Chapter Thirteen Within
Chapter Thirteen
Within
The forest grew deeper, dusky with the colossal shadows of ancient trees. The silence was profound, heavy with millennia of unsung songs and carefully kept secrets. My breath fogged as I exhaled, although the air kissing my arms no longer felt cold.
“What is this place?” My words jangled through the air, a profanity in this undeniably sacred space. The wood stilled even further, rebuking me with faint attention.
Do you not remember? ínne seemed so perfectly at ease here, I half expected them to have grown roots.
“I’ve never been here before.” I would have remembered this wonder and awe leafing through my chest. I would have remembered these widely spaced trunks, this canopy dense as a night sky. If this was a memory, it wasn’t mine. “Perhaps, for once, we could do away with the riddles.”
As you wish. ínne stepped through the gloaming toward the nearest vast tree. What do you see?
The gnarled trunk and lofting branches spoke to the tree’s age; its serrated leaves and draped yellow catkins told me it was some form of hazel. My eyes followed the undulations of growth, the whorls and burls and faces—
Shock pumped ice water through my veins.
It was a face—a woman’s, Folk Gentry, embedded in the trunk a few inches above my eye level.
No, not embedded—for she was made of wood, though I could not guess whether the tree had grown around her or she had somehow become the tree.
I stepped closer as my fear subsided, and saw the subtle outline of the rest of her form, merged effortlessly with the tree’s bark.
She was… arresting. Her figure seemed poised in motion—one pointed foot stepping off the ground while her other knee bent.
Her torso twisted as she reached, reached, a subtle flow of fabric falling over her generous breasts.
And her face. She gazed outward as if bewitched by some sight or sound I could neither see nor hear.
A glimmer of emerald flashed from the center of her breastbone.
“Who is she?” I could not take my eyes away from her exquisite face.
Her name was Eibhlín, said the figure, with tenderness. She was the first.
I searched for meaning in the Bright One’s shrouded expression. “The first what?”
The first heir to the Treasure of the Sept of Antlers. They lifted a hand, clawed and furred, and gestured expansively toward the forest spilling out around us. This is your birthright, child. Your legacy. And your last resting place.
A chill ghosted over my skin, raising a shiver in its wake.
I glanced again at the frozen maiden, then peered deeper between the trees.
Now that I knew what to look for, my eyes snagged on the suggestions of more figures entombed in the trees.
An outstretched arm. A reaching hand. An upturned face.
My unease intensified, pebbling my arms with gooseflesh as I began to understand.
This was no mere forest. It was a mausoleum. A necropolis of trees.
Every trunk a gravestone, every sighing breeze an epitaph.
Although they had to die for the magic of our Treasure to be renewed, their memories live on. Emotion, deep and heart-wrenching, threaded ínne’s voice. Here. Forever.
“But… where are we?” I had forgotten Talah for long moments, but now the thought of her encroached. I imagined her molten metal and scarlet flames wreaking havoc upon the sacred stillness of this grove. The thought turned my stomach. “Is this inside my memories? Or yours? Or—”
You. And they. And it—the Bright One reached out and tapped the Heart of the Forest; the stone flashed emerald in the dim, belling a note like homecoming—are we. Something borrowed. Something shared. Something taken. Something taught.
I frowned—the words echoed through me with a formless familiarity I could not name. I struggled to make sense of them.
“You’re saying this place exists both inside and outside of me?” I wrapped my palm around the Heart, as much for comfort as for understanding. “But only because I inherited this Treasure?”
I took the neutral weight of their silence as assent.
“Show me, then.” If Talah had not found me here yet, then I did not mind lingering.
I was curious about all these fallen heirs—had been curious about them from the moment I had learned of the Treasures.
From the moment I had learned who I truly was.
“If the memories of these past heirs are a part of me—if they live on inside me—then I want to know their stories. I want to know them. I want to know you.”
The Bright One’s regard was infinite, compelling. Somehow both seeing… and seen.
When the first chieftains ordered the Treasures forged, Eibhlín volunteered to carry the weight of this immense burden, to shoulder the responsibility of such power. She was brave and honorable and kind. She went to the first tithe in ecstasy and gratitude. We loved her. As she loved us.
