Chapter 17
Carys
The last night before the bloom, the fair throws the best party I’ve ever stood in, because a town that’s been told the world might end tomorrow turns out to know exactly how to spend the night before.
We rehearse the working first, in the meadow at dusk, all of us, and it’s a strange and holy thing to be inside of.
Madoc walks the town out to the anchor and sets them in their places one by one, patient, like he’d set posts for a frame.
Here, and here, and you here, big man, you can take the north side where the pull comes strongest. He puts their hands on the great rooted joint of the anchor so they’ll know its shape in the dark, forty hands laid on a thing of oak and iron and stolen living rowan, and I watch a whole town touch the thing that might save it and go quiet at the humming warmth of the living heart under the dead wood, the frightened one, the saved one, the one he cut out of the green’s own body and I sang still while he did it.
They feel it’s alive. It changes how they hold it.
Then I walk them through the words, the plain ones, no magic to them at all.
I choose this town. I choose these people.
Orc and human, I choose them, and I say so out loud.
That’s the human half of a bargain older than the war, and it’s so simple the innkeeper laughs the first time, nervous, sure she’s doing it wrong because it can’t be that easy.
It is that easy. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing there is, which is why we broke it in the first place.
I make her say it anyway. Her voice shakes on “I choose these people” and she has to stop and start again, and the second time it comes out steady, and the old clanswoman standing next to her says it back in the orc tongue, low, the same words in the language of the people this town spent a war killing, and the innkeeper reaches over without looking and takes the old orc woman’s hand, human fingers laced with grey-green ones, and neither of them makes a thing of it.
And that’s the working. Right there. Before a single bloom has opened or a god has come.
Two enemy peoples, in a ring, choosing the same town out loud with their hands joined, and I have to turn away and pretend to check the anchor because if I watch one more human take one more orc’s hand and mean it I’m going to cry in front of the whole valley the night before I might die.
Something moves through the ring of them that isn’t magic yet but is the exact shape the magic will pour into tomorrow, and I know, watching it, that the Keeper was right, that this was always the answer, that the green didn’t need to be beaten, it needed to be shown that the promise it was made could be made again and meant. If we live to finish it.
Then we go back and we dance, because Ordun insists, because a man who’s been marched at by a god twice in two days has earned a reel.
I make Madoc dance. Actually dance, this time, not stand at the edge like a sunk post. He’s terrible at it.
He’s enormous and grave and mouths the steps under his breath and treads on my feet twice and apologizes both times, and I laugh so hard I have to stop and hold his arm, and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole moving life, dancing badly with a serious orc in a frightened town on the last night before the end of everything.
The lanterns swing. Ordun’s mead, the batch that hasn’t turned, goes round.
Somebody’s fiddle finds the tune my old keeper used to hum, the one I hum to the bees, and I go still in the middle of the dance floor with my hand over my mouth, and Madoc bends down and asks what’s wrong, and I tell him nothing’s wrong, that’s the miracle of it, and I make him hold me and sway to my keeper’s tune under the lanterns while the whole warded town spins around us.
And it isn’t only us. The whole frightened town dances.
That’s the thing I’ll remember, if I get to remember anything after tomorrow.
They’ve spent the day carrying iron and cutting marks and being marched at by a god, and instead of going home to be afraid, they pour onto the green and they dance like the dancing itself is a kind of defiance, which it is.
The dairyman spins his five-year-old girl till she shrieks with laughing.
The candle-seller’s boy works up the nerve to ask a girl his own age and she says yes and they stand on each other’s feet exactly like Madoc and me.
And out at the edge, where I never once thought I’d see it, two of the young Stonefang traders teach a knot of human girls a clan reel, orcs and humans stamping the same steps in the lantern-light, laughing at the ones who get it wrong, and it is the working, again, before the working, the thing the green needs made out of a dance instead of a vow.
