Chapter 9
Carys
Iwake with my hand hanging off the edge of the bed and two of Madoc’s fingers hooked loose around my wrist from where he slept on the floor, and neither of us lets go for a good while after we’re both awake enough to know we’re doing it.
Neither of us mentions it, either. He gets up first, careful not to jostle the frame, and goes down to see about a fire, and I lie there in a bed I’m getting far too fond of and look at the ceiling and try to talk myself out of the size of what I’m feeling.
It doesn’t take. I’ve never once in my life talked myself out of a feeling.
I only ever talk myself into the next town before the feeling can put down roots.
And here I am with roots going down through the floor of a woodwright’s loft, and a god in the trees, and no next town I can make myself want.
So I do the brave thing, which for me is the terrified thing dressed up in a work apron. I go find the Keeper.
I don’t tell Madoc that part till we’re already halfway to the meadow, because I know exactly what his face will do, and it does it. The jaw. The stop-walking. The whole grim architecture of a man deciding whether to physically pick me up and carry me the other direction.
“You want to go back to the thing that nearly took you into the ground,” he says.
“Not that one. The other one. The sad one, from the first night, the grieving one. The cold angry one is the one that wants to collect. But the sad one knows things, Madoc. She’s the one who told me it’s owed in the first place, and she said it like it grieved her too, and I think, I think if anyone in that green wants this to end well, it’s her.
” I keep walking so he has to keep up or leave me, and he’d sooner die than leave me, and we both know it, so he keeps up.
“I can’t pay a debt I don’t understand. And I’m the only person who can even hear the terms. So I’m going to go ask the one who might tell me true.
And you’re going to stand behind me with your hand ready, and if the cold one comes instead, you haul me out same as before. ”
“That’s a great deal of trust to put in the guess that you can tell them apart in time.”
“It is,” I agree. “Welcome to my whole life. I read people right and roads wrong, and I have bet everything I own on the first half of that more than once, and I’m still here.” I bump my shoulder into his arm, which is as high as I reach. “Mostly still here.”
He doesn’t laugh. But his hand comes to rest at the back of my neck for a second, warm and enormous and unbearably gentle, before he takes it away. It’s not a thing he decides to do. It just happens, out of him, and it says more than any of the arguing.
The meadow’s quiet in the early gold. Good hums from the good hives. And at the far end, near the trees, the ground itself waiting, patient, that low grieving note pushed up soft under the clover.
I walk my hives before I do anything else.
I always do. You don’t reach into a colony without first standing a minute where they can see you and reading the day off them, like you’d knock before you walked into somebody’s kitchen.
The three good ones are busy and even this morning, foragers coming in gold-legged off the clover, and I put my hand flat on each lid in turn and feel the hum come up warm and content into my palm, and it steadies me more than anything a god or a joiner’s said all week.
It’s the fourth one that catches at my throat.
The box closest to the tree-line, the one that went wrong my first week here, the sour one, the one I knelt beside at dusk with the sad gold fae watching and coaxed back from whatever had gotten into its roots.
I healed that hive. Days ago. Sang it steady and felt it settle under my palm and been quietly proud of it every morning since.
When I set my hand to that lid now the hum comes up so glad and so ordinary, a saved thing thriving, that my throat goes tight over it.
Good bees. My good, healed, faithful bees, working honest work in good light, no notion at all that they’re the nearest box to a door into the whole grieving green, and no notion at all what a frightened woman does with the nearest thing to hand.
“Morning, loves,” I tell them, quiet, because I always tell them, and because I want the last ordinary thing I say to them to be a kind one, though I don’t know yet that it’s the last. “Bear with me. I’m about to do something I don’t know how to do, and I’d give a great deal not to need you for it.
” Then I make myself stop being tender at a beehive and go do the frightening thing.
I kneel at the edge of it, well back from the tree-shadow this time, and Madoc kneels behind me and lays one hand flat and open between my shoulder blades, not gripping, just there, a wall at my back I can lean into the second I need to.
