Post by No Face on Apr 22, 2024 14:37:04 GMT -5
It was not an easy descent. Every nerve begged her to let it tighten, every inch of her skin crawled as if the darkness she traveled through could be felt through tactile sensations. She made herself go forward through it, just as she had made herself take the steep, twisting stairs down to see Missus White.
The Guardians were with her there in that place of gnarled tree root and evergreen scent. There were no words to come from her as she focused on her footing. The ground was uneven, the roots that came to form the stairs they needed to travel felt strange beneath her feet.
The roots and bark were a godsend in comparison to the smooth and close confines of the stairway that led down to Missus White. Having reached the bottom, Liessel felt no less steady.
The tree was there, though, solid and true.
"Syrefi?" She asked, her voice quiet as ever, but seeming to echo in her ears through that darkness.
Not far behind was Adeline Webber.
The dark space they wandered through did not send the spike of fear through her spin as it did with Liessel.
"I am here with you." Adeline whispered as if sensing Liessel's unease while they made the trek down. "You are not alone."
Liessel did not reach the bottom. Her feet told her that there was less and less earth between each root. Her skin would tell her likewise. She and Adeline had passed through a closeness of earth, but the air had freshened.
Under the ground now, with no view behind them, a breeze blew.
The light came even as Adeline answered Liessel, and the quality of her voice was as if she had spoken aboveground, without walls. Liessel, in the lead, would step down once more when the dark beneath her began to brighten to sky blue. Adeline, following, would make progress into the same shift.
In the first glimmer of this blue, Liessel would see what she held on to, and what her footing was:
The Fortingall Yew was here just as it was above, but upside down, fully inverted, like the figure on a playing card. She stepped not on roots any longer, but on branches.
It was not earth below her, but endless, endless sky down there, and not a hint of land.
The blue continued to intensify as if Liessel had stepped into a world experiencing late afternoon.
Adeline's voice came just as the light was shifting, and Liessel muttered "Thank you," then suddenly night became day! Liessel almost stopped moving. Her feet wanted to falter over the branches that she and Adeline were stepping down.
It was endless sky! Bright, and blue! And the tree, upside down as it was, was magnificent. It had been a glory in the dark of night with its branches haunted by those ghostly people, the cluster of its twining trunk a mass of shadow and moonlight. But in the light of day, it was even more so.
The darkness wasn't forgotten, but with each step into the light of the bright afternoon Liessel could feel her dread slipping away like sand from a loose grip.
There was a scuffling sound. It was the kind of sound that was made when someone was trying keep from colliding into another. "Sorry." She amended softly.
Then Adeline saw the sky.
A blue and bright and entirely unexpected so much that she had to look back from where they came from as though some confirmation that this was real.
"Well," She breathed while stepping forward. "This is certainly not what I was expecting. You?"
The bottom dropped out below them, and the smaller the branches they navigated, the more give there was, the more they stirred in the wind.
Looking up, they'd find the earth above them, ruddy with fallen needles, but their own hair, and their own clothes, were still drawn downward, in the orientation of the world they'd left behind.
Sky underfoot, and not a thing to catch them if they fell; earth above, and the hole and darkness through which they'd ventured now utterly gone from view.
Names, came the thought on the wind. I keep lies and I keep truths.
Liessel's answer to Adeline was a grin and a shake of her head. She didn't have time to say anything on the matter though, for the wind spoke and the branches they traveled grew softer as the branches beneath them thinned.
"Wylarith, The Moon," She told the wind, "And Syrefi, the Guidestar."
The place was a wonder, and she could not keep herself from trying to see all of it. Everything from the upside down tree, to the ground above them, and the sky beneath. Liessel tried to take it all in as she gave her answer.
Fortingall Church was there--inverted--as was its graveyard.
The village was there, too, laid out over in the distance, above Liessel's head and following a mirror landscape. There night; here day.
She took in a quick breath. Glancing over at Liessel as she spoke to the wind. This wasn't the first time Adeline felt unsure of what to say. There were many times in Harroway that left her questioning what aid she could offer. Though, perhaps this wasn't about saying or doing the right thing. Maybe Liessel simply needed someone there with her.
"Perhaps you have to give the answer to the riddle first?" She offered.
