THE HOLLOWS RISE

Granny Odell was standing at the gate when the farmer's wagon came creaking up the lane to Marrow Creek, as though she had been standing there since the morning Tamsin left.

She had put on her good black shawl, the one with the jet buttons that she kept in a camphor chest for funerals and the visits of the doctor, and she stood very straight with her stick planted before her and her white head bare to the cold. Behind her, in the doorway of the cottage, Jonah was jumping up and down on one foot with his arms thrown wide. He had grown another inch since the autumn. The color had come back into his cheeks, and he had a smear of flour across his nose and a dish towel tucked into his belt, and he looked so much like a healthy boy of thirteen that Tamsin's throat closed up at the sight of him.

"Well," said Granny, as the wagon drew up. She looked at each of them in turn, taking in the coal dust and the bandages, the stolen coats, the Grand Duke of Vandermere with a sleeping child in his arms, and the young man with a bloody shoulder who was being supported between Tamsin and the driver. "I suppose you had better come in, then. I have put the kettle on, and there is a pot of stew, and it looks to me as if you could use both."

"Granny, there is a price on our heads," said Tamsin. "It is not safe for you to take us in."

"Child, I have lived in this village for seventy-three years, and I have been at risk of one thing or another for every one of them. I do not propose to start turning away guests now." She stood aside and held the door. "Bring him in by the fire, and let me see that arm."

…

She healed Dorian herself, at the kitchen table, with a wet cloth and a bowl of steaming water and an expression of mild irritation.

Tamsin had never seen her do it. In all her childhood Granny had been the person who made the poultices and set the bones and sat up through the long nights, and she had never once, so far as Tamsin knew, called on the green in front of anyone. But now she cut away the sleeve of Dorian's coat with a pair of kitchen shears, laid her gnarled brown hands on either side of the wound, which was long and deep and ugly, and began to hum. The sound was low and cracked and tuneless, like the buzzing of a hive on a summer afternoon. A pale green glimmer rose from beneath her fingers. It ran like water into the torn flesh, and the edges of the wound drew together, slowly, a hair's breadth at a time, while Dorian lay back in his chair with his teeth clenched and his eyes shut and said through them, with great dignity, that it was all really nothing at all.

"You are the worst patient I have had since your grandfather," said Granny, "and I should know."

"I beg your pardon, madam, but I have never met my grandfather."

"Then you have saved yourself a great deal of trouble." She sat back, wiped her hands on her apron, and regarded the neat pink scar with satisfaction. "That should do it, and you will have a stiff arm for a week, and you are to keep it out of fights."

"I make no promises," said Dorian, but he opened his eyes and looked at her with a kind of dazed and tender awe, and Tamsin saw that his own were suspiciously bright.

…

Lila ate three bowls of stew.

She sat on a stool at the kitchen table, in a borrowed gray flannel gown that came down to her ankles, with the rag doll propped against the sugar bowl and a spoon clutched in her fist. Her hair was a tangle. Her cheeks were pale, but she ate with a thoroughness that made Tamsin want to laugh and weep at once, tilting the bowl to get the last of the gravy, and when she had finished she looked up at Jonah, who had been standing at the other end of the table the whole time in a silence of acute self-consciousness, and said with grave courtesy, "Are you the brother?"

"I am the brother," said Jonah, going red to the ears. "Are you the Princess?"

"I was, I think, but I do not believe that I am any longer. It is rather confusing." She frowned and added, "Tamsin says that you can make the potatoes grow."

"Not exactly, because they grow on their own, mostly, I just ask them nicely." He scratched his head. "Would you like to see?"

They went out into the garden together, the tall black-haired girl in the enormous nightgown and the sandy boy with the dish towel, and Tamsin stood at the window with a cup of tea going cold in her hand and watched Lila crouch in the frozen vegetable patch, where the winter kale stood in grimy ranks, and place her small palm flat on the earth. Jonah squatted beside her. He said something, and she nodded very seriously, and for a moment they were both quite still.

Then the kale unfurled.

It did not do anything dramatic. The leaves simply loosened and lifted and turned their curled green faces up to the sun, like a row of schoolchildren responding to a bell, and a quiver ran along the length of the patch from end to end. Lila's laughter came through the glass. It was a high, clear, astonished peal, the first full laugh that Tamsin had heard her give since the ball, and it did something to her heart that she could not put into words.

"She has never been with another one," said Soren's voice behind her.

