The River Has Roots

You might well ask, why would these prospective gram catchers be so few? Why didn’t every latecomer rush out beyond the Professors’ trunks to drag baskets through the wild waters of the Liss for a chance at great fortune?

And you might find, after asking, that the Modal Lands between the Professors and the Refrain were peculiarly thick with strange wildlife. You might find your attention caught by small grey rabbits with uncommonly human eyes; you might see your name spelled out by a clump of nettles waving in the wind; you might feel a deep ache in your breast while hearing a bird singing with a dolorously human voice, the pain of which no one, not even the willows, could translate away.

Marred is what people called the unwelcome actions of grammar, and like paper torn by the press of a pencil, there was no way to set them right.

What the town of Thistleford gained from its proximity to Faerie was obvious: prosperity, merriment, uncommonly good weather. What it lost was negligible—the cost of doing business.

But we were speaking of the Hawthorn family, weren’t we, and their willow work—their coppicing, their basket-weaving, their management of this enchanted resource. Here is a secret that isn’t, really, for everyone knew it even if they didn’t understand the custom: the Hawthorn family’s true work was to sing to the willows. By ancient treaty this was only required four times a year, at the turning of the seasons; by long-standing tradition, it was done every day, at sunrise and sunset, the way one bids one’s family members good morning on waking and good night before bed. Just as beekeepers tell their hives all the news in thanks for honey, the Hawthorns sang to their trees in thanks for their translations. But none had ever taken to the task quite so vigorously as Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn, the latest daughters of that house.

When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.

Esther was two years the elder, with hair dark as the December of her birth, and if this story were a folk tale or an old song, she’d be certain to have a disposition as frosty; Ysabel was the younger, and because her own hair was bright as kings’ coins or summer corn, you might think she was given to chatter and merriment. But this was not the truth of them, singly or together. Esther was thoughtful and gregarious, and while Ysabel had a laugh loud and easy as barrel-tumbled apples in the fall, she was in fact very shy.

They loved each other utterly, and everyone in Thistleford knew it.

Though their voices had the sheen of grammar, Esther and Ysabel were not themselves grammarians, and in truth, they felt nothing especially uncanny about their home. The silver-green of willow leaves was familiar comfort to them, and the sisters read their moods like weather. The willows themselves felt like ancestry, like kin. They cherished the Professors in particular, for their height and their shade and the sound of the wind rustling through their leaves like chimes—but they loved even more the stories told of them, of how the Professors came to bow their leafy heads together over the River Liss. Their father told them that the Professors loved each other in a forbidden love, and they were driven from their homes into the river, and conjugated into trees; their mother said they’d made some great sacrifice for the good of their families, given themselves to the river in exchange for a secret gift. But whatever details blurred and shifted in the telling, the fact that the Professors had been and still were lovers never came into dispute; they had professed their love, hence the name.

From their earliest days, Esther and Ysabel never shirked their duty, singing the required hymn with great solemnity at the changing of every season. Strange to tell, it wasn’t in English; they couldn’t say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it. Their mother told them that her parents had thought it was Welsh, until the day a Levantine woodworker staying with the family had said it sounded to her like Arabic, but a dialect she’d never heard. Either it was older than her, or from a place she’d never travelled (“or,” their mother said, ruefully, “my accent was too atrocious to understand and she was too polite to say so”).

But the woodworker had been able to explain some of it; it was, their mother told them, a song about the North Wind opening doors and carrying messages to and from a beloved in exile. So the girls knew it as the Professors’ Hymn, and though they didn’t really understand it—they argued, sometimes, about whether the North Wind was one of the lovers, or merely a messenger—they enjoyed improvising harmonies into the repetition of nonsense la sounds in the long refrain, inflecting it slightly differently depending on the time of year, and how likely the North Wind was to blow.

As Esther and Ysabel grew, as singing became their favourite pastime, they began to play with adding new material to their repertoire. It did the trees no harm, and seemed even to do them some good; their parents observed small shifts of colour in bark and leaf, though any other effects were too subtle to track without a grammarian. But if any grammarian would stoop to such common work, instead of the fire and crackle of conjugation in the king’s service, they hadn’t yet wandered towards Thistleford. Or if they had—and only one had—they tended towards Arcadia, and never came out again.

Taste is a kind of language, and siblings speak it with a forked tongue. As entwined as Esther and Ysabel were, there came a point in their childhood where their interests diverged, and, like the Professors, they loved each other across the gap between them. Ysabel loved pickles where Esther couldn’t abide the smell of vinegar; Esther took to foraging while Ysabel preferred gardening; Ysabel was fascinated by boys and their company while Esther found them tedious and enjoyed being alone.

