After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

The Conjure Man Charles de Lint

The conjure man rode a red, old-fashioned bicycle with fat tires and only one, fixed gear. A wicker basket in front contained a small mongrel dog that seemed mostly terrier. Behind the seat, tied to the carrier, was a battered brown satchel that hid from prying eyes the sum total of all his worldly possessions.

What he had was not much, but he needed little. He was, after all, the conjure man, and what he didn’t have, he could conjure for himself.

He was more stout than slim, with a long grizzled beard and a halo of frizzy grey hair that protruded from under his tall black hat like ivy tangled under an eave. Nesting in the hatband were a posy of dried wildflowers and three feathers: one white, from a swan; one black, from a crow; one brown, from an owl. His jacket was an exhilarating shade of blue, the colour of the sky on a perfect summer’s morning. under it he wore a shirt that was as green as a fresh-cut lawn. His trousers were brown corduroy, patched with leather and plaid squares; his boots were a deep golden yellow, the colour of buttercups past their prime.

His age was a puzzle, somewhere between fifty and seventy. Most people assumed he was one of the homeless—more colourful than most, and certainly more cheerful, but a derelict all the same—so the scent of apples that seemed to follow him was always a surprise, as was the good humour that walked hand in hand with a keen intelligence in his bright blue eyes. When he raised his head, hat brim lifting, and he met one’s gaze, the impact of those eyes was a sudden shock, a diamond in the rough.

His name was John Windle, which could mean, if you were one to ascribe meaning to names, “favoured of god” for his given name, while his surname was variously defined as “basket,” “the red-winged thrush,” or “to lose vigor and strength, to dwindle.” They could all be true, for he led a charmed life; his mind was a treasure trove storing equal amounts of experience, rumour and history; he had a high clear singing voice; and though he wasn’t tall—he stood five-ten in his boots—he had once been a much larger man.

“I was a giant once,” he liked to explain, “when the world was young. But conjuring takes its toll. Now John’s just an old man, pretty well all used up. Just like the world,” he’d add with a sigh and a nod, bright eyes holding a tired sorrow. “Just like the world.”

There were some things even the conjure man couldn’t fix.

Living in the city, one grew used to its more outlandish characters, eventually noting them in passing with an almost familial affection: The pigeon lady in her faded Laura Ashley dresses with her shopping cart filled with sacks of birdseed and bread crumbs. Paperjack, the old black man with his Chinese fortune-teller and deft origami sculptures. The German cowboy who dressed like an extra from a spaghetti western and made long declamatory speeches in his native language to which no one listened.

And, of course, the conjure man.

Wendy St. James had seen him dozens of times—she lived and worked downtown, which was the conjure man’s principal haunt—but she’d never actually spoken to him until one day in the fall when the trees were just beginning to change into their cheerful autumnal party dresses.

She was sitting on a bench on the Ferryside bank of the Kickaha River, a small, almost waif-like woman in jeans and a white T-shirt, with an unzipped brown leather bomber’s jacket and hightops. In lieu of a purse, she had a small, worn knapsack sitting on the bench beside her, and she was bent over a hardcover journal which she spent more time staring at than actually writing in. Her hair was thick and blonde, hanging down past her collar in a grown-out pageboy with a half-inch of dark roots showing. She was chewing on the end of her pen, worrying the plastic for inspiration.

It was a poem that had stopped her in mid-stroll and plunked her down on the bench. It had glimmered and shone in her head until she got out her journal and pen. Then it fled, as impossible to catch as a fading dream. The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place. The annoying presence of three teenage boys clowning around on the lawn a half-dozen yards from where she sat didn’t help at all.

She was giving them a dirty stare when she saw one of the boys pick up a stick and throw it into the wheel of the conjure man’s bike as he came riding up on the park path that followed the river. The small dog in the bike’s wicker basket jumped free, but the conjure man himself fell in a tangle of limbs and spinning wheels. The boys took off, laughing, the dog chasing them for a few feet, yapping shrilly, before it hurried back to where its master had fallen.

