The first thing I did was reach out to my Third Eye. It answered sluggishly, waking from the slumber it enjoyed on the car ride here. It took some coaxing, like getting my body to wake and go to school on Friday mornings, but eventually I felt the spiritual appendage open. I could not only see better, but my senses spread outwards.

  There were spirits inside the trees.

  The spirits were all women, possessing traits of whatever trees they inhabited. A lot of them were naked, but not in an indecent way. As much as their skin was made of flesh, there were areas where it was completely covered in bark. Rough, rugged patches of skin that looked almost diseased if they were human. Their hair was branches, leaves, and vines melded together.

  They were spirits, or dryads, as the books referred to them. Their presence felt weak, but I did get the sense that they were sleeping. Since they were connected closely to the life cycle of their physical counterparts, I dismissed them from my immediate attention.

  Shamanism: Spirits had said that Mother Trees were likely to be in the deepest parts of the forest, as far away from civilization as possible. I took that to mean it could either be dead center or at the far edge. Either way, I was looking for strength. She’d be surrounded by the oldest and strongest of her children, and even while they were dormant, there was a sort of life that I could sense from them.

  “Hwari,” I said, eyes half-lidded, “Can you tell which of these spirits are stronger or older than the others?”

  ‘It’s faint, Caller,’ She said, ‘I defer to your instincts.’

  Which meant it was up to me.

  “Then you focus on anything else that might pop up,” I said.

  Hwari chimed her assent.

  I limped along, pausing once in a while to fix the flashlight’s position on my armpit, or to rub my free hand on my legs. I wondered if there was a way to stave off frostbite with the sigils that Wol talked about.

  “Wol,” I said. The forest was quiet except for the crunching of snow beneath my feet. Too quiet. I tried to make small talk to ease the nerves. “We went over the basics of abjuration. What about conjuration?”

  “It is the art of summoning and making contracts,” Wol said. He stayed near my feet.

  “I already did that with you guys.”

  “Different,” Wol said. “We are permanently bound to you. The other beings you summon would not be.”

  “How would that work?”

  Unlike mine, Wol’s steps were silent. “Simple. You’d summon a being and negotiate a contract. The traditional method is a scheduled offering, and they would be on retainer. Or they’d only agree to help you in specific situations, or for a specific time. It would depend on whom you summon.”

  “So they’d be like contractors,” I mused. “I could terminate them if I want to.”

  “Yes, but remember that preternaturals talk,” Wol said. “There are beings whom you can summon only if you are in good standing.”

  “Do daevils count?”

  Wol stopped, and I stopped with him.

  “Yes,” He said finally, “But you already are in good standing. Your ancestors saw to that. Are you thinking of summoning one?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “As soon as I get a chance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know nothing about Shamanism and this whole thing caught me off guard,” I said, my voice gaining heat. “If I knew even a little, I wouldn’t be in this situation, scrambling to get everything under control. When this kind of situation comes up again, I want to be ready.”

  “Fair enough,” Wol said. “But let’s concentrate on the trial for now, Practitioner.”

  I nodded and continued.

  Because I was the only one who could sense the minuscule differences between the trees, progress was slow on account of my lack of confidence. We stopped multiple times, backtracked even more, and were forced to stay still in the cold while I raised my focus to a point where I nearly woke the sleeping dryads. I realized that if I stared too hard at one of them, they could feel my gaze. One of them frowned and twisted in the trees when I stared at her for over a minute.

  It was only getting colder.

  The trees were getting more confusing too. Once I got past the outer parts, the spirits all looked the same—women in their late twenties or early thirties. No more teenage dryads. My Third Eye was having a difficult time sensing the difference in age and power between them.

  “Damn it,” I murmured, “I think we’re lost. I can’t tell which of the trees are older.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “It means we’re closer, Practitioner,” Wol said.

  “If I wake up one of them to ask for directions, what’s the chance they’ll be cranky?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “You would have to be ready to bind it,” Wol said. “Dryads can be… fickle.”

  My teeth clattered, so I clenched my jaw, trying to convince myself it was nerves and not the temperature. “Ok, that’s an option. Binding one of the dryads and asking it for directions. What about from a conjuring perspective?”

  Wol pressed up against my leg. I think he knew I was cold and pretending not to be. “You could try conjuring a being that could lead us to it. But that would require that we know which being to summon, as well as have the materials on hand to summon it.”

  I set my backpack on the ground. We weren’t going anywhere until we could figure this out. “Presuming we have materials, do you have any suggestions?”

  “Not off the top of my head, no,” Wol said.

  “Would a daevil work?”

  “…Possibly. But infernal circles are complex, even for the low-ranking ones. They're almost more likely to try to weasel out more terms than otherwise possible in a situation like this.”

  “Dryads, plan B. Daevil summoning, plan C. We need a plan A,” I said. “What about thaumaturgy? You said I might have talent in it.”

  “You definitely do. Manipulating the smaller circle and, in turn, the larger circle in the daemon binding. That’s a classic thaumaturgy technique,” Wol said.

  “Which means I don’t have a talent for divination,” I said, keeping the bitterness out of my voice.

  Wol pretended not to notice. “Thaumaturgy is the art of rituals. Making a symbol of something, and using that symbol to manipulate the original. Possibly one of the most versatile arts.”

  “Can it help me find the Mother Tree?” I asked.

  “Yes, we could use it as a tracking spell,” Wol said. “But we’d need something that can stand in as a symbol for the Mother Tree. There are too many dryads around us, though. It would interfere with the spell.”

  “It sounds like you’re telling me, if I can create a symbol that resembles the Mother Tree but filters out the rest of the dryads all around us, the spell would stick?” I said.

