light_of_the_world | wild sage growing in the weeds

Entry tags:

darrow,
effy stonem

wild sage growing in the weeds

There had been rain off and on for the last two days, not enough to stop Hild from gathering her herbs, but enough to make everything sticky and unpleasant. There were times that she liked the rain, when the weather had grown hot and the air pregnant with humidity, until it finally burst and fell. She liked the smell of newly wet cement, the patter of rain drops and the force of a torrent. There were times when she loved the rain, when the morning was crisp and cool and misting or when she could feel the mud between her toes but not yet fear slipping, when the world was green and beautiful and precious after the water had refreshed it. But there were of course times when mud clung to her dress and weighed it down, when water wilted what should be fresh growing flowers and made life feel somewhat impossible.

She was grateful for the sunshine and the lack of clouds on that day, knowing that the mud would dry out soon and the flowers would respond to the sun like children growing under praise. It was a day when everything felt fresh, the air cool and unsullied in the countryside morning. Hild had stopped at a walnut tree, it's broad spread boughs easily reached for a climb. Walking carefully along one of the branches, she reached for the nuts and threw them into the basket she had left down on the ground. Most of them hit the woven container, but many did not. She hissed out a curse as a squirrel bounded out to grab one and threw a nut at him.

"Bane of my life," she shouted down at him in Anglisc. Though a rueful grin tugged at her lips, she was only half joking.

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For the majority of Effy's life, she had always been in the shadow of a city. Even in childhood, when high rises were more a part of the horizon than her reality, the city had always been little more than a bus ride away. People gravitated towards it — people worked there, people lived there, and so Effy had always assumed that the city was the place to be. Only after she'd been whisked away to a magical island did she realize that there was so much to be said for the quiet of a countryside, the absence of any metropolis, nothing but clouds flying higher than the trees.

Having picked up a couple of books from the library, Effy had set out earlier with the intention of finding a quiet space in the woods to read, a small lunch pack slung over her shoulder with crackers, cheese, and a couple of small drinks. The books were dry, long treatises on tax law and corporate policies that she needed to familiarize herself before her interview.

Just as she was about to settle down, she heard a yell in the distance, and looked up to find a young woman in the trees. While the words were foreign, Effy soon spotted the source of the woman's ire, and made her way over to scare the squirrel off.

"Can't have thieves around, even cute ones," she mused, smiling up at her companion.

"They're not cute. They're little demons." But even as Hild countered the young woman's statement, she grinned, showing just how strongly she felt about squirrels being evil, which was not at all. She would have despised the thing, and tried earnestly to kill it, were it in her garden or somehow in her stores. But as they were, in open nature, they were in the squirrel's domain. It would have been foolish of Hild to expect anything other than competition.

Hild recognized that she probably looked a mess, all things considered. Her hair was wild and free, her dress was kilted up around her knees to give her freer movement as she climbed trees and walked across and through the tall grasses. Her feet were bare. But her eyes were as bright as ever, a light flush on her cheeks as she gaze down with interest at the other girl. Head cocked to the side, she looked like a bird, attentive and curious.

She was quite pretty with a husky, interesting voice. There was a sharpness in her gaze that Hild recognized, the kind of observant gleam that remained even when joking or sad.

"Who are you?" Hild asked in a friendly, open tone.

"Those always mutually exclusive?" Effy jokes, smiling to herself as she thinks of Cook, how a mischievous grin could so simply transform into a look of pure and simple contentment. It's been years since she's seen him; she's not even sure where he is nowadays. Returning to Darrow, somehow, makes the memories of him rise to the surface all the more. There are years of experience that have been added now to her memory. Emotional complexities they'd somehow never explored back home.

Sometimes she wishes they'd never left that little island.

But Effy pulls her attention now back to the other woman. There's an air of nonchalance, of disregard in the way that her skirt hikes up her legs, in the bare feet that brace against the bark of the tree. It's the opposite of how Effy presents herself these days, and maybe it's for that reason that she drops her belongings now and slips out of her shoes, coming up to stand near the foot of the tree.

Not climbing up yet — she hasn't been invited.

"Name's Effy. Recently arrived in the city for the second time," she says, lips curved and eyes bright with interest. "You?"

With the curious cock of her head just so, her hair spilled over her shoulder like a chestnut curtain. She tucked it back with her fingers, then righted herself and gave the other woman a nod. Hild moved further down the bough with the grace of one who had spent half her life up a tree, watching the world pass her by from below. She seated herself, as clearly they were about to engage in conversation, and balancing on their feet on a tree would be too tiresome after a while.

"Hild. I have been here two years and some months." It felt like forever, at times, and then no time at all. So much had changed and it was difficult to see where the change had occurred, exactly. When she had gone from seer and princess and butcher bird to a woman and shop owner and lover. It was a whirl and every time Hild stopped to count the time, she was surprised.

Her mouth tugged into a thoughtful frown, her eyes never leaving Effy's face. "I've never met someone who's been here a second time."

