The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 63: Connections and Bribes

For the next two moons, Den and Floridiana stayed with the Lady of the Photinia Tree. Originally, the mage only planned to camp for one moon in any given location, but their magical power was developing so slowly that she extended their stay to gather more data.

Den had no objections. The Lady's territory extended out from her tree trunk only so far as her root system reached, but that was more than enough space for two tents and a campfire. Their living conditions were by no means comfortable, but at least they were relatively safe.

As safe as you could get in the Wilds, anyway.

The day after the ambush, King Haplor sent a second troop of rock macaque demons to test the Lady's borders. Once more, she raised her flower shields to deflect their acorns and, when they got too close, sprayed them with foul-smelling pollen that knocked them out. They retreated once more, leaving their injured behind for scavengers.

Den was starting to understand how that wild boar had gotten so gods-cursed big.

Over the next couple weeks, they endured several more of these probing attacks from King Haplor, interspersed with a few from the Lady's other neighbor, a sambar deer demon with vicious, steel-tipped antlers.

"How can you stand living like this?" Den asked the Lady after she'd finally driven off the deer demon with a hailstorm of berries.

She looked pale, as she always did, but he thought she might be a little more transparent. It was harder than usual to make her out where she sat enthroned among her leaves. When she spoke, her voice was as faint as a midsummer breeze.

"Not all spirits have legs with which to flee danger, or wings with which to seek a different home, dragonet."

Well, it wasn't as if he had wings either. Although he could fly, buoyed by the water in the air. When there was enough water in the air. Dragons and deserts didn't mix.

And anyway, he hadn't been fleeing danger, precisely, when he first met her. Dragons didn't flee. They just made – what would Sati call it? – strategic retreats. It had been a strategic retreat from certain death.

And he'd never wanted a different home. Not really. Not even when he gawked at King Yulus' Black Sand Creek Water Court and fantasized about rising in the rankings of dragon kings. If it had been up to him, he would never have left his beautiful, precious pond to travel halfway (okay, a third of the way...uh, maybe more like a quarter?) across Serica so he could camp in a smelly tent under a smelly tree alongside a smelly mage, surrounded on all sides by smelly demons.

Den knew he should make allowances for the Lady's exhaustion after she'd just fought off a demon, but he was grumpy and homesick and offended and maybe, just maybe, the tiniest bit embarrassed. "Haven't you ever considered getting somebody to dig up your tree and replant it somewhere better?"

She just leveled that cool stare at him.

From the large rock she was using as a campstool, Floridiana mumbled without looking up from her notebook, "It would be difficult to transplant a tree this big.... You'd run the risk of damaging the roots too much when you dig them up, and the tree may wither and die...."

The Lady's face remained calm – forcedly so. Den winced at his own clumsiness and waited for a reproof, but she didn't speak again, and Floridiana's pen never stopped scratching across the page.

Every day after lunch, Den and Floridiana had been repeating the measurements they had taken that first day in the Wilds. She would bore holes in the ground right on the Lady's borders, and he would grow and shrink so she could calculate the percentage by which he'd increased his length. The notebook she used to record all the numbers had several pages in the back that were covered in a fine grid of evenly-spaced lines, which she explained was called "graph paper." She was using it to make two plots: one of the depth of the hole she could bore, and one of the percentage by which Den could increase his length, over time.