Where music was concerned, Ysabel loved flutes and murder ballads best, while Esther favoured harps and riddle songs. They often teased each other over their favourites, argued over what kind of music the willows preferred while gathering branches or stripping bark.

“All I’m saying,” mused Ysabel, bundling long strips of bark together into tight coils, “is that if I had died for love, I’d like to hear William and Margaret songs best. Songs of love winning out, of holding each other forever, even at the bottom of a river.”

Esther was weaving a basket, but paused in her work to look up and squint at her sister in amusement. “Bel, really? Do you love murder ballads because you want to be murdered? Or because you don’t, not really, but you get to have it safely in six stanzas and a looping refrain?”

Ysabel laughed. “You’ve turned it backwards! I’m saying if I were murdered, the ghost of me might still like to hear murder ballads!”

“Or,” said Esther, “you might go off them completely. I’d certainly find them less thrilling from the receiving end of a penknife.”

Ysabel rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. What do you think they like best?”

Esther looked at the trees thoughtfully. “Travelling songs, like their hymn. Sea songs. Songs that bring news from away.”

“So, Miss Hawthorn,” Ysabel said, raising an eyebrow and deepening her voice into a pitch-perfect mimicry of an insufferable headmaster from their school days, “it is your contention that people must in fact most ardently desire that which they cannot have? You don’t think that songs of travel are liable to sadden those rooted into the earth? Besides”—she smiled, reaching up to touch one’s trunk—“surely the river brings them all the news worth telling.”

“Only from one direction,” said Esther, watching the water flow. “That’s just it; I think they’d welcome news of mortal lands, mortal work. And there’s no singing in Arcadia.”

Ysabel went quiet for a moment, then worked her fingers into the grass. Too lightly, she said, “Did Rin tell you that?”

Esther nodded, then bent her gaze back to her weaving. Ysabel waited for more, but her sister stayed quiet, so she shrugged.

“Well, Rin’s wrong. We sang in Arcadia, when we were lost.”

Esther paused, again, and looked at Ysabel; it was so rare that she mentioned it.

“But we’re not Arcadian. It’s not that it’s forbidden,” she said, carefully. “Arcadians just … don’t. Or can’t. They play instruments, but they never sing. And if I were ever to live there, Rin said I’d eventually forget how.”

“But,” said Ysabel, “you said Rin loves your singing.”

Esther looked back to her weaving, nodded. “They do.”

Ysabel narrowed her eyes, reached for her sister’s hand, and twined their fingers together tightly. “Well. Rin can think what they like. If you were ever in danger of forgetting how to sing, I would simply have to come and remind you.”

Esther chuckled, but Ysabel went on, teasing. “Every other week. You’ll come here, then I’ll go there, and there won’t be a week we don’t see each other, and sing together. I don’t care how golden and honeyed Arcadia is, I won’t let you forget a single word of ‘Tam Lin.’”

“Ugh,” laughed Esther. “Mercy! That tedious tune! We always leave off a few verses!”

“We won’t anymore! In fact, we’ll invent new ones! I’ll make you learn them!”

“Fine, fine,” said Esther, reaching out to pet her sister’s hair. “Thank you, Bel. I accept your proposed tyrannies. And anyway,” she said, aiming for lightness and missing it with a thud, “you know—you do know I would never leave you for Arcadia.”

Ysabel smiled like a page turning. “What shall we sing to the trees?”

They settled on “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow,” and if the willows bent their branches towards them as they sang, trailed them even lower into the water, the sisters never noticed.

A necessary pause, here, to explain a delicate subject.

The Hawthorns always married from away. For generations, grey heads would nod knowingly if a Hawthorn youth set out on a journey away from town; more often than not, that youth returned with flushed cheeks and secret smiles, and the announcement of nuptials followed soon after. They attracted itinerant folk of uncommon but moveable skill, folk whose names sat on them lightly enough that they didn’t mind shedding them to dwell along the willow-lined banks of the River Liss. It was as if the willows, so practised at sifting grammar from the water with their roots, also filtered the Hawthorns’ marriage prospects through their branches, combing out anyone who might prove an unwelcome snarl to the family’s stewardship of the land.

Esther’s suitors, thus far, had proven troublesome exceptions.

There was Samuel Pollard, the Hawthorns’ nearest neighbour; a gentleman farmer, he owned the Thistleford bridge and several fields downriver from the Hawthorns’ willow stands. A union between their families would bring about a union of their lands, and draw the Hawthorns closer to the wholesome, settled tameness of Thistleford. This in and of itself was not so terrible—except that Esther could not bear Samuel Pollard’s company. His eyes always had the soft, beseeching expression of a whining dog; his hands, bafflingly, were always somehow both cold and moist, and he was forever finding ways to accidentally brush Esther’s skin with them. He had gone to one of the great universities—Esther refused to remember which—and returned speaking both Latin and poetry, which he saw fit to share as often as he could though he plainly spoke neither very well. He thought himself gallant—he aspired to gallantry—and he often brought Esther and Ysabel little gifts from his trips to London and Exeter, hinting of his political prospects to their bemused parents. Esther regarded him with that species of contempt bred by long familiarity and short temper.