I put my palm to the warm grass, and I don’t shove my whole self out into the green like I did before.
I go soft. I go small. I do the thing I do to a swarm that’s frightened, which is make myself the least alarming thing in the field, and I ask, gentle, for the sad one, and only the sad one, please.
She comes soft, and gold, and grieving, and I could weep at the relief of it being her.
You came back, the Keeper says, that voice of a hundred small hums layered into one. There’s the ache in it still, old as the first fenced field. Braver than the last, or more foolish. The two wear one face at your age.
“Teach me,” I say, out loud, because I can’t make my mind small enough to send it and hold myself soft at once.
“The other one, the cold one, it wants the tithe out of the jars or the children or me, and I can’t let it, and I can’t fight it, so there has to be a third road.
There’s always a third road, I’ve talked my way onto a hundred of them.
Teach me how to pay you. Teach me what the green will take that doesn’t cost a child. ”
The grief in the voice deepens, and there’s a fondness folded into it now that frightens me worse than the cold one’s hunger did, because it’s the fondness of someone who’s about to tell you a true thing you won’t like.
You cannot pay it in coin, or in prayers, or in a mark cut on a doorframe by a good man’s frightened hands, she says, gentle, and behind me I feel Madoc go still at that, heard and named.
The tithe is the sweetness of the living land, given back with intent.
It was given for an age, and then it was forgotten, and the forgetting is the wound.
You want to know how to pay it. First you must learn to give the green your listening.
All of it. Not the little reach you spend on a sick hive.
The whole of what you are. Reach past the box.
Reach past the field. Reach into the living green itself and let it know it is heard.
That is the first payment. It is only listening.
But listening the whole way down costs more than you have yet spent.
“Show me.”
Then reach, she says, and I will hold the shape of it so it does not take you. But child. Whatever answers, however it hurts, do not pull the reach back through anything living. Let it go slack. Let it fall. Never drag it home through a life.
I don’t fully understand the warning. That’s the thing about warnings from old grieving gods. You understand them exactly one moment too late.
I reach.
Not the shove of the first day, the one that got hauled at. Not the soft small ask I opened with. I reach the whole way she named, and it’s like opening a door I didn’t know was a door, in a wall I’d lived against my whole life without once leaning on it. The green pours in.
Not gently. It doesn’t come to me the size of a hive or a meadow.
It comes the size of everything. The clover under my knees, singing its small green sap-song, and behind it the whole field, and behind the field the old trees grieving, and behind them, going down and down, the slow enormous patient roots of the entire living valley, every growing thing that ever fed a bee or fell to rot or pushed up new through the rot of the last, all of it turning at once toward the first mortal throat that’s spoken into it since before anyone’s grandmother drew breath.
I feel it notice me, and the noticing is what undoes me, a green attention vaster than weather swinging round to fix on the small warm speck of me kneeling at its edge, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever felt and it is far, far too much, and I have made a channel the width of one woman’s arm and asked an ocean to say hello through it.
And the ocean leans in.
Let it go slack, the Keeper said. Let it fall.
Never drag it home through a life. I hear her, even now, and I try.
I honestly try. I open my hand against the grass and I tell my own reach to go loose, to spill out onto the ground and drain off harmless into the field like she showed me, and for half a breath it almost does.
Then the weight comes down in earnest, the plain crushing weight of a thing that vast pouring back down a channel far too small for it, and it’s on me, in me, filling me past what I’m built to hold, and every animal part of me that has ever survived anything screams one word, which is out, and a body that’s frightened does not obey a dead god’s careful instructions.
A body that’s frightened runs for the nearest door it knows.
And I do the one thing she told me not to do.
I pull the reach back home. Fast. Hard. Down the fastest channel I’ve got, which is the thing I’ve always reached through, the thing that’s always been safe, the nearest hive.
I feel it go through them like flood through a house.