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Instead, she slid easily from the opening as though being born from that gap in the tree, only in reverse. She had thought of the tree as the heart of the forest, of the tunnel as the bowels of the tree, and there was a richness and warmth and dark life to the tree that fed her comparisons to biology. But as she drew herself up beside her brother and glanced around at the interior, at the smooth wood of that massive hollow, she realized it was more a womb than anything else. The space was ten, perhaps twelve feet wide, and high enough that the magical luminescence of William's spell did not reach its height. And there, upon blankets of black and gold and white fur that no human hands had wrought, lay seven human children, perfect infants, each one as different from the others as could be. Some were fair and some dark, some sleeping and some wide-eyed and alert. Some were red-faced with tears, sobbing but exhausted. And at the centre a single babe with wisps of reddish hair screamed with such ferocity that Tamara worried that the child's heart would burst.
Not one of them was more than two months old.
"Oh my God, William. Look at them," Tamara whispered. And now she thought it might be her own heart that burst.
"I... I wondered if it was a trap," he confessed.
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