Chapter 9: The Helper
[The Moors — Morning, Day 12]
The wallerbog was screaming.
Not the chittering I'd grown used to—the conversational back-and-forth that served as their primary communication. This was a high, thin sound, distress compressed into a frequency that cut through the forest like a blade. I was on my feet and moving before the conscious part of my brain had finished identifying the source.
Fifty yards east of my hollow, where the meadow met a dense patch of bramble, a knot of wallerbogs had gathered in a loose semicircle. They milled and chittered, trunks waving, too agitated to hold still but too small to help. At the center of the semicircle, half-buried in a bramble thicket, one of their own was tangled.
The thorns had caught it—not the great thorn wall, but ordinary brambles, the kind that grew wild along the meadow's edge. The wallerbog had apparently tried to push through and gotten snagged. Every movement drove the thorns deeper. Blood—dark, thicker than human blood—beaded along its trunk and the soft skin of its arms.
The other wallerbogs were frantic. They pulled at brambles with their tiny hands, which only tightened the trap. One had bitten through a branch, but the freed end whipped back and caught two others. Pure chaos, well-intentioned and completely counterproductive.
"Hey. Hey." I crouched at the bramble's edge. The trapped wallerbog turned one terrified eye toward me. Its trunk quivered. "Hold still. I'm going to get you out."
I could have used my hands. Reached in, pulled thorns apart, accepted the scratches. But the bramble was dense, the wallerbog was small, and my hands were big. I'd do as much damage extracting it as the thorns were doing holding it.
Gravity, then.
I focused. Not on the wallerbog—I'd never tried to lift a living thing, and the headache from my last object-manipulation attempt was a fresh enough memory to inspire caution. Instead, I targeted the bramble branches themselves. Five of them, each the thickness of my thumb, each hooked into the wallerbog's fur and skin.
Lighter. Just the thorns. Make them lighter.
The branches trembled. The trapped wallerbog squealed. I adjusted—gentler, more precise, reducing the downward pull on each branch until they lifted away from the wallerbog's body like fingers opening from a fist. One inch. Two. Enough.
"Go," I said. "Now. Move."
The wallerbog scrambled free. The other wallerbogs surged forward, surrounding it, trunk-touching and chittering in a way that was clearly the wallerbog equivalent of a tearful group hug. The freed one was bleeding from a dozen small punctures but moving freely—nothing vital hit.
I released the brambles. They snapped back into position. The headache arrived on schedule—a sharp pulse behind my right eye, the familiar price of object manipulation. But duller than last time. Shorter. Either I was getting better at this or the body was adapting.
The freed wallerbog broke away from its companions and trundled toward me. It was small even by wallerbog standards—young, probably. It stopped at my boot, looked up with those round dark eyes, and wrapped both arms around my ankle.
I stood in a meadow in a magical forest with a tiny creature hugging my boot, and my throat did something complicated that I blamed on the headache.
"You're welcome," I said.
The wallerbog squeezed tighter. Its trunk pressed against my shin, warm and slightly damp.
Around us, the other wallerbogs had gone quiet. Not frightened-quiet. Watching-quiet. The same quality of attention I'd seen in the grove yesterday when Maleficent had turned her back and spoken to the flowers instead of me. The silence of a verdict being reached.
Then the dark-patched one—the scout, the first one who'd poked my boot on day two—stepped forward. It reached up and placed one small hand flat against my knee. Deliberate. A gesture with weight behind it.
The others followed. One by one, they approached and touched me—my boots, my legs, the hem of my tunic. Quick, light contacts, each one followed by a retreat, as if they were marking me with something invisible.
Acceptance, some part of my brain supplied. They're accepting you.
---
[The Moors — Afternoon, Day 13]
The tree was dying.
I wouldn't have known if the tree spirit hadn't come to find me. It emerged from the forest floor like a slow wave, bark and root and moss assembling into a vaguely humanoid shape that creaked with each movement. Its face—if you could call it a face—was a hollow in the trunk where two knotholes served as eyes and a crack in the bark formed a mouth.
It took ten minutes to reach me. Tree spirits moved at tree speed: patient, inevitable, achingly slow. When it arrived at the clearing where I'd been practicing hover-transitions, it raised one branching arm and pointed east.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
The spirit made a sound. Not words—more like the groan of wood under stress, a deep bass vibration that I heard more in my chest than my ears. But the meaning was clear enough: follow.
