IT WOULD BE three years before those soldiers returned, three years of Madenn campaigning for a rally, whispering warnings, insisting they must strike first or be struck. She had seen fire, she pressed those of her clan, had seen destruction.
Madenn’s brother Fionn echoed her concerns. He’d followed the rumors of southern invaders more closely than Madenn or Alys, greeting those who’d seen the conquerors with questions, voicing his own thoughts on strategy to anyone who’d listen, itching for the glory of war. He offered himself as envoy, asked his father to petition neighboring clans to join together, but each peaceful day that passed convinced the rest that the cousins were wrong. The empire’s hand had already exceeded its grasp; there was talk of revolt among its armies. There was no need—in truth no way—for them to act. Where would the clan even stage an attack, if threat was imminent? The seat of the alien empire, a several months’ journey away? The men tousled Fionn’s hair and called him child. The women told Madenn and Alys not to be frightened.
Then, at the height of the summer when Alys was twelve, the cousins saw crushed meadows that proved enemy movement. By autumn, most of those who’d laughed at their warnings were dead. Together, the survivors retreated to the forest, using their knowledge of the wood to taunt the soldiers who now camped atop the place that had once been their home. The insurgents ruined food stores, rerouted rivers, captured boys meant to relay news from one foreign camp to the next.
“We will rout you,” the conquerors hissed in a mangled version of Alys’s tongue, “we will civilize you. You will be ours.” They burned whatever land they could, hoping to smoke out the natives. They uprooted the old burial mounds, laughed at the old gods.
“The people practice savage rituals,” read one letter that Fionn intercepted, the translation forced out of the errand boy before his early death. “Their women run wild, their men are unclean. They are lucky to have come under our influence.”
HIDDEN IN THEIR sacred groves, shielded in the deepest tract of wood, the cousins plotted. While Fionn and Alys, fierce in firelight, mapped strategy, Madenn dove deep as she could into their history, her visions mining the remains of the old ways, building quiet communion with the trees. “Here before us,” Madenn swore, “and here long after.” Alys watched as her cousin mixed berries and blood, scratching pictures onto dry hide, disregarding her mother, who claimed that to capture a word was to empty it of power, to tame what should be wild.
Fionn refused to hide forever in the forest, despite his sister’s faith that the trees would protect them. His father gone, Fionn knew that he must take revenge, must stand against invaders to uphold the family name. Madenn eventually agreed. There would be a final barrage, led by the hundred of their kind still remaining, however unlikely its success: if they failed, they must fail gloriously, martyred to freedom, avenging their dead. And if they failed, Madenn promised, she’d preserve them. They would be remembered not in the eyes of the conquerors, savage and stubborn, but forever in the sheets of hide she’d bound into a book.
In swirling symbols drawn with blood and berries, Madenn wrote the story of the world that she wanted, the wisdom she’d learned from her mother, the promise of rebirth and a return to what was true. She drew a tree scarred with a spiral, a small human figure half hidden in its heart. A crested bird at the edge of a vast forest. An open palm held to a knife’s blade. It was a prayer, Madenn said, for the forest, for the meadows that burned, the crushed stems of the lilies, the uprooted trees. To tell the story, Madenn reasoned, was to harness its power. A prophetess, Fionn called his sister, handing her a sharpened spear.
MADENN DIED IN the first rush, a longsword to her throat. Alys stabbed the soldier that defiled her cousin’s body. In her shock, she had no time to invoke the land’s power, forgot to make the symbols Madenn thought might bring them aid. She knelt next to her cousin and stared into those vacant eyes, pressing a dirty finger to the wound. It was too much, in the crux of the combat, on the fields that stank of sweat and blood and piss, to remember the world as it had been, the quiet of a meadow, the babble of a stream. Those fireside tales of trees that defended men, tales told in whispers, a last leaf of hope as the clan was cut down, proved themselves only stories. Amid the corpses of their comrades, Alys and Fionn were taken alive, symbols of their crushed rebellion.
AT THE EDGE of the wood, in a cage recently vacated by some larger animal, the gristle of its meal mixed with its still fragrant waste, Alys saw Madenn’s blood crumbling quick under her fingernails, the remains of Madenn’s promise drying black upon her hands. She felt a trickle of wet between her legs. Alys took the angry red from where, inside and out, she had been broken, made an ink of her own blood and her cousin’s, reaching through her prison bars and smearing Madenn’s symbols—the spiral, the hand clutching a knife, the crested bird—onto a splintered piece of wood. Alys whispered a word to her family, the forest. She pressed her forehead to the iron bars of her prison, and felt them dissolve.
ONCE FREED, ALYS cursed the thieves, the lives and land they’d taken. She called on the forest, itself under ambush, for aid. She’d doubted Madenn’s claims that the forest would listen, wondered why the trees would help if there was nothing that they wanted she could give. But now her clan’s sacrifice was scattered all around her, bone and blood blossoming from the ground. Alys felt herself clutching at the forest in desperation. Preserve us, she prayed.
The trees shivered, listening, afraid of the changes that had come upon them suddenly: these men with steel and fire, the destruction of their ancestors a day’s journey away. The trees foresaw charred, chalky stumps, molten skeletons, fleeing woodland creatures spitted and skinned. There would be fields where once was forest, steel structures where once their kin rose tall. Preserve us all.
Alys’s eyes were shut, her flooded heart heavy. The trees knelt down to her, acknowledging her pain. She was so young. She was afraid. She did not bargain with the fact that preservation has its own meaning to trees, whose lives span centuries, whose reach is slow, who experience years as humans do moments. Eternity, for Alys, would last longer. Preservation meant stasis, not fulfillment. Preservation was more sister to suppression than release. This she would learn once it was already too late.
Sore from the soldiers who’d used her, the shackles they had locked around her wrists, Alys hid her heart inside an old oak tree. She took Madenn’s book from where it was concealed in the undergrowth and buried it deeper. She took the blood she’d used to paint her way to freedom to call to the forest, scarring the wood deep with Madenn’s symbols. Alys placed a splintered branch at the edge of the trees in memorial, a challenge and a curse.
She stood alone that evening at the top of Urthon Hill, wind gusting, slapping her dark hair against her cheek. Far below her, men sang bawdy songs of conquest, sparks hissed and popped in campfires, horses snorted nervous whinnies. The sky reeled with shifting galaxies of stars.
Alys shut her eyes and disappeared into the wood.
Part
III
12