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I began to chuckle. And even though I knew it was not wise to make a sound, I could not stop.

They didn’t come for me, I thought. They didn’t come.

I chuckled some more.

Far away to the southwest I heard the cannonade of thunder, saw the faint splash of lightning in building clouds. Here there was only the stirring of a faint breeze.

“They didn’t come!” I said. I thought I shouted it.

An emperor moth landed on my belly. I startled, then burst out with laughter that came close to hysteria. A second moth settled on my left knee, huge scarlet wings opening and closing, its feathery antennae tickling over the lacerations on my lower thigh. The emperor moth is nearly as big as an Earthly pigeon, though weighing scarcely as much as a hummingbird.

A third moth landed on my right wrist. I tried to shoo it but it merely rose and settled again. Frowning now, I watched its tongue unfurl, black and long, looking...plumper than I’d ever imagined a moth’s tongue could look.

More fluttering movements filled the air around me. More moths settled. Dozens of them. Black, sticky tongues slid from scarlet mouths, began to lick at my wounds. I didn’t like that. I shook my left arm free of clinging bodies, began to brush the things off my belly.

Still more landed. Wherever their tongues licked a pleasant numbness began to spread, soothing, easing my pain. I stopped trying to brush them away. A lassitude gathered behind my eyes. I closed them, could not open them again.

The numbness grew. Began to burn.

I tried to scream and failed.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

STORM QUEEN

There were torch-red eyes in the moonlit jungle, and the distant, bitter howling of beasts. There were the pulsations of soft, plump bodies that thudded on my cheeks, at my eyes, against my lips. And the whir of moths was as loud as thunder in the dawn, loud enough to cover my screams as I began to choke on glistening wings.

With a cry, I jerked to full awareness, brushing wildly at my face and chest, feeling the quiver of feathery legs and antennae tickling all over me.

Nothing was there.

Sweat ran. My chest heaved. I sat up.

Nothing was there! No eyes, no wings, no ribbon tongues licking at raw wounds.

But something had been there. I remembered well the reality from which this “dream” had sprung.

Pushing away a coverlet that seemed quilted of soft, cool moss, I rose stiffly from the kind bed of woven rushes upon which I had lain. The dream and the reality slipped into the background for the moment as I found myself alone and naked in a strangely cluttered room scarcely half a dozen paces across. Before me stood a table, or rather, grew a table. It lifted in one graceful piece from the living wood of the floor. Piled on top of it were candles, crucibles, wooden plates, scraps of rusted armor, weapons, ancient books half turned to dust.

Beyond the table, in an outside wall of the same wood, was a small, rounded window through which I glimpsed afternoon light and the crowns of trees below and around me in the jungle. I was in a tree, I realized suddenly, inside the upper trunk of some forest giant more massive than any redwood I’d ever heard of.

How had I come here?

I turned to study the room, looking for some explanation of my circumstances. I found none, but the chamber and its contents were themselves arresting in their harmony and discordance. There were more windows—enlarged knotholes in the tree I saw now—and even a cloud-dimmed sun filled the space with airy brightness. How much more lovely this room would be when the sky was clear and jeweled, or when the arc of a rainbow slashed past the tree’s upper reaches.

The inside walls of the room were naturally beveled, with a hundred nooks and cubbyholes and ledges where ferns and flowers were planted in a rich humus brought up from below, or where sat tiny crystal bottles, river-smoothed stones, intricately shaped works of deadwood. Gourds and chimes hung about. Miniature figures coaxed into being from