She found herself looking at Adeline and giving a good solid nod. Her head turned away, then, facing the upside down tree and then the open sky beneath them, "I wish to ask of the spirits -- those who have come before, but have not died. Snared by teeth, but never rent."
The Yew offered no face for them. No humanoid extension, like Missus White, and no shadow-play face formed of fingerlike branches, like the Dark Mother of the Woods. The wind around it, in this upside-down world, where the night above was day, whistled through the hanging gnarls with the cool of brisk late Scottish summer. Of the spirits, or you wish to ask after the spirits? These are divergent paths.
"Of them. I have names, and a connection, but I have questions that I have not been able to get answered. Ladys White and Ashbroom thought you might be able to help, Wise Yew Tree." She didn't know where to focus when she spoke, so her eyes skipped from gnarl to shadow, to branch.
A bird flew into the branches. Liessel would see its tufty grey belly, its little black feet. It was oriented to the tree.
The wind said, Snared by teeth, but never rent, You've been at Allbelow's knee. Allbelow knows the ways. Names are difficult to grow, and difficult to shake loose. If you would have the spirits, then offer me four names of those not born of this earth, this air, and this sun, and I'll return to you all that I can, and you will see what bows to the boughs.
"Gunnar and Sigrid Reistar," She spoke slowly, evenly, to the wind and to the powerful being whose voice it carried, "and Salvus and Fausta Artico."
Ah, but I know these! The wind sounded like it savored this knowledge. The crisp of them is here. If I give them away, I will be bare. Offer me the trade I asked for, and we will find faces and fates.
The names were known.
Liessel cast a glance toward Adeline before answering, "Halleh Reistar, Amma Stroth," And then two more of her former religious family were named. She spoke their names softly, giving quiet respect for those who had meant so much to her but were no longer within arm's reach.
A warming of the wind came with a distinct sense of joy. The sense of that delight was evident in nearly nothing else; just the way the air traveled through the branches in whorls and unseen divisions. Yet there was something to see, even if it would be by scantest chance that an unready eye might catch it: at the tip of one tiny branch, first one small green needle grew, and then three more, freshening the color of the old tree in that small, easily-missed place.
Above Liessel, where the ground was, the wind stirred up the dense layer of earth packed around the huge base of the tree. It was not only earth, of course. It was a great carpet, inches or feet or yards thick, of fallen needles, dropped for as long as the Fortingall Yew had lived. What might, under a different tree perhaps, have become dust, here spun into the air, down toward Liessel but stopping well shy. Inverted, it would have been a dust devil of the yew's needles; here it was a whirlpool seen from the side. It stirred, the great layer becoming a ruddy cloud, before the first long-dried needle flew to stick at Liessel's blouse.
The bird above -- below -- them could still be seen within the twining branches on which they stood. Those branches shifted, the wind brushing them about. At the tip of one came the smallest blossoming of dark green color. It was so small a thing that it was easily overlooked.
Liessel missed it, herself, distracted by the kicked up storm of fallen needles that suddenly rose up and swirled through the air. Instinct had her wanting to shield her face with her arms, and the flinch of that came as the cloud got closer.
The first long needle was felt more than seen. It tapped against the arm of her blouse, and stuck there in the fine fabric. She caught it out of the corner of her vision, like a dark smudge on a pair of glasses, and shifted to pick the needle gently from her blouse.
It was not a long needle at all, but the short, blunt, feather-shaped needle of the old yew, and the moment Liessel touched it, she touched Gunnar Reistar, and it was no mere sound, that name.
Even as three other needles found her hair, her fabrics, from that first one she'd plucked loose would come to her a story, a sense, a world seen through distant and long-ago eyes. Gunnar Reistar had never set foot in Fortingall, let alone touched this ancient tree, but the Yew knew him, and a magic had his likeness, and knew a strain of the world through his eyes, his hands, his years--
Looking down at the little needle pinched between her fingers didn't give her a sudden scope of the open sky beneath her feet. She had known it was there, but she hadn't looked down. Just past the edge of the needle, she caught the edge of the whirlwind and beyond that was the edge of the Yew's shading branches. Beyond that was a whole lot of nothing but bright blue.
