“She is here,” she said.

  “And not bespelled,” the dryad added, as though finishing Sereila’s sentence.

  Schaeffer would not have credited Sereila with the thought, if the elven female had not blushed red to the roots of her hairline.

  “I am sorry,” the elf said. “I did not know…”

  “I may negotiate for her another time,” the dryad said. “For now, I believe there are other matters that require my attention.”

  Sereila pressed her lips together, and then looked to Schaeffer.

  “We did not find her, before the trolls came,” she said, “but she escaped them, too, and we don’t know where she is. The unicorns are beside themselves.”

  “Did she find the grove?” Schaeffer asked.

  For some reason, she was sure the dryads were the goal of Winsome’s run, but she couldn’t think quite why.

  “She should have,” Sereila said. “The unicorns tracked her right to the edge of the acacias, and turned aside when the trolls came.”

  “Show me,” Schaeffer demanded, and heard a slight sound.

  She turned to the dryad.

  “I am sorry. I must go.” She hesitated, and then asked, “May I return?”

  To her surprise, a wide smile brightened the dryad’s face.

  “Please,” the tree-woman said. “As soon as you may.”

  It was all Schaeffer needed. Ignoring the expressions of shock and surprise on the faces around her, she turned to the elf leader.

  “Show me where the unicorns lost the trail,” she said.

  “This way,” and Sereila led the way back through the barrier of wattle and acacia under which Schaeffer had crawled the night before.

  She did not have to drop to her hands and knees, but wound her way around the branches and along a hidden parting that Schaeffer had had no chance of seeing in the dark. The pixie had been more than wise to take the officer beneath the barrier. She’d never have negotiated it before the trolls had caught them.

  Schaeffer looked back, when they reached the other side, and felt herself go weak at the knees. Great gouges had been torn out of the branches and bushes, as though a giant arm had reached down and tried to pull the bushes up by their roots, only to succeed in tearing a hole through the lower branches. She wondered exactly how near it had come, and then decided she didn’t want to know.

  “You have claw marks on the soles of your boots,” the pixies said, whispering in her ear, and Schaeffer wished she’d never heard the words.

  Before she could send the little creature away, Sereila led them through a second screen of acacia and wattle, this one laced with thorn bush. Someone had gone through before them, because there were scraps of cloth caught on twigs and branches, and a tuft hair hanging from some thorns.

  If she was inside the barrier, Schaeffer thought, Winsome wasn’t going to be terribly happy.

  They stepped clear of the bushes to find a thick-trunked oak tree. The elves spread quickly out to search around the base of the tree, before ascending into its branches. After a couple of minutes, they reappeared shaking their heads at Sereila as they stepped down onto the ground. Sereila frowned, and then stepped up to the tree trunk, and knocked.

  Schaeffer listened to the staccato pattern of beats, and stared at the ground. When nothing happened straight away, she glanced up at the overhanging branches, and then out at the surrounding bushes. They were very pretty with their highlights of yellow and white. She noticed Sereila raise her hand a second time, and glanced up at the tree.

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  “What’s that?” she asked, as the leaves nearest began to droop.

  “Oh, no.” Sereila’s voice was just above a whisper. “She wouldn’t.”

  Schaeffer glanced at the elf’s face, hearing shocked murmuring rising from the elves around her.

  “She couldn’t,” Sereila said, her voice rising, almost to the edge of tears.

  “What?” Schaeffer asked, looking up at the tree, and seeing its leaves curl to brown and shatter.

  Understanding dawned as she realized the tree was dying.

  “What can we do?” she asked.

  “What?” she repeated, seizing Sereila by the shoulder and shaking her as Sereila’s jaw dropped and a sob escaped her. “What can we do?”

  At first the elf didn’t answer, and Schaeffer shook her again. Sereila reached up and covered Schaeffer’s hand with her own.

  “Nothing,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “There’s nothing we can do. She’s killed the dryad.”

  Schaeffer heard the words, but her mind rejected them.

  “She’s what?” Schaeffer asked. “What did you say.”

