The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

Two tremendous trees, taller and thicker than any willow you’ve ever seen, stand on either side of the River Liss, and they bend towards each other like dancers, or lovers, reaching out to clasp each other.

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.

But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.

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.

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!”

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.

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

immediate; always near to hand and very far away. For this reason, Esther was not journeying into Arcadia. Rin was of a people to whom time was a kind of instrument, distance a kind of music, and while she did not know how to play, they could meet in the Modal Lands without too much difficulty, and did, as often as they could.

I gave my love a cherry that has no stone I gave my love a chicken that has no bone I gave my love a story that has no end I gave my love a country, with no borders to defend

“With the past, or with the future. We think of the cherry or the chicken as unchangeable things, and the song pokes at those assumptions. How is a cherry not a cherry? Well, when it’s a flower. How is a chicken not a chicken? Well, when it’s an egg. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry. All right?”

“Yes, exactly! And I think it’s all right, as answers go. But I got there because I thought, what is a country before a country? And I thought of Arcadia. And I thought, what is a country after a country? And I thought … That’s Arcadia too. So how can it have borders to defend, if it’s always in the past, or always in the future? What could it defend against?” “Perhaps,” said Rin, “that is how it defends itself.”

“Clearly,” he hissed, “I know better than you what’s best for our families. But you’re not the only Hawthorn girl, and Ysabel, at least, isn’t an elf-shot whore.” And then he pushed her into the river.

Gasp!!!!

Rowan frowned. “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?” “Indeed. The Liss saved her life with a pun.” Agnes looked at the swan thoughtfully. “Or a kind of riddle, I suppose. When is a signet not a signet? When it’s a swan.”

Its giving cryptic clue

“This,” she said hoarsely, leaning her head against Rin’s chest while they rocked her, “has been a very strange wedding day.”

“You know how, when you repeat a word over and over quickly, it loses its meaning?” The woman nodded, carefully. “Well,” Agnes went on, “your body has been through a great deal of repetition, and the grammar holding you together has come loose. The meaning attached to your name has gone slack, and we want to tighten it up again. But,” she said, and here she looked to Rin, who looked away, “that needs to be your choice.”

“Beloved,” they said. “He did drown you. You died, on the other side of the Refrain.

Gasp!!!!

I’d hoped … I’d hoped you’d have to make this choice in fifty years. But it’s here now. 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.”

GASPPPP