Excerpt

Hikola's eyes were cloudy, had been cloudy for centuries. But she saw.

One gnarled hand reached out and touched the oak. Her fingers were bent, but her touch was light and sure. She knew this tree as well as she knew her own body. The trunk was bent and twisted, like her. Her fingers trailed up and found two holes, one set beside the other like eyes. Her hand roamed south, and one yellowed nail drew a loop around a third hole, the largest and widest.

This, the lone tree at the centre of the Fallowgrounds, had stood for two hundred eighty-four springs. It would stand for many more. Its naked branches stretched like flailing hands. Its bark was rotten and reeked of decay; the stink of it was almost enough to overwhelm the stench of the ash that blanketed the Fallowgrounds like snow. Hikola breathed through her mouth. Her wheezing was the only sound in a place that had once rang with celebration and feasting.

Hikola let her hand fall from the tree. Then she stood for a while and remembered.

Behind her, weight shifted from bare foot to bare foot. Her nephew, Jaranim, made a sound of disgust as ashes crumbled beneath his weight but offered no other complaint. He was a patient boy. No, a man, now, she corrected herself. Seventy-four springs grown. Well, she was three hundred. To her, he was still a sapling.

Jaranim shifted again.

"Something weighs on your mind," Hikola said without turning to face him. His heart rate accelerated. Although they stood on a thick carpet of ash, she could sense him. The layer of things best forgotten—though she never would—was a patina of dead skin, hardly thick enough to block her connection with the Mother.

"We have made this journey every spring since I can remember," Jaranim said.

She did not turn.

"It pains me to be here, Aunt. My lungs cry out for fresh air. Yours do as well."

She waited. The blank canvas of her eyes dimmed as clouds suffocated the sun.

"Mother never told me why she wanted to return to the earth here, at this place." He made a face she could not see, yet she saw. "I do not understand."

She waited.

"One tree grows," he continued. "Is she—"

"It does not grow," she snapped.

Silence. Her sense of him through the earth faded and sharpened, faded and sharpened. Confusion. Hikola silently admonished herself. She was a druidess, and too old for such agitation.

"We do not grow when we return to the earth," she said, soft as a leaf against the cheek. "Flesh to wood, blood to root."

"To sway in the breeze, and forever be," Jaranim finished.

Hikola let the silence stretch for a time. "What do you know of your mother?"

"Yamalyn Kalliphaeia d'Oakia was a renowned druidess."

"Indeed. Fully committed to the Mother and Her will."

Jaranim's mouth tightened. "But she was cold for one charged with growth and warmth." He swallowed. "I am sorry, Aunt. I should not speak ill of the dead."

"Do not be sorry. You are half correct. Your mother was not cold. She was…" Broken. As hollow as a dead trunk.

Perhaps the truth should be passed on. If that was to be, it must be on this day.

"Would you like to know her?" Hikola asked.

Silence again. Her sense of him grew and shrank, coloured and paled. Seventy-four springs' worth of consideration. Ash crunched as he came to stand beside her. She felt him reach for the tree. She caught his hand, lowered it to his side. At last the vibrations of his anger and impatience grew still. She released her grip.

"Let me know her." His words were a whisper, but pleading. "Please, Aunt. I would know everything. Who she was. How she lived. How she…" He swallowed hard.

Tears leaked from the crow's feet around her eyes—the first tears she had shed in centuries. She sighed, and the years piled atop her shoulders like stones grew heavier.

"Very well."