Blindly, she reached for the branch she had been holding onto, using both hands once again as the sense of Gunnar Reistar filled her. His stature was very close to Jonnah's, barrel chested with thinning blond hair at the top of his head. He wore clothes that were made very similar in design to what was worn in Harroway. They were garments that were simple cut, and simple worn, but Gunnar was not a simple man. His beard was capped with beads of silver, his eyes the color of morning grass with a mixing of dark tree bark near the center.
He was a man who knew how to fight, and fight he did to protect his home and his wife and children. He spent his youth tumbling in the dirt and throwing fists to get where he wanted to be, to impress the woman he wanted. The gift he had gotten on marrying her hadn't been any funds, or livestock. It had been an ax made of the finest steel with inlays across it of world wasting beasts while the pommel was capped with the head of a wolf, its jaws open and ears back, as if it were about to spring forward from the post to attack.
Here lay the secret, that now Liessel would feel:
This old Yew collected names, and they were carriers of magic and spirit, and as she had told the snared by teeth, but never rent, she would feed the tree new names it had never entangled with before in exchange, and what she would receive would be a sliver of the spirit borne by those names.
No mere note-taking this.
She would be taking on responsibility for them, and their tending, as the tree had done before her.
A piece of him, of Gunnar Reistar, father of mothers and fathers before she came of his blood. Liessel could feel the flame of it, that piece of who he was, within her.
The feeling of it shook her breath, and her fingers, but she held on tightly to that needle just as much as she held onto the branches for her life.
His was not a small life at all. Father, lover, farmer and warrior. She could feel the pulse of that. She knew the pulse of it just as surely as she knew her own name.
His was not the only needle to land on her, though. She could have stayed there cradling the idea of this man she's never met, one she now felt as if she'd known for years, but there were others she had yet to meet.
Bracing herself against one hand clasping tightly at the swaying branches, Liessel tucked Gunnar's needle into her hair, just by her ear, before reaching for the next needle.
Adeline Webber remained back. Steady and on guard, she wasn't quite sure what was happening. So she kept her eyes on Liessel, holding onto branches and placing needles in her hair.
"I need for you to tell me if this is going south." She called out with an anxious tinge within her voice.
"It's alright," Liessel told Adeline with a little turn her way, "We are alright." She said those words and then breathed out slowly, her fingers feeling for the needle that had landed in her hair.
"The needles are showing me who they were, and how they got to Harroway."
Adeline's words might have stirred some attention, with Liessel communing with yew needles. The wind asked, Are you, too, here to offer and to take?
Liessel had given four, and taken four--or was in the process of of doing so. If Allbelow, above, gave advice with three heads, then....
"No." Her answer was firmer than any stone.
It was enough. The wind did not press.
Just as she had finished answering Adeline, her fingers found the edge of the needle she was feeling for. It took some shifting of a few strands of hair, but even with how careful her fingers were when she pulled the needle free she also pulled some hair free, too.
This one was not Sigrid. This one was Fausta Artico, a gentle woman of gentile birth. She had been spared into a marriage that gave Salvus many children, but not until after they had left this world for Harroway. Septimius' ancestors.
With the needle pinched between her fingertips, Liessel felt herself frown. "It was the same way," She breathed, tucking that needle into her hair, as well, near where she had put Gunnar's.
The next seed she touched was Sigrid's. Liessel blinked, her eyes narrowing down on the needle between her fingers. Sigrid, wife of Gunnar, blood of her blood from ages past. Mother, wife, and warrior.
The last was Salvus Artico, husband of Fausta. He was a roman noble by birth, married to Fausta to expand the families and keep good favor. There was love, but it was minimal. There was enough of it for the brood of children that came to them in Harroway.
Her frown deepened. Every needle brought a sense of the person to her. Not just to her, but into [i/] her. She knew them the way she knew the Flynns, or Aurelia -- or any number of people she'd become close to since coming from Harroway. Their lives, how they lived, why they lived, and why they left -- how they left.
"Syrefi," She said the name softly, tucking Salvus' needle away with the others, "It was a dream that took them there. A dream and a calling."
"What was that?" Adeline asked from the ground below. "What was the same?"
"The dream," Liessel answered, reaching back out to take full hold of the branches that were keeping her steady, "They each had one, and it was the same for all of them. It was The Guardians asking them to meet, asking them to go. It was an offer of stability, and of a prosperous life. If they wanted it, they just needed to join The Guardians at Stonehenge, or places like it."
