“I shall do exactly what you say,” said Evor, and he was so uplifted with hope and gratitude that his face was nearly handsome.

All that night he kept watch. He could not have slept, anyway. Love roared in his ears, and longing choked him. He went over and over the things Phega had said and each individual beauty of her face and body as she said these things, and when, in the dawn, he saw her stealing through the hall to the door, there was a moment when he could not move. She was even more lovely than he remembered.

Phega softly unbarred the door and crossed the yard to unbar the gate. Evor pulled himself together and followed. They walked out across the fields in the white time before sunrise, Phega pacing very upright, with her eyes on the sky where the sun would appear, and Evor stealing after. He softly took off his armor piece by piece as he followed her and laid it down carefully in case it should clatter and alarm her.

Up the hill Phega went, where she stood like one entranced, watching the gold rim of the sun come up. And such was Evor’s awe that he loitered a little in the apple trees, admiring her as she stood.

“Now,” Phega said, “I have come to fulfill my bargain, sun, since I fear this is the last time I shall truly want to.” What she did then, she had given much thought to. It was not the way she had been accustomed to turn into a tree before. It was far more thorough. For she put down careful roots, driving each of her toes downward and outward and then forcing them into a network of fleshy cables to make the most of the thin soil at the top of the hill. “Here,” she said, “I root within the soil you warm.”

Evor saw the ground rise and writhe and low branches grow from her insteps to bury themselves also. “Oh, no!” he cried out. “Your feet were beautiful as they were!” And he began to climb the hill toward her.

Phega frowned, concentrating on the intricacy of feathery rootlets. “But they were not the way I wanted them,” she said, and she wondered vaguely why he was there. But by then she was putting forth her greatest effort, which left her little attention to spare. Slowly, once her roots were established, she began to coat them with bark before insects could damage them. At the same time, she set to work on her trunk, growing swiftly, grain by growing grain. “Increased by yearly rings,” she murmured.

As Evor advanced, he saw her body elongate, coating itself with mat pewter-colored bark as it grew, until he could barely pick out the outline of limbs and muscles inside it. It was like watching a death. “Don’t!” he said. “Why are you doing this? You were lovely before!”

“I was like all human women,” Phega answered, resting before her next great effort. “But when I am finished, I shall be a wholly new kind of tree.” Having said that, she turned her attention to the next stage, which she was expecting to enjoy. Now she stretched up her arms, and the hair of her head, yearning into the warmth of the climbing sun, and made it all into limblike boughs, which she coated like the rest of her, carefully, with dark silver bark. “For you I shall hold out my arms,” she said.

Evor saw her, tree-shaped and twice as tall as himself, and cried out, “Stop!” He was afraid to touch her in this condition. He knelt at her roots in despair.

“I can’t stop now,” Phega told him gently. She was gathering herself for her final effort, and her mind was on that, though the tears she heard breaking his voice did trouble her a little. She put that trouble out of her head. This was the difficult part. She had already elongated every large artery of her body, to pass through her roots and up her trunk and into her boughs. Now she concentrated on lifting her veins, and every nerve with them, without disturbing the rest, out to the ends of her branches, out and up, up and out, into a mass of living twigs, fine-growing and close as her own hair. It was impossible. It hurt—she had not thought it would hurt so much—but she was lifting, tearing her veins, thrusting her nerve ends with them, first into the innumerable fine twigs, then into even further particles to make long, sharp buds.

Evor looked up as he crouched and saw the great tree surging and thrashing above him. He was appalled at the effort. In the face of this gigantic undertaking he knew he was lost and forgotten, and besides, it was presumptuous to interfere with such willing agony. He saw her strive and strive again to force those sharp buds open. “If you must be a tree,” he shouted above the din of her lashing branches, “take me with you somehow, at least!”

“Why should you want that?” Phega asked with wooden lips that had not yet quite closed, just where her main boughs parted.

Evor at last dared to clasp the trunk with its vestigial limbs showing. He shed tears on the gray bark. “Because I love you. I want to be with you.”

Trying to see him forced her buds to unfurl, because that was where her senses now were. They spread with myriad shrill agonies, like teeth cutting, and she thought it had killed her, even while she was forcing further nerves and veins to the undersides of all her pale viridian leaves. When it was done, she was all alive and raw in the small hairs on the undersides of those leaves and in the symmetrical ribs of vein on the shiny upper sides, but she could sense Evor crouching at her roots now. She was grateful to him for forcing her to the necessary pain. Her agony responded to his. He was a friend. He had talked of love, and she understood that. She retained just enough of the strength it had taken to change to alter him, too, to some extent, though not enough to bring him beyond the animal kingdom. The last of her strength was reserved for putting forth small pear-shaped fruit covered with wiry hairs, each containing four triangular nuts. Then, before the wooden gap that was her mouth had entirely closed, she murmured, “Budding with growing things.”

She rested for a while, letting the sun harden her leaves to a dark shiny green and ripen her fruit a little. Then she cried wordlessly to the sun, “Look! Remember our bargain. I am an entirely new kind of tree—as strong as an oak, but I bear fruit that everything can eat. Love me. Love me now!” Proudly she shed some of her three-cornered nuts onto the hilltop,

“I see you,” said the sun. “This is a lovely tree, but I am not sure what you expect me to do with you.”

“Love me!” she cried.

“I do,” said the sun. “There is no change in me. The only difference is that I now feed you more directly than I feed that animal at your feet. It is the way I feed all trees. There is nothing else I can do.”

Phega knew the sun was right and that her bargain had been her own illusion. It was very bitter to her; but she had made a change that was too radical to undo now, and besides, she was discovering that trees do not feel things very urgently. She settled back for a long, low-key sort of contentment, rustling her leaves about to make the best of the sun’s heat on them. It was like a sigh.

After a while a certain activity among her roots aroused a mild arboreal curiosity in her. With senses that were rapidly atrophying, she perceived a middle-sized iron-gray animal with a sparse bristly coat, which was diligently applying its long snout to the task of eating her three-cornered nuts. The animal was decidedly snaggle-toothed. It was lean and had a sharp corner to the center of its back, as if that was all that remained of a wiry man’s military bearing. It seemed to sense her attention, for it began to rub itself affectionately against her gray trunk, which still showed vestiges of rounded legs within it.

Ah, well, thought the tree, and considerately let fall another shower of beech mast for it.

That was long ago. They say that Phega still stands on the hill. She is one of the beech trees that stand on the hill that always holds the last rays of the sun, but so many of the trees in that wood are so old that there is no way to tell which one she is. All the trees show vestiges of limbs in their trunks, and all are given at times to inexplicable thrashings in their boughs, as if in memory of the agony of Phega’s transformation. In the autumn their leaves turn the color of Phega’s hair and often fall only in spring, as though they cling harder than most leaves in honor of the sun.