Phyllida, holding both eggs, took a step back, and Meg placed herself between Phyllida and Lemman.
“Maybe I’ve lived as a human too long,” Lemman said. “I should not like to see Bran pass forever from this world. Take Bran’s egg, Meg Morgan, before my people come to stop you. Restore his life before they can make the sacrifice complete. We will see to your brother.”
Trembling again, Meg took the little blue egg. “What do I do?”
“Simply break the egg above him. His life will know him, and seek him out.”
“But I thought breaking the egg would kill him.”
“Only if his life flies free apart from his body. It cannot live long out of its shell. It will search for him, but if he’s not near, it will disintegrate. Now, go!” Lemman’s eyes were unfocused, as though she was watching some distant scene. “They come closer. They will be here shortly. If you would save Bran, go. Let nothing they say stop you!”
Meg rushed away, pausing only for one last lingering look at her brother. What if it didn’t work—what if the egg didn’t restore Rowan to life? What if her interference in the Midsummer War, intended to save a life, only meant two were taken in the place of one?
Bran lay alone, with none standing vigil over his corpse. The dining hall’s many curtains had been drawn tight, for a house of death closes its eyes, but a candelabrum was lit at his head, and one at his feet, casting a shifting, uncertain illumination over his body. The light gave some flush to his pallid flesh, and it almost seemed to Meg as if his chest rose and fell. When she touched him, however, his skin was deathly cold, with none of life’s yielding quickness. His eyes were closed, and his lips parted slightly. His forehead, which had been clenched in a perpetual scowl, with indrawn brows, whatever other expression might have played on the rest of his face, was now smooth and unlined. He looked more content than he had ever seemed while alive, and as she held the precious egg above him, she had a moment of misgiving. Once before, he’d entered a state of happiness, one that seemed to the outside world like a prison, and had been ripped violently from it, unwilling. The loss had been so painful it seemed to him death would be better. Now he was peaceful, beyond earthly woe, and she proposed to fetch him back to a world that held little but suffering. He’d made his choice. Did she dare countermand him?
But it was only the hesitation of a moment, for Meg could not philosophize that deeply. The matter was simple. Two people had been, to all appearances, irrevocably changed—Bran in leaving this life, she in having taken that life (and, despite what you might think, the change to Meg was more severe). And here was the chance to remedy it. She had the power to resurrect Bran. There really wasn’t any choice.
Before she could act, she heard a commotion outside. It was the sound of horns such as the Seelie Court blows, and the tramping of many feet. She heard cries of “Inside!” and “Get the egg!” and then the massive front doors groaned as they were forced open. “Quick, before it’s too late!” a fairy voice called, which was Meg’s thought exactly. She tapped the egg against Bran’s belt buckle and broke it near his head.
There is the color of a raw egg yolk, and there is the color of a cooked egg yolk, and then, somewhere in between the two (when you have simmered the egg precisely four minutes), is the glorious orange-gold of the yolk that is gelled but not fully set. It is the most magnificent color known to man, grander than a sunset, richer than any precious metal, the color of light and life and happiness. From Bran’s cracked blue egg came a little bird, sharp-winged and darting like a swallow, but as ephemeral as morning mist. Its entire body was that vivid yellow-orange, and it seemed to burn with an internal smolder. It sang one clear, sweet note, tucked its wings, and flew between Bran’s parted lips. For a terrible moment, there was nothing; then Bran took a shuddering breath, and his lashes parted.
“Oh, Bran!” Meg cried, and threw herself over his chest, utterly unmindful of the deadly wound that pierced him. As she pressed herself against him in an ecstasy of relief, he gave a little groan and fell unconscious. He had been dealt a mortal wound the night before, and though his returned life force strengthened him, he was still in grave danger.
“Help me! Oh, help me, someone!” They couldn’t hear her upstairs, but Lysander came running. Behind him came the Seelie prince.
“By the powers! He lives!” Lysander breathed as he drew nearer and saw the shallow rise and fall of Bran’s broad chest.
“He is as the last flower before the frost,” the Seelie prince said solemnly.
