Title: The Oak Queen (3/6)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek TOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Sequel to The Desert Children; Kirk, Spock, and McCoy reunite, but they soon learn an otherworld, while easy to enter, is impossible to leave – particularly when it is conspiring to keep one of them forever.
Parts: Foreword | Where a Tale Begins | A Quest for Three | A Quest for Two | A Quest for One | At the Heart’s End

A Quest for Three

Leonard settles on the beach and lays an arm across his knees. There is a moment where it seems Jim is going to tell him this isn’t the time to be sitting down, but the man’s expression quickly softens with understanding. After another cursory view of the area, Jim skates down the sand dune he had previously climbed and goes to McCoy’s side. His questioning “Bones?” is quiet, a touch concerned.

“Just tired, Jim.” Leonard glances up at Kirk, his smile faintly sardonic. “I’m also tryin’ to figure out if you ‘n Spock being here is a good thing or a bad thing.”

And real. He doesn’t mention that part. There is no point in offending them, illusions or not.

“It’s a good thing,” Jim says with his usual confidence.

“Of course,” McCoy mutters. A sigh builds in his chest, born of both exasperation and acceptance. He fights it down. His fingers idly sift through sand. “So…did you come on your own, or did the colonists boot you and Spock out into the desert too?”

“On our own. We were searching for you when a woman offered to help.” Jim folds his arms and frowns, eyes fixed ahead. “There’s a body in the desert that looks a lot like you, Bones.”

It isn’t Jim’s jump between subjects which startles Leonard so much as it is what subject the man jumps to. Leonard’s brain stutters over it. “What are you saying?”

“Doctor,” Spock interrupts, no doubt aware that Leonard may be leaping to illogical conclusions, “the Captain’s statement—”

Is that a hint of disapproval in the Vulcan’s voice?

“—is not a fact.”

Jim’s mouth twitches with amused resignation. He remains silent.

Spock continues, “The body was not human; therefore it is unlikely it was yours.”

“I’m kind of in my body right now, Spock” is Leonard’s dry response. He pinches his arm for reassurance, only to find himself more disturbed.

You’ve passed from the earthly realm to this one—part of what Sir Rowan had said comes barreling back to him. Could this be an out-of-body experience? Or maybe his wandering spirit has fallen down some sort of Alice in Wonderland-like rabbit hole. No. For once it’s better to be practical like Spock.

“Gram said it was meant as a trick,” Jim offers, perhaps seeing uncertainty waver in Leonard’s expression.

McCoy lets out an explosive sigh. “You know what? Dead bodies that may or may not look like me are off the list of conversation topics until further notice. I think we’ve got enough to worry about without mulling over that one.” Leonard stands up, brushing at the sand clinging to his clothes. He looks between Spock and Kirk. “Somebody pick a direction.”

Jim and Spock share a look, communicating without words.

Leonard tells them after a few seconds pass, “It’s not going to matter. If there’s one thing I have learned while I’ve been here, we won’t need to find what we’re looking for. It’ll find us.”

“That’s not comforting, Bones.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

In the end, they decide to walk along the beach with the wind at their backs. That way, no matter where they’re traveling, at least the sand isn’t blowing in their faces. Leonard remarks how heartily sick of sand he is. Jim’s hand lands on his shoulder, warm and solid, and gives it a friendly squeeze in agreement. Spock points out that the planet’s red desert sand and this almost pristine white beach sand are likely not of the same composition (“note the unusual reflective properties of the gradient, Doctor“), and Leonard is immediately reminded of how much Spock likes to hear himself talk. But rather than rolling his eyes heavenward, Leonard smiles.

So, he decides, these two must be his real friends. That is a comfort he hadn’t expected once Gram left him at the Hall. He had had the sneaking suspicion then he would spend the rest of his life—or an eternity—wandering a strange land. Yet here Jim and Spock are.

He might make it home after all.

The Queen had sent them on a quest, undoubtedly of the dangerous kind, so it doesn’t surprise Leonard when nature turns against them. The wind switches direction almost immediately and picks up speed until smoke-like eddies of sand are snaking across the beach, stinging every inch of their exposed skin. They stop walking and turn around to shield themselves.

