The Bright One’s regard was infinite, compelling. Somehow both seeing… and seen.
When the first chieftains ordered the Treasures forged, Eibhlín volunteered to carry the weight of this immense burden, to shoulder the responsibility of such power. She was brave and honorable and kind. She went to the first tithe in ecstasy and gratitude. We loved her. As she loved us.
For the length of a heartbeat, Eibhlín seemed to move within the tree, like a child stirring in sleep. The Bright One paced onward,ducking beneath the low-sloping branches of a huge oak with gemstone leaves and pale gray bark. The figure interred in this tree was male, with a handsome, brazen face and a stark, muscular figure.
Cuan. Our little wolf.Affection blossomed in Ínne’s psychic voice.He, too, volunteered. In the beginning, all Folk were potential heirs for the Treasures. Magic was so plentiful then. We were as legion as the forest. As endless as the plains. As strong as the ancient oaks.
I stared at the face of a man who had died for magic nearly a millennium ago yet who somehow lived on in me. Or… through me? I wasn’t sure I understood. “What happened?”
We began to weaken.Sorrow touched the Bright One’s voice.All four of us who bound ourselves to Treasures began to weaken. We thought channeling our wild magic through conduits into Folk vessels would protect it from the voracious greed of the humans who sought to bleed our resources dry. But we should never have agreed to bind ourselves to the Treasures. The cycle was not robust enough. The balance, uneven.
I knew parts of this story. But this was my first time hearing it from a source.
The Bright One moved on, weaving between thick trunks. There were more figures growing from the wood, more faces blindly watching us pass. Ínne paused beside each; sometimes, the compassionate touch of their clawed hand seemed to shift the expressions of the old heirs. Unclenching a frown long held, turning a smile more serene.
Clodagh.They spoke the names of the long dead with reverence.Aodh. Bradan.
They stopped at last before a tall, weighty sycamore swaying in an invisible breeze. The woman entombed in the tree looked older, with graceful lines bracketing her smile and endless, unseeing eyes.
It soon became clear the magic flowing to and from the heirs was not as strong as it once had been. The number of those fit to inherit the Treasures dwindled. We all knew something waswrong.The Bright One touched the woman’s hand.Her name was Líadan. Through her, we begged to be set free of our prison. We had been enslaved once before, an age ago; we never thought those who had set us free once would themselves, in turn, keep us enslaved. The Folk said they did not know how to free us, and perhaps that was true. But they never sought to learn.
A terrible pity rose in me at the Bright One’s words, and I abruptly remembered what Gavida had said to me after Rogan and Irian battled in the arena:I know not how to unforge the Treasures. I am not even sure it can be done. Not the right way—not without warping the source by destroying the conduit or the vessel.
But the truth was, the Bright One continued, moving slowly onward through the stillness of the grove,the power of the Treasures was too great for the Septs to relinquish. Even as it slowly diminished, they clung to it all the harder. Year after year. Tithe after tithe. Heir after heir. In time, they retreated to their strongholds lest anyone steal from them what they claimed as birthright. Until the dynasties they guarded so jealously were themselves felled.
I knew the rest of this story. Heirs like Irian and Deirdre were hidden away by their Septs as the magic of the Treasures found fewer and fewer potential vessels. Dissident Gentry began to grumble about the balance of power wielded by the Septs. In the human realms, a high king and his queen began to wonder whether the Folk’s precious Treasures might be the answer to the wars, plagues, and famines tarnishing their lands. It was where my own story began.
The Bright One paused beside one last tree, a mighty yew with swirling gray bark that looked purple in the dim. I glanced at the figure sepulchred in the trunk, only to startle away. I stumbled over a root, nearly falling. Shock brambled fear against the inside of my skin. I squinted at the figure in the tree—a young woman with waving dark hair and slender limbs, her eyes gazing upward and her palms lifted toward the sky as if in supplication.
A young woman who looked exactly likeme.
“But she’s—” I swallowed, hard, and wrapped my hands around my arms as if to ensure I was truly standing here. Warm and breathing andalive. I remembered a frigid night a year ago, when I’d stood dripping and bleeding on a beach and a tall Gentry heir had looked at my face and said,It’s you. I glanced sharply at the Bright One. “Is this Deirdre? Is this woman my mother?”
No.The Bright One, boundless and benign, placed their clawed paw upon the neighboring tree, a pale-boughed ash with an unblemished trunk.Deirdre lives.
The revelation ricocheted through my chest like a rogue arrow glancing between shadowed trees. Irian had shared that same belief when he’d revealed his suspicions about my parentage. I’d rebuffed the notion, saying,People do not return from the dead. Tragedies do not have silver linings.But part of me had hoped. Of course I had. What child growing up without a mother does not secretly yearn for one, even when they have outgrown tall tales?
“How?” I demanded, longing and bitterness tangling inside me. “And if this woman trapped in the tree is not Deirdre, then who is she?”
Do you not know, child?Their voice held both warmth and sorrow.Do you not remember?
My memories of the night of the Ember Moon, when I’d tithed myself beneath the Heartwood, slid over me. I had chosen myself, accepted my birthright, and promised my heart to the Bright One before me. Then I had flung myself into their embrace, in ecstasy and ascendancy. I had fallen through an endless sky, unmade and remade in the same breath. My roots and branches had both scraped the stars.
“Then…” I had not wanted to accept it. “Then I truly died, beneath the Heartwood.”
You did.
“How am I standing here?” The question was plaintive, and I grappled with a sharp thorn of regret for all that had passed. Allwho had truly lost their lives. All who had not had the privilege of resurrection. “How did I come back to life?”
Circles. Cycles. Balance in all things, my child.The Bright One reached out and, with its thick, sharp claw, again drew a circle above my left breast, where my heart solemnly throbbed. Dark green blood once more welled; again I felt no pain. The Heart of the Forest glowed.We are all connected. We are all the same. We are all different. When we die, we return to the place we were born. Every ending is its own beginning. Time comes and time goes. Hearts break and hearts heal. Balance is not voluntary. It is essential. And endless.
As they spoke, the forest faded—the smaller, featureless trees melting away as if in a dense mist, leaving behind only the majestic trees marked by the figures of the long-dead heirs. The trees made a circle a hundred trunks strong, each with a silent face staring inward. The look of arrested wonder I had seen on Eibhlín’s face echoed across every expression. I turned to see for myself what they gazed at, in their final rest.
At the center of the grove was a vast tree. I had thought the Heartwood colossal. It was but a sapling compared to this eldertree—little more than a shadow cast upon the ground from a far greater essence. I fought to comprehend the immensity of its breadth, the profundity of its existence. I couldhearit, a soundless singing like stars screaming through vast empty spaces. Its trunk—a monolith of ancient knotted wood—swirled with intricate patterns tessellating in a million fractal forms. Its branches soared endlessly high before curving back down around us, jeweled with multicolored leaves. Its roots drove impossibly deep, thrusting not through dirt and loam and clay and stone, but through the very fabric of reality—twining through the memories of long-dead kings and the dreams of sleeping children and the hopes of pregnant mothers. When the roots entwined with the stretching branches, they wove the warp and weft of…everything. A hundred million stories, spoken in husky voices over crackling campfires and carved in ocherclay upon dark cavern walls and etched in ink upon parchment and thrilling to life inside hopeless, hopeful hearts.
One story. One vast, expansive, enduring story.
I swayed toward that unknowable tree, hardly noticing the cool tears on my cheeks or the trembling of my limbs or the song of wonder spilling unbidden from my throat.
