Under the Green Hill

by Laura L. Sullivan

  The Morgan children saw four trees in a row—two quite robust, nearly the same height for Rowan and Meg, one somewhat smaller beside them for Silly, and at the end a healthy little sapling no more than four feet tall, James’s tree.

  “You planted trees for us, even though you never met us? Even though you might never have met us?” Meg was touched.

  “Every member of the family—that I know about—gets a tree. And who’s to say I didn’t know you’d be coming, eventually?” She tapped the side of her nose in a gesture the Morgans had not seen before.

  “But shouldn’t there be more?” Meg asked. “Why aren’t there trees stretching back as far as the gravestones?”

  “The trees are each bound to a person’s life. When he or she dies, the tree is cut down. Generally used to make the casket, though not always, and the roots are dried and put on a bonfire after the funeral. Many, many trees have grown here, and many have fallen.”

  “If the trees are connected to a person’s life, what happens if the tree dies before the person?”

  Phyllida looked at Meg sharply, but then said, “Why, I don’t believe it’s ever happened. Ashes are hardy trees, and of course we take care to keep them safe from rabbits and such when they’re young. I doubt there are better-cared-for trees in the county than these. Sometimes the trees are omens, and wilt and droop when their person’s death is near. It is said that saving the tree can save the person. But you certainly wouldn’t want any harm to come to your ash tree.” She gave a delicate shudder.

  “Why plant the tree in the first place, if it would be so bad if it dies?”

  “People with ash trees tend to live longer, and fall ill less. Trees are strong, and they don’t suffer the same way humans do. They can withstand a great deal. It is sometimes helpful to have a part of your life bound up in something so solid, so enduring. It’s a very old magic, and generally not spoken of, but, given who you are, I suppose there’s no reason to keep it from you. It is said that if you hover at the very gates of death, if all hope is gone, your life can be saved by your ash tree. The tree is hewn, split straight down the middle, and you are passed through the cleft. Then the tree is bound up, and if it heals, and lives, why, so do you. But splitting a tree nearly always kills it. And what if you were wrong, and the person wasn’t really about to die? Well, they’d die for sure once their ash was killed. So it could really only be done when there was no other hope.”

  Meg wasn’t sure she liked all this. Her life bound to a tree she hadn’t even known about until this moment? Rowan’s life held captive in an egg? Was it in the egg, and the ash, too? How could life be separable from the person it belonged to? It had never occurred to her that our lives may not be entirely our own.

  Phyllida took them next to the outbuildings: a stable that housed two lazy hunters, four pied carriage horses, a quiet saddle horse, and a cream-colored pony named Persephone; a henhouse that supplied the estate with eggs, though they bought their roasting chickens from somewhere else; a low red building that held tools, fertilizer, and assorted useful flotsam; and the dairy and cowshed, Lemman’s domain.

  The Rookery cows led a very comfortable life, rising late and breakfasting on succulent grasses and grains before offering up their milk, and then heading out, sometime around noon, to a nearby field to do a little grazing and chew their cud. Each of the twenty or so cows had her own stall with a low swinging gate, but each cow also knew how to open that gate, and when left to her own devices sometimes bunked with a friend or took a midnight stroll around the shed. The cows could also unlatch the main gate to the dairy, which the Ashes thought a good precaution in case there was ever a fire, but the conscientious cows never strayed when they weren’t supposed to. Lemman, their caretaker, had an almost magical control over the beasts, and they always did her bidding. She slept in a loft inside the dairy, and rarely left its confines except to accompany the cows on their daily pilgrimage. When the children met her, she was milking the last of her charges, a shaggy red Highland cow.