For the length of a heartbeat, Eibhlín seemed to move within the tree, like a child stirring in sleep.
The Bright One paced onward, ducking beneath the low-sloping branches of a huge oak with gemstone leaves and pale gray bark.
The figure interred in this tree was male, with a handsome, brazen face and a stark, muscular figure.
Cuan. Our little wolf. Affection blossomed in ínne’s psychic voice. He, too, volunteered. In the beginning, all Folk were potential heirs for the Treasures. Magic was so plentiful then. We were as legion as the forest. As endless as the plains. As strong as the ancient oaks.
I stared at the face of a man who had died for magic nearly a millennium ago yet who somehow lived on in me. Or… through me? I wasn’t sure I understood. “What happened?”
We began to weaken. Sorrow touched the Bright One’s voice.
All four of us who bound ourselves to Treasures began to weaken.
We thought channeling our wild magic through conduits into Folk vessels would protect it from the voracious greed of the humans who sought to bleed our resources dry.
But we should never have agreed to bind ourselves to the Treasures.
The cycle was not robust enough. The balance, uneven.
I knew parts of this story. But this was my first time hearing it from a source.
The Bright One moved on, weaving between thick trunks.
There were more figures growing from the wood, more faces blindly watching us pass.
ínne paused beside each; sometimes, the compassionate touch of their clawed hand seemed to shift the expressions of the old heirs.
Unclenching a frown long held, turning a smile more serene.
Clodagh. They spoke the names of the long dead with reverence. Aodh. Bradan.
They stopped at last before a tall, weighty sycamore swaying in an invisible breeze. The woman entombed in the tree looked older, with graceful lines bracketing her smile and endless, unseeing eyes.
It soon became clear the magic flowing to and from the heirs was not as strong as it once had been.
The number of those fit to inherit the Treasures dwindled.
We all knew something was wrong. The Bright One touched the woman’s hand.
Her name was Líadan. Through her, we begged to be set free of our prison.
We had been enslaved once before, an age ago; we never thought those who had set us free once would themselves, in turn, keep us enslaved.
The Folk said they did not know how to free us, and perhaps that was true. But they never sought to learn.
A terrible pity rose in me at the Bright One’s words, and I abruptly remembered what Gavida had said to me after Rogan and Irian battled in the arena: I know not how to unforge the Treasures.
I am not even sure it can be done. Not the right way—not without warping the source by destroying the conduit or the vessel.
But the truth was, the Bright One continued, moving slowly onward through the stillness of the grove, the power of the Treasures was too great for the Septs to relinquish.
Even as it slowly diminished, they clung to it all the harder.
Year after year. Tithe after tithe. Heir after heir.
In time, they retreated to their strongholds lest anyone steal from them what they claimed as birthright.
Until the dynasties they guarded so jealously were themselves felled.
I knew the rest of this story. Heirs like Irian and Deirdre were hidden away by their Septs as the magic of the Treasures found fewer and fewer potential vessels.
Dissident Gentry began to grumble about the balance of power wielded by the Septs.
In the human realms, a high king and his queen began to wonder whether the Folk’s precious Treasures might be the answer to the wars, plagues, and famines tarnishing their lands. It was where my own story began.
The Bright One paused beside one last tree, a mighty yew with swirling gray bark that looked purple in the dim.
I glanced at the figure sepulchred in the trunk, only to startle away.
I stumbled over a root, nearly falling. Shock brambled fear against the inside of my skin.
I squinted at the figure in the tree—a young woman with waving dark hair and slender limbs, her eyes gazing upward and her palms lifted toward the sky as if in supplication.
A young woman who looked exactly like me.
“But she’s—” I swallowed, hard, and wrapped my hands around my arms as if to ensure I was truly standing here.
Warm and breathing and alive. I remembered a frigid night a year ago, when I’d stood dripping and bleeding on a beach and a tall Gentry heir had looked at my face and said, It’s you.
I glanced sharply at the Bright One. “Is this Deirdre? Is this woman my mother?”
No. The Bright One, boundless and benign, placed their clawed paw upon the neighboring tree, a pale-boughed ash with an unblemished trunk. Deirdre lives.