Chapter 12
Madoc
We go up to cut the anchor’s heart at first light, because Carys says the veil sits thinnest at dusk and thickest in the hour after dawn, and if we’re going to take an axe to a god’s own trees I’d sooner do it in the hour the god’s least awake to feel it.
Our way up takes us past the little grave at the meadow’s edge, the oak marker I cut standing where I drove it over ten thousand dead bees, and Carys stops there in the grey without my asking her to.
She crouches and lays two fingers on the top of the marker, on the notch I squared, and doesn’t say anything to me, only something under her breath to the ground, and I stand and let her, because a man learns when to leave a woman to her own quiet.
When she gets up her eyes are wet and her chin is set, and she looks past the grave to the dark trees we’re walking into, and she says, “Right. I’ve told them where I’m going and why.
If it eats us I’d like the record to show I said goodbye properly this time.
” She takes my belt again. “Onward, before I lose my nerve about the eating part.”
The wildwood eaves are a different country from my yard, though they start not forty paces past my woodpile.
The good managed timber I cut for my trade grows in rows a man planted.
This doesn’t. The trees here are old past any telling, close-grown, roots humped up out of the ground like the knuckles of something buried, and even in the grey dawn there’s a green-gold weight to the light under them that belongs to no sunrise.
I’ve lived five years at the foot of this wood and never once walked in past the first trees.
My whole body tells me not to now. I go in anyway, axe on my shoulder, Carys a step behind me with her hand fisted in the back of my belt.
“Talk to me,” I say, low. “The second it turns. You’re my ears in here.”
“It’s awake,” she says, just as low. “Not the cold one, not yet. The whole of it. It knows we’re in. It’s watching. It’s not angry yet. It’s just, oh, it’s like walking into a room where everyone stops talking. It knows exactly what you’re carrying that axe for.”
I find the tree I want twenty paces in. A rowan, young for this wood, which means old for anywhere else, straight-grown and sap-heavy, standing right at the seam where the wild ground meets mine.
Living wood, green to the heart, still drinking.
The exact thing the anchor needs. And the moment I set my hand on its bark to judge the cut, the cold comes up out of the ground and into the soles of my boots.
“Madoc.” Carys’s voice has gone tight. “It felt you choose. It doesn’t like the choosing.”
“It’s not going to like any of this.” I set my feet, and I read the tree like I read everything, where it’ll fall, where the grain runs, how to take what I need and leave the tree the best chance of living, because I’m not here to kill it.
That matters, somehow. I’m not here to fell the green’s tree out of spite.
I’m here to borrow its living heart for a thing that has to root, and I mean to take it clean and leave the stump a chance to throw new growth, and I let the wood feel me mean it. Then I swing.
The first bite of the axe goes in and the whole wood screams.
Not a sound. Nothing my ears catch. But the cold slams up through my boots to my knees and the green-gold light lurches hard and thornish at the edges and every tree around us groans at once in a wind that isn’t blowing, and behind me Carys makes a small hurt sound and grabs two fists of my shirt.
“That got its attention,” she gets out. “That got all of its attention. Cut fast, Madoc, cut fast, the cold one’s turning this way, I can feel it coming up from deep, it’s, it’s a long way off still but it’s coming and it is not happy you’ve put steel in its tree.”
I cut fast. I’ve felled a hundred trees and never once like this, the cold running up my arms now, the axe-head frosting over between strokes so I have to knock the rime off it, the wood fighting the blade in a way green wood doesn’t fight, closing on the cut, trying to hold the axe.
I set my shoulders and I drive through it.
Chips fly white and wet with living sap that steams in the cold air, and I work the notch and then the back-cut, fast and clean, no wasted stroke, forty years of a trade poured into taking one rowan down before a god can cross a wood to stop me.
“Closer,” Carys says, and her voice is shaking now. “Madoc, it’s closer, it knows what the wood’s for now, it’s saying, it’s saying you’ll not build a cage out of my own body, it’s furious, it’s—”
“Almost.” The tree cracks at the heart. “Sing it back. Same as the fair. Buy me the last three strokes.”