He had come to stand at her elbow, bare-handed, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and the shadow of three days' beard on his jaw. He looked exhausted and rather dangerous and unexpectedly happy. He watched the children through the window with an expression of wondering gravity, and she saw the muscle tighten in his cheek.

"Not one," he said. "In eleven years. She has sat in a nursery with a Chancellor's spy at her bedside and been told that the one thing that she was must be put to sleep, and she has never once had the chance to see another child do what she can do."

"She does now," said Tamsin. "And I think that I know how to give her the rest."

…

The song came to her as it always did, from below.

It was a little before dusk, in the narrow back bedroom that had been Tamsin's own as a girl, where a patchwork quilt lay over the iron bed and the window looked out over the gray slow river. Lila lay on the quilt on her back with her hands folded and her eyes wide open. Jonah sat at the foot of the bed with the doll in his lap. Granny stood by the door with her arms folded. Soren was beside the bed, holding the child's left hand in his bare right one, and Tamsin knelt on the rag rug and laid her palm flat in the center of Lila's chest.

"This may feel strange," she said. "It may feel like being tickled from the inside, or like a cold wind blowing through you. But I promise that it will not hurt, and if you want me to stop, you need only tell me, and I will."

"Will it make the sleepy go away?"

"I believe so. I think it will make a great many things go away." She smiled down at her. "Are you ready?"

Lila gave a small solemn nod.

Tamsin closed her eyes. She had sung the Rooting Song a hundred times by now in her head, in the dark of the Glasshouse and under the stars of the Hollows, and she knew every turn of it, the long low spiral of the opening phrase, the little hesitating rise, the steady downward fall that was like the roots going into the earth. She let it begin. It came out of her softly, hardly more than a breath, and she felt the small body beneath her hand go rigid with startlement and then, little by little, begin to relax.

The green rose in her like a tide.

It was easier than it had ever been. There was no struggling, no hunting for a thread in the dark. She seemed to go down into the child as one goes down a stair into a cellar, and to find at the bottom all the doors already open. And in the dim passages of the small blood she found them, the gray places, the long pale clotted threads of the thing that had been put there, year upon year, by the spoon. It lay along the veins like frost on a window. It had worked its way into every corner. She understood now what the Pharmacopoeia had meant by the damping of the sap. It was not a poison that killed. It was a sleep that was laid on the roots, so gently that the sleeper never knew, until she could neither grow nor wake.

Come out, she sang, without words. Come out, and let her wake.

The gray thread stirred. It rose from the vein like mist from a meadow, slowly at first, and then in long silvery wisps that coiled up out of Lila's wrist and her throat and the crook of her elbow, drawn up out of her skin toward Tamsin's hand. They gathered in the air above the bed. They were icy cold, and bitter with the smell of silverweed and quicksilver, and Tamsin felt them pass through her own body and out, drawn by the song, leaving a taste of metal on her tongue. Her nose began to bleed. Warm drops ran over her lip and fell onto the quilt.

"Tamsin," said Soren sharply.

"Keep holding her," she gasped. "I am nearly at the end."

The last of the gray came free with a sound like a sigh. It hung for a moment in the middle of the room, a pale shining cloud the size of a man's fist, and then, as if it had been stripped of whatever held it together, it fell apart into fine dust and drifted down over the bed and vanished.

Lila drew a long shuddering breath.

Her eyes snapped open, and they were green.

…

It was a green she had never seen in any eye, not in her own glass nor in any mine or meadow or fern, the deep, living, burning green of the first leaf in spring. They blazed up out of that thin white face like two lamps lit from within, and a gust of warm wind went through the room that smelled of loam and rain and cut grass, and every pot and jar and cup on the shelves began to rattle.

"Oh," said Lila, in a small amazed voice. "Oh, I can hear them. They are all talking at once."

The floor trembled.

A root pushed up between the boards at the foot of the bed, pale and thick as a man's wrist, and unrolled itself like a waking snake. Another followed, and another. Ivy poured in a green flood through the cracks of the window frame. The patchwork quilt sprouted a fringe of tiny white flowers. Jonah leaped to his feet with a yell of delight, and the doll fell from his lap, and as it hit the floor the seam in its back split open, and from out of the cotton stuffing there rose a thin trailing vine, studded with pink-tipped clover. It was the clover from the nursery quilt. It was the clover she had put in her pocket on the first night, and sewn into the doll's lining with the key for luck, and forgotten, and it had been lying there, dry and brown, for months, waiting.