(To Esther’s baffled irritation, Ysabel said she liked the man, saw nothing objectionable about him, and even claimed to admire his verse—though Ysabel, it must be said, was not usually the one bearing the full brunt of his recitations.)

But then there was Rin.

Rin came from Arcadia. Rin had a name that Esther could not hold wholly in her head, though they’d whispered it to her once, and when they did, what she grasped in images and feelings was glint of frost on the long grasses in a winter dawn. Rin was a feeling, a lightness in her step, a burr in her throat; some days she thought she’d made them up inside her head, so difficult was it to put words to them.

She had told no one but Ysabel about her lover—though people talked, of course, towns being what they are, and the Hawthorns being of such uncommon interest to them all.

Esther didn’t know what to do with Rin. She knew what she wanted to do—she knew this with great enthusiasm and precision—but she couldn’t grasp a future with them any more than she could grasp the river water in her bare hands. Arcadians were only about as novel in the area as any other foreigners, but they tended to visit, not stay; trysts were not uncommon, but marriages were. People sometimes fell into or out of Arcadia by accident—Esther and Ysabel had as children—but no one who’d set out on purpose to travel there had ever returned, and opinion was divided on whether that was because Arcadia was too delightful to leave or too dangerous to survive.

(There was of course the most obvious answer, which most folk didn’t discuss: that a traveller might emerge from Arcadia a hundred years after having ventured in, however little time they’d spent within its borders. But no one in Thistleford could remember it happening; perhaps it merely hadn’t happened yet.)

Everything was riddles with Rin, and as much as Esther loved riddles, her chief pleasure was in solving them. Pollard was a loose thread begging to be pulled; Rin was a knot that would not come undone.

The first time Esther met Rin, they were a storm. While walking in the Modal Lands she was caught in a howling gale, and took shelter beneath one of the granite outcroppings that littered the area near the Refrain. There was a great clashing in the air, and the sort of mixing weather common to the borders of Arcadia, a swirl of hail and thunder. It was so loud and dreadful that Esther began singing to drown it out—“The False Knight on the Road,” a riddle song with a tune somewhere between jaunty and mournful, just as she liked them.

By the end of the first verse the hail melted to heavy rain. By the end of the second verse the rain began to taper off. By the end of the third verse the storm fell away like an unclasped cloak, and late afternoon light glistened on the wet granite like grammar.

She finished the song—it always felt wrong to begin a song without ending it—and stepped out from beneath the shelter. A silver bracelet, delicately etched with stars, glinted in the grass at her feet.

But people sometimes left offerings in the Modal Lands, and Esther had been taught from her earliest childhood not to disturb them; it wouldn’t do to pick up other folks’ hopes and dreams, however accidentally. So she stepped lightly around the bracelet and went home.

The second time Esther met Rin, they were a snowy owl, incongruously bright in the bare branches of a wintering tree, tearing into a vole. Esther had stepped into the Modal Lands to gather bowls of snow; it was high summer in Thistleford, and she wanted to drizzle them with honey for a treat. But the owl looked so rare and strange and bloody that she found herself singing “Childe Owlet” to it, one of Ysabel’s more gruesome favourites, before she quite realized what she was doing.

The owl stopped eating. It swayed, slightly, as she sang. When she finished, the owl flew away, and she turned to go home, but heard a clang of metal on stone behind her.

On a flat rock by the river, a jewelled cup lay toppled on its side, spilling out a silver bracelet etched with stars.

Esther crouched down to examine them. She began to feel the grammar of a story circling her, the grammar of two out of three.

She left the cup and the bracelet, filled her bowls with snow, and returned to her family.

The third time Esther met Rin, they were a woman playing a harp. The moon was full in the Modal Lands, and the wind was blowing from the north, carrying the sound of harp strings to Thistleford. But no one heard them but Esther, who rose from her bed and wandered from the house; on bare feet she stepped carefully past the Professors’ roots, and stopped at what she saw there.

They had long white hair, tied back in black ribbon. They wore a green shirt with billowing sleeves, cuffed tightly at the wrist, and a black skirt embroidered along the waist and hem in silver, catching the moonlight. Their hands were pale and moved over the strings like they were shaping a story from them.

They stopped playing when Esther saw them, and looked at her across the span of the River Liss.

