Owl Be Home For Christmas

A Christmas in the Young Wizards universe

Diane Duane

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Errantry Press

County Wicklow, Ireland

Copyright © 2020 Diane Duane

This Ebooks.Direct ebook is v1.02, dated December 30, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

Donald Maass Literary Agency

1000 Dean Street, Suite 252

Brooklyn, NY 11238

USA

Created with Vellum

Endless thanks to the excellent person who posts as @Airawyn at Twitter…

for coming up with the best. Title. POSSIBLE

…and granting me permission to use it.

for @nh:

H/T

for the RT

Contents

Foreword

I. ONE

1. JD 2459186.50000 (2 December 2020, 7 PM EST)

2. JD 2458941.25000 (Spring 2020)

3. JD 2459164.91667 (11 November 2020)

II. TWO

4. JD 2459186.04306 (2 December 2020, 0702 EST)

5. JD 2459179.48264 (25 November 2020, 17:35 EST)

III. THREE

6. JD 2459186.58472 (2 December 2020, 21:02 EST)

7. JD 2459186.61250 (2 December 2020, 21:42 EST)

8. JD 2459186.63056 (2 December 2020, 22:08 EST)

9. JD 2459186.67882 (2 December 2020, 23:17 EST)

10. JD 2459209.04168 (25 December 2020, 1300 UTC)

11. Afterword

12. Another tale of Christmas in the Young Wizards universe

By the same author

Diane Duane on social media

Foreword

Every story comes in at least two versions: what seems to have happened, and what really happened. The better the story, the more versions of it make themselves apparent as Time’s arrow flies. The very best stories come in so many versions you can’t count them (and this is why we have parallel universes: there’s far too much story to fit in just one).

It’s usually easiest to start with the one that seems to have happened. Like this:

Once upon a time there was a small owl who had a big adventure.

…But reality is rarely so simple.

Part I

ONE

1

JD 2459186.50000 (2 December 2020, 7 PM EST)

For the many citizens of New York City (and elsewhere) intent on seeing the traditional lighting ceremony for this year’s iconic Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza, the day had started out looking promising. The weather was relatively mild for this time of year, in the mid-40s during the daytime because of the light cloud over the tri-state area. But the cloud had moved off as the temperature dropped. The National Weather Service was confidently predicting a clear dry night with temperatures in the 30s: no chance of snow, but at least no chance of rain either.

The tree itself was a particularly handsome one this year—a 75-foot Norway spruce from upstate New York. It had taken three days to transport it safely from its source to the streets of Manhattan and finally to the spot where it would stand, like eighty-seven other trees before it, in front of the handsome Art Deco skyscraper called Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, at the heart of the greater collection of buildings that made up Rockefeller Center.

Normally the streets around Rockefeller Plaza would have been crowded with people trying to get as close as possible to the upcoming lighting of the tree. However, this being 2020, normality was being forced into new and unfamiliar shapes. Nearly everybody who would have been watching the events live from the surrounding streets was at home watching it on streaming video. The entertainment that would lead up to the lighting was mostly pre-recorded on interior sets designed to blend in with the exterior reality of Rockefeller Plaza. A team of on-air talent from the local NBC affiliate was positioned up at the Fifth Avenue end of the brightly-lit Channel Gardens that led down to the Plaza proper. Here, optimally posed at the near end of a long double line of white-lit Christmas trees, they would deliver a more or less continuous and meticulously-scripted patter routine designed to segué smoothly through the numerous entertainment acts and the (far more numerous) commercials.

The Plaza itself looked more or less as usual—with the addition of giant rotating snowflakes projected onto the surrounding buildings, neon-limned columns and spotlights in constantly changing colors lighting the gilded statue of the ancient Titan Prometheus at the west end of the sunken Plaza. Above it all towered the tree, presently seeming unornamented by anything but a single many-rayed star of white Swarovski crystal at the top. The skating rink below it was covered with shining stage material for the live acts, littered with giant Christmas ornaments and yard-wide beribboned gift boxes.

The lighting-ceremony broadcast started at 7 PM. For the next two hours the extravaganza went forward with act after act taking place on video or live—this just a little eerie for lack of the shouts and screams of applause that would normally have followed every one. Earth, Wind and Fire stunned many people by reminding them how good they still were (and stunned some others by still being alive). A pre-recorded Dolly Parton sang affectionately about the Christ Child, her glittering white dress stirring in a wind carefully imported into the shooting set to match what had been predicted to be blowing outside. Masked Rockettes came out and danced their famous kick-line, split between two levels of stage and socially distanced, none of them touching any of the others. Various chart-topping pop singers of the moment (and hoping they’d last past it) emoted and harmonized, accompanied by pickup rock ensembles half-blinded by the color-changing light show going on around the stage. Commercial breaks came and went, as closer and closer drew the nine o’clock hour when the tree would blaze.

Throughout it all, hi-vis-vest-clad members of the production team who weren’t in a control room or getting to grips with behind-the-scenes work in the underground areas surrounding the rink-turned-stage-space moved silently and purposefully around the edges of the Plaza both at the sidewalk level and down near the stages, any sound they made mostly concealed by the flapping of the many flags around it and the soft clanging of hoists against poles. These people were all far too busy to pay attention to one apparently supervisory group, also wearing high-vis vests, who stood companionably together across from the skating rink entrance with their backs against the side window of the Lego Store, intently watching the tree. But then who in that space wasn’t doing just that, right then? It would possibly be inaccurate to say that no one saw them. They did go unnoticed.

During the commercial break at T minus three, the four long-serving on-air talent people got themselves onto their marks down at the Fifth Avenue end of the Channel Gardens and waited for their countdown cue from the control room, while their makeup people took one last run at them and hurriedly got out of shot.

The cue came. The cameras went live. Heartfelt sentiments appropriate for any holiday taking place during the disruptions and disasters of 2020 were expressed. On the stage below the divinely oblivious Prometheus, the Mayor of New York was revealed standing next to Rockefeller Plaza’s landlord, their hands poised over a waist-high podium topped by a large gilded button. The brief, stagy countdown began—again a little eerie because there was no crowd to shout the numbers along with the talent.

Then came zero, and the Tree blazed. As always, there were no ornaments: just lights, fifty thousand-odd of them in many colors, shifting and shining as the slight breeze moved the Tree’s branches, while occasional sparks of white light from randomly-firing LEDs glittered among the boughs. In the east-facing windows of 30 Rock, people started leaning perilously far out of their offices to grab hurried selfies against the newly-radiant backdrop.

An unseen chorus sang “Joy to the World” as the cameras lingered on the tree, and the credits for the lighting ceremony broadcast began to roll. The senior tech people tasked with keeping things running at the physical, Rockefeller Plaza end of things began to relax a little into the sense of Great-we’ve-pulled-this-off-again familiar to every production team that has repeatedly done a job well over half a decade or more.

This time, that sense was premature.

* * *

The mid-Hudson Valley National Weather Service weather radars at Poughkeepsie were the first to pick up something strange going on—an odd blurry collection of scattered echoes stretching nearly half a mile wide just west the Woodstock area, drifting southward toward Kingston. As the signature approached Poughkeepsie and passed it on the westward side, it started picking up speed. The weather people for the local TV stations regarded this peculiar feature with increasing concern as it slid by over Plattekill, still west of the Hudson but now starting to overlap the course of the river. Clouds didn’t look like that, but there were a few other phenomena that did, and none of them were good. Alarmed, some of the meteorologists emailed the NWS to pool their observations. Others got on the phone to the people down at the big FAA facility in Westbury on Long Island—the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control center—concerned about the possibility of bird strikes on incoming aircraft.

NY TRACOM immediately started alerting planes on approach to the five main airports for which they were responsible, and then began hasty consultations with the satellite Liberty Area airports at Stewart and Dutchess County. Radar coordinators there saw on their screens that the fuzzy slow-growing structure reported by the upstate facilities was spreading more broadly and reflecting more concentrated echoes, like a cloud growing thicker every moment.

The radar technicians immediately began running AI-based analyses to make absolutely sure that they weren’t seeing something strictly atmospheric like an inversion duct, or some kind of radar interference artifact. But every analysis quickly came back negative. The structure looked something like bird flocks that had been sighted in the past, but much, much bigger… moving faster than any bird flock should have been able to, and growing broader all the time as it slid down the Hudson toward Manhattan. At TRACOM’s LaGuardia desks, the sector chief hurriedly started ordering aircraft presently on LGA approach to climb one level higher in the approach “layer cake”, break eastward toward the Deer Park VOR beacon halfway along Long Island, and circle there until advised otherwise.

In mid-Manhattan, people who were gathering (against police advice) to try to get a glimpse of the tree-lighting ceremony from the surrounding blocks now glanced up at the slightly unusual sound of jet engines changing their normal angles of approach to LaGuardia just across the East River. “Must be the weather’s changing,” some of those people said. And others standing around in the non-restricted side streets—in West 48th and West 51st, in the blocks east of Fifth Avenue and down by the Radio City side of 6th—heard over traffic what they started to think might be the wind changing; a low rushing sound coming from way, way uptown.

Within the police barricades keeping the tree-lighting area secure—because due to COVID-19 restrictions, the public had been encouraged to stay home and watch the lighting ceremony online or on the local NBC affiliate—the vast majority of human beings present in Rockefeller Plaza initially had no idea what the faint rushing sound was. The officials and camera people and local dignitaries stared around them, trying to work out where the sound was even coming from. It was the usual problem when you’re in among the skyscrapers: sound bounces around and its originating direction gets hard to pin down. At first the sound was reminiscent of distant running water, and some concerned glances were thrown in the direction of the plinth where the statue of Prometheus lounged leisurely and golden in the evening cold, ablaze in the multicolored mood lighting. But the fountains around the statue were all bone dry, having been turned off just before Thanksgiving in preparation for the skating rink being commissioned for the season.

The sound drew closer, got louder. It started sounding less like water and more like wind; a very localized wind, but a strangely gusty one—sometimes nearly breeze-soft, sometimes rising to a brief soft roar and then fading down again. As it got closer it started to sound more like something breathing, slow and heavy: louder and louder with every breath as it drew nearer and nearer.

All of a sudden someone on the north side of the Plaza pointed upward. Heads all around tilted to see what was up there. At first glance it looked like vapor or smoke—but troubled smoke, trembling with obscure inner motion, and bearing with it an unnerving sense that though people in the Plaza might be looking at it, it was looking back.

Slowly the bizarre phenomenon dropped closer, where streetlights and building lights and the spotlights dancing around the Plaza could start to reach it. Inside it, shapes began to become visible... and eyes. Hundreds of eyes; thousands of them. More.

The cloud was made of owls.

A thousand owls? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? More?

There was no telling: the cloud kept thickening, kept settling earthward. It was becoming so thick now that it was more like a snowstorm settling to earth, with every clump of snowflakes an owl. To someone who knew birds, the wide downward-sinking feather-blizzard now reaching right across from 50th to 51st and covering the whole long block between 5th and 6th, contained every kind of owl that might reasonably have been expected to be living in the tri-state area. There were barn owls and barred owls and boreal owls, snowy owls and spotted owls, screech owls and long-eared owls, great greys and great horned owls, hawk owls and short-eared owls. And most numerous of all of them, scattered all through the settling soft-feathered flock, was a great cohort of saw-whet owls—mostly brown-feathered and diminutive, with cream-and-brown dappled breasts and round pale faces.

The flocking owls drew more and more closely together, the great assembly of them contracting into a cloud almost too dense to see through… a cloud full of eyes. They settled in toward the Plaza, nearly obscuring it. Here and there no more than a strangled flash of yellow made it through the flying bodies occluding the streetlights on either side of the Plaza. Soft blotches of feather-edged wing-shadow repeatedly blocked the downspilling spotlight-beams away and let the light out again, the huge spots flickering as some of the lights on the Tree were.

Slowly the cloud drifted toward the west side of the Plaza, briefly obscuring Prometheus’s gold and the whole lower frontage of 30 Rock as the owls identified their prey. Then as one they closed in and dropped down.

Like snow they settled on the Tree, quieter now by the moment—for owls’ wings are built for silence when they descend on their prey—and the Tree’s lights went dim, reduced to occasional blurry blooms through downy feathers. Finally it was totally hidden, every branch of it from outflung skirt to peak. Inside the Plaza, an unnerved stillness fell as every human being there stared, amazed into silence.

A few moments later, as if it had been waiting for everything to settle, one final owl, a very small one, came fluttering down out of the darkness to flare its wings out and settle onto the treetop’s Swarovski crystal star. It looked like some small and dangerous ornament, forgotten during too-hasty decorating—or like the actual intended tree-topper, come to reduce the present one to its proper subsidiary status.

All the cameras around the Plaza focused in on that smallest owl at the top of the tree. It stared at the nearest camera as if it knew what looked at it, and why. In what seemed very much like defiance, the owl opened its sharp little beak and began emitting high-pitched hooting sounds that could easily have been mistaken for a truck backing up.

The effect would have been comical if not for the expressions of all the other owls, who turned to glare at the cameras too… and as they did, seemed to start to settle chest-deep into the tree they concealed, as if sinking their claws into it. For a few breaths’ time this went on. Then as if on a signal, all wings were raised. For that bare second the Tree’s lights once more flashed out unimpeded. Then all together, all the wings began to beat.

Impossibly, the Tree began to rise. Its ascent was hesitant at first, the way a rocket seems to hesitate in the first few moments when the engines fire. But the upward surge gained speed. More and more quickly the Tree slid upward as if being lifted by a crane reversing some earlier one’s action. Straight up it rose, steady, faster every second.

Everyone watching its ascent was held briefly immobile in the face of the Tree’s mobility, caught in the tension between possible and impossible. Obviously it was impossible for owls, even so many owls—however many owls there were—to pick up a seventy-five-foot Norway spruce. Yet the owls appeared to have examined this news for evidence, found that insufficient, and discarded it as fake. It was as if they were being helped them somehow by some kind of intention that had decreed this tree to be free not just of Rockefeller Center, but of gravity.

Up went the tree, a multiplicity of relentless wings bearing it higher with every beat. The Tree’s lights, astonishingly, impossibly, did not go out. They gleamed between the wingbeats, fifty thousand points of light trembling and wavering in the dark as the Tree’s branches were tossed by the wind of the wings bearing them upward. Onward and upward the Tree soared, a conical blur of feathers and colored light and owl eyes catching it, with a few guywires and cables trailing behind like thin unregarded roots. The huge wing-blurred shape bobbled a little rightwards across West 50th Street as it rose, then lifted sharply upward so as to miss the top of the skyscraper at 45 Rock. Past that the Tree rose, higher and higher, finally drifting northward over midtown, higher upward still, and finally out of sight.