Wendy had already put down her journal and pen and reached the fallen man by the time the dog got back to its master’s side.

“Are you okay?” Wendy asked the conjure man as she helped him untangle himself from the bike.

She’d taken a fall herself in the summer. The front wheel of her ten-speed struck a pebble, the bike wobbled dangerously and she grabbed at the brakes, but her fingers closed over the front ones first, and too hard. The back of the bike went up, flipping her right over the handlebars, and she’d had the worst headache for at least a week afterwards.

The conjure man didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze followed the escaping boys.

“As you sow,” he muttered.

Following his gaze, Wendy saw the boy who’d thrown the stick trip and go sprawling in the grass. An odd chill danced up her spine. The boy’s tumble came so quickly on the heels of the conjure man’s words, for a moment it felt to her as though he’d actually caused the boy’s fall.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

She looked back at the conjure man, but he was sitting up now, fingering a tear in his corduroys which already had a quiltwork of patches on them. He gave her a quick smile that traveled all the way up to his eyes, and she found herself thinking of Santa Claus. The little dog pressed its nose up against the conjure man’s hand, pushing it away from the tear. But the tear was gone.

It had just been a fold in the cloth, Wendy realized. That was all.

She helped the conjure man limp to her bench, then went back and got his bike. She righted it and wheeled it over to lean against the back of the bench before sitting down herself. The little dog leaped up onto the conjure man’s lap.

“What a cute dog,” Wendy said, giving it a pat. “What’s her name?”

“Ginger,” the conjure man replied as though it was so obvious that he couldn’t understand her having to ask.

Wendy looked at the dog. Ginger’s fur was as grey and grizzled as her master’s beard without a hint of the spice’s strong brown hue.

“But she’s not at all brown,” Wendy found herself saying.

The conjure man shook his head. “It’s what she’s made of—she’s a gingerbread dog. Here.” He plucked a hair from Ginger’s back, which made the dog start and give him a sour look. He offered the hair to Wendy. “Taste it.”

Wendy grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself,” the conjure man said. He shrugged and popped the hair into his own mouth, chewing it with relish.

Oh boy, Wendy thought. She had a live one on her hands.

“Where do you think ginger comes from?” the conjure man asked her.

“What, do you mean your dog?”

“No, the spice.”

Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of plant, I suppose.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong. They shave gingerbread dogs like our Ginger here and grind up the hair until all that’s left is a powder that’s ever so fine. Then they leave it out in the hot sun for a day and half—which is where it gets its brownish colour.”

Wendy only just stopped herself from rolling her eyes. It was time to extract herself from this encounter, she realized. Well past the time. She’d done her bit to make sure he was all right and since the conjure man didn’t seem any worse for the wear from his fall—

“Hey!” she said as he picked up her journal and started to leaf through it. “That’s personal.”

He fended off her reaching hand with his own and continued to look through it.

“Poetry,” he said. “And lovely verses they are, too.”

“Please … .”

“Ever had any published?”

Wendy let her hand drop and leaned back against the bench with a sigh.

“Two collections,” she said, adding, “and a few sales to some of the literary magazines.”

Although, she corrected herself, “sales” was perhaps a misnomer since most of the magazines only paid in copies. And while she did have two collections in print, they were published by the East Street Press, a small local publisher, which meant the bookstores of Newford were probably the only places in the world where either of her books could be found.

“Romantic, but with a very optimistic flavour,” the conjure man remarked as he continued to look through her journal where all her false starts and incomplete drafts were laid out for him to see. “None of that Sturm und Drang of the earlier romantic era and more like Yeats’s twilight or, what did Chesterton call it? Mooreeffoc—that queerness that comes when familiar things are seen from a new angle.”

Wendy couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. What was he? A renegade English professor living on the street like some hedgerow philosopher of old? It seemed absurd to be sitting here, listening to his discourse.