"The Guardians met them in a dream?" Adeline asked. "How did they know who to choose? How did they see them before they asked?"
"That, I do not know," Liessel shook her head, causing the hair she'd pulled loose to shift as it would with the motion, "What I was given was only that of the names I traded for. I saw only what they lived, through them and through the eyes of those around them. There was nothing that came through from The Guardians."
"Ah." She nodded.
"Is there more to learn with the names you've given so far?"
One hand let go of the branch it had held onto slowly, releasing that tight grip as she forbade herself from looking down -- up? -- at the bright blue sky beyond those branches. Her fingertips found where the needles rested in her hair, "No, I do not think so. There is one more that I would ask for, though."
Turning away from looking toward Adeline, Liessel looked toward the Yew.
"Great Yew, I would trade one more with you. Koulm, handmaid of King Arthur, whose full name I do not know. In exchange, I offer Ryja Erphale."
The edge of an echo came as the branches were stirred by a refreshed breeze. Ryjaaaaa... It was there, then gone. It was a name. It was magic. Somewhere about the wild crown of the tree, a fresh green needle grew.
With another stirring, long-dropped needles, dried and browned and buried, were tossed up. The Yew tree's countless scores of lost needles spun down toward Liessel and Adeline. Somehow, by miracle and more magic or simply by the nature of the ancient Yew, from among the multitudes, one long and tiny needle was found unerringly, and it sped toward Liessel on a spin of the wind.
Koulm.
The one who wept over Arthur. The one Adeline theorized could be an ancestor of Liessel's.
She held her breath, watching the little long needle spin it's way towards Liessel.
One out of a million -- out of a trillion or more. One, out of a number that Liessel doubted she could ever truly fathom. She had four more tucked into her hair. She let that one find her, and let it land on her shoulder where she could reach and pluck it up between two fingers gently.
In a flash it was all hers to see. In a flash it was hers to keep. The life of Koulm was given like a stirring of the heart. This was different than Gunnar, or Sigrid. It was not the same as Salvus and Fausta. This was a part becoming whole. The little glimpse she had gotten while being down in Missus White's cavern, the feeling of the Kingsboon's weight.
Arthur's smile.
She almost dropped the needle. It almost fell from her hand, nearly slipping from fingers that had loosened in the moment of that flash. Liessel breathed in, and her body was hers again.
"You were right," She breathed out, "Syrefi."
"I was right or Syrefi was right?" Adeline asked, unsure of who Liessel was speaking to. It could have been her. It also could be the Yew tree.
"You," The needle was cradled close, brought in toward her heart as she answered Adeline, "You were right. I am Second Born of her."
"What happens now?" She asked with uncertainty. The endless blue beneath their feet was beginning to look more and more like a deathsky to her.
What happens now?
It was a good question. From holding the needle close to her heart, Liessel brought it up and wove it into her hair as she had with the previous four. A safe place for them would be made once she had her bag back in hand. She had traveled light, but she had managed to squeeze a few pieces of her Flynn kit into her luggage.
"Now," She straightened, giving a nod toward Adeline's question, "We thank you, Great Yew Tree, for accepting the trade that I had brought to you. May the sun forever favor you."
My boughs are the greener, and weigh the heavier, for what you've brought. They will color all that comes after.
At no time did the Yew itself open a mouth, or rustle with abnormal animation. The wind was its voice. And its hands. Remember me to the Ashen Broom and the White One, as I will remember them.
Liessel felt the warmth of a smile spread across her lips as the wind brought the Yew's voice anew.
"It will be done, Mighty Yew." She promised, risking the release of her right hand while holding on with her left in order to bring her hand to her forehead, and then to her heart with a bow of her head.
She and Adeline would have to climb on branches with give to get back up. Had down been easier than up would be? The hole through the needles and the earth, into the dark of the entangled roots was above them. But otherwise, no further words were borne for them on the breeze.
Up was much harder than down. Branches swayed and gave beneath weight, though they didn't break. It made balance a particular thing that needed to be paid attention to. It was a half walk, half climb with footholds and grasping of branches to leverage themselves up. Where, and if, Adeline needed help Liessel was there where she could offer it. And where she needed help, herself, Liessel asked quietly.
