Then spring came, and she was washed by fresh rains and warmed by the new sun, and she came alert again. Her gorgeous leaves burst out like the feathers of a beautiful green bird. Years later, when she tasted champagne for the first time, she would remember being a tree in springtime and think: Yes. This is like that.

Summer was a grand feast of sunlight—but almost as soon as it started, something unexpected happened. She was… shrinking?

Her head dropped below the mist again, slipping down away from the sun. Her leaves and her branches—her magnificent, multitudinous branches—were withering, and her roots were letting go of the soil, pulling back up out of it like a ship weighing anchor, preparing to set sail again.

And then she opened her eyes, and there she was. That’s right. She was Kate. She’d forgotten her name, but that was it: Kate. She was a girl. It was all coming back to her. Everything was so different: She was small and soft, and she wasn’t rooted in the ground, she wandered around loose. She could see and talk and move, but she couldn’t taste the soil or the sunlight anymore. What a weird way to live.

Everything looked the same as it had before. She was standing right in the same spot. The mist, the forest… did it all even happen? Was it all a dream?

But if it was a dream then the others had dreamed it, too. They were blinking and shuffling their feet. Kate felt lost and unsteady, being unplugged from the earth like that.

“We were trees,” Tom said.

It was all anybody really needed to say. They walked a little shakily back toward where the train was still waiting. Next to it stood a great big pyramid of firewood, all neatly stacked.

And many old voices thought together in Kate’s head:

Remember this.

17

He Thought He Could

THE SILVER ARROW’S FIRE WAS STILL GOING WHEN THEY got back, though only barely. Kate and Tom fed logs into it till it was big and blazing again, and they set out along the branch line, running on wood now instead of coal.

Leaving the misty forest behind, they clickety-clacked through miles of empty fields. Kate opened the doors and looked out at the grass skimming past. It was funny: From a moving train, things close to you slipped by so fast they were blurry, whereas the trees on the horizon looked like they were barely moving at all. Then the tracks merged with another set of tracks coming in from the right, so smoothly she didn’t even feel a bump, and just like that they were back on course again, on the main line.