The Orchardist II

~ Taylor ~

Getting kicked by a two-hundred-foot-tall tree was everything Taylor feared it would be. The impact was like being hit by a train, and only his last-second decision to redirect the force upward saved his life. His shield took some of the damage, and his enhanced body absorbed more, but getting kicked into the orchard would have killed him. In the air, he couldn't crash into anything.

Why did every large opponent decide to throw him? Captain Bennet, she of the stolen sandwiches, had tried the same thing. Reginar had assumed he wouldn't try to escape once they were far enough in the air. Taylor carried praxes, potions, and spells for all kinds of dangers. Did people think he wouldn't be prepared for obvious threats?

He chose not to worry about his tumbling or the stars in his head, but focused on healing himself for as long as he was going up. Pulling his attention inward, he found several ribs had broken, and his organs had some bruising, but nothing had ruptured. His neck needed some attention, as did his skull. He didn't remember cracking his head against anything, but the injury spoke for itself. He healed the worst of it and started a Slow Regeneration for everything else.

When he reached the apex and felt the first moment of weightlessness, he used his praxis of Slow Descent. "Might be the smartest thing I ever made," he said out loud. The magic effect not only slowed him down but also gave him something to stand on while he fell. "Now let's try something different."

He pointed his mithril-imbued sword at Prater. The reason he preferred a straight, thin sword to a curved one wasn't for the style of fighting it encouraged, but because it wouldn't spoil his aim or complicate the energy flow. He used it like a wand, focusing power that was difficult to control on his own.

Since his battle against Reginar, he'd thought a lot about new attack magics. He'd only tried this one experimentally, but it wasn't too tricky to pull off. And, given that area attacks worked, beams might also work.

He shot a stream of high-energy plasma at the tree. On its own, it would hurt enough to bore holes in him. He followed the beam with lightning, which wasn't typically accurate but, when channeled through a tunnel of highly conductive plasma, hit his target unerringly. The noise pounded him until all he could hear was the ring of broken eardrums, but he could heal those later. Half a dozen strikes later, the orchardist had deep holes in him, but he didn't seem to care. Trees didn't have the same kind of anatomy as people and animals. Poking holes wouldn't be enough.

Prater hurled sharp slivers of wood at him, larger than ballistae bolts, but Taylor could see them coming and easily deflected the attack with shields of pure force. He only had seconds of falling left before he hit the ground, and he needed a new plan. As he surveyed the land beneath him (the ridgeline was still the best place to fight) he spied the main house with the carriage still parked in front of it. Two small figures stood on the cab's roof, the smaller one waving her arms.

"Get out of here!" He shouted and made shooing motions with his arms. "It's not safe!" But, Alexis and the driver couldn't hear him from that distance, and he was too busy to add another spell to his cognitive load just to amplify his voice. If they were foolish enough to stay on the battlefield, that was on them. Besides, they were standing on a large area of pavement, and the land around the house was all green lawn. They'd be safe enough. Probably.

Fire. Naturally, it would come down to fire. He doubted the typical Fireball would be enough, and there was no way Prater would let him set up a proper circle, so Taylor would have to perform a major working free-hand. If the orchard burned down in the process … well, he hoped the apprentices would be protected, lying on a dirt road. He started a cyclone of air before he touched ground, to feed his spell on natural oxygen. Prater stomped toward him with earth-shaking steps until he reached the center of Taylor's attention, where the winds gathered.

All at once, two hundred feet of tree burst into flame. Taylor increased the wind and enhanced the fire so it would burn unnaturally faster and hotter. It didn't have the explosive power of Fireball, but it burned far hotter. Prater roared until leaves and fruit fell from the surrounding plants. The sound didn't come from any mouth, but emanated from the surface of his wooden body, which vibrated to make the noise. But they weren't shouts of pain.

Prater was laughing. "Fire is the first thing they always think of! Did you believe someone as old as I wouldn't be prepared for such an obvious assault? Look at me and learn! What you see is not some delicate cultivar, but a cypress older than your empire. We need fire to release our cones!"

To prove his point, Prater threw flaming pinecones larger than Taylor's head. They bounced harmlessly off his shields and scattered around, setting the nearby orchard on fire. "My kind thrives near fire. Our thick bark protects us. I have spent many long years improving on that natural defense. Burn my crown if you wish, but it will not stop me."

"Thanks for the lesson," Taylor yelled back at the immense tree. "Last chance. Let us leave."

"Last chance, you say?" Prater laughed again, filling the air with cruel mirth. "You never had a chance."

Surges of mana around him made Taylor look. Saplings, hundreds of them, nearly his height, sprang from where the flaming cones had dropped their seeds. They moved along the ground with their roots, spindly trunks whipping back and forth, aimlessly at first, until a central will took control. They shuffled to surround him. Individually, these new opponents didn't look strong, but there were so many of them.

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"I must thank you before you die. Long have I carried these cones, but no fire was hot enough to open them. Now, I will have thousands of children. I no longer need to rely on people."

Taylor put away his sword and dug frantically into his bag while the saplings gathered. He could slice through them by the dozen, but he couldn't get them all before they swarmed him. After that … he imagined them sinking their roots into his flesh, draining his mana and his fluids, then absorbing his body until he was nothing but a skeleton.

