How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

almost see the sky’s light dimming moment by moment. Bobo, what time’s sunset?
    Four thirty-one.
    “I might not be imagining it, then,” she murmured. And then at the bottom of her vision, she caught sight of something unexpected: a glow under the snow, a sign of the embedded transit circle waking up. He’s early, she thought, stepping back.
    A moment later a cold cinnamon-scented breeze blew in her face, and Filif was standing there, as suddenly as if a tree with its lowest branches demurely veiled in mist had suddenly grown on the spot.
    He looked at Nita with all the berries on that side, while using the others to gaze up and around him. “ Dai stiho, my cousin!”
    “ Dai, you,” Nita said, and stepped into the transit circle as soon as it had finished discharging, and buried her arms in among the fronds to give him a big hug.
    It was at that moment that a light breeze sprang up. Nita felt the sparkle of breezeblown snowflakes on her cheek just a bare second before one of the trees above them let slip some loose snow on top of them.
    They both laughed at that, and Nita reached up to brush Filif off a little. “I was early…” Filif said.
    “I don’t care,” Nita said. “It’s so great to see you! This is going to be so much fun.”
    “Where’s Kit?”
    “Over at his place helping keep his folks calm. This is their first time to have a bunch of non-Solars over…”
    “And they’re so kind to have me! I can’t wait for this.” He shivered with excitement.
    At least Nita hoped it was excitement. “You know, I’ve never even asked you. Does it snow where you are? Do you even get winter?”
    “What? Of course it snows,” Filif said. “Demisiv has a fairly pronounced axial tilt. And a lot of highlands. The climate’s temperate most of the year, but in the depths of the cold season we get quite big storms, sometimes. Normally no one’s too bothered. In the dark season a lot of people elect to go dormant and just wait it out. Others… stay more active, like to get around then.” He fell silent for a moment. “A long story.”
    “But you’re okay with this?”
    “Yes, of course.” He ruffled out his branches. “This feels quite homelike, actually. The temperature range isn’t far off.”
    Nita paused. “This is possibly the most idiotic time possible to be asking you this,” she said. “But… are you okay with all this? Because you understand about the normal Earth Christmas trees now, don’t you. And where they come from. And what happens to them.”
    Filif paused too. “Life is life,” he said. “But I did do my research before I came. Those lives have been brought about just for this purpose, haven’t they?”
    “Pretty much, yeah.”
    “Well, I can feel that. So can they.” Filif rustled his branches as a little more snow fell on him from the branches above. “That being the case, we should allow them all the dignity of accepting what they’ve been destined for. And of knowing that they’re making the best of it: in some cases, not just with acceptance, but great joy.”
    Nita nodded. “It seems a lot to ask of them…” Nita said.
    “It’s not what you’re asking,” Filif said. “It’s what they’re giving. Gift is a powerful state from which to approach the world…”
    Again there was that sense of what Filif was saying having come up from some great depth. But even when he was at his goofiest and most excitable, Nita had never had trouble feeling, at a slight remove, the underlying strength from which sprang everything Filif did and said, and in which he was powerfully grounded. When that power revealed itself in the middle of a wizardry, sometimes it took you by surprise. Nita wasn’t going to push the issue at the moment; if Fil had something that needed saying, explanations would be forthcoming soon enough.
    “Anyway,” Filif said, “ you should relax. I’m not a newbie here these days: you don’t have to hide the salad bar from me any more.”
    Nita