She had gone into the darkness they were now heading up through not feeling the lightest in the world. That was due, in part, to her distress at being consumed by pitch blackness. The rest was that of the world on her thin shoulders. Now, it felt as if that weight had been multiplied by five. It was a weight she'd learn how to carry.
The Guardians were with her there in that place of gnarled tree root and evergreen scent. There were no words to come from her as she focused on her footing. The ground was uneven, the roots that came to form the stairs they needed to travel felt strange beneath her feet.
The roots and bark were a godsend in comparison to the smooth and close confines of the stairway that led down to Missus White. Having reached the bottom, Liessel felt no less steady.
The tree was there, though, solid and true.
"Syrefi?" She asked, her voice quiet as ever, but seeming to echo in her ears through that darkness.
Not far behind was Adeline Webber.
The dark space they wandered through did not send the spike of fear through her spin as it did with Liessel.
"I am here with you." Adeline whispered as if sensing Liessel's unease while they made the trek down. "You are not alone."
Liessel did not reach the bottom. Her feet told her that there was less and less earth between each root. Her skin would tell her likewise. She and Adeline had passed through a closeness of earth, but the air had freshened.
Under the ground now, with no view behind them, a breeze blew.
The light came even as Adeline answered Liessel, and the quality of her voice was as if she had spoken aboveground, without walls. Liessel, in the lead, would step down once more when the dark beneath her began to brighten to sky blue. Adeline, following, would make progress into the same shift.
In the first glimmer of this blue, Liessel would see what she held on to, and what her footing was:
The Fortingall Yew was here just as it was above, but upside down, fully inverted, like the figure on a playing card. She stepped not on roots any longer, but on branches.
It was not earth below her, but endless, endless sky down there, and not a hint of land.
The blue continued to intensify as if Liessel had stepped into a world experiencing late afternoon.
Adeline's voice came just as the light was shifting, and Liessel muttered "Thank you," then suddenly night became day! Liessel almost stopped moving. Her feet wanted to falter over the branches that she and Adeline were stepping down.
It was endless sky! Bright, and blue! And the tree, upside down as it was, was magnificent. It had been a glory in the dark of night with its branches haunted by those ghostly people, the cluster of its twining trunk a mass of shadow and moonlight. But in the light of day, it was even more so.
The darkness wasn't forgotten, but with each step into the light of the bright afternoon Liessel could feel her dread slipping away like sand from a loose grip.
There was a scuffling sound. It was the kind of sound that was made when someone was trying keep from colliding into another. "Sorry." She amended softly.
Then Adeline saw the sky.
A blue and bright and entirely unexpected so much that she had to look back from where they came from as though some confirmation that this was real.
"Well," She breathed while stepping forward. "This is certainly not what I was expecting. You?"
The bottom dropped out below them, and the smaller the branches they navigated, the more give there was, the more they stirred in the wind.
Looking up, they'd find the earth above them, ruddy with fallen needles, but their own hair, and their own clothes, were still drawn downward, in the orientation of the world they'd left behind.
Sky underfoot, and not a thing to catch them if they fell; earth above, and the hole and darkness through which they'd ventured now utterly gone from view.
Names, came the thought on the wind. I keep lies and I keep truths.
Liessel's answer to Adeline was a grin and a shake of her head. She didn't have time to say anything on the matter though, for the wind spoke and the branches they traveled grew softer as the branches beneath them thinned.
"Wylarith, The Moon," She told the wind, "And Syrefi, the Guidestar."
The place was a wonder, and she could not keep herself from trying to see all of it. Everything from the upside down tree, to the ground above them, and the sky beneath. Liessel tried to take it all in as she gave her answer.
Fortingall Church was there--inverted--as was its graveyard.
The village was there, too, laid out over in the distance, above Liessel's head and following a mirror landscape. There night; here day.
She took in a quick breath. Glancing over at Liessel as she spoke to the wind. This wasn't the first time Adeline felt unsure of what to say. There were many times in Harroway that left her questioning what aid she could offer. Though, perhaps this wasn't about saying or doing the right thing. Maybe Liessel simply needed someone there with her.
"Perhaps you have to give the answer to the riddle first?" She offered.
She found herself looking at Adeline and giving a good solid nod. Her head turned away, then, facing the upside down tree and then the open sky beneath them, "I wish to ask of the spirits -- those who have come before, but have not died. Snared by teeth, but never rent."