Slowly at first, then gaining urgency and volume, shouting started to rise from all around the rink and the statue, and from support staff for the on-air talent up at the top of the Channel Gardens. But one group of people, the ones leaning against the back windows of the Lego Store, stayed right where they were and watched all this happen, as they had from the start, with expressions far more impressed than shocked.

“Well,” said one of them—a broad-shouldered middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a parka and a high-vis vest, his hands shoved deep in his pockets and a thick book tucked under one arm. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

* * *

And that is how one of the more unusual news events of 2020 actually happened.

…Unless, of course, you’re one of those who knows that it didn’t happen that way at all. Or (if you’re looking at the timeline in a different way, from outside) it did once—and didn’t stay that way.

Now for that version of the story.

2

JD 2458941.25000 (Spring 2020)

The owl first became aware of herself some time in the early evening of the world. It would have been hard to say just when; in the lives of most creatures so young, time isn’t a thing that matters much. What she did know first, in that newborn twilight, was that there were owls who were bigger than she was, and who fed her and took care of her, asleep or awake.

The world had been warmer, then. Light and shadow had been more unpredictable, coming and going without warning. Shadow had been warm, the feeling of soft down pressing down, enfolding and protecting her nakedness. Light had been chill, when that sheltering shadow sometimes stood up or went away. In between times there was food— warm, soft with fur, rich with wet flesh. Greedily she snatched and gobbled it when it dangled down over her, and knew, for the first time, the sweetness of getting just what she wanted.

There had been other owls in that tight little space with her, as small and as naked as she, until everybody’s first feathers started prickling in and then burst into down. Slowly the distinction crept into her awareness: there was me, and then there was them, the others. They would get between her and the food if she didn’t move fast enough. She learned to move fast. If a sister or brother pushed her out of the way, she pushed them right back out, knowing every time her crop was filled that she was doing the right thing.

She ate and grew as fast as any of the others, and everything seemed fine for a while. Then, slowly, the owl realized that something about life felt vaguely wrong, and she didn’t like that feeling at all.

It started to ebb somewhat—or at least the owl was distracted from it—when a second, more prickly set of feathers came in and the fledging-sheaths split off them. At that point the owl got a sense that if she worked her wings, the itchy aching feeling of something being wrong with the world would go away.

So, again and again, as she and the others in the nest got bigger, she clambered onto the narrow edge of the hole that led out of the nest and worked her wings, trying to understand what was supposed to happen next. Around her the world was shifting, as the nest stopped being everything and became instead a shadowy haven at the center of a much larger everything—the vast tree-pierced space with the half-seen empty sky arching over it, the wide realm through which the wind moved and breathed. In that larger space of being, the light-time was warmer and the dark-time cooler. But it was the darkness that felt most comfortable to the owl—the time where her eyes worked best and were learning to see the tiny movements down on the ground that made her insides feel pleasantly hollow, ready to have something warm and tasty put in them.

There, in that welcoming darkness, the owl learned to fly. At first she wasn’t very good at it, with some unexpected tumbles onto lower branches that hurt her and made her angry, because she somehow knew the falling and the hurting were wrong. Something much better was meant to happen, something to do with how hard you beat your wings, and making sure you kept on doing that.

So she kept on practicing, while the other owls who’d been in the nest with her, her brothers and sisters, did the same. The female who’d spent her time sitting on them and keeping them warm until their feathers came in had gone, and her mate, who’d brought mice and voles to eat while she was sitting, now fed the young owlets while they got better at flying. Soon enough he started showing them other things—especially about how to catch mice and voles for themselves, and what other things could be eaten when those were scarce.

During that learning time the owl discovered other things that weren’t so good… as on the night one of her brothers got out of the nest earlier than usual, just after the skyfire began to fade. Working on mastering his wings, he went flying out of the spinney of trees where their nest was. She had clambered up onto the edge of the nest-hole right after him, yet it was the merest chance that the owl was looking the right way to see something big and dark, far bigger than her, a broad-winged blot of shadow against the lighter night, come dropping swift and silent from above and snatch her brother out of the air exactly as he might have snatched up some mouse on the ground. The owl froze right where she was and kept absolutely still and silent, watching as the night-shadowed shape of the screech owl winged casually away into a tree beyond the spinney, settled onto a branch there, and set about turning her brother into meat.

The utter wrongness of it got down into the owl’s insides and made her feel sick. But she knew better than to move or cry out or do anything at all until she saw that darkness take wing and fly away again, away from the spinney and out of sight. The owl sat there clenching her talons on the edge of the nest-hole and was angry—so angry that it seemed to fill the world. If she’d had words, they would have said, Whose idea was this? Isn’t it hard enough that we’re hungry almost all the time and have to be on the hunt from dark to light? Do we have to worry about being somebody else’s food now? This is wrong.

The memory of that sudden, silent-falling darkness haunted every flight for a while afterwards. Watching out to catch prey while watching out to avoid becoming prey needed so much concentration, even as their father’s gifts of food decreased. She and the three others who remained had to spend more and more time on their own hunting, or they would sleep empty in the morning and wake hungry in the dusk.

They grew uneasy and testy with one another as the lights and darks went by, while the dark-time slowly began to get longer and the food more scarce. Then one night their father flew away and didn’t come back. The image of that wide-winged shadow against the night came back to the owl, and she wondered if it had taken their father as it took her brother. That feeling of wrongness rose up in her again. Once more things were changing, and she had no idea what to do.

The nest was too small for them all to share it any more, and the food around the spinney started to get scarce. The dark-time of the day got longer all the while, and even though there was more time to hunt, there was less and less to eat. The owl began to venture further afield, into new patches and copses of fir-trees. When she noticed she was eating better, she stayed in those places and no longer saw her former nestmates except by accident. Slowly, painfully, she learned the art of being alone.

Occasionally she saw other owls of her own kind that she didn’t know, and found it very strange—unnerving in a way that was like the memory of the dark-eyed shadow that had killed her brother. So that one night, when she dropped off a tree branch toward a mouse careless about staying out after dusk and unexpectedly fell onto another owl who’d seen the same mouse, she was torn between fear and a great rush of that suffocating wrongness-anger. She took the other owl down onto the thick pine-needled mat of the forest floor in a tangle of grabbing feet and thrashing wings, and bludgeoned it into shocked stillness. Then she flew hastily up again, out from among the trees she knew well, and flung herself away through the dark air, determined to never come back there again.

So it went for some nights, as nights grew longer; she was eating better, but spending her days sleeping huddled against the boles of trees she didn’t know. Sometimes she found one with an old nesting-hole in it, made then abandoned by some other bird, and stowed herself away, safe from the painful brilliance of day. She would wake in the dusk, look out of the hole to get a quick sense of where in this new place the mice might be hiding, and then flutter down to a lower branch of the tree to wait for movement, or for the slight rustle of food.

The owl became busy in the way of all career hunters—focused on her craft and on improving it, discovering how to find bigger nests of prey or learning where by rivers or ponds the voles best liked to be. When the hunt went well, it was fun. When it wasn’t going well, it wasn’t fun at all. When you missed your catch a few times in a night, when morning twilight came and you tried to sleep with an ache of emptiness ache in your crop, then woke up in the dusk a little sick with hunger, that feeling of wrongness could be very strong. But it wasn’t as if you could stop hunting. You got out of your hole (or off your branch) and got on with it, because that was all you could do to put things right again.

And by and large, things went well for the owl. Every night, under moon or cloud, in rain and wind or pine-scented stillness, she became more expert at dropping in perfect quiet on her prey—sinking claws straight in to stun them with pain, snapping their necks with her beak before they had a chance to know what had happened to them (for she found their meat tasted better that way). If her increasingly expert ears caught even the most distant whisper of screech owl or cry of eagle, near or far, she knew to hold absolutely still right where she was in the shelter of the tree-branches… and then, sometimes having stayed up late into the hurting sunlight, to fly away and find a new place, a new tree and new air clean of the memory, the wrongness, of that old shadow.

* * *

One such search-flight was how she found the tree. It wasn’t all about her unease over the presence of larger owls. Nights were becoming longer and longer, and they were getting colder, too. And though those longer nights meant more hunting time, which should have been better, the prey didn’t see matters that way. Every night there were fewer of them. Increasingly the owl flew further in search of food than she would earlier have done—even into places where there were more of the strange unwinged, two-legged creatures that sometimes turned up in the forests where she ranged.

There were many strange hard paths used by the twoleggers and by the large hard shiny beasts that repeatedly ate them yet always spat them out again unharmed. Close to one of these paths, prominent in a small bare field, stood one of the blocky things the twoleggers roosted in. A tree stood right alongside, one with gracefully upcurved branches and feathery flat needles that clumped thick and gave good cover. The owl fetched up in that tree after a good early evening’s hunt. She spent a while resting in its upper branches before going out again, and took some time to idly look it over.

With great speed she realized how very good a tree it was. It was taller than any tree in the nearest patches of conifers. The lower branches were a bit sparse, but the upper ones were close-set and symmetrical, perfectly hiding the tree’s bole. Better still, many woodpeckers had been at it over time; they’d driven some nice and unusually deep nesting-holes into it. About halfway up, two of those holes were so close together that the insides butted together, and the woodpeckers had pecked through the thin separating wall of wood to combine them.

The owl thought she’d never seen a better nesting-place—ample, roomy enough to stretch your wings in—and found herself considering the hole with some obscure sense of eventually using it for something besides sleeping. Meanwhile, as she stayed there for one night, and then another and another, the tree also turned out to be unusually good to hunt from. At first its nearness to the hard path and the hurtling shiny always-in-a-rush creatures bothered her. Normally (having seen not just prey but owls lying dead next to those paths, unwitting prey to the roaring shiny beasts) the owl avoided such places. But perhaps because of the brushland off to one side, this spot seemed to attract a lot of food—not many voles, but a great plenty of mice and rats.

The owl had already been feeling restless, needing to go even further afield, in a direction she hadn’t gone before—the direction where the skyfire again and again soared slowly across the daytime sky, lower and lower all the while.

That way soon enough, she thought. But not right now. Right now, the food’s good here. And this hole is very good. I like this tree. This is my tree. For now I’ll stay and just eat a lot before I go anywhere strange.

This she did for some days, as the skyfire swung gently lower every day, and was above the world’s edge each day for less time. She came back to the hole every morning with her crop well filled, slept long and well till the dark came again, and rose again in the twilight to go hunting. Everything in the world, she thought, was going very well.

…Until suddenly it wasn’t.

3

JD 2459164.91667 (11 November 2020)

Because the tree was near the hardened path, and that got chaotically busy with the roaring hurrying shiny beasts during the light hours, the owl’s light-time sleep was troubled by more noise than was ever normal in the woodland where she’d been reared. For the sake of this perfect spot and this excellent tree she put up with it and, as days went by, grew used to it. The noise was never a constant—sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, sometimes as unvarying, hour by hour, as the sound of some rushing stream. So when there came an evening when she woke and everything seemed unusually quiet outside, it didn't alarm her.

What did concern her—after a few still-sleepy blinks—was opening her eyes and looking around to realize that the light outside the nest-hole had changed. It was much darker than usual. And though the owl could hear the shiny beasts running toward the tree and away from it as usual out on the hardened path, she couldn't see any of the light from their eyes at all.

She had no idea what that might mean, so she shook her feathers out and preened a little, and then stepped up on the inner edge of the nest-hole to make her way out onto a branch just below. But that branch was no longer there, or at least it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Something had bent it until it pressed right up against the outside of the hole. The owl pushed against the branch and other narrower sprigs of greenery caught in the hole by it and blocking her way.

It wouldn't give.

She stared at the blocked nest-hole, bewildered. This made no sense. Branches didn't do this kind of thing. Sometimes—after a wind, or because they had rotted through from disease, or if woodpeckers had been at them—they might fall down. But she'd never seen one fall up before, and she'd certainly never seen a branch get stuck against its tree this way. The owl stared at the part of the branch that was blocking her nest-hole, picked at some of its needles with her beak, and then tried pushing at it again.

It went nowhere. She couldn't understand what had happened. She couldn't understand what she was going to need to do to put this right. So, in her confusion, the owl fell back on what she normally did when faced with what she didn't understand. She held very still, stayed quiet, and waited a while to see if the situation would change.

It didn't change. Outside, darkness grew deeper; outside, the sound of the hurrying creatures on the hardened path seemed to get louder in the following night. Again and again the owl’s patience failed her, and she went back again and again to try pushing harder against the barrier of wood and smaller fir-branches pressed up against the hole from which she could now not escape.

She had no idea what else to do. All that night the owl tried to get out, growing wearier and wearier with the useless labor of it. Sometimes she flung herself hard against the barrier; sometimes she just shoved herself against it and tried to pull it apart like prey; sometimes she flailed at it with her wings, other times tore at it with her talons until the bark on the branch frayed and her feet were sore. But nothing did her any good. She was hungry, she was thirsty, she wanted to fly! But there was nothing to eat, and nothing to drink, and no way to get out and spread her wings.

Slowly it grew lighter outside. Just as slowly, just as steadily, the noise of the shining beasts on the hardened path grew louder as more and more of them ran together on their path. And still she couldn’t get out. The owl was angry, angry—but it did no good. It didn't help. What’s the matter with my tree? she would have screamed, if she’d had words. It's not supposed to do this. I want my tree back. I want it back the way it was!

But all the time she’d spent waiting made no change. The tree didn’t go back the way it had been. The owl’s anger changed nothing. Outside the hole the light was getting brighter, but she was far too restless and upset to sleep.

That turned out to be just as well, because shortly things changed again, and not for the better. Outside the tree, she could hear a noise of the kind that the shining beasts made, a roaring that was deeper and louder than usual. It came right up by the tree—maybe even right under its lower branches—and sat there, roaring constantly.

The tree shuddered. The owl did the only thing that made any sense: held very still and stayed quiet, waiting to see what would happen.

And what happened was the worst thing she could have thought of. Another sound happened, a high thin screaming that made her ears hurt. She could feel it right through the wood of the tree. And then, horribly, the tree leaned over—right over sideways.

