Chapter 15
Carys
Two days before the bloom, we try for the first time to make my part and Madoc’s part work together, and it goes badly enough to scare us both.
The anchor stands in the yard now, raised, rooted, a great oak-and-iron thing with a living rowan heart I can hear humming faint and stubborn under all its dead bracing.
Madoc’s part is built. Mine isn’t a thing you build.
Mine’s a thing I have to do, on the night, at the seam, with a whole valley’s worth of grief pouring up out of the ground and a god deciding whether to be paid or to take.
So we practice. We have to. You don’t walk onto a bridge you’ve never once tested and ask it to hold an army.
It’s meant to work like this, the Keeper told me: I reach into the green and I sing it its own grief, true, named, out loud, so it knows at last that it’s heard.
And while I hold that note, Madoc’s anchor holds the door open against the cold one’s pull, so the green has room to be paid instead of forced.
My song and his structure, working the same seam at the same moment.
Neither’s any good without the other. His anchor with no true song is just a very stubborn tree.
My song with no anchor is just a woman shouting into a flood.
So Madoc sets both hands on the great root-joint, braced, ready to hold, and I kneel at the foot of the anchor with my palm flat to the cold ground, and I reach.
It’s worse than it was even a week ago, and that’s what frightens me.
The bloom’s coming on, the green’s waking fuller every hour, and where a week back the reach was a door I had to lean on to open, now it’s a door that swings wide the second I touch it and something on the other side is glad, so glad, too glad to see me.
I sing the grief, the true note, I hear you, you were promised and forgotten, I know, and the green turns the whole of its vast attention on me and drinks it down like a woman dying of thirst, and it’s working, I can feel it working, the sour edge easing out of the hum for the first time since I came.
And for one breath the two halves mesh. I feel it happen.
My song goes down into the green and the green settles under it, and at my back I feel the anchor take up the strain, the living rowan heart of it thrumming as it catches the pull and holds the door, and Madoc makes a low sound behind me, surprised, because he feels it too, feels the load come onto his joints clean and true and the structure answer it exactly as he built it to.
My grief-song and his rooted stubborn tree, working the same seam, and for one bright breath the green is being paid instead of taken and the whole valley’s hum turns sweet.
“That’s it,” Madoc breathes, wonder and strain both in it. “Carys, that’s it, I can feel it holding. Keep the note. Right there.”
And then it starts to pull me in.
Not cruel. Not the cold one. Just the plain enormous gladness of a lonely thing that’s found the one voice that ever heard it and does not, cannot, will not let go.
It wants me closer. It wants me all the way in.
My knees slide forward in the dirt before I’ve decided to move them, my palm pressing down into ground gone soft and warm and welcoming, and some far part of me thinks how easy, how easy it would be to just keep reaching, all the way down, to stay in the warm where I’m wanted.
His voice cracks across it like a snapped line.
“Carys.” And then his hand’s fisted in the back of my shirt, hauling me up and back off the ground, and the reach snaps and the ordinary evening slams down cold and blessed around me, and I’m gasping on my backside in the dirt with my nose bleeding and my heart going like a trapped bird.
“It pulled,” he says, grim, crouching over me, his thumb already wiping the blood off my lip. “Same as the meadow. I felt you go down toward it. Three breaths more and I’d have lost you into the ground with the anchor standing right there useless because I can’t follow you where you go.”
“I know.” My voice shakes. “It’s worse, Madoc.
It’s so much worse than it was. It’s not angry at me, that’s the trouble, the cold one I can brace against because it’s furious, but the green itself, the whole of it, it’s just so glad I can hear it that it wants to keep me close like you’d keep a fire banked against the cold, and I can barely, I can barely tell my own wanting from its wanting when I’m down in it.
” I press the back of my wrist to my nose.
“And it’s going to be ten times that on the bloom night, isn’t it.
When it’s pouring full. That’s what I have to do the working inside of. That.”
He doesn’t tell me it’ll be all right. He never does.