The Yew offered no face for them. No humanoid extension, like Missus White, and no shadow-play face formed of fingerlike branches, like the Dark Mother of the Woods. The wind around it, in this upside-down world, where the night above was day, whistled through the hanging gnarls with the cool of brisk late Scottish summer. Of the spirits, or you wish to ask after the spirits? These are divergent paths.
"Of them. I have names, and a connection, but I have questions that I have not been able to get answered. Ladys White and Ashbroom thought you might be able to help, Wise Yew Tree." She didn't know where to focus when she spoke, so her eyes skipped from gnarl to shadow, to branch.
A bird flew into the branches. Liessel would see its tufty grey belly, its little black feet. It was oriented to the tree.
The wind said, Snared by teeth, but never rent, You've been at Allbelow's knee. Allbelow knows the ways. Names are difficult to grow, and difficult to shake loose. If you would have the spirits, then offer me four names of those not born of this earth, this air, and this sun, and I'll return to you all that I can, and you will see what bows to the boughs.
"Gunnar and Sigrid Reistar," She spoke slowly, evenly, to the wind and to the powerful being whose voice it carried, "and Salvus and Fausta Artico."
Ah, but I know these! The wind sounded like it savored this knowledge. The crisp of them is here. If I give them away, I will be bare. Offer me the trade I asked for, and we will find faces and fates.
The names were known.
Liessel cast a glance toward Adeline before answering, "Halleh Reistar, Amma Stroth," And then two more of her former religious family were named. She spoke their names softly, giving quiet respect for those who had meant so much to her but were no longer within arm's reach.
A warming of the wind came with a distinct sense of joy. The sense of that delight was evident in nearly nothing else; just the way the air traveled through the branches in whorls and unseen divisions. Yet there was something to see, even if it would be by scantest chance that an unready eye might catch it: at the tip of one tiny branch, first one small green needle grew, and then three more, freshening the color of the old tree in that small, easily-missed place.
Above Liessel, where the ground was, the wind stirred up the dense layer of earth packed around the huge base of the tree. It was not only earth, of course. It was a great carpet, inches or feet or yards thick, of fallen needles, dropped for as long as the Fortingall Yew had lived. What might, under a different tree perhaps, have become dust, here spun into the air, down toward Liessel but stopping well shy. Inverted, it would have been a dust devil of the yew's needles; here it was a whirlpool seen from the side. It stirred, the great layer becoming a ruddy cloud, before the first long-dried needle flew to stick at Liessel's blouse.
The bird above -- below -- them could still be seen within the twining branches on which they stood. Those branches shifted, the wind brushing them about. At the tip of one came the smallest blossoming of dark green color. It was so small a thing that it was easily overlooked.
Liessel missed it, herself, distracted by the kicked up storm of fallen needles that suddenly rose up and swirled through the air. Instinct had her wanting to shield her face with her arms, and the flinch of that came as the cloud got closer.
The first long needle was felt more than seen. It tapped against the arm of her blouse, and stuck there in the fine fabric. She caught it out of the corner of her vision, like a dark smudge on a pair of glasses, and shifted to pick the needle gently from her blouse.
It was not a long needle at all, but the short, blunt, feather-shaped needle of the old yew, and the moment Liessel touched it, she touched Gunnar Reistar, and it was no mere sound, that name.
Even as three other needles found her hair, her fabrics, from that first one she'd plucked loose would come to her a story, a sense, a world seen through distant and long-ago eyes. Gunnar Reistar had never set foot in Fortingall, let alone touched this ancient tree, but the Yew knew him, and a magic had his likeness, and knew a strain of the world through his eyes, his hands, his years--
Looking down at the little needle pinched between her fingers didn't give her a sudden scope of the open sky beneath her feet. She had known it was there, but she hadn't looked down. Just past the edge of the needle, she caught the edge of the whirlwind and beyond that was the edge of the Yew's shading branches. Beyond that was a whole lot of nothing but bright blue.
Blindly, she reached for the branch she had been holding onto, using both hands once again as the sense of Gunnar Reistar filled her. His stature was very close to Jonnah's, barrel chested with thinning blond hair at the top of his head. He wore clothes that were made very similar in design to what was worn in Harroway. They were garments that were simple cut, and simple worn, but Gunnar was not a simple man. His beard was capped with beads of silver, his eyes the color of morning grass with a mixing of dark tree bark near the center.