It didn’t lean the way it did sometimes when wind pushed against the top of it, bending and then coming straight again when the wind stopped. Instead it was as if the whole tree was being blown down, though not as the owl had seen happen to a thinner tree during a storm out in the woods. That had been fast; this was slow. Soon the bottom of the nest-hole wasn’t a floor any more, but a wall. Bits of old bark and nest and old coughed-up fur-and-bone pellets fell over on the owl as she scrambled to work out which way was “up”, trying to find purchase in a space and a world that made no sense any more. How can down stop being down? What’s happening?

There were no answers. Soon enough the tree lay on its side with her in it, as trapped as ever. And then, horribly, it was somehow wrenched further along the new “up”, and swung sickeningly around so that the light outside spun and swung too. Then the tree fell down onto something hard, and the owl reeled with the force of its landing.

She clung to the nest-hole-floor-that-had-been-a-wall and listened in sick terror to the roar of the beast outside, and the voices of twoleggers that suddenly seemed to be all around it too. The tree was moving again, lurching side to side, turning and then going forward, top-first even though what had been the tree’s top was now down on its side. The going-forward happened faster and faster until the owl could feel wind, even through the blockage across the nest-hole, and her wings stirred helplessly with the desire to get that wind under them and get away from here.

But it was all in vain. She couldn’t get out to fly, to flee. All the owl could do was try to be still, and to do that she was having to cling to the wall with her every talon. Gradually she understood that somehow the tree was making this move away from where it had been. And now, trapped inside it, she was borne along to whatever horrible impossibility the tree sought.

The movement and the shaking went on for many hours—throughout the day, and into the fading-light time again, until the skyfire vanished again. That at least was normal, even though the owl couldn’t see the sky where that was happening. Finally, not long after the darkness came again, the movement stopped, and so did the roaring of the beast that had been close by all day.

Do some of these beasts prey on trees? the owl wondered as she shook her head to try to get her proper hearing back; she was half deafened by the constant noise. This isn’t just wrong for me! This is wrong for you. You ought to be in one place! You ought to be still, with your branches properly spread out for the wind! I wish I could make this stop for you, for me, for both of us!

Around the tree she heard more of the cries of the twoleggers, ahead of it, behind it, on all sides. Finally they too went faint, went away. There was still noise from whatever hardened path was nearby, a never-ending rush of the shining beasts, a river of them, never silent.

The night went by. The owl’s empty crop reminded her of it hour by hour, and she itched to be out, to fly, to hunt; but she could do nothing. She fell asleep a few times, waking in desperate hope to find herself and everything else back to normal again. But everything was still sideways; the world was still broken. My tree, my poor tree! she thought. And crowded up against the blocked hole, she drowsed once more and then woke again to the sound of twoleggers’ voices in the dawn, to incomprehensible slams and groans and the shining-beast roar. Once more the tree lurched and shifted, and the owl hunched down into a small tight ball and squeezed her eyes shut in despair.

* * *

The hours that followed seemed to go on forever—the owl trapped between sleep in which she found no rest and waking in which she found no pleasure. By dark or light-time she was hungrier every moment, but there was nothing she could do about it. In the middle of the rocking and the increasingly deafening noises, as the light bizarrely changed directions from one moment to the next, as she drifted in and out of a troubled doze, the owl remembered what it was like in her first nest.

She didn’t think often of that time when she wasn’t the one who took care of food and shelter, but the one who was cared for—the time when others gave you food, kept you warm and, if you got stuck or if your claws got hung up in your wings, would help you. They’d get you unstuck, and give you what made you feel less hungry, or less thirsty. She wished there was someone like that for her now. I wish you were here, she said inside her to that someone who wasn't there. I wish you could help.

But there was no answer. That was hardly a surprise. She didn’t know what she was expecting to happen. There was no one with her any more, no sibling, no mate — not that it was time for that, anyway. There was no one to answer if she called out. She sat listening, the way weeks back she’d sat listening between hunts for any sound of her brothers or sisters, or her egg-mother or egg-father. But she heard nothing.

Hopelessness, that was all she had now: a feeling of things gone very wrong and impossible to put right. For who could make a fallen tree stand up again? She had seen enough of those; they lay on the ground in the woods, going slowly all to pieces as the world turned them into dirt. The tree that had felt in a strange way as if it welcomed her, as if it was glad to have its emptiness filled—that emptiness was no refuge for her now, but a prison. It was somehow broken. And how could such a brokenness ever be put right?

And this tree, the owl thought, suddenly furious as the tree and the world lurched again, throwing her against the inside of the too-roomy nest-hole. This one! Why this one? There are trees and trees, forests of trees, all the trees there are that such a thing could have happened to—but this was the perfect one! This was my tree! Why did this have to happen to me? This is very wrong!

The world around her paid no heed to her protest, and soon the owl laid herself down on what was now the floor of the hole and tried to stretch her wings and just not be for a while: not hear the noises, not feel the shaking or pay any attention to the fading light… because night meant nothing different. No chance at food or water, no hope of flight through the welcoming dark that was her proper home…

The sickening motion continued, and the owl slept through some of it; there was little else she could do. For a long while she knew nothing until the light once more came back, and with it the shuddering movement of the tree, now so irregular that there was no bracing against it. For a long time it flung the owl about in the nesting-hole, too weak now to resist. Her insides felt empty as an eggshell with its insides eaten, and her thirst was a constantly growing soreness in her throat.

After a while the movement grew smoother, though it didn’t stop. A little strength came back to the owl, and once more she flung herself at the blocked-up entrance to the nest-hole. It made no difference, but it had become a habit. She was stubborn. Again and again she struggled with wings and feet to work herself free.

It was no use. The weakness made her lie down again and sleep a little, even though she was hungrier and thirstier than ever. But when she woke into the new night, she struggled up to her feet again and went to flail at the branch in front of the hole. I will not give up. Something may change.

But nothing did. The long painful night went by and passed into painful day again, during which the tree moved and stopped, moved and stopped. The beast-roaring went on all around, louder than ever, and the surrounding air smelled bad. Open or shut, the owl’s eyes hurt her; it hurt even to blink. Even breathing hurt, now. And the realization came to her then that if something didn’t change, she was going to wind up like her sib who was eaten, like the dried bird-bodies she’d occasionally seen by the hardened path. No movement about them, no life, bones stripped by crows; nothing left but glued-down rags and tattered feathers that occasionally jerked in some passing breeze.

The thought made the owl shake as if some icy wind had breathed on her. She was going to become the prey of something she couldn’t see, but could feel; hovering low over her, big-winged like the screech owl that took her brother, as silent in flight as she knew how to be herself. It was death, coming for her in the shape of the branches that hemmed her in and kept her from flight and food and drink, from all the things needed for life.

It will end, she thought. I will end.

And when the movement stopped, at last, in one more newfallen dark, and the noises and twolegger cries outside the tree mostly stopped too, the owl lay there faint and weak for a long time before she could push herself up and try one last time to get loose, to get free. It did no good. She was still trapped. And somewhere outside, in the strange too-bright darkness, now she was sure she could feel watching her—as if from somewhere nearby—the eyes that went with screech owls’ wings. They were glaring, waiting for the right moment to take her, as soon as she gave up completely, as soon as she lay down to surrender and let herself go. What watched wanted to see her agree to become prey.

All at once the steady ugly patience of whatever waited made the owl angry all over again. She snapped her beak with the anger, just as she’d have snapped it closed on a mouse’s neck to kill it the best way, quickly.

This is wrong, she thought in absolute fury, weak and helpless as she was. And it’s wrong for things to be so wrong! Meat I may be about to be, like the dry flat broken-boned things on the hard paths, like my brother when the talons tore him. But that changes nothing. What I know is true. Let what waits take me if it likes, but I won’t go willingly. I will pull against its talons even if I tear myself apart on them, and if I can I’ll put my beak in its eye before it swallows me down!

Then she fell down, faint and gasping harshly, on the wall-that-was-now-a-floor of her nest-hole. Breathing hurt her so much now that she wasn’t sure how much more of that she could do.

Something made a sound, then. At least the owl couldn’t understand what else she was hearing inside her, saying:

You desire Life.

I won’t willingly be the prey of That, the owl thought, still angry. But the strength was going out of her breath by breath, and she had no way to make what she said become true.

What would you do if the world helped you not be Its prey?

She realized then that the thought she’d just heard was nothing of her own, but had come from elsewhere. And it was as if, on being spoken to, she understood the idea that others, some others anyway, could actually tell her what they thought, what they wanted.

This was the strangest thing that had ever occurred to her. Yet it was also somehow very good. The owl’s feathers tried to rouse in pleasure at the sheer wonder of it. The question seemed strange, though. And with the concept of questions, came the idea of answering. You mean, what would I do to make this stop? Anything!

Would you help other creatures in like case? When it was wrong for them to be prey, would you try to stop that?

What? Of course I would, what kind of owl do you think I am?

Then make your promise.

It was odd that she now knew what a promise was: but she did. It was as if the word itself had told her what it meant. I’ll help! said the owl. That is my promise. But I’m hungry and so thirsty, and I feel so sick! I can barely move. If the world’s not to make prey of me first, I need help now!

No answer came back, though she waited. And after all that strangeness, sheer weariness bore the owl down beneath its weight and left her once more lying on the nest-hole’s floor. Slow but inexorable, an utter darkness fell over her—a thing of the mind and not the world outside, a great weight of irresistible endings. In it the owl lost herself, and knew no more.

* * *

And then there was light.

The owl blinked. She was no longer in the nest-hole. Now she was clutching crookedly onto a branch of her tree, outside the hole. And the tree was upright again, which she didn’t understand.

She had no strength to do anything but lean against the tree-bole and stare around her, concentrating hard despite her weakness on not falling down and re-enacting the embarrassments of her young days. Looking down, the owl could see that some strange substance had been wrapped around the tree, pulling all its branches in tight. The stuff was still wrapped around the tree’s lowest branches. But the upper swathe of the wrapping-stuff was gone from around the tree now. With it gone, the branch pressed up against the nest-hole had fallen away from up: had fallen down again. When that happened her body had toppled out of the hole onto a branch, and though she’d been unconscious, her body had felt the branch and gripped it as if it was her last chance.

Gazing past the branches, blinking hard to see out of hurting eyes, the owl could make no sense of the high hard walls of stony stuff that surrounded the tree on all sides. The noise that had accompanied her and the tree here, the rushing, hooting noises that the shining beasts made, was here still, echoing on all sides. Her head rang with it. At least the owl could once more feel the wind, though it was much broken by the walls all around…

And that was all she had time to consider. She was already wobbling on her branch, and would have fallen in just a little more time had something not stopped her: the strangest thing so far. Up in the tree with her, clinging onto some kind of metal branch of its own, was a twolegger. It was all covered in—not feathers, but something smooth, like what had been wrapped around the tree—in a color so bright it would have made her eyes hurt even had they not been hurting already. With big soft feet that had no talons, the twolegger reached out for the owl and took hold of her, pulling her away from the bole of the tree and off the branch.

The owl was both too weak to struggle, and too shocked by the utter strangeness of what was happening to her to try to move at all. She could do little but fall back on what she normally did when confronted by something frightening or strange: hold still and wait.

The strategy turned out to be a wise one, for strangenesses now piled themselves one on another in such variety and abundance that there wasn’t much else the owl could have done. Shortly the twolegger was down on the ground, still holding her, and the owl realized that she could see her whole tree again, though all its lowest branches were missing. She would have raged with indignation at that—those had been the best branches to hunt from!—but had no energy for it. Later. Later I’ll find somebody to peck for that.

In the meantime she found herself placed in a small space like a nest-hole, but with sharp corners. There were some fronds from her tree in there, which were some slight comfort for the familiarity of their scent, though they were no good to sit on. Twoleggers in their bright colors came to stare at her, and she stared back. Then the top of the hole closed up.

This event repeated itself several times until any curiosity the owl might have had about twoleggers was well beyond satisfied. She was relieved when the hole stopped opening for a while—especially since light and dark changed places so frequently now.

The owl gave up trying to make sense of it. She was in the little sharp-edged hole for a long while, it seemed, and for a while the hole was closed tightly enough around her that she wasn’t troubled by changes in the light, and fell asleep again. The next thing she knew, the hole was open again, and outside it was nothing but a comforting dimness. Another pair of those big soft twolegger feet reached in and wrapped around her. A moment or two later—or so it seemed—the owl realized she was standing on a leafless branch.

Weak as she was, she sank her talons into it in sheer relief and stared around. The branch was enclosed with some strange half-solid stuff that she could dimly see through, but there was no understanding what lay beyond it. In any case the owl realized that she didn’t care, because there was something else besides her on the branch where she stood. It was a little pool of water inside something hard, and next to it was a dead mouse.

In all her life the owl had never been so glad to see a mouse, dead or alive. She pinned it to the branch with one foot and tore it in two and gulped it down in two bites. Then she drank some water, which was not a thing she would normally have done except for being so thirsty. She really wanted to drink it all, but she felt strange inside, so she stopped.

The odd unbroken twilight around her lasted a long time, but the owl was weary enough to not really mind. She dozed and woke and dozed again, and every time she dozed there was another dead mouse handy when she woke up—sometimes two—and more water. Now and then she realized one of the twoleggers was watching her from outside the strange see-through walls of the large hole they’d put her in. They moved slowly and quietly, and did nothing that much bothered her; so she ignored them.

After a while the owl felt well enough to try to explore the hole she was in. She fluttered at the sides of it without effect. It was made of some unyielding stuff like very thin fronds from her tree, but cold and hard. A little ways below the branch was what seemed like a hard little patch of ground with some soft chips of wood scattered over it. The owl wasted no more time trying to figure all of this out, because that was when one of the twoleggers started coming inside the hole with her.

The first time this happened the owl went as far down her branch as she could and just held still against the side of the hole. When she did this the twolegger came to her, making soft noises, and took hold of her feet with its own foot, so that the owl had to stand on that foot. This was hard to get used to at first. But the twolegger kept distracting the owl by (with its other foot) giving her mice.

The owl quickly decided that she didn’t mind this kind of distraction too much. How many mice she ate, how much water she drank out of the strange little pool, how many times she fluffed her feathers out and settled down to roost and sleep on the branch, she had no idea. But she started feeling much stronger, enough to try to fly. This didn’t go well for her; she kept crashing into the walls of the hole.

But then the light changed in the hole, growing a little brighter; and the creature that kept holding the owl by her feet came into the hole, picked her up, and walked with her to another place. It was a bigger hole, much bigger, with bigger branches in it. And through the walls of it she could feel and smell the wind.