And she does. Behind me, in a wood going cold and bright and wrong, my small sunny beekeeper plants her feet and lifts her voice and sings the green its own grief, the true note, the one no glamour survives, tells it out loud that she hears it, that it’s owed, that she knows, that the man cutting its tree isn’t stealing, he’s borrowing a heart to make a thing that’ll finally let the debt be paid instead of taken, hold on, hold on, we’re not your enemy, hold the fury three more breaths.
And the cold, rushing toward us, hitches.
Slows. Doesn’t stop, but slows, held off the length of a woman’s true voice.
I take the last three strokes and the rowan comes down clean, falling away from the both of us exactly where I read it, and I’ve got the heart-length I need, green and dripping and cold in my hands, the living heart of the anchor cut out of the green’s own body.
“Now we go,” Carys says. “Now, Madoc, right now, I can’t hold it gentle much longer and I don’t want to be in its trees when it stops being sad and starts being quick.”
We go. I shoulder the green log and take her hand and we walk out of the wildwood fast and steady, no running, because you don’t run from a thing that hunts, and the cold chases us to the very eave and then breaks against the open dawn like a wave against a seawall and can’t follow past the last tree.
We come out into my ordinary muddy yard in the plain grey morning, both of us shaking, the log steaming between us, and Carys sits down hard on the chopping block and laughs the wild high laugh of somebody who’s just been more frightened than they’ve got a name for.
“We stole a god’s tree,” she says. “We walked into its own trees and stole its heart out from under it. I’m going to be sick and then I’m going to want breakfast and I’m not sure in which order.”
“You held it off.” I set the log down and I look at her, small and green-lit and shaking on my chopping block, who just stood in a hunting wood and sang a furious god still with her bare voice so I could swing an axe.
“Three strokes. You bought me the whole thing with three strokes. I’d not have got it out without you. ”
“You reach, I hold,” she says, wobbly, throwing my own words back at me for the second time. “Works both directions, turns out. Somebody enormous told me that once. He was very bossy about it.”
I get her inside and warm and fed, and I set the green heart-log by the forge, and then I do the thing I’ve been aching to do since the shape first stood up in my head. I join the living heart to the dead frame.
It’s the hardest joint I’ve ever cut. Green wood and seasoned wood don’t want to marry, one still moving and swelling with its own sap, the other four years still, and a lesser joiner would peg them tight and watch the green wood split the dead as it dried and the whole works fail in a season.
I don’t peg it tight. I cut the join loose in exactly the right places, a joint that lets the living wood breathe and move and settle as it wills, holds it firm where it must hold and free where it must give, so the two woods can be one thing without one killing the other.
It takes me the whole day and most of my skill and I get it, at last, near dusk, the green heart seated into the braced dead frame so clean you’d swear the tree grew into the harness, and I stand back from it in the failing light and there it is, the anchor, not finished but real now, a made thing with a living heart, standing in my yard where this morning there was only a sketch on a wall.
Carys comes and stands with me looking at it, her shoulder against my arm. She’s been near me the whole day, doing small quiet things at the edge of my work, keeping me company through it without once getting underfoot, which is its own kind of skill.
“It’s alive,” she says, quiet. “I can hear it. The heart of it. It’s very faint and it’s very stubborn and it’s a little bit frightened, and it’s alive, Madoc.
You built a living thing.” She leans her head against my arm.
“Of course you did. You collect frightened living things and give them somewhere to stand. It’s the only thing you know how to do.
You’ve just done it in oak and rowan this time instead of geese. ”
I don’t have an answer for that. I put my arm round her instead, and we stand in the dusk looking at the living thing I built out of a stolen heart and forty years of knowing how things break, and the cut we made together this morning sits between us like a thing survived, which does something to two people that no easy day ever could.
She doesn’t move back to her own side of the bed the second night, and by the second dusk with a god two days off, the careful distance I’ve kept my whole life gives out all at once, and I let it.
We’ve been circling it since the shed. A kiss doesn’t undo three weeks of wanting.
It only tells you exactly how much of it there was to undo.
I’ve spent the day at the anchor with my hands busy and my head anywhere but on the wood, and she’s spent it near me, close, finding reasons, a hand at my back, her hip against my arm as she leans in to see a joint, both of us pretending the fair still needs us more than we need the loft.