"Tamsin," whispered Granny from the doorway. "Look at the window."

She turned her head, still dizzy, with the blood running down her chin.

Outside in the dusk the village was blooming.

The dead gardens of Marrow Creek, the frozen plots and the sooty hedges, were putting out leaves where no leaf had grown in twenty winters. Along the lane the blackened bare branches of the hawthorns had broken into white. Out on the river, where for as long as she could remember there had flowed a sluggish sullen ribbon of gray water, scummed over with silver like the skin on cold milk, a single clear stream, no wider than a man's arm, had begun to run down the middle of the current. It shone like glass. It threaded between the pale stones. It ran through the gray as a stream of spring water runs through a slough, quite steadily, and the gray parted before it and did not close.

"The water," said Jonah, in an awed whisper. "Tamsin, the water is clean."

Soren had gone down on one knee at the bedside with Lila's hand still clasped in his. He did not look at the roots, or the flowers, or the green flood of ivy over the floor. He was looking at his sister's face, and the tears were running openly down his own.

"Good morning, little one," he said unsteadily. "I am so very glad to see you."

…

The elders came that night, and the old wooden church at the end of the village could not hold them all.

They had come from the Hollows and the Calder seams, and from the Bayou Reach, on foot and by wagon and by the night trains, in answer to the word that Granny's runners had carried by telegraph and hand and whispered rumor across the country in three days. There were two hundred of them. They crowded the plain bare pews and stood three deep along the walls, a congregation of the gaunt, the stooped, the scarred, the white-haired, in patched coats and miners' boots and the long black shawls of the Bayou women. Lanterns hung from the rafters. A stove glowed in the aisle. In the pulpit, which had been cleared of its Bible for the evening, an old man from the Reach named Gaspard Landry stood leaning on a cane carved with fishes, speaking in a slow musical drawl that rolled through the church like water over stones.

"I am telling you what my grandmother told me, and her grandmother told her," he said. "I am telling you that the Well is old, and hungry, and that it has to be fed on a certain day, or it dies. The Founders knew it. They made a rite for it, which they call the Binding. Every hundred years, at the lowest sun of the winter, an Aldridge must stand over the Well in the presence of a bride of the Founding houses, and say the words, and shed the blood, and the Well is renewed." He lifted his head. "Three hundred years have passed since the first, and this is the year of the third."

A murmur ran through the pews.

"That is why he is marrying the Chancellor's daughter at Midwinter," said Tamsin, from the front bench. She had been listening with a growing chill. "It was never politics. It is the Binding. They need the heir in the Cathedral on the shortest day, with the bride at his side and the Rootkin in the Cistern below."

"They do, and that is why you are here, and why the boy is here, and why they will do everything they can to keep him alive until the day." Old Landry looked at Soren, who sat at her side in a borrowed coat with his bare hand on his knee. "Forgive me, Your Grace. I do not mean to speak ill of the man who has fed the Hollows this week, but I will not pretend that I know what to make of you."

"You are quite right not to," said Soren. His voice was low and even. "I have not done anything yet to deserve a hearing, and I will not ask for more than I have earned."

"Then what do you say we should do? Fight or run?" A big red-haired man at the back of the church had risen, a miner by his hands, with a face like a clenched fist. "I say run, for my part. I say we take the children and the old folk and go south to the Bayou, or north to the Frost Coast, or anywhere the Chancellor's soldiers aren't. We can't win. We have nothing but picks and shovels and a few old women who can heal a cut."

"And I say we have run for three hundred years," cried a woman from the other side. "I say that if we run again, we are running to our graves."

"There are six hundred in the Frost Guard!"

"There are forty thousand of us in the Hollows alone!"

The church erupted. Voices rose and clashed. Men and women were on their feet, shouting across the pews, and old Landry rapped his cane on the pulpit for order and was not heard. Tamsin sat with her hands pressed between her knees, and looked at the tired angry faces about her, and understood for the first time that she was not looking at a mob. She was looking at a family. They had been divided and frightened and lied to, and yet they had come to this church tonight because someone had said the word cure, and some old half-buried part of them still believed.

…

The door crashed open.

A boy ran up the aisle, a small tow-headed boy of eight in a coal-stained smock, and she knew him at once. It was the boy from Ash Row, the one with the blue lips whom she had healed in the alley. He was gasping for breath and covered in snow, and he fell on his knees at the foot of the pulpit and gulped like a fish.