I followed. Twenty minutes of walking brought me to one of the oldest oaks I'd seen in the Moors—easily centuries old, its trunk wider than my hollow, its canopy a world unto itself. But where the other ancient trees radiated warmth and life, this one was cold. Its bark had blackened along one side, the discoloration spreading upward like a slow infection. Dead branches protruded at wrong angles. The leaves on the affected side had curled inward, brown and brittle.
Blight. Some kind of disease, magical or otherwise, eating the tree from the inside.
The tree spirit that had led me here placed one hand against the sick oak's trunk. The groan it produced was longer this time, lower. Grief. A tree mourning another tree, in the language of things that measured time in centuries.
I stepped closer. Placed my own hand on the bark.
Cold. Not just the absence of warmth—active cold, the kind that pulled heat from my palm. The blight had a temperature, a presence. It felt wrong in a way that bypassed analysis and went straight to instinct. The same instinct that had made me recoil from certain wounds in the ER—the ones where the tissue was too far gone, where the infection had passed the point of recovery, where the body's own systems had turned against it.
But this wasn't too far gone. Not yet. The blight covered maybe a third of the trunk. The rest was still alive, still fighting.
Healer, something whispered. Not a voice—a sensation. A pull in my chest, centered below my sternum, drawing my attention inward. I'd been feeling it faintly for days—near the wallerbogs, near the flowers in the grove, near anything alive and growing. A warmth. A connection. Something reaching out from inside me toward the living things around me.
I stopped thinking and let the pull take over.
My hand pressed harder against the bark. The warmth in my chest expanded—outward, down my arm, into my palm, into the wood. Not heat. Not magic in any way I understood. More like... encouragement. The biological equivalent of a doctor telling an immune system you can do this, you've got the resources, fight.
The bark beneath my hand shifted. The black receded—not vanishing, but retreating, pulling back from my palm like shadow retreating from light. An inch. Two. The wood underneath was pale, raw, damaged but alive.
Something in my chest gave. Not painfully—more like a muscle releasing tension it had held for too long. A lock opening. A door that had been stuck swinging free.
The blight pulled back another inch. The tree groaned—not grief this time. Something closer to relief.
Then the world tilted sideways and I was on the ground.
My vision grayed at the edges. The headache was different from gravity overuse—not sharp but deep, a full-body exhaustion that started in my core and radiated outward. Every muscle felt wrung out. My hands trembled against the moss.
The tree spirit loomed over me. Its knothole eyes, if I was reading tree expressions correctly, carried something like concern.
"I'm fine," I said. My voice was thin. Unconvincing. "Just... need a minute."
I needed considerably more than a minute. I lay on the moss for twenty, maybe thirty, staring up at the canopy and feeling the strange new emptiness where the warmth in my chest had been. Not gone—depleted. Like a battery drained to single digits, needing time to recharge.
When I finally sat up, the blight on the oak had receded about six inches from where my hand had been. Not cured—treated. A foothold for the tree's own healing to build on.
The tree spirit placed one branching hand on my shoulder. The weight was substantial—bark and wood and centuries of patience. But the touch was gentle.
Thank you, the wood seemed to say. Or maybe I was projecting. Hard to tell, with everything spinning.
---
[Eastern Meadows — Late Afternoon, Day 14]
"No," I said. "Absolutely not."
The wallerbogs didn't listen. They never listened. That was their defining characteristic as a species—enthusiastic, affectionate, completely immune to verbal refusal.
The mud pit was a depression near the meadow's eastern edge, maybe fifteen feet across and filled with mud that glowed faintly blue. Not because the mud was magical—the water fairies who lived in the stream feeding the pit were magical, and their bioluminescence bled into the sediment, creating mud that shimmered like diluted starlight.
The wallerbogs loved it. They dove in headfirst, surfacing with trunks full of glowing muck and hurling it at each other with the accuracy of major-league pitchers and the strategy of kindergarteners. The sounds they made during mud fights were indescribable—a symphony of squealing delight that could probably be heard at the thorn wall.
I'd been standing at a safe distance, watching, when the dark-patched scout approached with that particular body language I was learning to recognize as we have decided something and you are not going to like it.
"No," I said again, backing up.
The scout chittered once. A command. Six wallerbogs broke from the mud pit and advanced on me in a pincer formation that would have done credit to a military tactician.