The owl felt something strange inside her; something good, something the opposite of the anger she had felt when she was dying. But beyond that she didn’t know what to do or feel… so she held still and waited. Presently the twolegger with the soft feet came into the bigger hole and brought her more mice. At first it put them on the branch for her, and she ate them gladly.

But then the owl saw that the twolegger had a mouse in its foot and was simply holding it: not eating it, but simply holding it where the owl could see and where it would be easy to take. It seemed a waste to just leave it there, so—since there was room to fly in here—the owl fluttered warily to the twolegger’s foot and snatched the mouse. But she went back to the branch again before she ate.

The two of them repeated this odd business numerous times, while the world got bright and dark and then bright again, until the owl began to get both amused by it (another feeling she hadn’t felt since watching her brothers repeatedly fall out of the nest) and also bored. But then that bright time started sliding into darkness again, and without warning things changed.

The One Who Held Her By The Feet took the owl off the branch she’d been flying from and put her once more into a small hole that had parts she could see through, a little, but couldn’t get out of. Then came some jostling and bumping and the dimming light sliding past her and the hole that held her—sometimes in very odd ways. The owl kept having to close her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at what was happening outside the hole.

But this uncomfortable time didn’t last too long. The sense of headlong motion, such as the owl had felt before while trapped in her tree, now ceased. The little hole in which she was presently imprisoned was picked up and moved, and then suddenly she could smell the wind again, as The One Who Held Her By The Feet reached into the hole and picked her up in the usual way.

There were other twoleggers in company with the One Who Held Her; but there’d been others with the two of them before, and none of those had ever done her harm. So the owl held still a moment and looked around, and waited to see what would happen.

For a few moments, nothing happened at all. The soft-footed two-legger was still. The owl gazed around her, holding still, waiting, trying to work out what was happening. But the wind was breathing in her face again, speaking of water and trees and things living around and beneath them; and the sky was over the owl, the clear twilight sky she had seen only dimly for so long now, only at a distance.

It was there. She could fly. In utter astonishment she stood on the twolegger’s soft foot and stared up at the sky: then stamped her feet on the one that held her. As she did so she realized she wasn’t being held any more. She could fly!

A number of times during her captivity the owl had thought something like this and had tried it… then embarrassingly found herself wrong, flapping about in the twolegger’s foot, as helpless as a chick. But that wasn’t happening now. Her feet were free. So she stretched her wings out, and beat them, and leapt into the air and flew.

Almost too soon a tree loomed up in front of her. As much out of reflex as out of choice the owl dove in among its branches and sat down on one, not far from the trunk. It was all so normal that she hardly knew what to do for some moments. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, so neither of those conditions made her want to do anything. She didn’t know where she was, but even in normal times she often didn’t know that, so for the moment it didn’t bother her one way or the other.

She flew again, then, and caught another mouse or two that she heard in the sparse dry grass under the trees. Then after flying a few times more she found a tree with a good-sized bole, the space around its trunk well shaded with close-grown branches and fronds thickly needled. The owl clambered into that dark-green dimness and tucked herself up against the tree’s trunk as light started to creep into the sky again. With great relief she closed her weary eyes and roused her feathers out into a warm fluff against the daytime cold. Finally she was free of the twoleggers, free to fly where she pleased. She was full. She had shelter and time to rest. Everything was fine again.

…Except for one thing. It was an ache inside her, like being hungry; but it seemed to the owl that nothing she could catch or eat would assuage it. It was a soreness, a painful again-and-again rasp at the edges of her being, like being thirsty: but nothing she could drink would slake it. It was the one thing that had been perfect, but was perfect no longer: gone beyond ever getting back. Of all things wrong with the world, it was the most wrong.

Her tree was gone.

Before, she had not had words. Before, she hadn’t known what words were, and she still had no name for them. But now (without knowing that she was knowing, really) the words for how to speak her anguish and anger to the world came to her.

I. Want. My. Tree. Back!

Part II

TWO

4

JD 2459186.04306 (2 December 2020, 0702 EST)

In the reality we all share (whether we choose to believe in that reality or not), it’s a truism that the one thing magic was never designed for was exclusivity. There is too much in the world that’s gone wrong, and too little time to put it right, to limit access to the great Instrumentality that makes the never-ending wizardly Work of mending-the-marred possible at all. Therefore—by design—what most people would casually call “magic” is all over the place, if you only know where to look for it.

With so much of it lying around, it stands to reason that all kinds of problems can arise when magic is applied to reality in unstructured or disorganized ways. This is one of the main reasons for the existence of wizards: to assist the Powers that Be in imposing some kind of order on a tremendous, universe-spanning force that without management and supervision could easily spawn total chaos.

But even taking into account the near-constant efforts of all the many millions of wizards scattered across the planet (and many others), sometimes things still get out of hand. Of the three hundred eighty-one thousand, six hundred sixty-seven non-probationary wizards practicing the Art in the New York metropolitan area as of December 2, 2020, all of them who heard it were caught by surprise (the first time, anyway) by a voice that spoke suddenly in such emphatic and furious tones that not even the normally-irresistible forward flow of time could constrain what it had to say. Such was its power that this voice was heard both after it spoke, and before. And the words it spoke were these:

I. WANT. MY. TREE. BACK!

* * *

In the New York suburb of Nassau County on Long Island, a wizard sat bolt upright in bed, jolted awake by the words he’d just heard in a dream and which were still thrumming in his bones.

“… What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he muttered; for what he’d just experienced hadn’t been some casual moment out of nightmare. The demand—it was nothing less—had come in the Speech with which the world was made, not something any wizard could ignore however sleepy they might be.

From a couple feet away, a muffled voice said, “Mngff?”

“Did you hear that?”

“…Hear what?” said the man who still had the covers (as usual) pulled up over his head.

A second later the covers were yanked down with shocked speed, revealing someone with truly world-beating bed hair and a shocked expression. “Now what in the—”

“Yeah.” The first man held out his hand. A book, hardbound and about the size and thickness of a fairly comprehensive dictionary, appeared there and weighed it down. “Go get in the shower,” he said. “I have a feeling we’re on the clock.”

* * *

In their modest bungalow tucked away in a relatively obscure corner of the Town of Hempstead, two Supervisory-level wizards—presently on a scheduled rotation as managers for North America’s East Coast region—spent the morning doing what an uneducated observer (or someone who didn’t know they were wizards) might have mistaken for “not very much”. Coffee was made, and drunk. Toast was made, and burnt only once when the wizard in charge of the toaster was so distracted by something he was reading in the wizard’s manual on the countertop that he forgot that the pop-up lever on the toaster had been misbehaving.

By the time the burnt toast had been over-buttered and consumed (because no wizard likes to waste things, and one of them didn’t mind toast that was half charcoal if there was enough butter on it), they had made the joint determination that whatever had awakened them hadn’t actually happened yet. Their manuals weren’t at all forthcoming about the cause.

They had moved business into the dining room where they could use the dining table to spread out the manuals into as many viewing/reading expansions as they needed. There, for most of an hour or so between nine and ten AM, the two men wandered around the table, reading a great number of situational précis documents filed by other wizards around the world and sifting through them for any clue of what was about to happen. A lot of their colleagues were asking the same question of the local universe, though as yet no one had anything but vague intimations of detail. There was agreement that something unusual was about to happen, it was about to happen in the US northeast, where the wizards who’d heard the strange declaration were overwhelmingly concentrated, and that it involved a tree.

But beyond that?

“Nothing,” said the dark-haired one, dressed now in sweats and a grey athletic sweatshirt that said DUKE. “Which means that whatever it is will be fairly major.” He scowled down at his manual, which had spread itself into a broad fold-out display of the New York metropolitan area.

His counterpart, wearing jeans and a polo shirt with a fleece vest over it, was leaning against the table beside his partner and eyeing the map narrowly. It was presently displaying a hazy blue-glowing balance-of-probabilities interventional-locus region apparently spray-painted over midtown Manhattan, its boundaries irregularly expanding and contracting, solidifying and going vague, like some kind of giant ghostly amoeba.

“…Right. Look, Carl,” he said, “most of the time if someone started talking to me about trees in this part of the world, I’d be looking up here.” He reached across the table to tap the representation of Central Park. “But the loci of potential incidence don’t seem to be particularly emphatic up that way. Down here, though…” Now he gestured at the area where the hazy light representing the loci looked thickest, in a rough oblong between 42nd and 57th Streets and 7th and Lexington Avenues. “It’s looking a lot thicker.”

“And that being the case, there’s one tree that might be at issue.” Carl pointed at the block between 49th and 50th.

“Is that today? I thought it was Friday—”

A mobile phone face down on the table began buzzing insistently. “Uh oh, here we go,” he said, reaching for it. “Well, at least she let us finish breakfast.” He picked it up. “Tom Swale—”

A brief pause. “Good morning, Irina! —Yes, we did. Would’ve been hard to miss, yeah! —Somewhere in midtown Manhattan, but the indicators are still— No. —No, I wouldn’t say— Not inimical at all. Not a direct manifestation of our old friend, no. Something quite different. If you—”

He stood there listening intently for a moment, his eyes on the spread-out glowing map. “I take your point, of course. But I don’t think this is ripe yet. I think we should allow it to progress before attempting to intervene. That’s normally best practice with these—”

Another thirty seconds or so of quiet. “All right,” he said, “we wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. —No, the city’s shutting down Rockefeller Plaza and the surrounding blocks, and they won’t be permitting anyone in. The ceremony will be a streaming broadcast, both live and recorded content, and— And, well, your guess at this point would be as good as ours. From what I’ve seen in the manual, not even the visionaries have been able to get a reading on this… which by itself is unusual. I don’t think we have much of a choice other than to wait…”

Another silence. Then he smiled. “No. There’s that, at least. We’ll put together an assessment group, people who know the area—” A pause: then a chuckle. “Well, why not? They shouldn’t be strangers. —So we’ll view it in realtime—” He glanced over at Carl and mouthed the word Timeslide? Carl nodded and made an Of course, what else? gesture. “And once we’ve made an initial risk assessment, Carl will fix an up-timeline view timefix for the team. Once we’ve run through it onsite, we’ll start examining intervention options. Does that—”

A last brief silence. “All right,” Tom said. “I’ll drop you a debrief package with imagery and synced-up context when we’re done with our first look. Anything else you want to add? —All right, then I’ll talk to you later. Dai, elder cousin—”

He put the phone down. “That didn’t sound too traumatic,” Carl said, straightening up and stretching a little with his fists in the small of his back.

“Any conversation with a Planetary that leaves your hide in one piece is a good one,” Tom said.

“So what now?”

“We make some calls… do some manual messaging. Find out everything we can about what’s scheduled to happen. And then…”

“We wait and see.”

* * *

Which was exactly how things went until seven P.M., when the two of them settled down in their living room to observe and assess the imminent whatever-it-was. They had their wizard’s manuals handy—not for viewing the events, though wizards’ manuals have been capable of streaming video even when they were still manifesting themselves as carvings on stone, slabs of cuneiform-pressed dried clay, rolls of papyrus, or wax tablets.

Tom had passed the NBC streamed video to the big 4K screen on the living room wall, augmented by timestamp and graphic annotations from their Supervisory manuals that illustrated and classified the wizardly power-influx and power-expression in the target area. Carl, meanwhile, came in with an ice bucket full of cola bottles (the bucket had a small wizardry applied to it that would keep the ice from melting) and sat down next to Tom with his manual in his lap.

Their attention, at least in the early stages of the ceremony, was less on the ceremony’s performances (excellent though some of them were) and more on the maps and charts that showed what energies, wizardly and otherwise, were presently at play in the tri-state area. The two Supervisors could see brief flashes of fire all over the maps, power-signatures of wizards presently on assigned errantry, or simply attending to the minor interventions that were every wizard’s bread and butter.

Then, in an upstate area about eighty miles north of Manhattan and west of the Hudson River, one spark flared with unusual brightness, several orders of magnitude brighter than anything else they’d seen so far.

“Time fix,” said Tom, leaning forward. “Start a clock.” The manual display on the TV marked the time—JD 2459186.59622 | 20:13:33, 2 DEC 2020—and another display appeared directly below it, counting seconds upwards from the fix-marked Julian date.

They watched that spark drift slowly southward toward Woodstock and the Bluestone Forest, flaring again occasionally as it went. In every moment that followed, other sparks flared and began slowly to drift toward the brightest one.

There was—at first—a tentative quality to what they were viewing; a sense of some unusual process feeling its way through the unexpected, the new. At one point it paused for some seconds, and the energy-influx indicators wavered, dropped off...

Then that brightest spark flared, and flared again, higher. The power-influx and -expenditure indicators on the display started spinning their values up.

“Now what was that?…” Tom murmured.

Other glitters of light began to manifest themselves around the bright central one, drifting in closer. The movement southward started to speed up. The display lit with a faint webwork of fuzzy lines interconnecting the gathering glints of light as more of them appeared, closing in around that brightest source.

“Look at that,” Carl said under his breath as the lines of light intensified, multiplied, grew denser. “What’s going on up there?”

Tom eyed the six-digit readout at the right of the screen as the digits spun up and up through higher and higher values. “Not a new probationary talent. Or just a new probationary. Too low for an inhabition…”

“Bets?” Carl said.

“Figures don’t really support it…”

“We’ll see. Graphing for later analysis…”

More and more sparks of light were drifting inward from both sides of the Hudson and clustering around the bright power core that was heading south at an ever-increasing speed. “Significant physical component to that,” Carl murmured. “That’s gonna show on somebody’s ground radar pretty quick.”

Tom flipped a few pages in his manual, nodded. “It’s happening right now…”

“Aaaaand course-correcting,” Carl said as one of the associated compass-heading indicators shifted all at once, with abrupt certainty. “Heading straight for Manhattan. Somebody’s got their own tracking routine running.” To the manual, he said, “Tighten in…”

The view on the screen pushed in. The tangle of glowing interconnections among the incoming phenomenon resolved into lines and sparks again, then gradually once again became too dense to make out particulars as the aggregate of compelling power and subsidiary forces slid more and more quickly south. “TRACOM’s noticed,” Carl said. “No alarms yet, though—”

“Good. Rather not have this be another of those NORAD things where they almost nuke the neighbors over a flock of geese…”

“No sign of that. Small mercies.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Flock, yeah. Geese, no...” The glowing cloud slid downwards out of Westchester and crossed the river into the airspace over Washington Heights.

“Split it,” Carl told his manual. The wall-screen’s view immediately divided between a view of the incoming cloud of objects and the countdown toward the lighting of the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree.