He was a man who knew how to fight, and fight he did to protect his home and his wife and children. He spent his youth tumbling in the dirt and throwing fists to get where he wanted to be, to impress the woman he wanted. The gift he had gotten on marrying her hadn't been any funds, or livestock. It had been an ax made of the finest steel with inlays across it of world wasting beasts while the pommel was capped with the head of a wolf, its jaws open and ears back, as if it were about to spring forward from the post to attack.
Here lay the secret, that now Liessel would feel:
This old Yew collected names, and they were carriers of magic and spirit, and as she had told the snared by teeth, but never rent, she would feed the tree new names it had never entangled with before in exchange, and what she would receive would be a sliver of the spirit borne by those names.
No mere note-taking this.
She would be taking on responsibility for them, and their tending, as the tree had done before her.
A piece of him, of Gunnar Reistar, father of mothers and fathers before she came of his blood. Liessel could feel the flame of it, that piece of who he was, within her.
The feeling of it shook her breath, and her fingers, but she held on tightly to that needle just as much as she held onto the branches for her life.
His was not a small life at all. Father, lover, farmer and warrior. She could feel the pulse of that. She knew the pulse of it just as surely as she knew her own name.
His was not the only needle to land on her, though. She could have stayed there cradling the idea of this man she's never met, one she now felt as if she'd known for years, but there were others she had yet to meet.
Bracing herself against one hand clasping tightly at the swaying branches, Liessel tucked Gunnar's needle into her hair, just by her ear, before reaching for the next needle.
Adeline Webber remained back. Steady and on guard, she wasn't quite sure what was happening. So she kept her eyes on Liessel, holding onto branches and placing needles in her hair.
"I need for you to tell me if this is going south." She called out with an anxious tinge within her voice.
"It's alright," Liessel told Adeline with a little turn her way, "We are alright." She said those words and then breathed out slowly, her fingers feeling for the needle that had landed in her hair.
"The needles are showing me who they were, and how they got to Harroway."
Adeline's words might have stirred some attention, with Liessel communing with yew needles. The wind asked, Are you, too, here to offer and to take?
Liessel had given four, and taken four--or was in the process of of doing so. If Allbelow, above, gave advice with three heads, then....
"No." Her answer was firmer than any stone.
It was enough. The wind did not press.
Just as she had finished answering Adeline, her fingers found the edge of the needle she was feeling for. It took some shifting of a few strands of hair, but even with how careful her fingers were when she pulled the needle free she also pulled some hair free, too.
This one was not Sigrid. This one was Fausta Artico, a gentle woman of gentile birth. She had been spared into a marriage that gave Salvus many children, but not until after they had left this world for Harroway. Septimius' ancestors.
With the needle pinched between her fingertips, Liessel felt herself frown. "It was the same way," She breathed, tucking that needle into her hair, as well, near where she had put Gunnar's.
The next seed she touched was Sigrid's. Liessel blinked, her eyes narrowing down on the needle between her fingers. Sigrid, wife of Gunnar, blood of her blood from ages past. Mother, wife, and warrior.
The last was Salvus Artico, husband of Fausta. He was a roman noble by birth, married to Fausta to expand the families and keep good favor. There was love, but it was minimal. There was enough of it for the brood of children that came to them in Harroway.
Her frown deepened. Every needle brought a sense of the person to her. Not just to her, but into [i/] her. She knew them the way she knew the Flynns, or Aurelia -- or any number of people she'd become close to since coming from Harroway. Their lives, how they lived, why they lived, and why they left -- how they left.
"Syrefi," She said the name softly, tucking Salvus' needle away with the others, "It was a dream that took them there. A dream and a calling."
"What was that?" Adeline asked from the ground below. "What was the same?"
"The dream," Liessel answered, reaching back out to take full hold of the branches that were keeping her steady, "They each had one, and it was the same for all of them. It was The Guardians asking them to meet, asking them to go. It was an offer of stability, and of a prosperous life. If they wanted it, they just needed to join The Guardians at Stonehenge, or places like it."
"The Guardians met them in a dream?" Adeline asked. "How did they know who to choose? How did they see them before they asked?"