  Her knees felt weak, and a wave of dizziness passed over her, but she still heard Sereila’s reply.

  “She killed the dryad.”

  “Are you sure? Can we get in there? Save her?”

  By her, she didn’t mean Winsome, and Sereila understood. The elf shook her head.

  “Only the dryad can let you into her tree. If she could have let me in, she would have.”

  “She wouldn’t have kept you out to protect you?”

  Sereila frowned, and shook her head.

  “No. I have authority here. She…” her voice tapered off. “Trolls’ blood and breakfast!”

  Frantically, she raised her hand and knocked again. This time, she raised her voice in elvish, commanding the tree. When it did not respond, Sereila repeated the action, and the command. She repeated it a third time, when there was still no response, and then the leaves began to fall.

  Sereila called out, banging on the trunk with both hands, her voice commanding and pleading by turns. Her voice faded into sobs as the leaves fell around her, and the tree remained both solid and silent. Schaeffer did not need the arrival of several dryads to tell her that there was nothing to be done. Both the tree and its spirit were gone, and Winsome…

  “Winsome?” she asked, and she wasn’t calling the woman in any hope of finding her; she was asking Sereila what might have happened to her.

  “She is in the tree.” Sereila’s voice sounded hollow, almost emotionless in its grief.

  “You mean, she’s trapped in there?”

  The she-elf nodded.

  “Without the dryad to give it life, the space within the tree will close, filling in with wood...dead, dead wood. Anything within will be crushed, forever entombed.”

  “Killed?” Schaeffer barely dared to hope. After all that Winsome had done, nothing would be more fitting.

  But Sereila scrambled suddenly away from the trunk against which she had been resting.

  “No,” she said. “No, much worse than that. She was a murderer. She killed the tree’s spirit, it’s soul. Whatever good it had within it is gone.”

  “But the tree is dead,” Schaeffer said, looking at Sereila apprehensively. “Gone, right?”

  The she-elf shook her head, gesturing frantically to her people, as she back-pedaled away.

  “No, not gone. All that is good is gone. Now, it is only dead, and not dead. And the evil deed done within its heart spreads. Look!” She gestured upward, and Schaeffer followed the direction of her hand.

  The tree’s bark was blackening, bruising from within. Lumps appeared along its trunk and branches—and they moved, shuddering as though touched by the wind, despite the fact that the air around them was perfectly still.

  One by one, the dryads turned and walked away, but the elves ran, scattering like leaves before the wind. Schaeffer looked up at the tree and stepped back. She stopped when she felt the prickle of branches at her back. She stopped and did the only thing she could think of to do; she drew her sidearm.

  As one root ripped free of the earth, and the tree lurched sideways, followed by a second, Schaeffer was glad she’d decided on a PSN-8-26. It was .45 in caliber, but designed to fire loads of cold iron or silver. P.S.N.—Pistol, Super Natural. Schaeffer had loaded it with alternating rounds, because she never knew exactly what she’d need it for. She pulled the trigger, compensating for kick as she emptied the magazine into the tree trunk.

  It was still trying to pull free of the ground, when she reloaded and fired again. She was reaching for a third mag, when another gun sounded from the clearing’s edge. The tree shuddered, and cracks ran up and down its trunk, before it shattered. The force of its death pushed Schaeffer into the bushes, wedging her deep within a nest of acacia and wattle branches fringed by thorns.

  “Well, trolls’ blood and breakfast!” she swore, trying to pull herself free, and feeling herself slip deeper into the brush.

  From somewhere nearby, she heard someone else cursing a blue streak. Mitch! And she was supposed to have kept him away from the dryads. Now, they were in the middle of a grove, with one dead tree, caused by someone they’d let escape. There was going to be hell to pay for this. She wondered what the penalty would be. She also wondered just how long it would take the elves to get her out of the thorns.

  Before nightfall, she hoped. They had a rescue mission to supervise, a plane crash to investigate, reparations to negotiate…and then there were the trolls. Yes, before nightfall would very much be for the best.