The conjure man turned to give her a charming smile. “Because that’s our hope for the future, isn’t it? That the imagination reaches beyond the present to glimpse not so much a sense of meaning in what lies all around us, but to let us simply see it in the first place?”

“I … I don’t know what to say,” Wendy replied.

Ginger had fallen asleep on his lap. He closed her journal and regarded her for a long moment, eyes impossibly blue and bright under the brim of his odd hat.

“John has something he wants to show you,” he said.

Wendy blinked. “John?” she asked, looking around.

The conjure man tapped his chest. “John Windle is what those who know my name call me.”

“Oh.”

She found it odd how his speech shifted from that of a learned man to a much simpler idiom, even referring to himself in the third person. But then, if she stopped to consider it, everything about him was odd.

“What kind of something?” Wendy asked cautiously.

“It’s not far.”

Wendy looked at her watch. Her shift started at four, which was still a couple of hours away, so there was plenty of time. But she was fairly certain that interesting though her companion was, he wasn’t at all the sort of person with whom she wanted to involve herself any more than she already had. The dichotomy between the nonsense and substance that peppered his conversation made her uncomfortable.

It wasn’t so much that she thought him dangerous. She just felt as though she was walking on boggy ground that might at any minute dissolve into quicksand with a wrong turn. Despite hardly knowing him at all, she was already sure that listening to him would be full of the potentiality for wrong turns.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t have the time.”

“It’s something that I think only you can, if not understand, then at least appreciate.”

“I’m sure it’s fascinating, whatever it is, but—”

“Come along, then,” he said.

He handed her back her journal and stood up, dislodging Ginger, who leapt to the ground with a sharp yap of protest. Scooping the dog up, he returned her to the wicker basket that hung from his handlebars, then wheeled the bike in front of the bench, where he stood waiting for Wendy.

Wendy opened her mouth to continue her protest, but then simply shrugged. Well, why not? He really didn’t look at all dangerous and she’d just make sure that she stayed in public places.

She stuffed her journal back into her knapsack and then followed as he led the way south along the park path up to where the City Commission’s lawns gave way to Butler University’s common. She started to ask him how his leg felt, since he’d been limping before, but he walked at a quick, easy pace—that of someone half his apparent age—so she just assumed he hadn’t been hurt that badly by his fall after all.

They crossed the common, eschewing the path now to walk straight across the lawn towards the G. Smithers Memorial Library, weaving their way in between islands of students involved in any number of activities, none of which included studying. When they reached the library, they followed its ivy-hung walls to the rear of the building, where the conjure man stopped.

“There,” he said, waving his arm in a gesture that took in the entire area behind the library. “What do you see?”

The view they had was of an open space of land backed by a number of other buildings. Having attended the university herself, Wendy recognized all three: the Student Center, the Science Building and one of the dorms, though she couldn’t remember which one. The landscape enclosed by their various bulking presences had the look of recently having undergone a complete overhaul. All the lilacs and hawthorns had been cut back, brush and weeds were now just an uneven stubble of ground covering, there were clumps of raw dirt, scattered here and there, where trees had obviously been removed, and right in the middle was an enormous stump.

It had been at least fifteen years since Wendy had had any reason to come here in behind the library. But it was so different now. She found herself looking around with a “what’s wrong with this picture?” caption floating in her mind. This had been a little cranny of wild wood when she’d attended Butler, hidden away from all the trimmed lawns and shrubbery that made the rest of the university so picturesque. But she could remember slipping back here, journal in hand, and sitting under that huge …

“It’s all changed,” she said slowly. “They cleaned out all the brush and cut down the oak tree … .”

Someone had once told her that this particular tree was—had been—a rarity. It had belonged to a species not native to North America—the Quercus robur, or common oak of Europe—and was supposed to be over four hundred years old, which made it older than the university, older than Newford itself.

“How could they just … cut it down … ?” she asked.

The conjure man jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the library.

“Your man with the books had the work done—didn’t like the shade it was throwing on his office. Didn’t like to look out and see an untamed bit of the wild hidden in here disturbing his sense of order.”

