The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

(What is a river but an open throat; what is water but a voice?)

There was a time when grammar was wild—when it shifted shapes and unleashed new forms out of old. Grammar, like gramarye, like grimoire.

What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.

The river may conjugate everything it touches, but the willows translate its grammar into their growth, and hold it slow and steady in their bark.

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.

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;

Professors had been and still were lovers never came into dispute; they had professed their love, hence the name.

The Hawthorns always married from away.

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.

but she couldn’t grasp a future with them any more than she could grasp the river water in her bare hands.

The first time Esther met Rin, they were a storm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Ysabel Hawthorn,” she said, and she could not keep the heat from her voice, “demand better than to be worshipped by a crumb.”

“Every conjugation is also a translation,” she recited dutifully. “But not every translation conjugates. Transformation implies movement, but things can move without being transformed.”

“It looks like a signet ring, only it’s too big … oh! Signet, like … cygnet, like the name for a young swan! So it was easier for the Liss to make her a swan?”

The Liss saved her life with a pun.”

So, you can either remain here in this shape, with me, forever—or you can go back through the gate, and die as soon as you step beyond the bounds of the Refrain.”

“Make me into a harp,” she said. “Can you do that? Make me into a harp, and call it by my name, and take me home to my sister.”

But a harp is played most like a lover: you learn to lean its body against your breast, find those places of deepest, stiffest tension with your hands and finger them into quivering release.

said, If the river has roots, it has branches, too; learn to climb them, and find your sister.

And their joy runs together like rivers, like voices, like families.