“What now?” Leonard shouts over the wind.

Jim points to the border of sand dunes in an unspoken command. Time to leave the beach.

That, it seems, is exactly what they shouldn’t do. The wind speed doubles, ripping at their clothes and hair. With a curse that is partly words and partly sand, Leonard grabs onto Spock’s arm. Jim anchors him from the other side with a tight grip upon his wrist. But the closer they trudge doggedly toward the dunes, the more difficult it is to stay on their feet. At last, Leonard tugs sharply on both of his companions.

“Down!” he shouts, crouching. “Down!”

The malevolent wind eases into a playful breeze the moment their knees make contact with the beach.

Leonard coughs and spits sand out of his mouth. He is afraid to touch his eyes with his hands. Above them, the wind carries a murmur, water speaking as its delicate froth laces the shore. Leonard refuses to look up, to heed the voice, and concentrates on the hollow claw of a crab poking through the sand. It is decorated by a long crack from whatever had drilled into its hard shell. He doesn’t touch it.

“Maybe we’re supposed to head south,” Jim is saying.

“I’m not goin’ in the water,” Leonard counters, shaking sand from his shirt sleeves.

They look at him strangely, as if he had spat something out, an inarticulate thing, a fish scale.

Jim promises, “Nobody is going in the water.”

He rubs wearily at his cheek and allows his gaze to track the crest of a wave over Spock’s shoulder. “Then how do we keep something from coming out?”

They all see it: the giant, dark head lifting free from the water before retreating beneath the rolling waves again. Its face was mostly obscured, except for green-gold scales glittering under the sun and long, trailing seaweed whiskers from a short snout. It’s too far away to tell about teeth.

“South,” the Captain states more firmly. “We’re definitely going south.”

No one disagrees because not one of them has the urge to linger and meet a sea monster. With their luck, Leonard thinks, it wouldn’t simply be a sea monster, but a hungry one at that. The selkie in the river was frightening enough. What terrifying things could exist in an otherworldy ocean?

Jim helps Leonard to his feet. Spock abandons staring out across the ocean, his face emptied of expression, and stands. Herded by seen and unseen obstacles from the other directions, the three men begin the journey south.

Leonard listens to the quiet singing of the sea as he walks. He might have been alone and the world beginning itself all over again but for Captain James T. Kirk and First Officer Spock keeping pace at his side. They do not speak to one another, not until a shape rises from the dunes as a wavering silhouette against the orange sun. Leonard shades his eyes to look at it. A small house, or smaller perhaps. A hut, slightly sunken into the sandy earth on one side.

For some unknown reason, Leonard’s heart closes like a fist in his chest. His first word is barely a whisper, as though his voice has suffered years of disuse. “W-We could keep walking.”

Jim studies the outline of the sagging hut through narrowed eyes as they approach it from the right. “You said the path finds us, Bones. We should have seen this place from farther away but didn’t. It appeared for a reason.”

“You can’t pay attention to half the things I say, Jim,” Leonard argues weakly. “I might be crazy from dehydration.” Heck, I might be dead.

“Spock?” Jim asks for their third companion’s opinion.

“While I find merit in Doctor McCoy’s statement, I must agree with you, Captain. We should investigate.”

Leonard eyes the Vulcan sourly. “In exactly what part of my statement did you find merit, Mr. Spock? The suggestion of avoiding trouble, or when I said I might be crazy?”

Spock’s posture speaks plainly enough: need you ask?

Leonard calls him an unpleasant word under his breath. Jim, ignoring them both, turns sharply and heads for the hut. The wind doesn’t fight the decision. Leonard calls it an unpleasant word too.

The hut looks like a gnarled tree growing alone among gentle hillocks. Along its face, a small wind chime made from bird bones, feathers, and seashells stirs gently. The hut’s door is ajar. Jim gives it a push with his boot. From the threshold, nothing can be seen. The interior is cloaked in darkness.

Leonard peers at the darkness, looking for an inkling of a presence within. “No one’s home.”

“Or the structure is un-inhabited,” Spock adds. As if on cue, a mouse, tiny and grey, scurries around the corner of the door, squeaking indignantly at them, and heads for the swaying grass which crowns the dune.

