careful—there were tidal pools everywhere between the granite boulders, some of them skimmed with ice and all of them greasy with kelp and sea lettuce. I hurried as fast as I could towards the dock.
“You don’t own those trees.” Winter’s voice rang out so loudly that my ears hurt. “Those are the King’s Pines—no man owns them.”
“Well, I own this land,” retorted Tierney. “And if that doesn’t make me the goddamn king, I don’t know what does.”
I clambered over the last stretch of rocks and ran up alongside Vala. Winter stood a few yards away from us, towering above Thomas Tierney. The other man stood uneasily at the edge of the dock. I recognized him—Al Alford, who used to work as first mate on one of the daysailers in Paswegas Harbor. Now, I guessed, he worked for Tierney.
“King?” Vala repeated. “Hann er klikkapor.” She looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “He’s nuts.”
Maybe it was her saying that, or maybe it was me being pissed at myself for crying. But I took a step out towards Tierney and shouted at him.
“It’s against the law to cut those trees! It’s against the law to do any cutting here without a permit!”
Tierney turned to stare at me. For the first time he looked taken aback, maybe even embarrassed or ashamed. Not by what he’d done, I knew that; but because someone else—a kid—knew he’d done it.
“Who’s this?” His voice took on that fake-nice tone adults use when they’re caught doing something, like smoking or drinking or fighting with their wives. “This your son, Winter?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” said Vala, and under her breath said the word she’d used when I first met her: feogar.
But Winter didn’t say anything, and Tierney had already turned away.
“Against the law?” He pulled at the front of his red-and-white windbreaker, then shrugged. “I’ll pay the fine. No one goes to jail for cutting down trees.”
Tierney smiled then, as though he was thinking of a joke no one else would ever get, and added, “Not me, anyway.”
He looked at Al Alford and nodded. Al quickly turned and walked—ran, practically—to where the Boston Whaler rocked against the metal railing at the end of the dock. Tierney followed him, but slowly, pausing once to stare back up the hillside—not at the King’s Pines but at the farmhouse, its windows glinting in the sun where they faced the cliff. Then he walked to where Alford waited by the little motorboat, his hand out to help Tierney climb inside.
I looked at Winter. His face had gone slack, except for his mouth: he looked as though he were biting down on something hard.
“He’s going to cut the other ones, too,” he said. He didn’t sound disbelieving or sad or even angry; more like he was saying something everyone knew was true, like It’ll snow soon or Tomorrow’s Sunday. “He’ll pay the twenty-thousand-dollar fine, just like he did down in Kennebunkport. He’ll wait and do it in the middle of the night when I’m not here. And the trees will be gone.”