He pulls me into his chest, blood and all, and holds me there in the dirt at the foot of the thing he built, and we sit with the size of it, the two of us, and neither of us says the thing we’re both thinking, which is that my part of this asks me to walk into the exact deep water I’ve spent thirty years reading roads to avoid, and hold my own name against a god that wants to keep it, and trust that the man at the anchor can haul me back before I drown.
“Then I don’t take my hands off the anchor and I don’t take my eyes off you,” he says at last, into my hair. “You go down, I pull you up. As many times as it takes. You reach, I hold. It’s held twice now. It’ll hold on the night.”
“You can’t pull me up if you’re holding the anchor. You said it yourself. You can’t follow me where I go.”
He’s quiet a moment. “Then we’ll find the piece that can,” he says.
“There’s a piece of this we’re still missing.
The Keeper said three. Song, anchor, and the binding, the two who choose each other out loud.
Maybe that’s what the third one’s for. Maybe the binding’s the rope that reaches where my hands can’t.
” He tips my face up. “We’ve got two days to find out.
And I’m not spending either of them letting you practice drowning alone.
Enough for tonight. You’ve bled enough into my dirt for one evening. ”
“Romantic,” I say, wobbly, because the joke’s the only rope I’ve got and I climb it out of habit.
“‘You’ve bled enough into my dirt.’ You should put that on a sign.
Woo the ladies.” But I let him haul me up out of the dirt, and I lean into the great warm bulk of him harder than I’d admit to, and I feel how his heart’s still going too fast under all that stillness, because he felt it too, felt me start to go down where he can’t follow, and it frightened the man who doesn’t frighten.
Neither of us says the last of it. That in two days I have to go into the deep of that on purpose, at full pour, with a valley on it, and the only thing certain about the plan is the part where I nearly drown.
I let him carry the practice no further. But it sits in me, cold under everything, the knowledge of what the bloom night’s going to ask.
I can’t settle after. Madoc goes back to the anchor to fret over a joint, which is his way of not-fretting over me, and I take myself off to my hives in the last of the light because they’re the one thing I’ve ever known how to be calm around.
The surviving three hum their good even hum, settling for the night, and I put my palm on each lid and let it steady me, and I don’t reach, not tonight, I’ve reached enough for one evening.
I just stand with my hands on the warm boxes and my bees working honest and ordinary under them, and I tell them, because I always tell them, low, the thing I can’t quite tell him yet.
“I’m scared,” I say to the hive. “Not of the god. Well. Yes of the god. But mostly I’m scared of how much I want to stay.
I spent thirty years never wanting anything I couldn’t drive away from by morning, and now there’s a man and a goose and three good hives and a whole valley and I want all of it so badly it’s going to be the death of me, probably literally, in two days, and I don’t even care, and that’s the frightening part.
I’ve never once not cared about the leaving before. ”
The bees don’t answer. Bees never do. But saying it out loud to something that won’t hand me a comforting lie settles me like it always has, and I take my useless spoon of comb out of my apron pocket, the one I still carry from habit, and I taste it, because I keep hoping, and it’s nothing, texture and gold and a clean silence where thirty years of comfort used to live.
I stand in the dusk with a mouthful of tasteless honey and my hands on a hive and a god in the trees that wants to keep me, and I think: the green took the one sweet thing I carried for myself.
It reached into me and found it and took it.
And it does not get to have the other one.
The one I didn’t know I had till three weeks ago.
That one I’m keeping, and more than keeping, I’m going to go put my hands on it right now while it’s still mine to put my hands on, because who knows how many nights are left, and I’m done, I am so completely done, being careful about the wanting.
So maybe that’s why, when the fear won’t quiet and the wanting won’t either, I do what I do.
That second night, I don’t wait for the wanting to build.
I’ve watched a man tell a god no to my face for the sake of letting me choose, and I’ve felt that same green try to pull me down into it by the root not three hours past, and there’s only one answer I’ve got to all of it, and it isn’t patience.