“However the gardener may shield the blossom, he cannot stop the coming winter.”
“Stay away from him!” Meg hissed across Bran’s body, baring her teeth like a little wildcat. “I won’t let you kill him!”
“It is not for me to give him life or death, little one,” he said, not unkindly. “Nor is it for you. Do not try to cheat him of his fate. His path lies in the unknown lands. Let him go there.”
“He will live!” she insisted. But Bran’s breath was already growing weaker, and the beat of his heart beneath her hands was faint. Despairingly, she looked to Lysander.
“There is only one chance,” Lysander said. “His ash must be split. If it lives, maybe Bran will live, too.” He felt Bran’s pulse and held his knuckles to those cold lips to feel his breath. “He doesn’t have much time. Perhaps it would be better just to let him…” But when he met Meg’s liquid, imploring eyes, he said, “I’ll get the ax. You bring the others down to the grove again.”
Meg cast a suspicious look at the Seelie prince. “I won’t leave him alone with Bran. He wants him dead. I don’t trust him.”
“We don’t have time, child—go!” Lysander said.
Meg didn’t move, and glared at the prince. “Swear that you won’t hurt him,” she said.
“I swear by the Green Hill, and all that lies beneath it, that I will do Bran no harm.”
“And the other fairies?”
“The oath of one is the oath of all. He will die easily enough of his own accord, without my help.”
A moment later, she burst into Rowan’s room to find him awake and very cross-looking. “You mean I didn’t even…” he was saying, then spied Meg. “You! Of all the nerve—”
“Later!” she said. “Bran’s alive again, but he’s dying. Lysander’s going to split the ash tree. We need your help!” Phyllida and Silly hurried out, with Rowan following, looking confused and angry. There hadn’t been time to answer all his questions, and he was still trying to sort out what was real and what was only a dream given to him by Lemman. In his mind, he’d fought heroically on the Green Hill. But Phyllida told him he’d shamefully (to his way of thinking) slept the night away while Meg took all the glory. He had never thought he needed saving, and now that Midsummer was past and the fairies no longer held his life in an egg, the noble warrior’s heart he’d borrowed was replaced by the somewhat petty, childish, though fundamentally good one he’d started out with. He was annoyed with Meg, as if she’d kept him from playing some game, or broken a favorite toy.
Some of his testiness was knocked out of him when he saw Bran, stretched almost lifeless on the banquet table. Now that his heart was beating, blood once more seeped from the gash in his chest. “He’s alive?”
“Barely,” Meg said.
“But…but I thought one of you had to die.”
“He did die. But he’s alive again.” In April, such a conversation would have seemed absurd. “Come on—we have to get him to the ash grove.”
Bran was well over six feet tall and powerfully built—not the sort of burden young people or old can easily carry. It took Rowan, Meg, Silly, Dickie, and Phyllida to get him outside, and even then they half dragged him. By some miracle, he was still breathing when they laid him at the foot of his ash, a thick, sturdy tree with a somewhat sloping trunk. The ash bent its spearpoint leaves low, but could not quite touch Bran’s body where it lay among the thrusting roots.
Lysander propped a ladder against the trunk a
nd climbed to the place where the ash naturally split into two main branches. It would take skillful ax-work to cleave the tree properly, for it must be hewn deeply enough for Bran to pass through the gash, yet cleanly enough so the tree had a chance of mending itself. Fifteen feet off the ground, Lysander examined the tree. The trunk was stout, true, but the branches were so well grown and heavy that their weight might be enough to split the tree to the ground, killing it. This is why splitting the ash hardly ever saves the very young or the very old. Saplings are too tender to recover from harsh treatment, and old trees are too ponderous, too set in their ways to take injuries without falling. Only trees—and humans—of middling age will spring back easily from grievous hurts. He checked the tree for any sign of weakness or rot that might thwart their efforts, chose a likely spot, and, balancing carefully on the ladder, raised his arms to deal the first blow.
