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“Details. I need details,” I told her. “Paint a picture, play by play, and don’t leave anything out.”

“Oh, of course.” Aspen cleared her throat—or at least I thought that’s what she was doing. She was a tree, so it sounded different, kind of like the sound a woodpecker made drumming its beak against a trunk. “Well, you see, I am a princess. Or at least I’m supposed to be. The official list hasn’t been announced yet, but everyone expects me to be on it.”

“Official list?”

“Yes, on my world, the new monarch is decided by popular vote.”

“So anyone can be monarch?”

“No, of course not,” she giggled. “That’s where the official list comes in. In order to make the list, you must build up enough support. You must form alliances. If your alliances are strong enough, you are added to the official candidate list. The people on that list are named the princes and princesses of the Court. They’re the only ones eligible to become monarch at the next vote. Which will happen very soon, following a series of pageants and contests.”

Wow. And here I’d thought deity politics were complicated.

“I’d just about gathered all of my documentation to be signed by the royal notary when the accident happened,” Aspen continued. “I was bringing along a basket of apples.”

“Just in case you got hungry?”

“No, to bribe the notary, of course,” she tittered. “I’ve found that when I bring him apples, I’m always jumped straight to the front of the queue.”

“Because you give himapples? Really?”

I would have understood cookies or cupcakes, but apples?

“Apples are a rare delicacy on my world,” Aspen said. “They don’t grow there. So I went on a little shopping trip to Earth to pick them up. On my way home through the magic portal, I ended up here. Like this.” Her bough shook, raining downapples. “And every moment that passes, I become more and more a tree. Soon I won’t even be able to speak anymore.”

I picked up one of the apples she’d dropped, lifting it up to my nose. “The apple smells like you, Aspen.” I inhaled again, more deeply this time. “And you smell like apples.”

“Yes, the apples and I appear to have, well, merged during transport. We combined into one being, an apple tree stuck here, at this waypoint. My friends and I have tried to separate the apples from me?—”

“Why would you do that?” I cut in.

“Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as an apple tree.”

“I think you’re going about this all wrong,” I told her. “You shouldn’t try to separate the apples from the woman. You’ve already merged. You are one being now. There’s no way to separate you.”

“So I’m doomed to stay like this forever?” The tree sagged.

“No.” I gave the trunk a comforting pat. “Not if you stop fighting it.”

“Fighting what?”

“Fighting yourself,” I said. “Remember what I said? You and the apples are one being now. But you haven’t accepted that. You’re fighting the transformation.”

“Of course I’m fighting it! I don’t want to be a tree!”

“But youarea tree now, or at least some part of you is. Denying that won’t change anything. You need to embrace the change.”

“No!”

“This magic,” I said, indicating the talking apple tree, “it’s unusual, yes, but at the end of the day, it seems to follow the same fundamental rules of magic. When magic touches you, it changes you, whether that’s Nectar, Venom, or mysterious interdimensional tree voodoo. To survive that change, you can’tfight it. You must accept it. You must welcome it with open arms and an open mind. Because this is who you are now.”

Silence descended on the orchard for a long while. Finally, Aspen spoke.

“You’re sure about this?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “As sure as I can be.”

“Ok.” A slow, thick wave rippled across the trunk, like Aspen was swallowing her fears. “I will do as you say, Leda Pandora.”