  “Theoretically, yes. But practically—”

  I wasn’t listening. I set the pink backpack down on the ground again, dusting the snow off the zippers. I began to rummage through.

  “Jain, one has to be extremely careful when creating symbols in a ritual like this. It is the same for summoning circles. There are offerings required, and those are a must.”

  “When I was summoning the Yeounui,” I said, less looking in the backpack and looking for ideas, “I didn’t stick to the offerings that were listed in the book. I did a lot of substitutions. I feel like this whole magic thing is less about the rules and more about the interpretation of those rules, combined with my own intent. The whole point of being a practitioner is to bend rules, right?”

  “Correct,” Wol said. He tilted his head at me, staring. “That’s something your mother used to say as well.”

  I nearly hooked myself onto that tail-end of the conversation and started another one. But just in time, I found something that gave me an idea.

  “In the book, the Mother Tree is not just the oldest, but oftentimes, the actual mother of a lot of these trees. The original tree, if you will. Hence the name, Mother Tree.” I muttered. “The symbolism in the parent-child relationship. The idea that there was once one, which spread to many. That’s the relationship we need to touch on.”

  “You are sounding like an enchanter,” Wol said, but he poked his head into my backpack out of curiosity.

  “I took an Information Technology class in my sophomore year, and they covered database management systems. They have these things called tables, which are just big blocks of data. It’s easy if I think of all these dryads as rows in a table, with their individual selves being the primary key.”

  “Huh?” Wol said.

  “A primary key is a unique identifier. Like DNA, or names. Everyone has their own,” I said.

  Hwari rose from the shadows, tilting her body to let me know I lost her as well.

  I kept talking because the goal here wasn’t to convince my familiars. It was to convince myself. Everything I did, I had to believe this would work, which was exactly what I told Wol minutes ago. Unless I could interpret the rules and bend them in my favor, this would never work.

  I was already working against unfavorable odds. My talent was in conjuration, then abjuration. Thaumaturgy was a second wing, and since my talent in different practices diminished the further I got away from conjuration, thaumaturgy would be the weakest of my practices. I needed every advantage I could get.

  “But they also have a foreign key, the Mother Tree from whom they are descended. If I pretend the Mother Tree is a single row data table, she has a primary key too. Theoretically, I could use the common foreign key of all these different dryads to link directly to the Mother Tree. The question is, what’s in my bag that I could use as a symbol for that relationship?”

  I brought out a notebook. “Notebooks are made of paper. Which were once trees. Close enough,” I said, satisfied.

  Wol watched closely, not saying anything.

  After setting the notebook so that it remained standing on the snow, I limped over to the nearest trees and scraped off bits and pieces of it. Bark and small branches mostly. It was gruesome, having to limp back and forth across the clearing to multiple different trees while holding my crutch and flashlight in my armpit.

  I thought knowing magic would mean less work. To me, it just seemed like a lot of thinking combined with preparation —which required manual labor— to do stuff that normal people would never have to do. Just how many non-practitioners had to find a Mother Tree in the middle of the night in December?

  I returned to the notebook and started tearing out pages, scrunching them into little balls with a single piece of a different tree wrapped inside. I made about twenty of them.

  I pointed to the balls of paper, “Trees or dryads,” then I pointed to the notebook, “Mother Tree.”

  Wol looked at the balls of paper that I shoved into the snow, lest they be blown away. He walked over and sniffed them one by one. Finally, he walked over to the notebook. The cat familiar sniffed that as well.

  Then he looked at me.

  I waited.

  “…These will do,” He said.

  “Huh, that was kind of fun,” I said, smiling. That felt like solving a brain teaser, or one of those puzzle-likehomework problems. I'd actually enjoyed this exercise.

  The small celebration didn’t last long. Wind howled through the trees, and I clutched my jacket to myself, dropping my crutch to the snow. Wol leaped in the air and pounced on one of the balls of paper that threatened to blow away.

  “I need help with going through the ritual,” I said.

  “Two separate circles, one around the dryad symbols and another one around the Mother Tree,” Wol said.

  “Wait, let’s overlap them,” I said, “Chances are that the Mother Tree is surrounded by other dryads. Probably older ones. So we can add in more of the symbology through the circle placement, too.”

  Hwari sank half her body in shadow and began to trail the circle I described. It would be nearly impossible for me to draw a circle in the snow, even if it wasn’t snowing already. But Hwari’s inky trail was a metaphysical trait, and the snowflakes didn’t disturb it.

  “Now what?” I asked. Despite the cold, I got slightly excited. It felt like I had really contributed to this one, instead of blindly following Wol’s directions or relying on Hwari to come in and save me. The three of us were doing this together.

  “I will power the circle, and you will chant,” Wol said. “The chant does not need to be in Iambic Pentameter. Even a single word will do. But like the symbols you’ve displayed here, the word must connect with your intent to find the Mother Tree. I recommend Latin.”

  I narrowed my eyes, thinking of the proper word. Unfortunately, I did’t know Latin. But I took Spanish as my language.

  Wol walked over to the circle and lay his tail on the snow, pointing directly at the circle. I felt the black cat’s presence grow in my Third Eye, feeling the flow of energy start to feed into the dual circles. Slowly, Hwari’s murky ink began to rise into the air like mist and the objects —the symbols— within began to glow with white light.

  I walked over and held both hands over the circle. “Encontrar, encontrar, encontrar,” I chanted. Subconsciously, I placed a hand over my rear pocket, holding my gravity knife through my jeans.

  The inky circle pulsed in time with my chants, exactly three times each. Then it faded in the air, the power spreading out in a circle and dissipating into the forest in every direction.

  I picked up the notebook and opened it to the middle.

  The pages began to tug in a specific direction.

  It had worked.

  After cleaning up after ourselves, we began our trek deeper into the Old Forest.