It was as well that their Manuals were recording everything that happened, for the two men spent the next ten minutes spellbound (so to speak) watching the output from the video stream as the cloud of eyes descended; as a very small owl sat down on the star at the top of the tree and stared her infuriated defiance at the cameras; as the wings lifted and beat and took the Tree away, up out of Rockefeller Plaza and high into the light-polluted night.

On one side of the screen, on-air talent was babbling ad-libbed nonsense, helpless to add any context to what had just happened. On the other, tracking was showing the same network of power, with one bright star at its core, heading for upstate New York, and finally vanishing into it.

The two wizards stared at each other, speechless for a few seconds. Carl found his words first.

“That,” he said, “was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen happen in that town.”

Tom gave him a look. “Oh? Not the time the dinosaur ate Luciano Pavarotti?”

Carl laughed… though somewhat grimly. “We sorted that out,” he said. “We’ll sort this.”

“Maybe so.” Tom fell back against the sofa and rubbed his eyes. “But now all we have to do is figure out one thing.

“…How in the Powers’ names did she just do that?”

5

JD 2459179.48264 (25 November 2020, 17:35 EST)

After she’d been freed, it had taken very little time for the owl to feel back at home in the world once more, now that she was away from the twoleggers. She hunted; she ate and drank and flew; she did all the things that were right for an owl to do in the normal course of life. But none of them left her feeling right. And this wrongness she felt most keenly every day as dawn drew near and the world grew light… when she woke and found herself, every time, in the wrong place.

She knew—because her bones told her so—that when the fierce light in the sky swung this low, it was a normal thing to follow it south and go where there was more and better food. The time for her to do that had been drawing near when the normalcy of her life had been upended. But now, day by day, she felt less inclined to do what her bones were suggesting. Warring with their continual uneasy murmur, as food got steadily scarcer, was an equally deep-set feeling that if she left this part of the world, she would lose the only possible satisfaction for some hunger that mere food would never satisfy.

And it came to her again and again, in the evenings, when she woke: I want my tree. I want my tree.

I want my tree back!

It was like seeing prey escape from right under your talons, that want. It was like drinking water (when one did that at all) and finding it foul. It was like having to hold still for what seemed like a whole night when you heard the cry of one of the bigger owls that would be glad enough to make a meal of you if it could. Very slowly that emptiness and that anger grew, though there was nothing the owl could do to change the longing, to make it stop.

Some days she found herself sinking talons right into branches where she sat waiting for prey, clenching and clenching again with the growing frustration of wanting this one thing and not being able to have it—the tree that had been hers, and that she was sure had been glad of being hers. She missed the tree. She missed what they had been together. She missed the tree’s groundedness, perfect complement to her flight. She missed being home… being part of a home.

Days went by; hunt-time and light-time, hunt-time and light-time again… and matters did not improve. She was full-fed and comfortable, but everything was still wrong. For all the strange and awful-wonderful things that had happened to the owl, waiting had made no difference, holding still had made no difference, to the one thing lacking. Now she woke in the dusk of yet another evening that was like all the others had been, and in which things were still all wrong… or wrong as regarded that one great lack that made everything else wrong, because all other things were seen in its light.

The thought of the strangeness that had come to the owl when she was trapped in her tree—the strangeness that spoke—had recently come to her now and again. In this particular dusk, as she sat on a lower branch of the tree that was not her tree, watching the ground for prey, it came to her again. But the speaking had done nothing since then: nothing! And at the thought, a great flood of anger rose up in the owl at all the things that were wrong, very wrong, and needed to be put right.

Without warning that anger caught in her throat like prey swallowed sideways. It swelled inside her until it felt like it filled her right out to her skin, leaked out past it into every barb of every feather, right down to the needly points of her talons. The owl was furious at the lack of her tree and all the things about it that had made life right. But one thing she had now that she hadn’t had before, until the words were spoken to her. Now she remembered that she had words of her own.

So now she used them. She caught the anger in them the same way she would have used her talons as she dropped onto a fleeing mouse. She sank the words in hard. She gripped with them, and would not let go. And the words were:

I. Want. My. Tree. BACK!

And instantly the knowledge came to her of where the tree was.

As if she hovered at a height and gazed down on prey that was huddled still, knowing her about to drop onto it, the owl could see a great expanse of ground made small enough to see. It lay out before her, a long narrow island to the southward, with very little forested or open land, but with those strange straight hardened paths running all up and down and across it. Just off one of those wide paths, in a great patch of tall thin sharp-edged stony things rearing up as close together as some choked pine-spinney, was a narrower pathway surrounded by more of the skinny squared-off stones and ending in a kind of broad pit. And on one side of that pit was her tree.

The owl’s breast expanded with excitement and satisfaction as she saw it, and she shook herself until all her feathers stood out in pleasure and anger and warmth. She could feel her tree there. The sense of it—sight, feeling, whatever it might have been called—made the owl’s anger flare up higher.

And when it did, through the anger she could hear the challenge of something bigger, stronger, older, crueler:

Come and get it, then.

The owl clenched her talons into the branch, hard, and shivered. Sudden fear of that voice, of what used it—of what waited, unassailable in Its certainty—breathed through the feathers of her face and made her shiver the way one did when one’s body-feathers weren’t enough to cope with the cold.

But she was angry. The mockery of the dark-feathered voice with the great curved claws hidden in it just made her angrier still.

The owl snapped her beak in defiance. All right, she said. So I shall!

She launched herself out of the tree and fluttered across the clearing to the first copse of firs, and perched on a branch of one of them, thinking.

That—whatever it was that had challenged her: it was strong, and old, and much bigger than she was. She wasn’t going to be able to do this alone. She was going to need help.

There is a way to call for help, said whatever it was that had spoken to her in the tree. Its voice was very soft in her ears, like the merest rustling in the grass of something that didn’t care to be heard. There is a word to bring it to you… if you have the strength.

The owl flew into another tree, and rested for a moment. Tell me.

What came into her mind then, sound by sound, seemed to wind itself into her bones, hot as blood, as she heard it. She knew immediately, without having any idea how she knew, that any owl uttering that call would be infallibly be followed by any owl that heard it. Even those that could not hear the sound of it would feel that same demand in their bones to seek out its source and follow. The anger and desire of the one who uttered that call would make it all the stronger.

There is a possibility that you might not live after you speak this word, said whatever had spoken to her. Is this danger worth your life?

The owl knew that what this voice said was true. The way it spoke to her, the words it used, made not-truth impossible. For a moment she hesitated…

But then she thought of the tree, her tree, and all the anger came back at once. I may want it, but it wanted me too! And it has no voice to say so. I’ll speak this word for both of us!

And the owl opened her beak and spoke her first word aloud: spoke the Word.

It seemed to take forever. The owl had few calls of her own—a repetitive hooting noise, and a few other softer sounds. What came out of her beak now was more like a song, and in a voice she’d never known she she possessed. Uttering it took more than one breath. Indeed it took a second, and a third, and seemed to want to take all the breaths—all the ones she’d ever breathed, and all those yet to come. That knowledge frightened the owl. But along with it came a certainty that this word had to be spoken, that it had been waiting forever for her to speak it; that it was speaking her—

Then it was gone from her, and let her go. With its departure the owl felt all her strength depart her. She sagged against the bole of the tree, weak and befuddled as a new-hatched chick, and gasped for air as one does who’s just realized for the first time that it might be taken from them.

It took some good while for the owl to start to feel better. At last she was able to stand up on on her feet again. Now I have to fly! she thought. But first I have to eat.

So she flew a short distance to another tree and turned her attention to the ground beneath it. Soon, but not nearly soon enough for her, she heard a mouse scuffling among the deep-piled pine needles. She dropped from the tree, seized it, snapped its neck with her beak, and made her meal.

The owl had rarely bolted her food so quickly, for already she could feel what the Word she had said was doing, and she wanted to get on the wing to meet it. Already she was beginning to feel something strange. It was as if, though no other owl was near her, yet somehow owls were. She felt the way she had when her sibs were shouldering up against her in the nest-hole long ago, sharing the warmth of fluffed-out feathers… a familiar presence that she had nonetheless never felt in this way before. Every moment that warmth grew, and it was both a comfort to her and a cause for alarm. But the comfort outweighed that.

She hadn’t quite finished eating the mouse and was in that comfortable post-main-gobble, tail-still-hanging-out-of-your-beak moment when another owl came floating silently out of the deepening evening and perched on a branch above hers. Normally such an occurrence would have filled the owl with alarm and jolted her into instant flight. But not this time. She could feel that strange connection, shoulder-to-shoulder, feathers-to-feathers—though the other owl, a horned owl, was easily three times its body-length away from her, and was one of those who’d normally have considered her small kind of owl an entirely acceptable meal.

The horned owl looked down at her, and as the owl gazed up at him, she realized that she knew what he was thinking. You called me. I’m here. What are we doing?

We’re going to get my tree back, the owl said, and took a moment to swallow the mouse’s tail. We’re going to put things right.

That sounds good, said the horned owl (while looking a bit startled that it had words at all). I’ll go with you.

As usual, eating made the owl need to excrete something to put herself in balance before flying again. She was just doing that when another owl landed in the tree, a barn owl this time, and stared down at her curiously. You called me. I’m here. What are we doing?

We’re going to get my tree back, the owl said. We’re going to put things right!

That sounds good, the barn owl said. I’ll go with you.

By the time the owl had finished putting her feathers in order for what was going to be a longish flight, there were perhaps fifty more owls in the trees around her. At any other moment of her life such a situation would have thrown her into utter panic, certain that she was about to be made meat, as her brother had been. But now the Word she had spoken—or which had spoken her—left her in no doubt that she was safe; that all these other owls (for the time being, anyway) were her kindred, and they would all fly southward together and help her achieve her desire.

So she knew it was time. Let’s go now, the owl said, and get my tree!

She jumped off the branch and flew; and in a flurry of wings, all the other owls rose and flew with her.

* * *

What happened next seemed to go very quickly. It didn’t feel to the owl as if she was flying any faster than usual, but the landscape around her shifted with unusual speed. And every few wingbeats, it seemed, there were more owls around her, asking the same question, almost in chorus sometimes: You called us. We’re here. What are we doing? Always she answered them: We’re going to get my tree back. We’re going to put things right! And readily all the other owls agreed, and flew with her.

Their numbers grew and grew as they flew south along the great river. Well above the the trees they mounted—the owl leading them higher, so as to better know their way—and then higher still, until the gatherings of twolegger places spread out below them in glimmering splotches of golden light. The darkness fell more deeply around them as they flew, but other light grew at the edge of the world, to southward; a low haze of more golden light, brighter—the light of the place where the owl’s tree was. Down the dark road of the river they flew, more and more swiftly.

Presently ahead of them the owl glimpsed something coming in the air to meet them. Another owl, she thought. But all alone, and so big! And as it drew closer she realized it was easily the biggest owl she had ever seen. It was dark-feathered, hard to make out in the deepening shadows of night, even for an owl. Its wings melted into the sky when you tried to see them clearly, and its eyes burned in a chilly color the owl had never seen before.

You called Me, said this new owl. I am here. What are you doing?

The question seemed for the owl only, and those eyes dwelt on her, hungry and patient, the way one looks at prey. I’m going to get my tree back, she said. I’m going to put things right!

Not without Me, the dark owl said. You need not fly this long dangerous journey at all. I am the Lord of Owls. I will put things right for you in a better way, and give you your desire. Abandon this quest, therefore, and give over your mastery to me. Then all things will be well.

The owl wasn’t sure what the dark owl meant, but she didn’t much care for its tone. We’re close to where I want to be, she said as she paused, hovering in the air; and all the others slowed to hover with her. Why should we stop now? We’ll do what we need to do, and find my tree, and put things right ourselves.

How can you be sure you will succeed? the dark owl said. You are the smallest of owls! You are not great or strong. Give this task over to me, and I will accomplish it easily. All you need do is surrender your mastery to me. Then I will give your desire into your claws.

For a moment, while it spoke, the longing grew in the owl—to go back to the way things were, exactly as they were, before all this trouble started. You could have that, the dark owl’s thoughts seemed to whisper inside her. Time may be turned back. All can be as it was. Accept the offered gift!

Yet all the while the owl felt herself somehow being closed in by the dark owl’s words, as if moment by moment they were enwrapping her in the hard cold stuff she hadn’t been able to get through while the twoleggers had her. The owl snapped her beak in annoyance, for she’d had more than enough of being in places she couldn’t get out of. You came at my call, but I don’t know you, she said. Who are you to offer me things? How do I know you mean me well?

The dark owl, its wings spread wide as it too hovered, glared at her in momentary impatience. Because I am wise. This power that has come to you will do you no good, bring you no rest! Other owls will envy you for it, and seek to kill you. The dark owl’s tone turned wheedling now, like that of a chick who wants the bigger scrap of meat that another one got. But what do you need such power for? All you desire is your tree! I will give you that. Your tree will be yours forever, to own. None but you will ever roost there. If you like, it’s even in My power to give you all the trees you can see from one edge of the world to the other; all the trees there are! None will roost in any of them without your leave. You will rule all owls as I rule you—

The owl snapped her beak again, feeling suddenly how the passing moments were pouring through her feathers like wind. She felt the urge to be flying again before that wind shifted somehow and denied her the path to what she wanted. I don’t want to rule all owls! she said. And I don’t want all trees. I want my own tree!

At which point something else occurred to the owl. Anyway, who are you to give it to me? The tree’s itself, and no one else’s to give! And even so, it liked to be mine. Who are you to give me what’s mine already?

Those cold eyes widened, going colder still, going angry. The owl, hovering kestrel-like in the moment with all the other owls, could feel a strange pressure in the air about her—a whirlwind of possibilities, waiting to break free. Enough of this! she said then. It’s time for us to fly. Be one of us and help me put the world right. Or be off out of my way before I make you!

The dark owl stared at her in astonishment. You’ll make Me? And it began to make a ridiculous cawing noise, almost like a crow. Great cruel amusement and disdain were in that noise, and it brought the owl’s hackles up.

She had heard this kind of thing before—sometimes from other raptors, sometimes from other birds who thought her size made her a joke, and who then amused themselves by mobbing her. Yes, I will! the owl said, feeling her anger start to rise hot again. I’ll fly at you and fasten onto your face and put my claw in your eye so that you fall right out of the air down onto the ground and lie there going cold! I’ll pull the feathers off you and strip your breast meat off and bolt it in four gulps! And when I’m done the little things of the wood will pick your bones clean, and when they’re done the ants will run in and out of where your eyes were, carrying off whatever’s left!