"They're coming," he said. "I came up on the milk train. I heard them at the Highmark depot, the whole regiment, with the guns on flat cars. Frost Guard, sir, a thousand of them, and the Chancellor's own seal on the order." His voice cracked. "They're coming up the Calder line, and they're to burn the Wards."

A terrible silence fell on the church.

"When is this supposed to happen?" said Granny Odell.

"The Ash Row Ward is to go first, they said, on Thursday, and the Hollows districts after. All the Wards. All the quarantine fences and the buildings inside them, and everyone that is in them, and there's to be no survivors that can bear witness." The boy was crying. "My mother is in Ash Row. My two little sisters."

Soren was on his feet before the words had finished. He crossed the church in four strides, and the crowd parted before him. He stopped at the pulpit steps and turned to face them, with his face white and set and his hands at his sides, and when he spoke it was in the calm, clear, carrying tone that he used in the Council.

"I am the Grand Duke of Vandermere, and the heir to the throne of this Dominion," he said, "and I have heard everything that has been said in this place tonight. I will not insult you with promises. I have only this to say. I will go to the Council, and I will stand up in the full Chamber, in front of the lords and the press, and I will renounce my claim to the Crown. I will tell them what I saw. I will name the Chancellor, and the Well, and the Founders, and I will say that the House of Aldridge is not fit to rule, and I will give up everything I have to make them stop this."

A gasp rippled through the pews.

"No," said Tamsin.

She was on her feet, and she did not remember rising. She went to him through the staring crowd, and took his arm, and turned him to face her.

"You cannot do it," she said. "You must not. If you renounce the throne, you become one more fallen duke with a grudge and a story, whom the Chancellor can discredit in a week with a stack of forged letters. The press will call you mad. The Council will lock you in a tower, and there will be no one left in the Cathedral to stand in front of the Founders' Book, and Sterling will take the Binding in your place with a puppet in a crown." Her voice shook. "Don't throw the crown away, Soren, but use it as the weapon that it is."

He stared at her.

"It is the only weapon they cannot take from you. It is the one thing that all those lords and governors and bishops will have to look at when you speak, and the only thing that can make them stay in the room and listen." She turned to the church, and raised her voice. "Everyone in this place has spent their whole lives being told that our story does not matter. Well, the story matters a great deal, and it matters most when it is told by the person whom nobody can say is lying about himself. Let him walk into the Cathedral on the day of the wedding as the Heir of the Crown, with all the lords there, and the press, and the Founders' Book. Let him say it there."

"And what about the Cistern?" said someone from the pews.

"I will go beneath it," said Tamsin. "With the key. I will find the Well, and I will do whatever it takes to stop it, and Soren will give the world the truth above. If we both succeed on the same morning, they will have nowhere to run."

The church was silent. Then, somewhere in the back, an old woman began, very quietly, to hum.

It was the spiral melody. It rose, thin and cracked and uncertain, and another voice took it up, and a third. It rolled through the rafters like a wave. By the time the hymn reached its second phrase, every person in the church was singing, and the lanterns swung and shivered in the rising sound.

…

Later, after the elders had gone to their beds, Tamsin stood alone at the cottage door with her shawl drawn tight about her, watching the new clear stream running in the creek.

The night was very still. Stars shone over the hills. From the village came the faint, sweet, unfamiliar smell of hawthorn blossom in midwinter, and beyond it she could hear the murmur of the water, its small bright voice wandering over the pebbles. Behind her in the cottage, Soren and Dorian were murmuring over the map. Lila was asleep in the little back room, with Jonah curled on the rug beside her and the doll between them.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Granny," she said, without turning. "You ought to be in bed."

"I ought to be a great many things." The old woman came to stand beside her, leaning on her stick, small and bent and solid as a standing stone. She looked out over the village in silence for a time, over the white-blossomed hedges and the shining thread of the creek. "I have not seen the hawthorn bloom in January since I was a girl. I thought it was dead. I thought we had all been dead for years, and merely forgotten to lie down."

"It is only a little water, Granny. It is only the smallest beginning."

"It is the beginning that matters." Granny's hand tightened on her shoulder, and Tamsin felt, to her astonishment, a tremor in the strong old fingers. "I have been thinking about your mother, child. I think about her more, as I grow old. She had the same stubborn little chin, and the same way of walking into a room as if she meant to rearrange the furniture." Her voice shook. "She would have been so proud of you tonight, my darling. And she would have been so terribly afraid."