Ordun watches it from his bench with his soured-cask grief set down for one night and something wet and bright in his old eyes, and he catches me watching him watch it, and he lifts his cup, and I lift Madoc’s arm, and we don’t have to say the thing.
Look what we made. Look what she gathered. Look at the two peoples dancing.
For one hour, we are not a beekeeper and a joiner against a god. We’re just two people who found each other late and stupid and against every sensible plan, dancing, in a whole town of people doing the same, on the last free night any of us may ever get.
Then the veil tears, and I find out what we’ve really been dealing with.
It happens at full dark, at the height of the reel, and it doesn’t come soft or thornish or from the edge of things.
It comes down the middle of the fair like a blade opening a seam.
The lanterns gutter all at once. The fiddle dies mid-note.
And the air over the dancing ground splits, a long vertical wound in the ordinary dark, green-gold light pouring out of it too bright to look at straight, and the cold comes through it in a wave that puts frost on the summer grass, and the whole town screams and scatters and I stand rooted, because I’ve heard this thing and felt this thing but I have never once seen it, and now I do.
It steps through.
I’d braced for a monster. It would have been easier if it were a monster.
What comes through the tear in the world is beautiful, which is so much worse.
Tall as the old trees and no taller, a shape of bark and thorn and something older than either, crowned in a wreath of the deadest, greyest, most perfect roses I’ve ever seen, roses souring even as I look at them, the tithe gone bad made into a crown.
Its face is a face only as a mask is a face, held light where the eyes should be, and its expression, if the still cold beauty of it can be called an expression, is grief worn so long it’s gone to iron.
It is the loveliest and the most terrible thing I have ever laid eyes on, and it has come, at last, out of the trees and into the town, to be seen.
You made them a promise, it says, and its dry cracked voice fills the whole ruined fair, not for me now, for all of them, for the scattered screaming town.
All of you. Your grandmothers’ grandmothers.
You made the green a promise and I stood witness to it.
I vouched for you. I told my own court that the mortal peoples could be trusted to remember a kindness.
It turns its terrible held-light gaze slow across the town, and where it looks the sweet things sour, jars bursting, the last good mead going grey in the cask, a whole fair’s worth of honey dying at a glance.
And you forgot. You mocked the ones who remembered.
You made a liar of me before everything I ever answered to, for a hundred years, and tomorrow the debt comes due in full, and I have come tonight only to let you look at what you cheated, so that you know, when I collect, exactly whose trust you spent.
It lifts one long hand, and it points, not at me, at the crowd, at a girl, the candle-seller’s girl, the first child who ever went cold at the treeline, standing frozen at her mother’s skirts, and the mark on her own door is a hundred yards away and does her no good here in the open, and the cold reaches for her across the whole fairground, and her mother’s scream is the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
I don’t think. I sing.
Not the small reach. Not the careful learning.
I open the whole of myself as the Keeper taught me and I throw my listening across the fairground and into the tear in the world and I do the one thing I’ve got, which is to be heard, and I sing the true note of the grief in that thing, its own grief, its hundred years of being made a fool, straight back at it, named, witnessed, out loud, in front of the whole town.
“I HEAR YOU,” I scream at it, and it isn’t only words, it’s the whole of my craft poured into three of them.
“I hear you, you were cheated, you were shamed, you trusted us and we spat on it, I HEAR YOU, and I am so sorry, and it was wrong, and you are OWED. There. Somebody finally said it. Somebody finally heard you. Now let the child go, because she never cheated you, her grandmothers did, and you know the difference, you were a thing that kept promises once, you know the difference between a debt and a child.”
The whole fair has gone silent.
I’ve never heard a silence like it. A hundred people who a breath ago were screaming and running, gone dead still, because the small loud bee-woman has planted herself in the open between a god and a child and is shouting the god’s own grief into its face, and nobody, human or orc, has ever seen the like, and nobody dares move for fear of breaking whatever fragile impossible thing is happening in the frost-white middle of their fair.