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Plantes. They moved many of my specimens there, but not this one. My nephew, Vespasien, insisted they leave it here because he knew what had become of me. I hate to think what would have happened had they tried to dig me up!” He shuddered so hard that a few of the lumignon perched on his shoulders and knees flew up in a flurry of multicolored wings and then settled down again. I noticed that when they brushed their wings along Jean Robin’s “skin,” the wood gleamed more brightly. They were, I saw with wonder, polishing him.
    “But how…?” I began.
    “Ah, it happened when I was seventy-nine. I knew I had very little time left on earth … heh, heh, I didn’t know yet how much time I’d have under it!… and I’d come to visit my dear pseudoacacia, which I’d planted twenty-seven years earlier. I just wanted to make sure it was doing well … growing straight, you know, with enough room to spread its roots. The pseudoacacia likes to spread its roots. It was a warm summer day and the tree was in full bloom, its lovely white blossoms scenting the air. When I’d pruned a few branches and cleared away some saplings, which threatened to encroach on its space, I sat down in its shade and leaned my head on its trunk. I could feel the lifeblood in me fading as I listened to the sap flowing strong in her veins. I remember I had the distinct idea that as long as the sap ran in the tree I’d planted, I wouldn’t really be dead.” Jean Robin’s voice, which had grown from gruff to wistful, lapsed into silence. I thought I could hear in that silence the rustle of a summer wind through leafy boughs and the sultry drone of bees in the heavy-hanging blossoms. I waited for him to finish his story.
    “When I woke up, I was here in the lair of the lumignon below my beloved pseudoacacia. They had lain me among the roots—to die, I imagine, but then the tree itself wrapped its roots around me and took me into itself. It fed me its own sap as a mother would feed its young, sharing its own lifeblood with me. Over time its cells replaced my own, much as quartz crystals may grow in wood, turning it into petrified wood, and I became as you see me now. A wooden man or, as I prefer to think of myself … a manly root!” His chuckle was more constrained than before. I had the feeling that reliving his past had made him a bit melancholy.
    “That’s amazing,” I said. “And you’ve remained so … alert. How did you learn to speak English so well?”
    “Ah, my friends the lumignon, recognizing my hunger for knowledge, have brought me books and information over the years. That’s how I learned about you. The fey community has been all abuzz about the arrival of the Watchtower in Paris.”
    “The fey community? You mean there are more of them?” Although I’d met half a dozen fairies in New York, I hadn’t thought of them as a community exactly. They had seemed more like a handful of scattered exiles who had all managed to disappear without a trace once they were done with me. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a larger population here in Paris.
    “Oh my, yes! The Parisian fey community is one of the largest and oldest in the world. It is composed of three main classes…”
    The minute he began, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was a botanist, after all, trained to classify and catalog. I could be here all night listening to a disquisition on fairy phyla while what I really wanted to know was when Will had been sighted in Paris and how long ago he had left. I felt bad interrupting him, though. As he had said, he didn’t get many visitors, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know a little more about the local fairy population. They might be able to lead me to Will. So I settled onto my stool to listen.
    “The arboreal fey, or les fées des bois, are considered by most experts to be the original indigenous species,” he was saying. “They are so old that they don’t remember themselves when they first came