Leonard grimaces. “Except by rodents. Wonderful.”

“Keep the door open. I’ll look for a light,” Jim says and disappears inside the hut. Spock slips between Leonard and the door and follows the captain.

McCoy huffs, thinking isn’t this always the way? Well, he’s not going to be left standing outside like a fool! He swings the door as far back as it will go. It droops against the wall of the hut like it doesn’t intend to move anytime soon. For good measure, Leonard finds a heavy rock for a doorstop. Satisfied, he enters the hut, fully expecting to bump into someone within the crowded space in short order.

But there is no one.

“Jim? Spock?” The names echo.

A spidery sensation crawls down Leonard’s spine.

A light flares to life in the darkness, far away though the hut is not very deep. The small flame soon breeds other flames. Only when they begin to elongate does the darkness reveal another shape, round and glowing metal-hot. Leonard’s eyes adjust to the dim light and widen with realization. The flames are licking sullenly at the bottom of a pot, and that pot—

But the rest is encased in an inky blackness. The pot, only its lower half visible, seems to hover eerily in the air.

“Hello?”

There comes a sound, flint to stone. Sparks are born and given to the wick of one candle after another. Leonard, seeing the illumination of the curve of a face, backs toward the door and the brightness beyond it that signifies the outside world. His foot stumbles over something on the floor, a thing which makes an unhappy noise, and Leonard turns to flee. Instantly, the door to the hut flies shut. He reaches for the doorknob but it disappears beneath his hand.

Someone chuckles, the sound husky with age, amusement and mayhap a hint of cruelty. “Leaving so soon,” a voice muses, “when you’ve not stayed for dinner?”

Leonard, fearing both to turn around and to stay blind to attack, chooses to face the guest in the hut with him. The room is now visible by hundreds of dots of candlelight that seem to recede beyond human perception. The floor is packed dirt and the walls are a patchwork of uneven stones. At the center of the room sits a cauldron above a pit of fire. Steam dances into the air, but there is no smell of whatever is cooking. Something clucks and Leonard looks down, startled to find a white chicken pecking the ground near his feet.

“Lovely, isn’t she?”

The voice belongs to a woman seated in a rocking chair made from the bones of some large animal. At first glance she is too old to be threatening. But as he watches, her figure sharpens into a perverse parody of the firebird. Her fingers end in golden talons, which she is using like knitting needles to make a garment or a tapestry. Rather than hair, a plumage of dark-red feathers sprouts from her head. Her eyes are wide-set and maliciously black, not beguiling.

“My hen—don’t you think she’s lovely?” The woman’s voice, when she speaks, is a jarring squawk.

The aforementioned hen raps Leonard’s boot with her beak before waddling past him.

Leonard folds his arms (mainly to hide the shaking of his hands) and tries to exude the aura of an annoyed Jim. “What have you done with my friends?”

She blinks owlishly at him. “Friends?” Her mouth pursues in dismay. “There are more of you? What right do you have to intrude in my home!”

On any other day, Leonard would be apologetic. But since he came to this world, he has endured his share of tricks. “Ma’am, I will gladly leave if you put the knob back on the door.”

She cackles delightedly. “That’s not my doing. Magic brought you here and only magic will release you.” Putting aside her knitting, she goes to her cauldron. “I suppose I ought to ask you what you came for.”

“My—”

She waves away his response before he can voice it. “Come here. What is it that you see?”

When he doesn’t immediately obey, she snaps, irritated, “Or don’t! The door will stay shut and eventually I’ll grow tired of bantering with you. Then you’ll be in the pot instead of outside it!” She mutters madly for a moment, finishing with “The tastiest bones have magic in them.”

That propels him forward. When Leonard looks at the murky liquid filling the cauldron he sees a reflection of himself. Except it isn’t a true reflection. He has strange eyes, both blue, yet one as though he saw out of day and the other out of twilight.

“I don’t understand. That can’t be me.” The surprised words fall from his mouth, settling like embers to smolder in the muck. The liquid accepts them greedily. He pulls back from the pot’s edge in alarm.

“What do you search for?” the woman asks him.

“Nothing,” he almost says. Instead, “My friends.”