  I say “met,” but though Phyllida offered an introduction, Lemman never looked up from her chore or offered any indication that she was aware of the Morgans. The steady sound of milk hitting the pail did not falter, and her cheek did not move from the cow’s side. The cows, however, seemed quite interested in the newcomers, and lowed welcomes as they stretched their necks for a closer look. At Phyllida’s urging, the children stepped hesitantly forth to pet them. It’s more intimidating than you might think to make overtures to a cow. If you’re not used to them, they seem awfully big. But these were kind cows, and very gentle, and though they crowded close to the Morgans they were careful about where they put their hooves and moved in an orderly fashion, each yielding her place to another when she had had a good sniff and gotten her ears rubbed. They were all the colors cows come in, some pure white, others brown, some calico or patchwork. One was brindled, one blue-ticked, and one, the smallest, was a pale dun that was almost yellow. Her left horn turned downward, her right one up, and something about her expression made her seem particularly intelligent. On some secret cue, she moved to the door and waited at the boundary, while the other cows lined up behind her.

  Lemman, finished with her milking, took the bucket into the adjoining dairy, and returned a moment later to take her place at the dun cow’s side. With one hand on the cow’s back, she led the procession past the children, giving no sign she saw them. Rosemarie was right: Lemman was lovely, with a sort of wistful, distant sadness in her large eyes. Her movements were very slow, like those of an old woman who must put a great deal of thought and care into each step. And yet she was graceful, as though performing in slow motion the steps of some inner dance. She was tall and lissome and fair, with hair the color of a wheat field under the sun.

  “Well, that’s Lemman,” Phyllida said as the girl and cows trooped past. “I’d hoped she might pay you a bit more mind, but she’s lost in her own thoughts, as usual. Once in a great while I’ll get her to talk to me, and Bran sometimes spends hours with her. He does most of the talking, of course, but it’s one of the few times she raises her eyes to look at any human.”

  “Why is she called Lemon?” Silly asked. “She didn’t look sour.”

  Phyllida laughed. “Not Lemon, dear! Lemman.” She spelled it for them. “It isn’t really her name. It means ‘sweetheart.’ It’s what that Gus Leatherman called her, while he lived, and it stuck with the rest of us. But it’s like their kind not to give their proper names. He already had her in his power—she’d be a fool to offer him any more control.”

  “What do you mean…their kind?” Silly asked.

  “Och, can’t you tell to look at her? She’s a fairy—or was, until that wretched man stole her away and bound her to a mortal life.” Phyllida shaded her eyes and looked after the retreating figure at the head of the line of cows. “A few years ago, it was. We took on Gus Leatherman as a stablehand. Never did like the looks of that fellow, but he came on a high recommendation. So we kept him on, and gave him the little cabin just behind the stables. Did his job well enough, though none of the other servants ever took to him. He had a sort of greasy way about him, hard to put your finger on. A Dr. Fell sort. You know that rhyme? ‘I do not like you, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell….’

  “Then, one day, he brings home a woman. Perfectly allowed, and in fact I was going to ask him if he’d like to move into a larger cottage down by the glade. Thought there might be more Leathermans on the way. But then I saw her, and there was no mistaking it. She was one of the fairy folk, and he’d somehow captured her.

  “Now, that’s no mean task! Some fairies are innocuous, and some are powerful, but if there’s one thing they all excel at, it’s keeping themselves out of human sight when they want to. It’s well nigh impossible for all but the bravest and cleverest to capture one. And from what I could tell, Gus Leatherman was neither. But there she was, meek and submissive, sitting quietly in a corner, while he tried to tell me he’d met her at
the harvest fair. I wouldn’t have believed it even if she was human—he wasn’t the sort to get a girl like that without some sort of strong coercion. And there might be times when a fairy falls in love with a human, but even then she generally lures him to her world, not the other way around.

  “I badgered him for the story, but I suppose I wasn’t intimidating enough. Lysander tried, too, but Gus Leatherman only laughed at his threats and said he’d earned his Lemman fair and square, and he meant to keep her. We were determined to find out how he succeeded in trapping her, for only then could we find a way to set her free. He was stubborn, and in the end we had no choice—we had to tell Bran.