Meg knelt at Bran’s side, laying her hands upon him as if there was some healing virtue to her touch. She felt powerless, but at least her cool hands could soothe his brow, her fingers could tell him, through his insensibility, that someone was near, caring for him. He had seemed to her somehow more alive when he lay on the banquet table, for then he had been serene, and though he was cold he seemed strong, like a marble pillar. Now, alive, he looked nearer death than he’d been before. His body was no longer firm but flaccid, his head lolling to one side and his muscles without any will. He was flushed with fever, and burned under her cool touch. Above them, the ax fell.
A violent convulsion passed through Bran’s body as the ax blade bit into his ash tree. Again the ax struck, and his body arched in response. His eyes opened, wide and staring, but he seemed to see nothing, not even Meg’s anxious face a bare few inches above his own. With each chop at his tree, his body shuddered, but between strokes he lay immobile and ever weaker. He was hardly breathing—air seeped in and out of his parted lips, but this seemed to be more a special favor of the air than the result of any effort on Bran’s part. The elements were conspiring to keep him alive a bit longer; would it be enough?
A terrible creaking came from above, and with it that dreaded sound of wood splintering on its own. All eyes turned upward and watched the great ash, now cloven several feet at its crook, hover on the edge of splitting. Lysander held his breath. He could risk no more chops—another might kill Bran’s last chance. The tree, overweighed by heavy branches, groaned, and the split widened before their eyes…one inch…two…three…. The jagged crack snaked lower…. Then the tree seemed to find new strength. The fissure stopped, and the split tree held its ground, firm in its trunk and in its roots. The first stage was successful.
Lysander threw the ax away from him as though its mere presence might move the tree to break its equilibrium, and climbed down the ladder. Now came the tricky task of getting the limp and unresponsive deadweight that was Bran up the ladder, to pass his body through the split. Lysander took off his belt and looped it under Bran’s armpits, hauling him up awkwardly, while Rowan and Meg grabbed whatever parts of Bran they could and followed him up the ladder, clinging to the side like monkeys, pushing and pulling as best they could. One careless moment and Bran (or all of them) would plummet to the ground, and that would surely be the end.
Once, Meg’s foot slipped, and all was almost lost, but Lysander had one arm hooked securely through a rung, and his prodigious strength saved them. Each step on the ladder was an impossible obstacle, each inch gained a hard-won victory. Bran’s head hung, with his chin tucked against his chest, unconscious and absolutely incapable of offering any help.
On they struggled, until, at last, as they neared their goal, their burden grew suddenly lighter. They looked up and saw leafy hands reaching down, strong forked branches catching at Bran’s arms, snagging in his clothes, pulling him toward the cleft. They had done their part—Bran’s ash tree was taking over.
“He’ll pass through the split,” Lysander said. “Then we’ll take him down and put him to bed while I bind up the ash with rope. We won’t know for many days if Bran will live. Trees never do anything quickly.”
The three clung to the ladder and helped the tree guide Bran into the deep cleft. But as he lay propped against the gentle incline of the split trunk, high above the ground, the tree began to move of its own volition. The raw inner wood, bleeding pale sap, began to close around Bran’s body. Before his kin could think to pull him free, the split bark seemed to seal itself, pulling the edges of its wound together, with Bran trapped in the center. Wood fibers were reconnecting, sap and pulp joining together to close the cleft. And in the middle, still insensible, was Bran, entombed in the healing flesh of his ash tree. In a matter of seconds, his body was hidden, encased in the ash, and only his head was visible, cradled at the top of the split, held gently in a woody embrace. Man and tree were locked together. There he was sealed, to live or die as the strength of his tree decreed.
Huddled together at the base of the tree, the Morgans, the Ashes, and Dickie looked wonderingly up at the encapsulated Bran.
“What do we do now?” Meg asked.
“The hardest thing of all,” Phyllida said. “We wait.”
Sometimes People Get What They Deserve
There is no pain, there is no sorrow, that can match the torture of waiting in uncertainty. Waiting is timeless, it has no beginning and no end. The mind becomes uncannily fertile, imagining every variation, every conceivable outcome. Hope burns painfully bright in the breast of the one who waits, but so does the certainty of tragedy.
