I’m stretched out on the long settee, Rhea’s curled in an armchair, Mr Tib balanced on the curved back behind her. There’s a small fire lit – a spark from her fingertips and a laugh when I’d sought out the tinderbox – just to take the chill off the night air. When summer proper comes, we won’t need it, but spring still likes to flirt with winter’s breath, just to remind folk that she’ll come again. This has become our habit of an evening, to sit and chat, a mug of honeyed rum or mulberry mead in hand, unless we’re too exhausted or I’m concentrating in the workroom and have insufficient patience. We’ve settled into a rhythm much more quickly than I thought we would – indeed, I didn’t think we’d ever find an ease in each other’s company. It’s a good reminder that I’m not always right and sometimes people must simply accommodate habits and quirks. Not always. But sometimes.
‘The forest is far older than us, older than people. The woodsmen cut down trees, count their rings and call its age – surely there’s the oldest tree ever, the most ancient of them all, somewhere in the deepest depths of the forest. But what’s the point of learning its age if you can only do that by killing it?’
‘What indeed?’
‘And we act as though we’re separate from it, as if we just live here with no connection to the woods, but some say the first people were born of the trees. That trunks opened like caskets to let them out when they were ready. Or that the birds and animals dropped from the branches as strange seeds and grew in the primordial mud to become two-legged things that spoke.’
‘Like the sapling in its soup of shite?’
I nod. ‘Like the sapling in its soup of shite.’
She unfurls herself, goes to refill our glasses, then returns to her position. The cat gives a haughty look as if she’s inconvenienced him.
‘They say when those first folk were birthed, they strayed. Strayed from their mothers, thought them worthless, took it into their heads to find another use for those organs of the forest. Thought it not enough that they’d been given life by the trees, that those trees weren’t doing as much as they could. That they should have morepurpose. So, the people hewed and hammered, made houses of their wood – their parents – burned their bodies for warmth. They no longer slept in the branches nor returned to the boles; they mated with each other, producing more and more offspring with less and less sap in their veins, less connection to where they’d come from. And the trees stopped birthing humans, having seen it at last as a terrible idea. Can’t blame them.’
‘Is that true?’
I laugh. ‘It’s a “they say”. Maybe a little part is true, but it’s wrapped about in other tales to make up its bulk. Yrse told it to me when first I came here. The story sits differently on every tongue, tastes different, and every tongue adds a little something to the tale, so it’s constantly forming and reforming, some parts added, some parts left behind.’
‘Tell me more.’
I dredge up memories of other recountings: some from those my mother told for my sister’s pleasure and which I stole in the listening; some from the high sorceress when she waxedexpansive, sharing more than just lessons; some gathered from different places and faces over the years. ‘I’ve traversed deserts where the trees themselves burn forever – or at least beyond the memory of the living. Not their outside, no, but internally – get close enough and you’ll see the glow of their red-hot core, the very coals of them.’ I shrug. ‘Sometimes I wonder if witches like you have somehow come from trees like that. If we did indeed spring from them, some of us at least.’ I take a sip of my drink. ‘They say a tree, if bathed in enough blood – those on and around battlefields – might come to crave it. The blood. It’s rumoured there are groves, sacred and otherwise, where the trees lay in wait for unsuspecting victims, most often animal but a human is a cause for celebration. They say that when these groves are discovered, they’re destroyed because such things, sentient and bloodthirsty, cannot be allowed to thrive. Cannot be tolerated. And their keepers – for sometimes there are people who bring fresh meat to their charges – are thrown onto a pyre made of those very trees.’
‘So, from birthing us to eating us?’
I shrug. ‘There’s always an element of consumption in old tales, don’t you think? How many are told of families that, in times of famine, devour their own? Or those who, loyal to their kin, ambush travellers to provide themselves and loved ones with meals.’
‘A bit desperate.’ Rhea pulls a face.
‘I think that’s the point. And we never truly know what we’ll do in extreme circumstances.’
‘Mehrab? Any further thoughts? About what left the offerings on our doorstep?’Our.
I have suspicions and I hesitate before sharing. If I’d not already had two glasses of mulberry mead, I might have kept them to myself. ‘There were older things, things that were here before us – the trees weren’t the only beings to produce uncanny fruit. And the trees might not have been the first things here; something brought them forth.’ Without warning, the cat leaps from her chair to mine, no sign of effort, and curls himself over my feet; I don’t react. Cats are such queer things. ‘The old ones? Some still remain, some sleep and wait. Most are gone, dead or elsewhere. We’re just the next iteration of them, I think – worse and weaker but sometimes better and kinder. One thing’s for sure, they don’t like us as anything except fodder. We’re nothing but game to them, those few that remain; we’re here to be hunted and consumed. It’s fortunate, then, there aren’t too many of them left. Those that are here, hide, weakened by age and natural decay; even gods die in one way or another, little by little.’
‘Have you met any?’
‘No. Perhaps. They leave snares, though, on forest floors,’ I grin ruefully, ‘beneath the surface of lakes and ponds, tiny sparks that burst into flame without warning, air that suddenly turns poisonous or so wild that it carries a full-grown cow or bear or person away.’ I empty my drink. ‘And there are tales of tricksters for whom it was never enough to simply steal children – nothing would suffice except to have parents hand those children over. A sort of tithe. There are rules, you see, to the giving and taking of such things – if a child is given, a parent has no recourse; if a child is stolen, there’s a debt that mounts against whatever takes them and eventually, it will betallied though it might take aeons. Some gods don’t care, some gods do. The cunning ones know that the smaller their debt, the longer they can reign, the longer they can do whatever they wish either in shadow or light. Some get around it by sending the children back, changed.’
She’s silent for a while, then says very quietly, ‘Do you think Anselm and Gida handed their daughter over?’
I shake my head. ‘No. They weren’t the most patient parents, but I don’t believe they gave her up. Their grief was genuine, and the guilt. And they’d not have come to me for help. Why set a witch to investigate when you know you’re responsible?’
‘So, whatever took Ari, why leave offerings for you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did it take herforyou? As a sacrifice specifically for you?’
‘I don’t know.’And I don’t want to think about it.
10
‘Thisis the hardest part?’ Rhea asks as I straighten.
My spine aches, I’ve been leaning over working for too long. Pressing out a painful hiss of a breath, I nod. Every year it hurts more, so every year the need to do this is greater. ‘I know it’s hard to believe after weeks of stirring that trough, but yes.’
Five days ago, we lifted the sapling from its bath and laid it in the drying room again. The timber had swollen, absorbed the nutrients of the admixture – a sapling no longer, but a log essentially, its circumference wider than my waist, my shoulders, my hips. For four days, it lay out to dry, the excess moisture leaching away. Yesterday, I began the task of carving and reshaping – wood is always harder to change than flesh. Here in the barn, he’s lying on a table formed of two trestles and another old door, repurposed. My tools sit on the bench running along one wall, knives, chisels and gouges, the hatchet again, blades and hooks, adzes and veiners, of various sizes and for various purposes. Rhea has watched with increasing interest as I’ve toiled, roughly at first, splitting the trunk into legs, then higher, two arms, higher still a ball of a head. At theend of yesterday, a rudimentary man lay before us, then we left him overnight to settle, to prove.