  “I’ve never seen him in such a fury. He…he hurt Gus Leatherman…badly. Lysander tried to pull him off, but Bran threw him aside like he was a sack of leaves. He would have killed Gus that day, I think. Finally—and perhaps Gus did have some hidden cleverness—he said something that cut through Bran’s rage. He said, ‘Only I know the secret. If you kill me, she’ll never be able to go back to the fairies.’

  “Well, those words saved his life, but they didn’t save him from the next two hours alone with Bran. He got it out of him…in the end. That is, he found out how he’d caught Lemman in the first place. Some fairies take the form of animals. Oh, they all can, if they want to, but some spend most of their existence that way. There are swan maidens, and the selkies of the northern coasts—the seal maidens. These fairies sometimes spend time in human form, and when they do, they take off their feathers, or their fur, like unzipping a dress. If someone finds their pelt, they can’t change back. They’re prisoners in their human form, prisoners of the one who has their animal skin. Gus Leatherman happened upon Lemman’s pelt, and she became his.

  “Lemman was one of the otter girls. There are a few in these parts, where the stream grows wider and deeper. Marvelous creatures, always sporting and carefree. I don’t know why they’d ever want to take on human form, as lovely as they are. Have you ever seen an otter at play? Can you imagine what a torment it was for Lemman to be trapped, bound to a low, coarse man, living behind dark walls, instead of swimming in cold, clear water? Unless her otter pelt is returned to her, she will always be human, and miserable.

  “Gus Leatherman never told where that fur was hidden, no matter what Bran did to him. We searched his house, the grounds, we contacted his family and everyone who had ever known him, looking for that skin. Alas, he’d hidden it too well, and when he died a while later, drowned in the mill pond, he took his secret with him.

  “Three years Lemman’s lived with us. We thought she’d pine and die, but Lysander had the idea to let her work with the cows. Right about when she took them over, that little dun cow came from nowhere and joined the herd. One of the fairy cows, we think, come to keep an eye on her. After that, well, she’s never been exactly happy, but she seems able to bear it better, even though she knows she’ll grow old and die like the rest of us if her pelt is never found. We haven’t given up yet, but who knows where it is? He was too cunning for us in the end, and poor Lemman has to suffer for it.”

  “Can’t the fairies help her?” Meg asked. “Isn’t there some way they can find her pelt?”

  “The fairies live by strange rules, child, and even they can’t do whatever they like. No, poor Lemman can only be freed by a human. There’s nothing the fairies can do, short of comfort her.”

  Phyllida gathered herself up with a little sigh, and shook her head like a bird ruffling its feathers. “Go on about your business, children. That’s enough tales for today. Stop to see Lemman when you’ve a mind. She may not look at you, but I think the company cheers her a bit. And she does hear everything you say, however silent she may be.” She wandered off toward the house, leaving the young Morgans alone at the door of the dairy.

  For a time, they spoke of the pitiable Lemman, and made resolutions to search for her otter skin. But with so much else on their minds, they knew it was little more than rhetoric of the moment. War was coming, after all.

  Meg was still waiting for an opportune time to start her new tirade against Rowan’s decision, and was debating whether bringing it up in front of Silly and James would work for her cause or against it. Would he see how horrible was the very real prospect of his death when he looked into his little siblings’ eyes? Or would Silly’s warlike nature only encourage him in his grim determination? Before she made up her mind, she saw a dark figure in the distance, moving swiftly and, she thought, furtively, away from the Rookery. Large and broad and, even in outline, wild-looking, it could be no other than Bran, and she directed their attention his way.

  “Where’s he going in such a hurry?” Rowan asked, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

  Meg shrugged. She was thinking of the tale Phyllida had just told them. It was Bran’s role that most arrested her. She pictured him in that murderous rage, attacking Gus Leatherman, and the thought of it made her tremble. She was drawn to Bran, particularly as she learned more about him, but it dawned on her for the first time what a large and powerful man he was, how capable of violence. He was like a great dog that sits quietly by the fireside until roused by a threat, and then becomes all teeth and snarls.