“The head librarian?” Wendy asked.

The conjure man just shrugged.

“But—didn’t anyone complain? Surely the students …”

In her day there would have been protests. Students would have formed a human chain around the tree, refusing to let anyone near it. They would have camped out, day and night. They …

She looked at the stump and felt a tightness in her chest as though someone had wrapped her in wet leather that was now starting to dry out and shrink.

“That tree was John’s friend,” the conjure man said. “The last friend I ever had. She was ten thousand years old and they just cut her down.”

Wendy gave him an odd look. Ten thousand years old? Were we exaggerating now or what?

“Her death is a symbol,” the conjure man went on. “The world has no more time for stories.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Wendy said.

He turned to look at her, eyes glittering with a strange light under the dark brim of his hat.

“She was a Tree of Tales,” he said. “There are very few of them left, just as there are very few of me. She held stories, all the stories the wind brought to her that were of any worth, and with each such story she heard, she grew.”

“But there’s always going to be stories,” Wendy said, falling into the spirit of the conversation even if she didn’t quite understand its relevance to the situation at hand. “There are more books being published today than there ever have been in the history of the world.”

The conjure man gave her a sour frown and hooked his thumb towards the library again. “Now you sound like him.”

“But—”

“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better.

“The others are just words on a page.”

“I know that,” Wendy said.

And on some level she did, though it wasn’t something she’d ever really stopped to think about. It was more an instinctive sort of knowledge that had always been present inside her, rising up into her awareness now as though called forth by the conjure man’s words.

“It’s all machines now,” the conjure man went on. “It’s a—what do they call it?—high tech world. Fascinating, to be sure, but John thinks that it estranges many people, cheapens the human experience. There’s no more room for the stories that matter, and that’s wrong, for stories are a part of the language of dream—they grow not from one writer, but from a people. They become the voice of a country, or a race. Without them, people lose touch with themselves.”

“You’re talking about myths,” Wendy said.

The conjure man shook his head. “Not specifically—not in the classical sense of the word. Such myths are only a part of the collective story that is harvested in a Tree of Tales. In a world as pessimistic as this has become, that collective story is all that’s left to guide people through the encroaching dark. It serves to create a sense of options, the possibility of permanence out of nothing.”

Wendy was really beginning to lose the thread of his argument now.

“What exactly is it that you’re saying?” she asked.

“A Tree of Tales is an act of magic, of faith. Its existence becomes an affirmation of the power that the human spirit can have over its own destiny. The stories are just stories—they entertain, they make one laugh or cry—but if they have any worth, they carry within them a deeper resonance that remains long after the final page is turned, or the storyteller has come to the end of her tale. Both aspects of the story are necessary for it to have any worth.”

He was silent for a long moment, then added, “Otherwise the story goes on without you.”

Wendy gave him a questioning look.

“Do you know what ‘ever after’ means?” he asked.

“I suppose.”

“It’s one bookend of a tale—the kind that begins with ‘once upon a time.’ It’s the end of the story when everybody goes home. That’s what they said at the end of the story John was in, but John wasn’t paying attention, so he got left behind.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Wendy said.

Not sure? she thought. She was positive. It was all so much … well, not exactly nonsense, as queer. And unrelated to any working of the world with which she was familiar. But the oddest thing was that everything he said continued to pull a kind of tickle out from deep in her mind so that while she didn’t completely understand him, some part of her did. Some part, hidden behind the person who took care of all the day-to-day business of her life, perhaps the same part of her that pulled a poem onto the empty page where no words had ever existed before. The part of her that was a conjurer.

“John took care of the Tree of Tales,” the conjure man went on. “Because John got left behind in his own story, he wanted to make sure that the stories themselves would at least live on. But one day he went wandering too far—just like he did when his story was ending—and when he got back she was gone. When he got back, they’d done this to her.”