“Why won’t you let me requite you?” they said.

Their voice made Esther think of weather, of winter, of woodsmoke: something cold but bright, burning and fragrant, curling into the air before vanishing. They were utterly strange and utterly beautiful, in a way that Esther yearned towards because she didn’t understand it, the way she yearned towards horizons and untrodden secret paths in unfamiliar woods.

It took her a moment to focus on their words, and another moment to reply,

“Requite me for what?”

“Your songs,” they said. “You gave them to me, and I must pay you for them. But you keep refusing.”

Esther shook her head. “They cost me nothing to give. I sang to please myself.”

The harper closed their eyes. “O what is crueller than the frost,” they murmured, running their thumb over the strings, “a gift far greater than its cost.”

Esther’s eyes shone. She’d never heard that one.

The harper went on, “I can hear them, still—‘The False Knight,’ the ‘Owlet Childe.’ I treasure them. You must have something from me, if I am to keep them.”

Esther frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re a musician—can you not remember the tunes? They’re both rather common—”

The harper looked at her as if she’d grown another head.

“Your singing,” they said, gently, “is not … common. I want—” they said, and it seemed to Esther that something in their voice was stiffening, deepening around an unspeakable ache, “to recall the songs as you sang them.”

Esther felt very stupid as she said, “Would you like me to sing them to you again?”

The harper looked away with so much anguish that Esther felt herself sinking into nightmare. This was a riddle, a real one, come to her from Arcadia, and here she was failing to solve it.

The harper suddenly stood, and placed a hand on the harp’s neck.

“I brought you this,” they said, and now their voice made Esther think of a well at night, dark and echoing the sound of coins thrown into it. “It is my most prized possession. I shaped it from the space between seven stars and strung it with silk spun from their light. I beg of you not to refuse it, nor to sing to me again until we’ve reached an agreement.”

Esther stared at the harp—sleek and black as an otter swimming, white strings that shimmered with grammar. She thought about gifts, and Samuel Pollard, and how much she hated him giving her things she hadn’t asked for—tortoise-shell combs, lengths of fancy ribbon—under the guise of being neighbourly when they were clearly meant for courting. She thought about how the gift forced a bond on her that was awkward and difficult to refuse, and how payment could dispel that, could break the bond.

There was a grammar, too, to gifts.

The harper, she thought, was asking her to release them from something—but saying that they did, also, want what she’d unwittingly given. That it was too much to carry without balancing the exchange.

And Esther did not want this to be the last time they met.

“I have a bargain for you,” said Esther, “if you’ll take it. I’ve long wanted to play the harp—would you teach me?”

“Yes,” they said, immediately, and then sank to their stone seat again, and closed their eyes. All the glittering ice of them softened; they all but melted the harp back against their shoulder (Esther, inexplicably, blushed) and raised their hands to the strings. All of a sudden they were playing “The False Knight on the Road” as if it were accompanying a voice, and in another moment had blended it into “Childe Owlet,” then back out again.

Esther watched, and listened, and felt her heart twist inside her.

“Thank you,” they said, when they’d finished. They looked peaceful, now. “Thank you. You may call me Rin.”

“Rin,” she said. “I’m Esther, by the way.”

“I know,” they said. When Esther blinked, they said, “There is a witch who runs a mill in Arcadia—”

“Not Agnes Crow?” said Esther, softly, wondering.

“She is a neighbour,” they said. “I asked her counsel in how to approach you. She suggested”—they gestured at themselves—“wearing a shape that could talk to you.”

“Sound advice,” said Esther, looking towards the Refrain. “My sister and I gave her a chicken once, and she showed us the way out of Arcadia. But it was a long time ago.”

Rin looked at Esther closely, with a kind of gentle scrutiny that made her feel like there was a brush running through her hair.

“I see it on you. That you’ve been in Arcadia. That it left a mark on you.”

“I see,” said Esther, with a boldness she would later marvel at for days, “that we have many things we could share with each other, if you’re interested in further trade. Perhaps someday you’ll give me something worth another song.”

She couldn’t put words to the look on Rin’s face. She only knew, very sharply and deeply, that she wanted to go on being the cause of it.

On market days Esther and Ysabel walked together into the town, carrying bundles of their willow work to sell: woven baskets, twisted cordage, pouches of willow-leaf tea, and earthen bottles of willow water stoppered up with wax. The Hawthorns didn’t especially need the income—they sold most of their willow wood wholesale, with farmers and artisans and prospectors coming up to the property to pick their own materials—but the sisters enjoyed the independence, the change of scene, and each other’s company. Their work wasn’t the finest available, but it had an undeniable potency, and the sisters themselves were charming, with an eye for beauty and a knack for patter that drew them reliable custom.