Free The Waterstone by Rebecca Rupp Page A

embarrassingly, and he suddenly realized that he was starving. He hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and that had only been a half slice of rootbread. He took an enormous bite of cherry cake. There were no sounds for several minutes but those of chewing and swallowing. When the plates were empty, the green woman helped them to some more. At last they laid down their forks and sat back. Birdie, looking guilty, began to lick her fingers. Pondleweed was strict about finger licking. Their mother, he said, would never have approved of it.
    Tad was puzzled. The Fishers lived on the shores of streams and ponds; the Hunters never stayed long in any one place; and the Diggers — at least so everyone said — lived in burrows in the ground. He’d never known that any of the Tribes lived high in the branches of the trees. “Which Tribe do you belong to?” Tad asked.
    The green woman shook her head slowly and gave him a pitying look. Tad felt at once that he’d said something irreparably stupid. “My kind came long before the Tribes,” she said. “I am a Dryad.”
    “A Dryad?” Birdie repeated blankly.
    The green woman’s voice sharpened. “Yes,” she snapped. “A Dryad.
Dry-ad.
A Tree Witch.”
    The woman’s name, the children learned, was Treeglyn. She also told them the names of the squirrels, Flick-tail and Scooter, and of her tree, the giant oak, a long complicated word filled with bird whistles and wind sounds. Birdie gaped at her.
    “Trees have
names
?” she asked. She sounded as if she didn’t believe it. “Real names?”
    “Of course they have real names,” Treeglyn squawked irritably. Her normal speaking voice, Tad thought, sounded like an outraged crow. “What else would a tree have? You can’t just call them all
Tree
, can you, as if one were just the same as another? How would you like it if people just called you
Girl
or
Boy
?”
    Birdie shook her head. “I wouldn’t,” she said.
    “A tree learns its name on the day it first opens its leaves to the wind,” Treeglyn explained. Her crow voice dropped lower and softened; her words took on a rhythm as if she were reciting a familiar poem. “Forever after when the wind rustles its leaves and branches, the tree repeats its name. The forest is full of the names of trees. Some names are so old that your great-great-grandfather must have heard them spoken. Some are so new that they were heard for the first time just yesterday.”
    Birdie’s eyes were round. “Our willow must have a name, Tad,” she whispered.
    “The old willow by the northernmost pond?” Treeglyn demanded. “Of course.” She spoke another word in the strange windlike language, a name with quick little lilts in it that reminded Tad of the thin green points of willow leaves. The wind words were oddly familiar somehow, as if he had heard them sometime long ago, perhaps when he was a baby. He felt as if any minute he would begin to understand them.
    “Lawillawissowellowellomore.”
    “I wish I had a tree name,” Birdie said wistfully.
    “You do,” Treeglyn said. “Redbird.
Roossoollaweralliss.
” It sounded like flute notes and whispers. “You have a feel for trees, you do, girl. Now and again the New People are born with a touch of green blood.”
    “Roossoo . . .,” said Birdie.
    “The old willow,” Treeglyn said at the same time. “Remember to give her my best wishes when you return home again. Is she doing well?”
    “I don’t know,” Tad said. All their terrible troubles suddenly returned to him, like a great black flood. He ached to have Pondleweed back again. Pondleweed would have known what to do next, how to make everything right again. “If this is a Drying Time, like my father said —”
    “Father said our tree could die,” Birdie said. “He said that the pond could vanish and the whole world turn to dust.”
    Pippit gave a dismal croak. Treeglyn was silent for a moment.
    “The forest is also drying,” she said finally. “The trees grow