Wendy said nothing. For all that he was a comical figure in his bright clothes and with his Santa Claus air, there was nothing even faintly humourous about the sudden anguish in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And she was. Not just in sympathy with him, but because in her own way she’d loved that old oak tree as well. And—just like the conjure man, she supposed—she’d wandered away as well.

“Well then,” the conjure man said. He rubbed a sleeve up against his nose and looked away from her. “John just wanted you to see.”

He got on his bike and reached forward to tousle the fur around Ginger’s ears. When he looked back to Wendy, his eyes glittered like tiny blue fires.

“I knew you’d understand,” he said.

Before Wendy could respond, he pushed off and pedaled away, bumping across the uneven lawn to leave her standing alone in that once wild place that was now so dispiriting. But then she saw something stir in the middle of the broad stump.

At first it was no more than a small flicker in the air like a heat ripple. Wendy took a step forward, stopping when the flicker resolved into a tiny sapling. As she watched, it took on the slow stately dance of time-lapse photography: budded, unfurled leaves, grew taller, its growth like a rondo, a basic theme that brackets two completely separate tunes. Growth was the theme, while the tunes on either end began with the tiny sapling and ended with a full-grown oak tree as majestic as the behemoth that had originally stood there. When it reached its full height, light seemed to emanate from its trunk, from the roots underground, from each stalkless, broad saw-toothed leaf.

Wendy stared, wide-eyed, then stepped forward with an outstretched hand. As soon as her fingers touched the glowing tree, it came apart, drifting like mist until every trace of it was gone. Once more, all that remained was the stump of the original tree.

The vision, combined with the tightness in her chest and the sadness the conjure man had left her, transformed itself into words that rolled across her mind, but she didn’t write them down. All she could do was stand and look at the tree stump for a very long time, before she finally turned and walked away.

Kathryn’s Café was on Battersfield Road in Lower Crowsea, not far from the university but across the river and far enough that Wendy had to hurry to make it to work on time. But it was as though a black hole had swallowed the two hours from when she’d met the conjure man to when her shift began. She was late getting to work—not by much, but she could see that Jilly had already taken orders from two tables that were supposed to be her responsibility.

She dashed into the restaurant’s washroom and changed from her jeans into a short black skirt. She tucked her T-shirt in, pulled her hair back into a loose bun, then bustled out to stash her knapsack and pick up her order pad from the storage shelf behind the employees’ coat rack.

“You’re looking peaked,” Jilly said as Wendy finally got out into the dining area.

Jilly Coppercorn and Wendy were almost a matched pair. Both women were small, with slender frames and attractive delicate features, though Jilly’s hair was a dark curly brown—the same as Wendy’s natural hair colour. They both moonlighted as waitresses, saving their true energy for creative pursuits: Jilly for her art, Wendy her poetry.

Neither had known the other until they began to work at the restaurant together, but they’d become fast friends from the very first shift they shared.

“I’m feeling confused,” Wendy said in response to Jilly’s comment.

“You’re confused? Check out table five—he’s changed his mind three times since he first ordered. I’m going to stand here and wait five minutes before I give Frank his latest order, just in case he decides he wants to change it again.”

Wendy smiled. “And then he’ll complain about slow service and won’t leave you much of a tip.”

“If he leaves one at all.”

Wendy laid a hand on Jilly’s arm. “Are you busy tonight?”

Jilly shook her head. “What’s up?”

“I need to talk to someone.”

“I’m yours to command,” Jilly said. She made a little curtsy that had Wendy quickly stifle a giggle, then shifted her gaze to table five. “Oh bother, he’s signaling me again.”

“Give me his order,” Wendy said. “I’ll take care of him.”

It was such a nice night that they just went around back of the restaurant when their shift was over. Walking the length of a short alley, they came out on a small strip of lawn and made their way down to the river. There they sat on a stone wall, dangling their feet above the sluggish water. The night felt still. Through some trick of the air, the traffic on nearby Battersfield Road was no more than a distant murmur, as though there was more of a sound baffle between where they sat and the busy street than just the building that housed their workplace.

