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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.
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.
“Ysabel Hawthorn,” she said, and she could not keep the heat from her voice, “demand better than to be worshipped by a crumb.”
When the moon is on the wane, Read the wood against its grain. Sing no song and forge no chain. Do not seek me out; Refrain.
As it happens the River Liss is always changing, itself and all it touches. Here it touches our story, and makes a change.
lost felt like a shifting, chancy word, a dangerous word to apply to oneself in Arcadia.
No, it’s—more that I want … something I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want what I do know, and you’re what I know best, Bel.” She reached out to hug her again, and this time Ysabel didn’t wriggle away. “You’re what I love best.”
“Let’s make up a song together. Just for the two of us. A secret song. And if we’re ever apart and we miss each other, we can sing it, and it will bring us back together.”
Most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument. One wraps one’s mouth around a whistle and pours one’s breath into it; one all but lays one’s cheek against a violin; and skin to skin is holy drummer’s kiss. 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. You rock together, forward and back; your left hand keeps a base rhythm while your right weaves a melody through it, and they flutter past each other as the music becomes more complex,
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“It’s an unruly willow,” said Ysabel, quietly. “It needs coppicing.” Wherever its branches were cut, it bled.
And their joy runs together like rivers, like voices, like families.