That anger was swelling greater and greater inside the owl again, overflowing her. This time it also flowed over into those who hovered all around her, waiting to see what she would do. She glared at the dark owl, and all around her more and more of the owls who’d come at her call turned their gazes to do the same—hovering still, but all flexing their talons like they wanted to sink them into something.

So get out of our way right now, the owl said, or that’s just how it will be!

The dark owl’s only answer was to scream, a horrible screech-owlish shriek that promised death and destruction to them all. It flung itself at the owl.

But she was already out of her hover and winging forward. Quick as if she was catching a mouse, the owl did just as she’d said, reaching out with her feet and fastening her talons into the dark owl’s face—

At that, the screaming face pressed up against the owl’s breast began to grow, and its big beak snapped at her. That was horrible, but the owl’s rage grew too, and she hung on and kept on beating her wings and clenching her talons tighter, feeling inward for an eye.

Then another owl’s feet, bigger than hers, fastened into that face along with her. And right after those, another pair of feet, longer-taloned—a great brown owl’s, possibly—hooked in through the dark owl’s head-feathers from behind, and reached for its skull.

One after another, more and more pairs of razor-sharp talons pushed in out of the night, clenching into the dark owl’s great body and gripping around its flailing legs and feet. The more the dark owl grew, the more owls came to fasten themselves to it, gripping tight, talons working inward toward its vitals. Huge as it was now, there were still more owls than it could deal with, though by comparison they might seem small as mice.

And what talons alone could not do, beaks now started doing. Swiftly the screams of the dark owl changed, turning at first from mere rage to rage and pain, as the sharp beaks of all that great gathering of owls dug into what the talons held, and started to tear. Soon enough the screaming became all one howl of pain as the owls ripped dark feathers away and let them fall; as the flesh beneath the feathers was rent off the flailing bones.

Nor could the tormented, diminishing shape now even fall. As it dwindled, the owls bore it up in the air over the dark river, ripping what life it had away. The dark owl’s screams shifted into a strange high anguished keening—the aggrieved complaint of One who’d only become this physically real for the sake of having a conversation, and was realizing (now that the conversation had gone so utterly, unexpectedly wrong) that It might have miscalculated.

Finally the screaming faded away, and the owl felt what her talons held go still, then start to go unsubstantial. She let go, and watched the scrap of feathers and flesh she’d been gripping fade away into the darkness as they fell—the night now every moment growing more clean of those huge wings’ shadow. All around her, all the other owls hovered and did the same. The last night-black fragments fell out of their claws and into a river now glowing faintly under the risen moon as a patch of high cloud slipped away. Untroubled, the light and the water swallowed those last scraps, vanishing them.

All right, the owl said at last. Let’s go on. We’ve got things to put right!

And all together, bound by the one purpose, the owls flew.

* * *

When they arrived in the air over the stone-overgrown island and dropped down toward the pit-like place that held her tree, the owl realized the dark owl had done her a favor. She hadn’t been terribly sure how she was going to take the Tree back. But now she knew that the owls who were with her had been enough to hold their enemy up in the air while they dealt with it. And surely my tree won’t be that heavy! We’ll manage.

Yes you will, something whispered in her ear—and with some humor, as if there could seriously have been any doubt on the subject.

Nonetheless, the owl had missed enough kills in her time that she knew better than to celebrate the mouse’s taste before it was in her gullet. There it is! she said to all the owls who’d come with her. Go sit down on it and take a breath or so. Then we’ll get it out of here and go home.

The other owls were perfectly willing to do just that. In a great cloud of beating wings they settled on the tree and gazed curiously around them.

The owl found herself glad of the covering they lent to her tree, because the twoleggers had somehow managed to turn it into an eyehurting tree-shaped aggregation of glaring colored fires and little sparks like tiny confused seeds of lightning. That’s going to have to be put right too, she thought, but we’ll leave it as it is for the moment. Right now, getting it out of here is the most important thing. So let’s take care of that.

In the wake of the other owls she drifted down to the top of the tree and managed to get a grip with her feet on the prickly, overbright object the twoleggers had fastened there. Then she too looked around.

Instantly she felt something unusual. Glancing from one side to another at the smooth-faced stone cliffs surrounding the tree, and then more closely examining the pit it stood beside, the owl realized that eyes were watching her—some sort of strange twolegger eyes that didn’t need to be inside heads.

She couldn’t say that she particularly cared for the feeling. Staring is something predators do to their prey, and no predator likes being stared at that way. Still, it seemed right to let whoever was watching know what she’d come for.

The owl looked into the one of those glinting, expressionless eyes that was nearest. I’ve come to take my Tree back! she said. I’ve come to put things right!

All the twoleggers who were standing around in their bright plumage stopped and stared at her. All right, the owl thought. They heard me. Is anyone going to object?

She sat and waited, but heard nothing to make her think that any other creature nearby was inclined to argue the point. So the owl turned her attention downward to all her many colleagues who were sitting on the tree.

All right! she said. Sink your talons in. We’ll do what we did before, and go back the way we came.

All over the Tree she could see the other owls doing as she’d asked. Soon it could hardly be seen for their fluffed-out feathers, and it gleamed all over with the reflected light of their eyes.

And you now, the owl said to the Tree. Is this all right? Is this what you want?

There was a long pause. Then from the Tree she slowly gathered that this was more than all right, much more, if only it meant getting away from all this fuss and noise, back to someplace quiet and dark!

Yes indeed, the owl said, in emphatic agreement. To all the other owls, now settled in and waiting for her, she said: All right. It has to go up now. All together—!

And up it went—not least because the Tree knew the owl, and was more than willing to do what was asked of it even when no one had ever asked it for anything before… indeed, perhaps because no one had ever asked anything of it before. The owl could feel the Tree trying to make the work easy for them… and indeed it seemed surprisingly easy, as if whatever normally held things down was making an exception in their case. Up the owls went, and up the Tree went with them, rising high above the staring, shouting faces below.

Soon enough all those grew tinier, too tiny for even an owl to see, until the twoleggers and their shiny cliffs were lost in a crosshatching of golden and colored lights—all of it dropping further and further behind and below them, more quickly every moment. Finally the night closed around them as the owl and her people crossed the sideways rivers between them and the north, and passed at last into the beginning of the welcome dark beyond the island. The lights on the ground grew fewer and fewer as they rose, obscured by the mists of early winter, until finally the brightest thing left to be seen was the rising moon’s light in the great river, shining on the path back home.

Part III

THREE

6

JD 2459186.58472 (2 December 2020, 21:02 EST)

In the wake of these events, on the South Shore of Nassau Country, two wizards were sitting in front of a Manual-augmented flatscreen TV and watching several split screens’ worth of output from various sources.

One of them had completely forgotten the bottle of cola he was holding in favor of staring at six different networks’ and news agencies’ bulletins about the suddenly empty spot in Rockefeller Plaza. The other was swiping through news pages on his iPad and cursing good-naturedly in the enacture-stripped recension of the Speech that was set aside for human swearing.

“So?” Carl said.

“Social media? About what you’d expect. Facebook’s experiencing traveling Tree-gossip-related outages. North America’s worst at the moment, but it’ll spread. Twitter would’ve FailWhaled out at least four times between now and the initial time fix, if they still had the whale. Between the app and the servers, they just don’t have the scaling to deal with what’s happening here.” An amused pause. “As for Tumblr, there are at least ten or fifteen threads’ worth of owl memes already—”

He stopped, staring at the iPad.

The silence was telling. “What?” Carl said.

“Just you wait.” Tom doubletapped the screen he was viewing.

It mirrored itself to the main display, which promptly showed a palely generic-looking male reporter in a navy blue overcoat and a star-spangled-and-stripy wool scarf. This worthy stood in front of the suddenly tree-less Rockefeller Plaza space and was attempting to project excitement, stern disapproval, and a sense of delicious scandal all at once.

“Stories have been going around for a while now that the antifa were attempting to weaponize animals in their struggle to destabilize our nation. So-called mainstream media pundits pooh-poohed the very idea. Well, tonight, right here in Rockefeller Center itself, we’ve seen evidence that animals do indeed appear to have been drafted into the liberal War on Christmas—”

Tom eyed his partner, who was now doing a fair imitation of a famous starship captain facepalming. “Is it speeding up entropy to wish those guys and their whole broadcast establishment were in the East River?”

“This is wizardry, not magic,” Tom said. “Wishing doesn’t make it so. Just mind your recensions and you’ll be okay… Meanwhile, I’m thinking we’ve done enough assessment.”

“Yeah.” They both stood and collected their manuals and other equipment. “Whatever way this gets handled, there’s no point in letting the first run of this mess embed itself any deeper into the event substrate.”

“Precisely. Since we’re the Regionals on call, Planetary’s going to drop this in our laps any minute now. So let’s have the manuals pull an oversight team together—at the very least, we’ll need an inhabition specialist and a substrate expert. Then we can meet up with whoever Irina’s office sends around… say, in the Plaza, half an hour or so before the time fix?”

“Seems right. We’re going to need a whole sheaf of timeslides for this, but it can’t be helped. I’ll sort it with our senior cousins one level up.”

“And make sure they freeze other timeslide requests from the time fix forward!” Tom shouted after Carl as he went for his coat. “Last thing we’ll need is having to correct some other timeline before we’ve sorted this one.”

Laughter from the side room. “I’ve only been doing this for two decades, you know…”

“Thought it was three.”

“Are you trying to make me feel old?” Carl emerged from the side room and tossed Tom’s parka at him.

“I seem to remember telling you I liked older men…” Tom grinned as he shrugged into his coat. “Vests?”

“Yeah, protective coloration never hurts.” Carl gestured at the empty air, reached into it, and pulled out two hi-vis vests: chucked one at Tom. “Gating? Or personal transport circles?”

“Personal, I’d say. No telling how this is affecting the City gates.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask the Twins to shut down the 48th-50th-Street subsidiary gate; there’s always a chance of contagion. Better more caution than less until we work out what’s to be done.”

“…Okay, ready. Inside? Outside?”

“Outside’s probably better—too many people target on the living room when they’re inbound. I’ll go set the alarms.”

A few moments later their patio door was closed and locked behind them, and they were standing out in the near-dark and the cold clear air.

“Over by the hedge?”

“Yeah. One thing, though,” Carl said.

He headed over to the concrete koi pond on one side of the yard and just stood there a moment, watching the ripples. Then in the wizardly Speech he said, “We might be in and out a lot this evening. Just so you know…”

For a few moments there was no response. Then, after a moment, a pale shape whose sides glinted here and there with bright scales like mirrors drifted toward the surface, putting its head up out of the porch-light-sheened water.

“On a drying branch,” it said,

“A lone bird is alighting:

“Nightfall in autumn…”

Carl nodded. “Right on the money,” he said. “Arigato, Akegane-sama. See you later…”

The fish drifted down into dark water once more. “Right,” Carl said, and went back to join Tom by the hedge. “Ready?”

“Ready. Let’s do it.”

A symbol-written circle flared into life in the grass around the spot where they stood. A second later it vanished, and so did they.

7

JD 2459186.61250 (2 December 2020, 21:42 EST)

As the wizards who’d initiated the meeting, protocol dictated that they should be the first to arrive. After that, new arrivals would be expected to turn up fairly closely together, temporally speaking—the individual timeslides themselves mandating enough physical offset to keep anyone appearing at those temporospatial coordinates from accidentally impinging on one another’s space in more than just the idiomatic sense.

To an observer unfamiliar with what was happening it would have looked enough like social distancing not to arouse suspicion. But then observers who were actually able to notice the arrivals would have been thin on the ground… since all those who appeared, one after another, were wearing vests or other items of clothing overwritten with Speech routines designed to make the non-wizardly either not notice the wearers at all, or (if they did) promptly forget they had.

One after another the expected arrivals appeared by the west-facing back window of the Lego Store, and each time for some moments nothing much happened except introductions among those who hadn’t met yet, and greetings among those who had.

“Dai stihó!”

“Dai, cousin. Carl Romeo— “

“Lissa Dalwhinnie. Dai!”

Carl peered at the tall curly-haired young woman in the long furry-hooded parka and leggings, and frowned, an I-ought-to-know-you expression. “Wait! I remember. Didn’t we meet at the Invitational back in 2011?”

“In kind of a hurry, yeah…”

Laughter. “When is everybody at an Invitational not in a hurry?”

“Yeah, now that you mention…”

“Are you our inhabition person?”

“Oh no, I’m the scrubber! I’ll be tidying the scene of leftovers from the original timeline after we concur on what needs overwriting.” Then she smiled, glancing sideways. “If I’m not very much mistaken, that’s your inhabition guy…”

Off to one side, a tall young Hispanic man wearing (under his own hi-vis vest) a long navy woollen coat and scarf, and a perfectly cut navy suit, was checking the ground around him to make sure his transit circle had vanished. He looked up, and his grin flashed out as he saw the Supervisories.

Tom laughed out loud. “Mars boy!”

“Are you kidding me!” the young man said, and strode over to Tom and hugged him hard. “When are you going to let that go?!”

“You’ll need to make sure no one saw that,” Tom said, over Kit Rodriguez’s shoulder, to Lissa.

“With these on?” Lissa plucked at her vest, laughing. “Trust me, no one will!”

“Not that the bug can bite anybody on errantry anyway,” Kit said, and headed over to Carl: hugged him too. “It’s been forever! You promised you were going to come visit. When exactly does that happen?”

“What can I tell you?” Carl said, post-hug. “You know how things’ve been this year! And other work gets in the way no matter how many worldgates you manage.” He held Kit away a little. “Nice look, Kit! Kind of dressy, though? I thought billionaires let all their employees wear sweats to work these days. Or at least to Zoom in.”

“Mmm, no. Sometimes it’s useful to misdirect a bit. Or indulge in protective coloration… depending on who’s on the call. Makes life easier…”

“I’m not sure what’s ‘easier’ about wrangling some of these self-made-money types into more responsible channels.”

Kit developed a small vertical line between his eyebrows. “Might be that’s too much work for even a whole crowd of wizards. Anyway, not my job. Some errantry’s more about damage control.”

“Controlling the damage before it happens, you mean.”