“Remember that time we went camping?” Wendy said after they’d been sitting for a while in a companionable silence. “It was just me, you and LaDonna. We sat around the campfire telling ghost stories that first night.”

“Sure,” Jilly said with a smile in her voice. “You kept telling us ones by Robert Aickman and the like—they were all taken from books.”

“While you and LaDonna claimed that the ones you told were real and no matter how much I tried to get either of you to admit they weren’t, you wouldn’t.”

“But they were true,” Jilly said.

Wendy thought of LaDonna telling them that she’d seen Bigfoot in the Tombs and Jilly’s stories about a kind of earth spirit called a gemmin that she’d met in the same part of the city and of a race of goblin-like creatures living in the subterranean remains of the old city that lay beneath Newford’s subway system.

She turned from the river to regard her friend. “Do you really believe those things you told me?”

Jilly nodded. “Of course I do. They’re true.” She paused a moment, leaning closer to Wendy as though trying to read her features in the gloom. “Why? What’s happened, Wendy?”

“I think I just had my own close encounter of the weird kind this afternoon.”

When Jilly said nothing, Wendy went on to tell her of her meeting with the conjure man earlier in the day.

“I mean, I know why he’s called the conjure man,” she finished up. “I’ve seen him pulling flowers out of people’s ears and all those other stage tricks he does, but this was different. The whole time I was with him I kept feeling like there really was a kind of magic in the air, a real magic just sort of humming around him, and then when I saw the … I guess it was a vision of the tree … .

“Well, I don’t know what to think.”

She’d been looking across the river while she spoke, gaze fixed on the darkness of the far bank. Now she turned to Jilly.

“Who is he?” she asked. “Or maybe should I be asking what is he?”

“I’ve always thought of him as a kind of anima,” Jilly said. “A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don’t believe in them anymore.”

“That’s sort of what he said. But what does it mean? What is he really?”

Jilly shrugged. “Maybe what he is isn’t so important as that he is.” At Wendy’s puzzled look, she added, “I can’t explain it any better. I … Look, it’s like it’s not so important that he is or isn’t what he says he is, but that he says it. That he believes it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s just like he told you,” Jilly said. “People are losing touch with themselves and with each other. They need stories because they really are the only thing that brings us together. Gossip, anecdotes, jokes, stories—these are the things that we used to exchange with each other. It kept the lines of communication open, let us touch each other on a regular basis.

“That’s what art’s all about, too. My paintings and your poems, the books Christy writes, the music Geordie plays—they’re all lines of communication. But they’re harder to keep open now because it’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to other people, it’s all surface. How ya doing, what about the weather. The only opinions they have are those that they’ve gotten from people on the TV. They think they’re informed, but all they’re doing is repeating the views of talk show hosts and news commentators.

“They don’t know how to listen to real people anymore.”

“I know all that,” Wendy said. “But what does any of it have to do with what the conjure man was showing me this afternoon?”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that he validates an older kind of value, that’s all.”

“Okay, but what did he want from me?”

Jilly didn’t say anything for a long time. She looked out across the river, her gaze caught by the same darkness as Wendy’s had been earlier when she was relating her afternoon encounter. Twice Wendy started to ask Jilly what she was thinking, but both times she forbore. Then finally Jilly turned to her.

“Maybe he wants you to plant a new tree,” she said.

“But that’s silly. I wouldn’t know how to begin to go about something like that.” Wendy sighed. “I don’t even know if I believe in a Tree of Tales.”

But then she remembered the feeling that had risen in her when the conjure man spoke to her, that sense of familiarity, as though she was being reminded of something she already knew, rather than being told what she didn’t. And then there was the vision of the tree … .

She sighed again.

“Why me?” she asked.

Her words were directed almost to the night at large, rather than just her companion, but it was Jilly who replied. The night held its own counsel.

“I’m going to ask you something,” Jilly said, “and I don’t want you to think about the answer. Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind—okay?”