He found the bag he was looking for, full of magic crystals from the algae incident, and shoved his hand inside. He tapped into the solidified mana and let it fill him with its raw cruelty. His heart became a newborn sun, pumping plasma through his veins. He breathed fire, shot white-hot light from his eyes, and his blue hair began to streak with gold. When he screamed, his voice was frayed by mana fire. The pain was so much worse than he imagined, but with that much power, he could use his magic instinctively, without regard for efficiency.

A single Slice, thrown in a circle, cut down all the gathered saplings and decimated the nearby orchard. He reversed his wind, sucking oxygen away from the ancient cypress that had named itself Prater. He bent light away from his enemy to deprive him of the nourishing sun. The fire died, and a creeping cold took its place.

"I have plenty more children, thanks to you. What's this? You think you can freeze me out?" Prater laughed again, or maybe he had never stopped. "You don't know your trees so well. I'm very frost-tolerant."

If he had time to design a proper circle, he could make a total vacuum to freeze and boil the monster simultaneously. But there was no point in wishing for time he didn't have.

"Trees die in the Arctic," Taylor said in his damaged voice. He set up a new energy cycle, a cyclonic heat pump tall enough to surround Master Prater. The orchardist slowed as the cold zone hit zero degrees Fahrenheit in seconds. Taylor scurried through the orchard, zig-zagging beneath the canopies, Slicing anything that threatened him, and then doubling back under the cover of camouflage.

When he was sure Prater lost track of him, Taylor added an outer layer to the heat-pump system, plunging the inner zone to minus fifty. Wood creaked and cracked, and long strips of thick bark spalled away from the trunk. Ten-foot-long sections of bark fell from hundreds of feet to crash in the orchard below. Ignoring the fire in his veins, Taylor added a third layer …

~ Prater ~

Prater was late to realize the danger he was in, but he wasn't a fool. He animated the trees nearest the little magician (the ones that still had their limbs) and attacked, but the child cut them down with a single wordless spell. When Prater raised a thousand roots to ensnare it, it was ready with another invisible blade.

Cold crept past Prater's cambium, and he knew he had to do something decisive. Ranged attacks gave his enemy too much time to respond, and the human could feel magic before it manifested. That was the only explanation for how it so easily countered all the magic thrown at it.

The only attack that worked so far was brute force. This time, instead of kicking it, he'd crush the insect underfoot. He stalked the insect child with one slow step after another, while it scurried beneath him. The weevil ran backwards, dodging through the wrecked orchard, jumping over fallen trees, weaving its way in and out of Prater's line of sight, cutting down every attempt to slow him.

Then it was gone. Simply gone. But the magic it had set in motion was still alive. Cold, deeper and darker than any Prater had ever known, crept deeply into sapwood. Roots split where he bent them to walk. His trunk became stiff. His bark began to peel.

If the human was still on the ridge with him, then Prater needed to be elsewhere. He reversed course with an alarming sound of cracking wood and snapping branches, and tried to leave the way he'd come. But he couldn't outrun the freeze. His sap ran cold, and his heartwood turned brittle. Against his will, he slowed. If the ice in him reached his pith, he would die.

As so often happens, his roots gave out first. They shattered into frosted splinters beneath the weight of his great bole, and he tipped. The child added to his momentum with a well-timed push from an invisible hand, just enough to shove him past the point of no return, and there was nothing more to be done. Prater was very tall when standing on his roots, and he took a long, long time to fall.

How many years had he lived through simulacra, aging them and replacing them with 'younger' ones? He pretended to have children, married to cover his true nature, and handled legal tasks through intermediaries. Even his Merchant Guild membership was at arm's length: he'd never stepped foot inside the famously grand building. How long had he lived like that, only to be felled by this child?

Too many years to be worth counting. He'd made a deal with the first king of Estford. The realm was called something else back then, stitched together from minor towns that needed shelter from more violent neighbors. The first king lacked the typical human urge to kill everything that wasn't itself, so the pact was easily made. Prater promised to abide by certain rules, like never to enslave another intelligent being, nor harm one without cause. In return, his land was his forever.

But that king was dead long before the empire came with its new laws and treaties to claim the nation and rename it Estford. A new nation meant a new negotiation, but that, too, went along similar lines. The early emperors weren't interested in turning everything upside down everywhere they went. But they, too, had passed with time to be replaced by a new growth of emperors with stronger grips and weaker consciences.

Perhaps he'd grown too tall for his roots. He didn't need either child. He'd picked the fight because he didn't like being told no, and because he could. He assumed he would win, then brush aside niggling consequences like missing children with enchanted fruit, lies, and bribes. It had worked so well for the last few centuries that it didn't occur to him it wouldn't always work.

He thought of his many seedlings and urged them to roam far from here, to find new soil and take root. Many would be discovered and destroyed, but not all. If enough of them survived, then maybe one day they could make a nation of their own.

Prater's body crashed to the ground, crushing smaller trees beneath him. His last, faint sensations were of the human child carving its way deep into frozen heartwood until it reached the pith and Prater's mana stone. The magician would claim its prize, and why shouldn't it? Prater had tried to feed on its flesh and failed. Now the child would do the same to him.

That was the truth of things, and all the treaties in the world couldn't change it.

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