"That, I do not know," Liessel shook her head, causing the hair she'd pulled loose to shift as it would with the motion, "What I was given was only that of the names I traded for. I saw only what they lived, through them and through the eyes of those around them. There was nothing that came through from The Guardians."
"Ah." She nodded.
"Is there more to learn with the names you've given so far?"
One hand let go of the branch it had held onto slowly, releasing that tight grip as she forbade herself from looking down -- up? -- at the bright blue sky beyond those branches. Her fingertips found where the needles rested in her hair, "No, I do not think so. There is one more that I would ask for, though."
Turning away from looking toward Adeline, Liessel looked toward the Yew.
"Great Yew, I would trade one more with you. Koulm, handmaid of King Arthur, whose full name I do not know. In exchange, I offer Ryja Erphale."
The edge of an echo came as the branches were stirred by a refreshed breeze. Ryjaaaaa... It was there, then gone. It was a name. It was magic. Somewhere about the wild crown of the tree, a fresh green needle grew.
With another stirring, long-dropped needles, dried and browned and buried, were tossed up. The Yew tree's countless scores of lost needles spun down toward Liessel and Adeline. Somehow, by miracle and more magic or simply by the nature of the ancient Yew, from among the multitudes, one long and tiny needle was found unerringly, and it sped toward Liessel on a spin of the wind.
Koulm.
The one who wept over Arthur. The one Adeline theorized could be an ancestor of Liessel's.
She held her breath, watching the little long needle spin it's way towards Liessel.
One out of a million -- out of a trillion or more. One, out of a number that Liessel doubted she could ever truly fathom. She had four more tucked into her hair. She let that one find her, and let it land on her shoulder where she could reach and pluck it up between two fingers gently.
In a flash it was all hers to see. In a flash it was hers to keep. The life of Koulm was given like a stirring of the heart. This was different than Gunnar, or Sigrid. It was not the same as Salvus and Fausta. This was a part becoming whole. The little glimpse she had gotten while being down in Missus White's cavern, the feeling of the Kingsboon's weight.
Arthur's smile.
She almost dropped the needle. It almost fell from her hand, nearly slipping from fingers that had loosened in the moment of that flash. Liessel breathed in, and her body was hers again.
"You were right," She breathed out, "Syrefi."
"I was right or Syrefi was right?" Adeline asked, unsure of who Liessel was speaking to. It could have been her. It also could be the Yew tree.
"You," The needle was cradled close, brought in toward her heart as she answered Adeline, "You were right. I am Second Born of her."
"What happens now?" She asked with uncertainty. The endless blue beneath their feet was beginning to look more and more like a deathsky to her.
What happens now?
It was a good question. From holding the needle close to her heart, Liessel brought it up and wove it into her hair as she had with the previous four. A safe place for them would be made once she had her bag back in hand. She had traveled light, but she had managed to squeeze a few pieces of her Flynn kit into her luggage.
"Now," She straightened, giving a nod toward Adeline's question, "We thank you, Great Yew Tree, for accepting the trade that I had brought to you. May the sun forever favor you."
My boughs are the greener, and weigh the heavier, for what you've brought. They will color all that comes after.
At no time did the Yew itself open a mouth, or rustle with abnormal animation. The wind was its voice. And its hands. Remember me to the Ashen Broom and the White One, as I will remember them.
Liessel felt the warmth of a smile spread across her lips as the wind brought the Yew's voice anew.
"It will be done, Mighty Yew." She promised, risking the release of her right hand while holding on with her left in order to bring her hand to her forehead, and then to her heart with a bow of her head.
She and Adeline would have to climb on branches with give to get back up. Had down been easier than up would be? The hole through the needles and the earth, into the dark of the entangled roots was above them. But otherwise, no further words were borne for them on the breeze.
Up was much harder than down. Branches swayed and gave beneath weight, though they didn't break. It made balance a particular thing that needed to be paid attention to. It was a half walk, half climb with footholds and grasping of branches to leverage themselves up. Where, and if, Adeline needed help Liessel was there where she could offer it. And where she needed help, herself, Liessel asked quietly.
She had gone into the darkness they were now heading up through not feeling the lightest in the world. That was due, in part, to her distress at being consumed by pitch blackness. The rest was that of the world on her thin shoulders. Now, it felt as if that weight had been multiplied by five. It was a weight she'd learn how to carry.