Wendy nodded uncertainly. “I guess.”

“If you could be granted one wish—anything at all, no limits—what would you ask for?”

With the state the world was in at the moment, Wendy had no hesitation in answering: “World peace.”

“Well, there you go,” Jilly told her.

“I don’t get it.”

“You were asking why the conjure man picked you and there’s your reason. Most people would have started out thinking of what they wanted for themselves. You know, tons of money, or to live forever—that kind of thing.”

Wendy shook her head. “But he doesn’t even know me.”

Jilly got up and pulled Wendy to her feet.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go look at the tree.”

“It’s just a stump.”

“Let’s go anyway.”

Wendy wasn’t sure why she felt reluctant, but just as she had this afternoon, she allowed herself to be led back to the campus.

Nothing had changed, except that this time it was dark, which gave the scene, at least to Wendy’s way of thinking, an even more desolate feeling.

Jilly was very quiet beside her. She stepped ahead of Wendy and crouched down beside the stump, running her hand along the top of it.

“I’d forgotten all about this place,” she said softly.

That’s right, Wendy thought. Jilly’d gone to Butler U. just as she had—around the same time, too, though they hadn’t known each other then.

She crouched down beside Jilly, starting slightly when Jilly took her hand and laid it on the stump.

“Listen,” Jilly said. “You can almost feel the whisper of a story … a last echo … .”

Wendy shivered, though the night was mild. Jilly turned to her. At that moment, the starlight flickering in her companion’s blue eyes reminded Wendy very much of the conjure man.

“You’ve got to do it,” Jilly said. “You’ve got to plant a new tree. It wasn’t just the conjure man choosing you—the tree chose you, too.”

Wendy wasn’t sure what was what anymore. It all seemed more than a little mad, yet as she listened to Jilly, she could almost believe in it all. But then that was one of Jilly’s gifts: she could make the oddest thing seem normal. Wendy wasn’t sure if you could call a thing like that a gift, but whatever it was, Jilly had it.

“Maybe we should get Christy to do it,” she said. “After all, he’s the story writer.”

“Christy is a lovely man,” Jilly said, “but sometimes he’s far more concerned with how he says a thing, rather than with the story itself.”

“Well, I’m not much better. I’ve been known to worry for hours over a stanza—or even just a line.”

“For the sake of being clever?” Jilly asked.

“No. So that it’s right.”

Jilly raked her fingers through the short stubble of the weeds that passed for a lawn around the base of the oak stump. She found something and pressed it into Wendy’s hand. Wendy didn’t have to look at it to know that it was an acorn.

“You have to do it,” Jilly said. “Plant a new Tree of Tales and feed it with stories. It’s really up to you.”

Wendy looked from the glow of her friend’s eyes to the stump. She remembered her conversation with the conjure man and her vision of the tree. She closed her fingers around the acorn, feeling the press of the cap’s bristles indent her skin.

Maybe it was up to her, she found herself thinking.

The poem that came to her that night after she left Jilly and got back to her little apartment in Ferryside, came all at once, fully-formed and complete. The act of putting it to paper was a mere formality.

She sat by her window for a long time afterward, her journal on her lap, the acorn in her hand. She rolled it slowly back and forth on her palm. Finally, she laid both journal and acorn on the windowsill and went into her tiny kitchen. She rummaged around in the cupboard under the sink until she came up with an old flowerpot, which she took into the backyard and filled with dirt—rich loam, as dark and mysterious as that indefinable place inside herself that was the source of the words that filled her poetry and that had risen in recognition to the conjure man’s words.

When she returned to the window, she put the pot between her knees. Tearing the new poem out of her journal, she wrapped the acorn up in it and buried it in the pot. She watered it until the surface of the dirt was slick with mud, then placed the flowerpot on her windowsill and went to bed.

That night she dreamed of Jilly’s gemmin—slender earth spirits that appeared outside the old three-story building that housed her apartment and peered in at the flowerpot on the windowsill. In the morning, she got up and told the buried acorn her dream.

