Page 79 of The Sixth Spring

“Is this how it always feels to you?” Will asked, looking around. “The land.”

“You feel it?” Itori asked with interest.

“Yeah. I didn’t realize it was you. That it was real. I–” But Will didn’t know how to explain repression and desire and how he’d been telling himself from the beginning that what was unfolding between them was all made up in his head.

Itori only stared back at him steadily. Their hands were still joined. “It is all real.”

Will let out a long, slow breath.

His gaze drifted to the trees looming over them. It was a forest of cypress with thick, sturdy trunks and canopies draped in moss. Most native Florida trees were small and thin to survive the heat, but these must have been dipping down into the spring even before it had been broken open.

“These trees, they’re old, aren’t they?” Will asked.

Itori drifted toward them, tugging Will with him. When he got close enough, Itori reached out and touched the fanned roots.

“This one is over eighteen thousand moon cycles old,” Itori said.

Will had never excelled in math, but he figured that was ancient no matter how you crunched it.

“Can you just tell that by touching it?”

“Yes. I can tune myself to its energy. Like how you can feel the energy here, I can do it for each individual creature.”

That made Will unspeakably sad for a moment. Science told humans that trees and plants were alive, but humans still felt separate from that. They couldn’t connect like this, feel the life and death around them so vibrantly.

It hurt, thinking about the other felled trees in the area. To live eighteen thousand moon cycles, and then be cut down for one man’s greed. How many of its kin had it lost?

“Come,” Itori said, tugging Will’s hand again. “There is a place over here that will work as a seat for you.”

Itori threaded their way through the dark water and into the trees. Will stared up at the shadows and moonlight, enchanted to be towed along. Without Itori, Will wouldn’t have ever dreamed of swimming through a lake in the middle of the night. Florida had too many scaled creatures with teeth.

But everywhere that Itori went, it went silent. Itori scared off lesser predators.

Or maybe Will had assumed that backwards. Maybe Itori was the keeper of this land, and everything here knew it. Maybe the silence was their respect for him, for his power to protect this place. Itori got energy from the land, but it seemed like he might give it back too. Like he was the exchange here, the balance the land required.

Itori stopped at a tree that contained a concave seat made by a sharp left curve in the trunk base. Itori lifted Will up out of the water like he weighed nothing, and set him down in the smooth cup the trunk made.

Then Itori followed him up.

Chapter 15

“You can be out of water?” Will asked when Itori pulled him into his lap in the tree.

“Here, yes. The tree holds the water, and us. We are still connected.”

“Oh,” Will said. “But wouldn’t the land too?”

Itori made a gesture with one hand that Will didn’t understand. “It does, which is why with enough energy I can walk there at all. But it is a stretch. The farther I go, the more the stretch, the more the cost. This tree is in the middle of my spring vein. There is no stretch.”

“I see,” Will said, turning that over in his head.

Beneath the tree canopy it was darker, but Will could still see the red shine of Itori’s eyes. He reached for him, fingers finding the smooth scales of his cheek.

“I am sorry that you lost memories,” Itori said. “I should have noticed.”

“It’s not your fault. Have you ever done exchanges with others?”

“A few, with kin, but never this much. Never this often. Never with a human,” Itori said.