For those who kept vigil at the base of Bran’s ash tree, there was no hope of tranquillity. Every moment that he yet lived filled them with joy even as it destroyed them with the fear that each breath could be his last. While they sat among the roots or paced slowly, winding their way through the other ashes in the grove, they were not merely biding their time for an outcome. No, they were constantly conjuring in their heads all the wonderful and terrible ways the world could turn out. One moment, Bran was fully recovered; the next, irrevocably doomed. There was no peaceful middle ground in their thoughts, only that seesawing between extremes. They waited. And waited. And waited.
Eight days passed with Bran trapped in the cleft of his ash tree, and never was the pair left untended. His heart kept up a steady, slow beat, but he did not seem to improve. Likewise, though the tree had in part mended itself, it still wept sap from its jagged split, and seemed to heal itself no further than it had in those first few minutes when it encased Bran. The high branches of its canopy drooped, and the narrow leaves were beginning to brown and curl at the tips.
On the morning of the ninth day, Rowan and Meg were sitting together in a patch of clover at the edge of the ash grove. Meg was absently making a chain, and fat, dusty bees buzzed around their heads, sometimes resting on the children’s knees when weary of gathering nectar.
“I still don’t understand why you did it,” Rowan said. Time had done much to cool his irritation, and now he was reluctantly grateful to her. He still felt he hadn’t needed any saving and had been thwarted in his calling, but overwhelming this was relief that he hadn’t been the one to injure Bran. He thought he could handle the hardships of warfare, but it had never occurred to him that the real trial comes after the fighting is over. He didn’t think he’d much like to be in Meg’s shoes, watching a man hover between death and life, knowing that she had been the one to put him there. Then again, if he lived, she’d be the one who saved him, for without his life-egg he’d have had no chance. Come to think of it, she’d as good as saved his life, too, Rowan mused. Imagine, their two lives rolled up in Finn’s sock and shoved into a mousehole! However did Finn get hold of those eggs? Meg wouldn’t tell her brother how she’d gotten the eggs away from him, but he knew from a certain uneasiness in her eyes when he asked her about it that she wasn’t exactly happy about her methods.
Finn had come home late on the night after the Midsummer War, and expressed some faint sympathy for Bran’s plight. He’d wished the man ill
, but that’s a far cry from wishing him dead. Though no one much cared to talk to him, he got the gist of the story from Dickie. Once, it might have impressed him, or scorched him with jealousy. But he had seen the Green Hill, he had seen the Seelie queen, and no other sight, no other thought had the power to charm him now.
As soon as Meg had led him to the Green Hill and run along home to the Rookery, Finn, concealed in the brambles surrounding the hill, had placed a daub of the seeing ointment in his right eye. At once the character of the hill changed. What had been merely a pleasant knoll was now charged with a vitality that seemed to hum through the air. Some people will feel this in all wild places—in fields that are alive with insects, in clumps of earth thrilling with crawling worms and bacteria. Such people experience an almost ecstatic awareness of the glory of life in even the smallest patch of nature. But for Finn, it took a magic ointment to open his eyes, and the rest of his senses, to what was already there.
The hill was a living thing. Even as a house takes on something of the personality of the people who live in it, the Green Hill was unmistakably a fairy home. Each herb that grew on the slope sang a faint paean to the people who lived beneath its roots, each insect droned its homage to the fairies. Above the Green Hill, the sky seemed more blue than any sky has a right to be, and the very trees that ringed it bowed to the sacred fairy mound.
Only Finn Fachan was out of place, the interloper. He was not invited, nor did he fortuitously stumble on the hill, but had won his prize by treachery, to which even the fairies are vulnerable. Through the centuries, there have always been men, too clever for their own good, who have sought to gain the secrets of the fairy world. And it is true that fairies, though masters at deception, can themselves be befuddled. But fairies are like the sea—time and again, you might sail through storms and laugh at the fierce salt spray, and think that you have beaten her, but the sea does not like arrogance, and will wait until your back is turned to drag you under or toss your ship on the rocks. Never turn your back on the sea, they say, and never cross a fairy.
Under the Green Hill Page 24