  Instinctively, all four sidled across the lawn to keep him in sight. His loping, wolfish strides skirted the garden and headed for the first thick stand of trees where the estate merged into the forest. There he stopped and looked over his shoulder, back toward the Rookery but not, to their immense relief, southward toward the dairy. Thinking that the way was clear, he stepped into the trees, where he was immediately met by another figure. The pair vanished into the woods. Meg had no idea who the other man was, but Rowan, whose vision must have become preternaturally sharp, said with a gasp, “It’s the Black Prince! Bran is going off with the Black Prince!”

  Inside the Rookery, Finn was grilling Dickie. “I’ve only been at it a day!” Dickie protested when Finn demanded concrete results. “I don’t know how much of this is real, and how much is just made up. For all I know, these are bedtime stories.”

  “But have you learned how to find fairies?” Finn pressed, as though he hadn’t heard a word.

  Dickie waved his arms at the books spread a foot thick over the entire table. “This one says all you have to do is carry a four-leaf clover. But this one says a four-leaf clover is a surefire method to keep fairies away. One says primroses, another bluebells. Some say you carry ’em, some that you have to eat ’em, but I think they’re poisonous. This one says to make a salve and rub it in your eyes….”

  But Finn didn’t like the sound of these. He was too practical to think that merely carrying a flower would lure fairies, and a bit too cautious to risk imbibing potions…yet. “What else?”

  “Well,” Dickie said haltingly, flipping through pages, “there are a few other things, but the theme through it all is that you only see them if they want to be seen. They get angry if you intrude—”

  “But I did see them, in the pool. They’ll let me again. I just have to find them. They can’t be that picky if they let all the stupid Morgans see them.”

  Dickie sighed. “Then why don’t you just go out into the woods and look for them? If they want you to see them—”

  “Just tell me what else you found,” Finn said, rather too sharply for one who was pretending to be friendly.

  And so Dickie told him about looking upside down between your legs at twilight, or standing upon the foot of one with the Sight, or binding about your waist a cord that has tied a dead man to his bier. He suggested that Finn could swim naked at midnight to find a water fairy, but Finn had had his fill of that sort of thing in his fleeting sight of the springing Jenny Greenteeth. Alternatively, almost any activity at midnight was apt to lure fairies, albeit of a more sinister kind. Dickie tried to tell him this, but for one so obsessed with discovering fairies, Finn seemed remarkably uninterested in knowing a great deal about their habits and ways. His understanding of the Seelie Court and the Host was that they were like kingdoms,
or families—there was a division, but not along lines of character. And he paid scant heed to Dickie’s warnings about the shifting, dubious fairy morality, and the dangers inherent in any contact with them.

  “There’s a story in Old Wives’ Tales about seeing fairies through keyholes. But that only works if they come in the house. Oh, I almost forgot. Several books mentioned using a self-bored stone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A river rock that has a natural hole in it, worn by the water. If you look through that, you’re supposed to be able to see fairies.”

  “Where do I get one?”

  Fortunately, Finn didn’t see Dickie roll his eyes. “You find one. In a river.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll go get one, then.” And he left Dickie shaking his head in astonishment. He really couldn’t understand why Finn was so keen on finding fairies. What reason was there, other than curiosity? And if so, why wasn’t he more curious about fairy lore in general? Of course, like Finn, Dickie felt the natural temptation to get back at the Morgans for keeping secrets from him. But he was used to being excluded, and it didn’t have the same sting it had for Finn.

  Then, too, he had an idea that there was more going on around him than he realized—or than he was meant to realize. His encounter with the Urisk had been tame enough, but even that frightened him somewhat in retrospect. Some of the things he’d read thus far scared him even more: captives in fairyland forced to serve all their lives. Monsters that would lure you in a benign form, then rend you in another more fierce. Human sacrifices every seven years. For every kindness a denizen of Fairy did to a mortal, it seemed one of its ilk did something wretchedly horrible. Dickie was seduced by the fairy glamour as much as the rest of them, but his instincts for self-preservation told him that it would be just as rewarding to study them in the safety of his cozy library.