“Well, what’s tonight going to be about, then? You don’t always need timeslides to be proactive. Keeping stuff from happening in real time has its challenges, but if it gets the job done…” Kit shrugged, glancing up into an evening sky half blanked-out with sodium-vapor streetlight glow and nonetheless locking onto a specific spot with the certainty of someone who knows exactly where something is without needing to search, or to see. “It’s a nice planet, these days. Hate for anything to happen to it. Or happen the wrong way.” He grinned. “And if I have anything to do with it, it won’t.”

Carl nodded. “How’s the family? How’s your Mama holding up?”

Kit sighed. “She’s okay.” He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s been tough,” he said more softly. “But she’s tough too. She just keeps on picking herself up, you know? She says, ‘I can’t fall over right now. My patients need me. And my colleagues need me more.’”

“That’s our Marina,” Carl said. “Give her our best.”

“I will.”

“How’s your sister?”

Kit shook his head. “Haven’t seen much of her this last year.”

Carl looked concerned. “Nothing to do with… you know?”

“What? Oh, no, no, she’s fine! All that’s pretty much water under the bridge now. But she’s been spending a lot of time in space.”

“Chocolate?”

“Strangely enough, it’s more about diplomacy.” Carl gave him a look. “No, seriously!”And then Kit grinned. “Well, some chocolate. You’d have to talk to Sker’ret. He’s been using her as kind of a secret weapon. That Imivi thing, for example—”

Widened eyes. “She was tangled up in that? My God. And got out of it all right?”

Kit glanced to one side, at Tom. “Yeah. Long story. After this, if we can sit down—”

“For certain values of ‘after’. We may get through a few of them before things settle—”

“It’s never gonna settle if you three don’t stop with the Boy Gossip and get down to business,” said a voice from just around the corner of the Lego Store as the parasitic light from another transit circle died away.

“We’re on the good side of a timeslide,” Tom said. “Business won’t start for four minutes yet. And as for you—” With a smile he turned toward the startlingly blue-haired, grey-eyed young woman in jeans and a snowflake-covered sweater and a long dark shawl who was ambling toward them. “You set this little reunion up somehow, didn’t you! And here I was thinking we were going to wind up with just one more of the newbies that you keep shoving out of Irina’s office to see if they’ll fly.”

Nita Callahan snickered at Tom as she wandered over to give him a hug. “What? Not a chance when I’ve got other fish to fry. I get all kinds of things delegated to me now. And you’re due for your half-yearly evaluation!”

Tom guffawed as he patted her back. “Oh, Juanita Louise, you’re going to have to try harder than that! Like I’d believe something like that coming from you that didn’t come out of you in the Speech. You just like poking me to see if you can get me to jump.”

She grinned at him, but made no attempt to deny it. “Tomás,” she said, “the L word? From you? What a transparent attempt to get me to jump.”

“What, isn’t it applicable? My sources tell me—”

“Way too much as usual,” she said, elbowing him genially in the ribs. “Shut up.”

“See that?” Tom said. “That was assault! Right here in front of the Powers that Be and everybody.”

This assertion was greeted with numerous snorts or shouts of unconvinced laughter.

“All right,” Carl said over the ruckus. “Cousins! …Not that we don’t all feel the need for more socializing than usual, under this year’s circumstances, but let’s get local matters sorted out first.”

Everyone quieted down and gathered together a bit, though not so closely that it would attract attention if the blanket don’t-notice-me wizardry their vests had coded in should start to fray around the edges. Kit glanced over at the as-yet-unlit Tree. “Has the sitrep changed at all?”

Carl shook his head. “Further downstream in time? It’s as you saw it, and getting worse. City’s going out of its mind, the whole country and half the world just saw what happened. The rest will know within minutes.”

“So as usual when we’re considering timeline alteration,” Tom said, “three questions. What just happened here? Who are we dealing with? And what do we do to fix it?”

“Define ‘fix,’” Nita said, with an expression of good-natured skepticism.

“One thing at a time,” Carl said. “The manuals go into a lot of detail, but what seems to have happened is this: There’s a new power in town who is at the very least a wizard, and may be considerably more. Our cousin-of-interest is, to all appearances, an owl. She is the same owl who was discovered trapped in this very tree—” and he waved at it— “a couple of weeks back, starving and dehydrated; was rescued and rehabilitated in an upstate New York facility; and was then released into the wild. She remained there without apparent incident for some days, moving from place to place in upstate New York, in what could have been mistaken for normal pre-migration patterns for a saw-whet owl. And that pattern continued until—at approximately the time point where we’re all standing—half an hour ‘ago.’ At which point, this owl spoke the Strigid Word.”

Bemused glances were exchanged among three of the five. “Never heard of that one,” Kit said.

“Possibly because there won’t have been one until around 8:34 PM Eastern time this evening,” Carl said. “But there’s sure one now.”

Everyone considered that for a moment, some of them checking their wizardry-synched watches or phones for the Julian-dated referent time to compare it to their own local time ticks. “She spoke a Master-word!” Nita said under her breath. “And not for another species. For her own.”

Tom nodded, looking sober. “I don’t need to tell anybody here how tightly managed the use of such mastery-and-control words is as a rule,” he said. “Not least because their usage typically entails the payment of a tremendously high price… and using it on your own species is routinely strongly enjoined. But we’re breaking new ground, here. Or rather, she is. For nonhuman species, new styles or roles of wizardry tend to arrive in forms that at first glance may not make much sense to us. Our job is to assist them without allowing our preconceptions to accidentally limit what unexpected shapes it wants to take.”

“And this is unexpected, all right…” Kit said.

“Dr. Rodriguez’s normal tendency toward understatement is in evidence,” said Carl with a lopsided grin. ”Always good to see.” Kit rolled his eyes.

Carl glanced at his manual. “We’re coming up on the hour, cousins. All your manuals or affiliated instrumentalities have their own specialty settings in terms of what phenomena they observe and record most preferentially. So if you’ll hit your ‘go’ buttons, and lean back to observe… the show’s about to begin.”

Almost as if it had been waiting for his cue, the tree lit in a blaze of multicolored fire…

And within a matter of minutes, things got very interesting.

* * *

When the Tree had finally sailed out of sight with its escort, the five leaning against the Lego Store wall regarded one another with astonishment.

“Definitely,” Lissa said, shaking her head, “not something you see every day…”

“So,” Tom said. “Beyond that… discussion?”

“No question, she’s a tremendous power,” Nita said. She was glancing down at her own manual, paging through it. “She was administered a version of the Oath that was adjudged mindset-appropriate for her species. She accepted it. After a delay, she began to use wizardry for the first time. And when she was on the way down here in the last half hour and the Lone One challenged her, she beat It… and then continued right on with what she’d been planning: taking back her tree.”

“So that’s what happened,” Carl said. “Next: who is she, besides an owl who’s also a wizard?” He glanced at Kit. “What about it, Dr. Rodriguez? With all that power in play… is she the One for owls?”

Another eloquent eyeroll. “It’s almost as if you keep forgetting my first name, Carl. Could it be some kind of age problem? I’d hate to get personal about it…”

“Ow! Somebody get me a cryo spell for that burn.” And a laugh. “Kit. What about it?”

Kit considered. “The One for owls? …I don’t think so. From what I know about inhabitions and upper-level avatars, not to mention the One For Dogs, the power involved here doesn’t feel to me as if it’s on the same scale.” He thought for a moment. “But something lower-level? Could be. And I do think she’s the answer to some problem—a problem bigger than the one she was having. I think she’s a conduit for power. What problem, and what power…?” He shrugged. “Probably it’ll take a while for us to learn. It might be trying to stay covert; if it is, it’d be rude to out it before it gets its job done. But in the meantime—” He laughed. “I think that owl’s someone it’d be really smart not to annoy.”

“Agreed,” Lissa said. “If anyone was considering some kind of intervention that would attempt to recover the Tree and put it back, I think that would be a big mistake. She felt so strongly that the tree was hers, that to get it back it looks like somehow she reached right down into the Speech’s own language-generative routines and made it manifest a Master-Word that’s never even existed before. If someone thwarted what she’s just done—possibly as part of her Ordeal—she could well come back here and do it all over again, in a way that we couldn’t cover or repair after the fact.”

“I’d say there’s an even better reason to let her keep that tree,” Nita said.

Lissa regarded her with interest. “Oh?”

“Absolutely! Sure, she feels like the Tree’s hers. But more to the point, the Tree feels the same way.”

Tom’s eyebrows went up at that. “Well, plants were one of your first specialty areas way back in the day, weren’t they? Far be it from me to question your expertise on this.”

Nita shrugged. “The sense I got was that before it was moved here, the Tree didn’t really feel particularly owned by anybody. But it absolutely feels that way now! And when the owl turned up, that tree didn’t feel like it was being stolen. It felt as if it was being rescued.”

Carl was nodding. “All right,” he said. “We know the what. We know the who… or as much of it as we’re likely to know in the short term. But the short term’s the issue, right now. So, the third question: what’s our move? How are we going to fix this?”

“Well,” Kit said, “the simplest fix would be simply to patch the timeline. ‘Make it didn’t happen.’”

Tom gave him an incredulous look.

“What?” Kit said, and laughed. “I seem to remember how once upon a time we had about a thousand dinosaurs break through a malfunctioning worldgate into the middle of a Three Tenors concert in Central Park and one of them ate Luciano Pavarotti, and we patched that—”

“Within minutes of the event occurring,” Carl said. “And without the event having been extensively covered on national and international news and social media.” He shook his head. “Granting you that in the wake of a patch, even for that event, those would be minor issues. The kind of post-patch site scrub that Lissa here specializes in would remove the possibility of any echoes of the old timeline lingering. However—”

He started riffling through his manual. “There’s a vital difference between that event and this one. There was was nothing about the Central Park gating breakthrough that was either desirable or important to keep. But this time, our tree-napping event here—if we can really call it that when the Tree wanted to be -napped—has brought with it something else unexpected.”

He riffled through his own manual and held it open to one spread of pages that obligingly reproduced, in the air in the midst of them, a line graph with a startling exponential spike at its downtime end. “This evening’s proceedings have come associated with a really unexpected influx of positive energy that I don’t think this region, or indeed this planet, can afford to lose at the moment. Look at the timing there!”

He pointed at the highest spike on the curve. “That’s when our cousin the owl was in the midst of her Ordeal. With what seems relatively little fuss, she defeated the Lone Power in a way that involved thousands of others of her kind—all of whom seem to have become adjunct gateways for this power to make its way from its source and into our world.” He shook his head and shut his manual. “Leaving aside a profound respect for a brand new cousin who came right out of the gate as a serious badass… I’d be very, very unwilling to tamper with that result.” He looked meaningfully at Nita.

She said nothing for a moment, and then glanced up. “There was something unusual about how she framed her own challenge,” Nita said. “‘I’m here to put things right.’”

“An awfully broad invocation,” Kit said. “A whole lot of good could travel down that road… if we don’t accidentally block it.”

“If we’re going to patch this timeline and rewrite this particular piece of history so that it doesn’t cause endless trouble in all the local cultures,” said Lissa, “we’ll need to be very precise about the moments where the patch begins and ends. But they can’t interfere with the owl. They can’t interfere with what she does. She has to take the Tree, and keep it. And people here need to have no idea that happened.”

“That’s my thought,” Carl said. “And it’s a hell of an ask. How do we do that?”

They were all quiet for a moment, staring at the empty space and the production people and tech people flocking around it. “I want to run that through again,” Nita said after a moment, opening her manual.

Lissa came to lean over her shoulder. “What?” she said, concerned. “Did we miss something?”

Nita looked uneasy. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s as if there’s something… I don’t know. Something missing…”

“Take a moment to think about it,” Tom said. “Take a breath and let it come to you.”

Nita turned over a page or two in her manual, and another page or two, stepping away from the others and toward 49th Street. Kit and Lissa glanced at each other as they leaned against the window. Lissa was watching Nita, but Kit’s attention was mostly on the spot where the Tree had been.

“It was a nicer one this year than usual,” he said. “Weird that all this wound up happening around it…”

“‘Nicer than usual?’” Lissa said. “Have you come down to see it before?”

Kit shrugged. “A few times. Mostly I’ve just watched it on TV… you know how busy it’s been. Once or twice I came down here with ‘Mela, before things got so hectic a few years back.” And then he laughed. “One time she said, ‘You know who ought to see this? We should get him down here and he’d just go green with jealousy. Except he’s green already, so how would anybody even tell?—’”

And very loudly Nita said “Oh my God!”

Everyone whirled to look at her, even some of the people who hadn’t noticed her before. The nonwizards immediately forgot to pay any further attention, of course, but Kit and Lissa and Carl and Tom all stared. “Neets?” Kit said.

“What?” Lissa said.

“Filif!!” Nita said: and vanished.

8

JD 2459186.63056 (2 December 2020, 22:08 EST)

So it was that the intervention team wound up adding to their number an expert of their acquaintance who could easily have been mistaken for the Universe’s long-purposed answer for this very problem. That the expert happened to look like a mobile Christmas tree carrying his own small, red, occasionally intensely-bright lights around with him was (in later discussions) taken by the team as a sign that the Powers that Be aren’t above the occasional very broad joke. And if the hi-vis vest with which Nita equipped him on his arrival struck an interestingly dissonant note, that was more or less par for the course.

He—at least it was “he” at the moment, or close enough to that concept—had quite a long name which most of his wizardly cousins tended to shorten to Filif. He was a Demisiv—a communal-arborid member of the dominant species native to the planet of the same name, the seventh world out from the star called 16 Aurigae. As a wizard, one of his specialties was working with the exquisitely tailorable semblance-management systems called mochteroofs. It took no more than a few minutes for Filif to arrive on site after receiving the request for a consult, the 48th-50th Street subway station’s worldgate being brought back online just long enough to fetch him in.

“Sweet Powers, the way time flies!” he said to the gathered wizards when he’d had a few moments to greet everybody, and had turned his attention to where the tree had been. “Hadn’t realized it was that time of year again here! Usually Carmela mentions. Hadn’t heard anything about it from her, though…”

“She’s offplanet,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “More cocoa business. Oh, and there was something about getting one of her cargo ships’ engines refitted.” He glanced at Nita. “Dairine was in on it too… Some computer thing. Don’t ask me…” He waved a hand and shook his head in the bemused manner of younger brothers everywhere when their older sisters were being discussed.

“All right,” Filif said. “Replay the event for me, would you? Let’s see how complicated this is going to be.”

It took only a few moments to lay a wizardly event superstrate over the site that could be viewed by no one but them, and the event was duly replayed. Filif stood there admiring the recording both for the sake of the beauty of the Tree and for the unusual nature of what was happening. But even as he made vague frond-whispering noises of admiration, every berry was trained fixedly on what was happening.