Autumn turned to winter and Wendy’s life went pretty much the way it always had. She took turns working at the restaurant and on her poems; she saw her friends; she started a relationship with a fellow she met at a party in Jilly’s loft, but it floundered after a month.

Life went on.

The only change was centered around the contents of the pot on her windowsill. As though the tiny green sprig that pushed up through the dark soil was her lover, every day she told it all the things that had happened to her and around her. Sometimes she read it her favorite stories from anthologies and collections, or interesting bits from magazines and newspapers. She badgered her friends for stories, sometimes passing them on, speaking to the tiny plant in a low but animated voice, other times convincing her friends to come over and tell the stories themselves.

Except for Jilly, LaDonna and the two Riddell brothers, Geordie and Christy, most people thought she’d gone just a little daft. Nothing serious, mind you, but strange all the same.

Wendy didn’t care.

Somewhere out in the world, there were other Trees of Tales, but they were few—if the conjure man was to be believed. And she believed him now. She had no proof, only faith, but oddly enough, faith seemed enough. But since she believed, she knew it was more important than ever that her charge should flourish.

With the coming of winter, there were less and less of the street people to be found. They were indoors, if they had such an option, or perhaps they migrated to warmer climes like the swallows. But Wendy still spied the more regular ones in their usual haunts. Paperjack had gone, but the pigeon lady still fed her charges every day, the German cowboy continued his bombastic monologues—though mostly on the subway platforms now. She saw the conjure man, too, but he was never near enough for her to get a chance to talk to him.

By the springtime, the sprig of green in the flowerpot had grown into a sapling that stood almost a foot high. On warmer days, Wendy put the pot out on the backporch steps where it could taste the air and catch the growing warmth of the afternoon sun. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it once it outgrew its pot.

But she had some ideas. There was a part of Fitzhenry Park called the Silenus Gardens that was dedicated to the poet Joshua Stanhold. She thought it might be appropriate to plant the sapling there.

One day in late April, she was leaning on the handlebars of her ten-speed in front of the public library in Lower Crowsea, admiring the yellow splash the daffodils made against the building’s grey stone walls, when she sensed, more than saw, a red bicycle pull up onto the sidewalk behind her. She turned around to find herself looking into the conjure man’s merry features.

“It’s spring, isn’t it just,” the conjure man said. “A time to finally forget the cold and bluster and think of summer. John can feel the leaf buds stir, the flowers blossoming. There’s a grand smile in the air for all the growing.”

Wendy gave Ginger a pat, before letting her gaze meet the blue shock of his eyes.

“What about a Tree of Tales?” she asked. “Can you feel her growing?”

The conjure man gave her a wide smile. “Especially her.” He paused to adjust the brim of his hat, then gave her a sly look. “Your man Stanhold,” he added. “Now there was a fine poet—and a fine storyteller.”

Wendy didn’t bother to ask how he knew of her plan. She just returned the conjure man’s smile and then asked, “Do you have a story to tell me?”

The conjure man polished one of the buttons of his bright blue jacket.

“I believe I do,” he said. He patted the brown satchel that rode on his back carrier. “John has a thermos filled with the very best tea, right here in his bag. Why don’t we find ourselves a comfortable place to sit and he’ll tell you how he got this bicycle of his over a hot cuppa.”

He started to pedal off down the street, without waiting for her response. Wendy stared after him, her gaze catching the little terrier, sitting erect in her basket and looking back at her.

There seemed to be a humming in the air that woke a kind of singing feeling in her chest. The wind rose up and caught her hair, pushing it playfully into her eyes. As she swept it back from her face with her hand, she thought of the sapling sitting in its pot on her back steps, thought of the wind, and knew that stories were already being harvested without the necessity of her having to pass them on.

But she wanted to hear them all the same.

Getting on her ten-speed, she hurried to catch up with the conjure man.

[For J. R. R. Tolkien; may his own branch of the tree live on forever.]