I don’t think time meant anything in that place – maybe it was some adjunct of faerie. The mountain, though, was as dry as the plain.

 

So? So I started looking for caves. For some reason I was reminded of Odin stealing the mead of poetry. If I could turn into an eagle, this might be so much easier. Shapeshifting, though, was still not a skill I had.

 

Loki kept refusing to teach me. There was probably some information in that, too, but I wasn’t in the mood to try and tease it out. I was in the mood to solve this riddle.

 

No caves. For want of a better idea, I started to climb. I knew that in the real world, the stars were other suns.

 

Here, though, they seemed to get closer as I climbed. Maybe that was what I was supposed to do. Tug a star down from the sky.

 

Maybe they were people, like in Narnia.

 

But I had no water of youth for old stars. Eventually, though, I reached the summit. And stood with the stars literally around me.

 

They were still cold. If anything, they were colder than the world around. Stars were supposed to be hot.

 

Trees were supposed to need water and light.

 

I reached out and touched a star. It was so cold it almost burned me. “What should I do?”

 

And I was not entirely surprised to get a response.

 

“What is your nature?”

 

“Fire,” I admitted.

 

“Of course.” The voice might be the star. It might be something else. “And what else?”

 

“War.” Another admission.

 

“Then why are you here?”

 

“Because somebody feared what I might do.” Maybe the stars, whatever they really were, were prisoners here too.

 

“And what would you do?”

 

“Go home. And convince people I’m not the one who’s planning on burning the world.”

 

“Where is home?”

 

I thought about it. I realized I didn’t have a great answer. “Not here.”

 

Laughter. The star became a woman. A star-nymph. “So, you would go home.”

 

“But I would rather like to help the tree.”