When it was finished he shook all his branches out and thought for a moment. “So tell me if I’ve got this right,” Filif said. “You need an exact duplicate of the Tree that was here, and all the electrical installations and connections that were on it. You need me to copy all of these from the data in the recording, pretty much atom for atom—but substituting nonliving surrogate tissue for the Tree—with an eye to swapping it in at the same time our new cousin and her people arrive—”

“Nearly,” Tom said. “More accurately, it needs to be swapped in ten seconds or so before the lighting. But it needs to arrive perfectly in sync with it, molecule for molecule, and it needs to overlay the original perfectly for just so long as it takes the owls to grab hold of the living tree and take it away.”

“I did something similar that time I came around for your holiday party, as I recall,” Filif said to Kit. “Left the mochteroof in place and stepped out of it.” He wiggled his (unseen) roots, and the cloud of cloaking field that hid them as usual shifted too. “It’s no great mastery.”

“Well, after that it gets a little more complex,” said Carl. “We’ll throw a stealth wizardry over the owls as they exit with the real tree, and cover their transit upstate to wherever the owl decides she wants the tree to go. The mochteroof that you construct will stay in place here until the time the people responsible for managing the Plaza take it apart and take it away to be disposed of.”

“But we don’t want to interfere with the owl, or her wizardry, in any way,” Tom said. “In particular we don’t want to take the chance of destabilizing it, or her, until we’ve had a chance for the situation to settle down and for someone expert in the avian mindset to have a chat with her. Too much rides on this.”

Filif swayed backwards and forwards a little, gazing up at the presently-paused image of the Tree with all his forward berries, while he made a small wind-in-the-branches hissing sound very like what a plumber or mechanic produces before telling you that something’s going to be difficult, or expensive, or both. “All right,” he said. “It’s all entirely doable. When do you want it?”

Carl raised his eyebrows. “Half an hour ago?”

Filif thought a moment, then shrugged some fronds. “Done,” he said. “Check the backtime timeline; I’ll have left you the mochteroof off to one side there, cloaked and rotated out of physical phase. We’ll keep the dimensional rotation when we strike the cloak, so the mochteroof won’t have any coexistence issues with the base installation.”

Carl sighed. “Thanks, cousin.”

Filif produced a you’re-welcome rustle, while angling a fair number of berries in Carl’s direction. “I’d have thought you’d have preferred to just patch this one, though.”

“If we had no other choice, yes, we’d have gone into more aggressive patching options. But New York’s fragile right now.” Carl rubbed his face. “There are too many things we could accidentally affect here that could wind up costing lives… and there’s been way too much of that around here lately, despite our best efforts. So this is better.”

“Choice is always good,” Filif said, and everyone smiled a bit at the feeling of what Demisivs used for a smile as it sizzled along their nerves.

“So,” Tom said. “We’ll sketch a timeline down to about the hundredth-of-a-second level, then refine it, find the spot where you’ll drop the mochteroof into place and activate it; then construct the wizardry that’ll stealth-cloak the owls past the local radars and follow them back up north. Can anybody think of anything else that needs doing?”

Heads were shaken. Kit, regarding the “paused” image of the Tree, said, “For such a big problem… it doesn’t seem like we’re doing enough, somehow. Seems almost too easy!”

Carl shrugged. “Not sure there’s much we need to do here except make sure the owl’s not interfered with as she leaves, and as she gets settled. The rest we’ll manage later.”

Tom nodded in agreement. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of that old saying. ‘To be the miracle, get out of its way…’”

”So let’s get on with that.” Carl said. “The Tree proper will need some help, of course. As a conifer, even after the treatment it’s received since it’s been cut down, there’ll still be a lot of life left in it. We’ll get it re-implanted and re-rooted pretty quickly.” He smiled an innocent smile. “I seem to remember we’ve got someone on site who used to be good with trees…”

“Used to be!” Nita said, indignant. “I beg your pardon!”

Tom chuckled. “We don’t often get much begging out of the Planetary’s office, but hey, we’ll take what we can get.” He glanced at Kit. “Where’s our new cousin now?”

Kit was leafing through his manual: he paused. “Looks like she and the Tree decided not to settle where it originally came from,” he said. “Too much road noise. It seems she found a spot she liked better—not far from where they released her, near Saugerties.”

“So we need to get the Tree re-implanted and its roots regrown ASAP,” Carl said, “assuming it’s someplace where it won’t attract attention.”

“And assuming it consents,” Lissa said.

“That’s a given,” Carl said. “But first things first. We backtime to the predetermined time fix a few seconds before the first owls arrive, and install the mochteroof. Then we render the real tree and the incoming owls invisible by the least invasive method possible, let them pull the real Tree offsite—leaving the perfect replica behind—and shadow the Tree and the owl to their new relocated.”

“We’ll make the rerooting process as non-invasive as possible,” Tom said, “and make sure owl and Tree are safe and well as they can be… then leave them to their own devices.” He glanced over at Lissa. “We’ve brought you a long way for not much work, cousin! Won’t be much scrubbing to do here.”

“Are you kidding? I’d have come even if there weren’t other reasons.” Lissa smiled at him. “This’ll be one for the Book! Glad I didn’t miss it.”

“Then thanks for being on call. We’ll make it up to you some other time.” Tom looked around. “Any suggestions, people? Anything we’ve left out? I’m listening.”

Heads were shaken all around.

“Then the ball’s in your court, Nita,” Carl said. “Go or no go? With an event this major, we can’t move without Irina’s office’s sanction. If you want to take this back for an upline consult, or if you feel we need to spend more time discussing this, it’s fine. But every extra minute we spend risks this whole business embedding itself more deeply into the event substrate.”

Nita stood there very straight with her hands behind her, looking down and the paving, and holding her manual fairly tightly.

”This is as much your evaluation as mine, isn’t it?” Tom said to Nita, with just a slight smile. “But no pressure.”

“You,” Nita said, giving Tom what was plainly meant to be a cool, annoyed look. For some moments no one said anything, and what thoughts might have passed from mind to mind among the assembled wizards went otherwise unexpressed.

Finally Nita sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “I concur. On behalf of the Planetary Wizard for Earth, and in her place, I sanction it.”

And she smiled. “Let’s go.”

9

JD 2459186.67882 (2 December 2020, 23:17 EST)

And so it went—smoothly and without flaw, as might have been expected when so experienced a team of wizards, who mostly knew each other well, were intent on getting an intervention right on the first try. Once everything’s planned out, once the master strategy’s in place, once the spell diagrams are laid down and triple-checked… good wizardry (once the spells’ execution is complete) can be boring. The only thing guaranteed never to be boring are the people or creatures you work with, and the feeling of satisfaction you get from talking the universe into giving them what they need.

The five humans and the Demisiv stood together against the Lego Store wall, a little ways down from where the same five humans (slightly differently temporally positioned) were already standing watching the lighting ceremony the first time, and together they all watched it happen again. They saw the very briefest blink as Filif’s mochteroof snapped into position and exactly coincided with every blink and every motion of the real Tree. They saw through the invisibility that shrouded the incoming owls, and heard their wings through the sound-baffling wizardry that kept the whistle of the birds’ wings from being heard by nonwizards in realtime. They heard the cry I’ve come to take my tree back! I’ve come to put things right!… and at that all of them shivered a little; for some words, and some acts of intention, have their own power that make wizardry more potent, rather than the other way around. And finally they saw the owl and her Tree sail up into the night, shining, and vanish northward into the dark.

After that there was little to do but go home and get some rest—because wizardries of such complexity, regardless of having become boring, also require payment in energy from the wizards enacting them, and tend to leave one completely wrung out.

“But at least we had a chance to touch base without manuals for a change,” said Tom to two of the younger three, while Carl did one last walk around the Plaza to make sure all the parts of the wizardry that needed to be collapsed or decommissioned had done so correctly.

“Yeah. And speaking of which,” Kit said,”you really need to come and visit. I’m serious!”

“All right, all right, we will! If we can just figure out where the Autonomous Collective is even located these days. It was Prague, last I heard…”

“Nope, Neets decided she didn’t mind the commute back to Irina’s so much after all. We found a place in the south of France: we’ll be there until the weather warms up. Then maybe back over here for a while.”

“I thought it was going to be England,” Lissa said.

“Still under discussion,” Kit said.

“Scotland,” Nita said, coming around the corner from the near end of the Channel Gardens.

“I told you I didn’t want a vote this time!” Kit said. “Gimme a break. We going back now?”

“Nope, nope. We’ll see you back home. Come on, Liss, I promised I was going to show you the Saks windows before we go…”

The two of them waved at Tom and Kit and headed off down the Channel Gardens towards Fifth, hand in hand. “She got her second wind,” Kit said, watching them go with a smile. “She always does that somehow…”

“We’ll come visit,” Tom said. “Message us when you’ve had a chance to recover from all this.”

Another brief spate of hugging ensued. “Dai stihó, Mars Boy,” Tom said. “Tell them we said good night.”

Kit grinned, rolled his eyes again. “You’re hopeless,” he said, “but I will. Dai, Tom.” And he dropped a transit circle around himself and, with it, vanished.

Tom smiled and went to help his partner finish beating the bounds.

* * *

As far as the so-called Real World was concerned, the lighting of the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Plaza went off without a hitch, and was shortly swallowed up in a rush of (theoretically) more newsworthy events. But shortly after the ceremony was over, an odd sequence of events centered on the Plaza area began to spread out from it in slow ripples, as if a stone had been thrown into a pool.

The local crime rate dropped (though when this statistical artifact surfaced in spring of 2021, reports of it were immediately rejected because its source was the police). Additionally, mortality of all kinds (not merely COVID-related) in hospitals around the area dropped off significantly for a thirty-six to forty-eight hour period. This statistic, too, was closely scrutinized in January of 2021, but health experts could detect no possible reason for it.

The authorities therefore discounted it as something that hadn’t actually happened. The algorithm that had been used to process that period’s data was therefore flagged as possibly faulty and scheduled for reassessment, and the conclusions resulting from it were never made public. Some health professionals who suspected the “reverse spike” was connected to some weird sort of holiday-associated confirmation bias began considering what kind of papers might be written. And it would have been strange to see—for anyone who knew all these scientists and statisticians—how these papers were set aside and never written, or how those that were written failed of publication in a number of interesting and non-traumatic ways.

In a far larger context, general discussions of the ways 2021 began to differ from 2020—in terms of occasionally unexpectedly-positive results in unlikely circumstances—would go on in popular-culture and social media venues for some time, routinely drowned out by the alarums and excursions of the insistent Now. But wizards, who have access to manual-and-similar instrumentalities that can reveal the true causes of things, will simply describe such occurrences in the Speech as huheilth’amehn—“Owl moments”—and get back to their never-ending business of fixing the broken world.

10

JD 2459209.04168 (25 December 2020, 1300 UTC)

Meanwhile, in real time (or “more-real time”, as some would put it) a most unusual tree can now occasionally be found in a forest reserve in upstate New York, not far from Woodstock. Wizards know where it is, and a few local humans who are good neighbors to beasts and birds, and know how to keep their own counsel about the strange things they see among the trees in the dark of night.

If one looks downtime at the Tree and its inhabitants, they will for many years hence find a perfectly shaped Norway spruce, thick-boughed and heavy-fronded, looking for all the world as if it had never previously been chainsawed off hundred-year-old roots and denuded of half its lower boughs. In that tree lives an owl who, after her yearly migration, comes back to it every year to nest.

Mostly the owl seems just like all other saw-whet owls. And mostly she is just as she seems. But there are moments when she wakes in the dusk and looks out of the hole where she and several generations of chicks have lived while they fledged out, and the owl remembers how it was, on that one night of anger and glory, when she took back what was rightfully hers.

On such evenings, casual travelers through those woods (some of them wizards taking time to look in on a cousin) have seen a peculiar thing: a tree made of light, a Tree with the remembered burning gleam of thousands of owls’ eyes in it, shining with the preserved reality of fifty thousand less-unusual lights in every color that humans see.

By the time any non-wizardly observer comes within reach of this apparition, it has always faded into impossibility, and the woods around it are dark again. But wizards understand why things in those woods are always greener after such a moment… and why the Owl has been there so surprisingly long, and will continue to be so.

For power inevitably changes what it channels through. What suffers itself to conduct the light, soon enough becomes light itself. And in that quiet rural region of upstate New York, where all the owls (it’s said) are wise, the battlecry of an ancient strength, new-fledged and new-inhabited, can yet be heard by those with ears to hear its greeting and defiance, deep-founded in the dawn of time:

I’ve come to put things right!

11

Afterword

Twenty-five percent of proceeds from the sales of this ebook will go to the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center. Their staff rehabilitated “Rocky” the Owl after her initial sojourn in the Tree, and facilitated her release.

We invite you to make your own donation to help Ravensbeard afford a “forever home” from which they can continue their work with injured and orphaned wildlife.

Also: See Rocky’s merch.

12

Another tale of Christmas in the Young Wizards universe

How Lovely Are Thy Branches

The How Lovely Are Thy Branches

Advent Calendar

(Free)

By the same author

In the Young Wizards universe:

The main-sequence Young Wizards series:

So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry

High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad

The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone

Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War

A Wizard of Mars • Games Wizards Play

the Feline Wizards sequence:

The Book of Night with Moon

To Visit The Queen

(UK title: On Her Majesty’s Wizardly Service)

The Big Meow

Interstitial works in the YW universe:

Interim Errantry • Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

For adult readers:

the Middle Kingdoms novels

The Door into Fire • The Door Into Shadow • The Door Into Sunset

Interstitial works:

Tales of the Five #1: The Levin-Gad

Tales of the Five #2: The Landlady

Other standalone adult fantasy:

Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South

Stealing The Elf-King's Roses

Collected short fiction:

Uptown Local and Other Interventions

Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales

In the Star Trek (TM) universe:

The Wounded Sky • My Enemy, My Ally

Spock’s World • Doctor's Orders

Dark Mirror • Intellivore

The "Rihannsu Quartet"

The Romulan Way • Swordhunt

Honor Blade

(omnibus edition: Star Trek: The Bloodwing Voyages)

The Empty Chair

* * *

For ebook editions of many books above

and others not listed here,

please visit

https://Ebooks.Direct

or the Books page at the author's site:

DianeDuane.com

Diane Duane on social media

Twitter: @dduane

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