She clucks chidingly. “They are not lost. They have never left you.”

He looks around, half-expecting to see Jim and Spock standing behind him. “But…”

“What do you search for? A beginning? Many men have come here seeking their beginning, only to realize it will always be ahead of them, always shifting back.”

Her riddling hurts his head. “I know my beginning.”

The woman’s wide mouth stretches in a smile with a glint of teeth. “How fortunate for you.” Her eyes cut to the cauldron. A bubble of air swells the liquid until it pops with a wet belch. “Your ending, then?”

He doesn’t have to think about it. “No thanks.”

“I haven’t all the time in the world!” she snaps. “What is it you want to know? No, never mind that. I’ll make it simpler: what do you need?”

He stares at her.

“A spell? A sword to slay a dragon? A story?” She snorts like that would be the last thing she would willingly provide.

He releases a cry of frustration. “How would I know what I need? I didn’t even ask to come to this damn place!”

The woman eyes him from the opposite side of the cauldron. “Ah,” she murmurs knowingly, “a tithe-payer. So it’s your heart.”

For a brief, confused moment there is an echo of a different voice in her words, a voice which could melt mountains with ribbons of fiery song. Leonard reasons he must have imagined it after the echo is gone. He presses his fingers against his breastbone anxiously. His heart? That makes no sense. He hasn’t lost his heart. It’s in his chest, where he hopes it will stay.

“I have plenty of those,” the woman is saying as she shuffles over to a basket, “but I don’t remember collecting yours.” He is appalled when she lifts a heart out of the basket and inspects it. “No, not this one.” The rejected heart is summarily flung into the pit of fire beneath the cauldron. First it bursts into a handful of red stars then melts into a hard, black stone.

Another heart goes into the fire. Then a third. “Of those who give their hearts to me, few come back for them. Enough of this!” She overturns the basket with a kick. “There are too many. Choose one that suits you.” The woman returns to her rocking chair, lifting her white hen into her lap so she can pet it.

Leonard kneels on the floor and gingerly picks up the scattered hearts one by one and places them back into the basket. “A heart is a precious thing,” Leonard tells her with reproach coloring his voice. “You can’t treat these so carelessly.”

“They’re not mine.”

“It doesn’t matter if they aren’t yours. A man will die without his heart. This,” he says, lifting one up for her to see, “is somebody’s chance at life.”

The hen is put aside for the partially knitted garment. Her talons click against each other as she loops thick yarn of wool around them. “You speak with the respect of one who knows hearts.”

“I know their value to the body. I’m a doctor.”

“Ah-ha. And what is another use for a heart besides to live and to feed upon?”

He isn’t certain how to answer that question. “If you’re talking metaphorically, I have loved—and do love—some people with all of my heart.”

“But you don’t love everyone.”

“Do you?” he counters.

Her cackle is pleased. “I might not put you in the pot so soon, doctor—you who has the gall to argue with a witch who would eat you!”

Leonard sighs. “I’m stuck here, aren’t I?”

“Mm, perhaps not. Answer this last question, and it could free you.”

He cannot see the harm in answering another question. “Ask.”

She rocks slowly in her bone chair, her weaving forgotten. “What is a heart’s worth?”

“It depends on how you would use the heart. But even when you’re not using it,” Leonard insists, thinking of how carelessly she threw them into the fire, “you can’t simply pretend it’s worthless.”

The candle lights gutter, ebb, and begin to vanish one at a time. “Wise words. I hope you remember them,” the witch tells McCoy as darkness, born anew, slowly consumes her house. “Otherwise you shall never discover where your heart lies. You will have forgotten you have one.”

“Wait, you can’t leave—how do I get out of here?”

“The door, obviously,” she says, amused, and vanishes.

The hut returns to being a hut, dark and empty except for Leonard. He stretches out his hands, encounters a wall, and follows it to the door. Its knob twists compliantly under his hand and the door creaks open. Sunlight momentarily blinds him.

“Bones!”

“Jim?”

Kirk grips his shoulders. “Thank God. We were beginning to think you weren’t coming back.”

“I wasn’t—” He turns to stare at the hut. “I went in after you and Spock…”

“And found yourself alone,” Jim finishes grimly. “I know. The same thing happened to us.”

