Though I promised not to bring Apollo back to Daphne, I couldn’t control his desire to see her again. I turned and found him standing before me. In his arms Dryope the girl struggled to escape. He held the blade of his lumberjack’s ax to her throat. In her hands she held a vial of changing syrup, the very one I kept locked in the curio.
“If you let me take Daphne, I’ll let the girl go.”
“But your vial is empty.” I raised my hands in the air, conceded to victim-hood in the name of saving a girl’s life. “You have more?”
“I’ll take her wood,” he said.
“But she’ll die. She can’t change back if she’s dead.”
“She’ll be better that way. She’ll be mine that way.”
“And what do you intend to do with this other vial? The one you stole from me?”
“I’ll return it.” He grinned. “I brought that one for you. I know how failure makes a woman desperate.”
I tensed not from anger but from guilt. I didn’t want to give Apollo what he wanted, but it seemed I had little choice; Daphne couldn’t speak, couldn’t beg me to save her. Plus, if I let him go with what he wanted, I had a better chance of coming out alive. If I didn’t barter, if I gave nothing, he might kill the girl, kill me, kill Daphne: all of us. I was of a logical mind. Logic told me to take as few chances as possible. With the syrup, I could give the girl back the body she had chosen for herself, all those years ago. Without it, without the woman, we might all be no more than fodder for the swollen earth.
“You may have Daphne,” I said. “You have the word of a Guardian of the Orangery.”
Apollo let the woman loose. She ran to me, and I pried the syrup from her hands. Better to wait until Apollo had finished his deed. Better to wait until the monsters had gone before I let myself be alone once more.
He didn’t speak to Daphne but wrapped both hands tight around the handle of his ax the moment he was near enough. The woman beside me tensed and looked away. I didn’t look elsewhere. It was my burden to watch what I didn’t stop. In so many years, had the world not changed?
Apollo had claimed himself a lumberjack; what I knew of him, then, was that he, and others like him, had made a profession of hunting wood. And to what end? My hut was strong and warm and contained no wood of which to speak. Though the Orangery had not changed, the world had surely grown around it, Apollo evidence enough of that.
Apollo struck. I uncorked the syrup and advanced upon him. He struggled to yank the dulled ax from wood grown thick with time, one hand pushing against the bark while the other worked at freeing the ax. With my knife, I pinned his hand to the bark. I pulled his head back with his hair and poured the syrup down his throat. He didn’t struggle, shocked, I think, to taste a liquid so rancid on the tongue, the bitterest medicine there ever was.
He stumbled from Daphne, roots forming their armor around his feet then up his legs, encasing his cock, his torso, the arm that still held tight to its ax, his face, its mouth hanging wide as though to wish liquid out. His tree was no more gnarled, no less beautiful, than any others in the Orangery.
I left him unmarked.
Without the syrup, I could not help the girl pursue her highest of desires—to change back—but I taught her to read, to write, to care for the trees. The wind outside the Orangery whispered through the cracks in the hurried patching I’d completed for the wall. I’d looked too long at Apollo’s naked body. I knew enough to understand that it wasn’t the thrill of a monster that so intrigued me but the thrill plain and simple, and if within the Orangery’s walls the tides could turn, why could a Guardian not leave her post to pursue a life of which she’d only read?
I went to find a man worthy of my skin, to sate the curiosity of my body. I went to experience stories with a different ending than the trees’. Perhaps, I thought, the women of the wood would like to hear them. Perhaps it would call them forth once more.
And this one, you ask? He was no one: an admirer of Daphne. We don’t even celebrate his name.
I watched the guide return to the cabin that once was mine, so many years ago. The roof was gone, given way to the sky.
“What happens when it rains?” I asked, stepping out from the shadows.
At first, Dryope did not recognize me. I’d changed, that much was certain. I’d hated and loved. Outside these walls, there was so much love to go with the hate. After a breath, Dryope smiled. “You,” she said. She stepped into the light so that I saw her face weathered only slightly by age. “Were you here the whole time?”
“No, no, I heard your tour. I hid behind a woman and her daughter. I’ve gotten good at blending in.” I stood so that I, too, caught the light. Time had not been as kind to me, for I’d lived the kind of life some would be ashamed of. I’d known a hundred men, women too. I’d embraced Dionysus and explored other states of reality. I’d exhausted many of the world’s possibilities. I wasn’t ashamed. “I’m impressed with the amount of people on your tour. We never had so many. I did tell people about this place, in the hopes that you wouldn’t stay too lonely, but I suspect it’s your lively storytelling that’s drawing them in.”
“Thank you,” Dryope said.
I motioned up. “You didn’t answer my question, about the rain.”
“I like the rain,” she said.
“Ah.” I remembered, then, that before she became human again she had not lived under a roof for over a thousand years. It is strange the things you forget for an instant, as though you could make the world disappear by forgetting it. I smiled to myself; one of my lovers and I used to play that game, forgetting pieces of the world, seeing if we could make them stay gone. We never could. I tried to forget the horrible things that happened to Dryope. But how can you forget things you never knew? “So there has been no relief for you?” I meant the memory of bark, the memory of hands of which she spoke. “I thought you said you didn’t remember the skin. But in your tour—”
“I remember.” She pursed her lips, a human habit she must have picked up from those who visited the Orangery. “Sometimes I don’t know if they’re memories I’ve embellished, or if they’re true. But they feel true, when they come at me in nightmares. I never used to have nightmares, before…”
“I’m sorry.” I stepped forward. “May I?” I held out my palm. She nodded. I grasped her hand. “I’ve brought you something. I searched for them everywhere. I destroyed them all, except this one.” I slipped the vial into her palm. “For you, I thought an exception should be made. After all, I’ve learned that it is more painful to lose something than to never have known it at all. And I am responsible. I never should have led him to you, never should have offered you in Daphne’s place.”
She looked down at the vial. Then in one fluid motion she tossed it into the fire at the room’s center. The liquid poured into ash.
“Are you back for good?” she said. “Are you here to replace me?” She pursed her lips again. “I don’t want to go.”
I had intended, yes, to take back my old post. To free Dryope. After all, the Orangery needed someone, for once, who knew the world in all its shades of grey. Too long had the guides told terrible stories and known only the world’s terrible truths. Too long had we subjected the trees to their grief retold and nothing more. I had brought with me stories of light to soothe the dark.
But she had thrown the vial into the fire. It had been her choice to stay in her skin, and now it was her choice to remain in the Orangery. Why shouldn’t she? I could build a bed of leaves for myself, could even make a new cabin if she did not wish to share. As I had learned outside the Orangery walls, light came in many shapes, including the shape of a companion, a friend to hold your hand and quell your nightmare shaking. I would do this for her, if she wanted me to.