"Look, I appreciate the invitation, but—"
The first mud ball hit my chest. Warm, weirdly pleasant, glowing blue-white on impact. The second caught my shoulder. The third—thrown by the scout itself, with a wind-up that used its entire trunk—hit me square in the face.
I stood there, dripping luminescent mud, while a dozen wallerbogs held their breath.
Then I laughed.
Not the pressurized stress-release from Diaval's midnight interrogation. Not the careful, managed humor I'd been rationing since arrival. This was the real thing—deep, unstoppable, the kind of laugh that starts in your stomach and takes over your whole body and doesn't care about dignity or strategy or the careful plan to become indispensable. This was the laugh of a man standing in blue glowing mud in a magical forest surrounded by tiny creatures who'd just ambushed him with the enthusiasm of golden retrievers, and finding the entire situation so absurdly, overwhelmingly good that the only possible response was surrender.
I sat down in the mud pit. The wallerbogs swarmed.
They climbed on me. They burrowed under my arms. They filled my lap and my shoulders and one particularly adventurous individual nested in my hair, trunk wrapped around my ear. They were warm and solid and alive and they didn't care that I was a dead man from another world—they cared that I'd freed their friend from brambles and helped their tree and stayed when he could have left.
The mud soaked through my clothing. I didn't care. The headache from the tree healing had faded to nothing. My chest, empty since the Verdant Communion had drained it, was starting to fill again—slowly, like a well refilling from underground springs. Something about proximity to living things. Something about joy.
From a branch at the clearing's edge, a raven watched. It made a sound—not a caw, not a croak. Something shorter, lighter, with an uptick at the end.
Suspiciously similar to a laugh.
---
[Stream — Evening, Day 14]
The mud didn't want to come off.
"It's bonded to the fabric," Diaval said, watching me scrub my tunic in the stream with the detached amusement of someone who'd elected to stay in raven form during the mud fight and was now reaping the benefits of that decision. He'd shifted to human form specifically, I suspected, to comment on my appearance.
"Bonded how?"
"The water fairy luminescence. It binds to organic material. Your clothes will glow for about a week."
I held up the tunic. Faint blue light pulsed from the fabric.
"Great."
"It's not dangerous. Merely... conspicuous." He leaned against a tree, arms crossed, that almost-smile hovering at the corners of his mouth. "She'll hear about today. The tree, the wallerbogs, all of it."
I wrung out the tunic. Water and residual glow dripped between my fingers. "Will that be good or bad?"
Diaval considered the question with the seriousness it apparently warranted. His head tilted. His eyes went distant—the calculating look that meant he was weighing possibilities against sixteen years of serving a woman who didn't do good or bad in simple terms.
"Different," he said finally.
"Different how?"
"You helped a tree. You rescued a wallerbog. You let yourself get dragged into a mud fight and you laughed." He pushed off the tree and straightened. "The last person who laughed like that in the Moors—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "It's been a long time since anyone laughed here. She'll notice."
He shifted before I could ask what he meant. The raven launched from the ground, banked hard over the stream, and disappeared into the canopy heading north. Toward her. Toward the report that would include a healer who healed trees and laughed in blue mud and stayed when everyone else had left.
I pulled on the damp, glowing tunic and walked back to my hollow.
The wallerbogs followed. Eight of them, maintaining their customary distance, trunks bobbing in synchronized rhythm. One of them—the scout—had upgraded from four feet to three. Progress.
At the hollow entrance, I paused. Touched the oak's inner wall with my palm. The wood was warm. Alive. The same warmth that lived in my chest, the connection that had surfaced with the sick tree and hadn't left.
Verdant Communion. I didn't know the name yet, but I knew the feeling: the forest was starting to talk to me, and I was starting to understand.
Inside the hollow, I sat on the moss bed. My clothing glowed faintly blue. My hair was stiff with residual mud. The iron nail pressed against my ankle inside my boot, a small hard point of certainty in a world made of magic and uncertainty.
Tomorrow, Maleficent would know what happened today. She'd know about the tree, the wallerbogs, the mud. She'd process it through whatever framework she used to categorize threats and anomalies and unexpected things, and she'd make a decision about what it meant.
I couldn't control that decision. I could only keep doing what I'd been doing: being useful, being honest, being present. Earning it.
Outside, the Moors exhaled into evening. Somewhere in the meadow, wallerbogs were still fighting in their luminous mud pit, and the sound of their joy carried through the trees like a song in a language I was only beginning to learn.
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