“What!”

Jim tells him about walking into the hut and becoming trapped in there until out of nowhere somebody—a man with hair cropped short and neat as a fox’s pelt beneath a crown—raised a lantern and asked him what he thought he was doing wandering around in the dark like a fool.

“For a minute, I thought you were playing a trick on me, Bones.”

“Who was he?”

Jim shakes his head. “I have no idea. He handed me the lantern and bade me follow him. The farther we walked, the younger he became. He said he was a prince who made an unfortunate choice and now he was in exile. I think he meant to advise me. The experience was strange, but eventually he led me back to the door.”

“That’s it?” Leonard says incredulously. “You had an innocuous conversation with a crowned prince?”

“Fascinating.” Spock joins in. “I was approached by a scholar. We agreed to an exchange of tales since we both sought knowledge. I offered a story I learned during my early tutelage of Surak’s ideals, which I believe she transcribed in a book as I related it. She shared the firebird’s story.” At Jim’s curious look, Spock adds delicately, “Forgive me, I was warned not to repeat it.”

Leonard looks nonplussed. “Why am I the only one who got a chicken lady that wanted to cook my bones?”

Sadly, neither Jim nor Spock has an answer for him.

After skirting the dunes and returning to the beach, they debate on which direction to take. Strangely, the sun is dipping toward the horizon though they haven’t spent hours inside the hut. The ocean is a liquid gold, rolling gently with calm waves. Overhead, a bird with a long wingspan drops in altitude to skim the surface of the water, probably hunting for fish.

“It feels like we’re back where we started,” Leonard says, shivering as a breeze tugs at his torn shirt sleeve. The wind was warm earlier. Now it carries a chill, both in temperature and the way it whistles, like the sound made from a pipe of hollow bone.

Spock looks inland. “Our movements may no longer be restricted to the beach. If we must wait through a night, it would be best not to endure it so plainly in the open.”

“Yeah, I don’t see the point in hanging around here either,” Leonard agrees. “We should—Jim?” Jim’s shoulders are tense. Because the man is facing away, Leonard cannot see his expression. “What’s the matter?”

Leonard and Spock turn around as one, and Leonard immediately regrets having done so. The sea monster is no longer in the sea but lumbering along the beach towards them. Its great, heaving breaths send up pockets of sand. The air suddenly has a stench of swamp rot.

Leonard finds it difficult to tell if the beast looks friendly or not. And he remembers that in his many interesting years as CMO of the Enterprise, he hasn’t met a single creature of that size whose interest in them didn’t amount to categorizing them as a bellyful of dinner.

Jim is remarkably still in Leonard’s opinion. “Jim.”

Kirk’s hands slowly form into fists. Spock remarks sharply, “We do not have weapons.”

“Jim, did you hear that?” Leonard presses. “We have no weapons.“

“I heard you.”

But Kirk is considering the beast with a look McCoy recognizes too well. A bad feeling sinks the doctor’s stomach to his feet.

“This might be my test,” Jim tells no one in particular, almost dismissively. His voice doesn’t waver once; his eyes do not blink.

Leonard curses Jim Kirk’s insanity. Of all the times, why did it have to flare up now? Jim might as well announce to the world—and to the Queen, who undoubtedly has spies watching them—he wants to do battle with a seven-headed serpent. Leonard glances at Spock’s lean, composed face to confirm they are thinking the same thing. Then he grabs one of Jim’s arms; Spock takes the other arm.

Increasing from a lumber to a trot, the sea monster looses a low bellow and shakes its enormous head like a bull preparing to charge.

“We’re running” is all that McCoy says.

Somehow that startles Jim out of his daze. “What? Running?”

As if it heard that, the sea monster’s trot suddenly switches to an earth-rattling gallop. And run they do, all of them—Jim, Spock, Leonard, and the sea monster.

A Quest for Two

Related Posts:

• The Oak Queen (6/6) – from June 29, 2012
• The Oak Queen (5/6) – from June 19, 2012
• The Oak Queen (4/6) – from June 17, 2012
• The Oak Queen (2/6) – from June 4, 2012
• The Oak Queen (1/6) – from May 29, 2012