Just like that — an answer without the need to say a word, and Effy smiles with all the familiarity of looking into a slightly distorted mirror. Her eyes trail down to the skillful grip of Hild's feet, observing the way her toes brace against the bark. Effy does her best to mimic the skill as she scales the tree, relying on callouses that have thickened over time and too many pairs of stilettos.

It doesn't take her too long to find an adjacent branch, fingers resting gently on the bough.

"Seems like we were both in the city before, then, even if we didn't cross paths," Effy says quietly, her gaze dropping. A greater romantic might spin the moment into something bigger — an opportunity to meet someone she'd unfortunately missed before. But truth is, trying to assign some greater meaning into why and how she's returned is one of the few things Effy fears in the city. Finding a reason means there might be something she could do that would make them take it back.

Counting on chance to be cruel is a safer bet, in its way.

"And I can't say that I know anyone else who's been here a second time and remembers what they lived, either," she adds, looking up again. "But this city practically lives to take us all by surprise, doesn't it?"

Hild looked curiously, more curiously, at the young woman when she made mention that they were in the city at the same time. It must have been early on, Hild figured, when she was still learning the ways and manners of the strange new place into which she had been transported. She tried to memorize every face she saw, note mentally who was a native and who was not, who looked interesting and who looked unimportant. Effy looked interesting. Effy would have been noticed, perhaps. But there was so much to absorb back then that Hild decided not to fault herself for not having looked closely here.

"It does," Hild agreed, but her words only a breath of acknowledgment. She was much more intrigued by what else Effy had said.

"You truly remember everything that happened before, here? And you went back to your life before when you disappeared? Or did you go to some other place as well?"

It was a strange thought. Hild had often wondered which would be the case, whether she would return to Northumbria and recall every piece of the modern that she had encountered, every friend and lover she had made. But her story was in the past. Surely if she brought some of this knowledge back with her, things would have been different. She would have been different. And she had to be the same.

"I went back... to my world," Effy says, pausing for a moment on the word on the tip of her tongue. Perhaps the fact that her memories of the island and of Darrow disappeared the moment she returned to England meant that it was indeed returning home, but she doesn't want to use that word anymore. Not now that she's here, in a place that's taught her to grow every bit as much as the high rises of London did.

She leans against the trunk of the tree, bringing her legs up to balance on the branch, body holding a loosely perpendicular position.

"Before I came here, there was actually another world that I'd been to that wasn't my own," she explains. "I was born in England, and before I completed college, I was transported to an island that bore some similarities to this city. People would show up out of nowhere. And they would vanish without warning or trace. There weren't people who considered themselves natives, however — just a bunch of us outsiders, marooned on an island that would magically provide for us, stocking some food in our pantries and providing roofs over our heads." She closes her eyes, recalling the wash of the waves and smell of the sea. "When I returned suddenly to England, I remembered nothing of the island. And then, one day, I showed up here, and everything that happened on the island came back to me. Back to England, nothing. And now, back here again, with my memories intact."

Her eyes opened slowly, an almost imperceptible furrow in her brow. "It seems like none of these places let you remember anything when you're living life in your original world. But apparently you don't have to lose them forever. Just have to go through the looking glass again."

The pause was noted, considered, weighed, met with approval, and stored away into Hild's mind for later remembrance. Still she called Northumbria home, but that did not stop her from calling Darrow home as well. One she had been born to; the other, she had grown in. As a young woman who had spent nearly all of her life moving from place to place, stronghold to stronghold, following the seasons, home was a shifting concept, as intangible as the wind. She knew her place, the places she filled, and that was all that mattered.

Hild's eyes widened as she listened to Effy's tale of an island, seemingly commanded by the same magic that ruled their lives here. The inexplicable appearances and disappearances. The magical provisions (for there certainly wasn't enough farmland within the confines of Darrow to feed the entire city with what made up their daily meals). The way Effy's memories came and went. She wondered at it, wondered how the knot of connection was made, but, as with so much in Darrow, there was no readily available answer. All she could do was soak up the information that Effy gave her and try to fit it into place later. If she wanted to. She wished for understanding even as she did not wish to return home, but she knew others did. Others wanted simply the option.

"Is it better though?" Hild asked. She knew that she should tread carefully, not lead them astray into dark thoughts, but Effy had been open so far and Hild wondered. "Do those memories help you now or do they only hurt?"

"It's not really one or the other," Effy remarks quietly, gently pushing her hair away from her face, hooking it over an ear. "But I would rather remember everything that nothing at all. It's tempting to think that erasing the memories prevents hurt — you can't miss what you don't know. But not remembering is..."

She closes her eyes, thinking back to that brief period of peace, when she'd been able to walk the streets of Bristol without thought or hesitation. When she made time to observe how beautiful the parks were, with the water flowing under the bridges, people milling through streets and glancing around corners. Being a blank slate had made her more observant, but at the cost of losing Effy.

"...like a loss of self," she determines, swinging her feet gently through the air, feeling its coolness against her skin. "I guess there were two Effys for a while. One in London, one who didn't remember anything from here and had only those experiences to drive her. But I like the one here more. Not to mention that there's something nice about a place with as many surprises as this one. I like a bit of risk."

She leans against the tree, gaze tracing along the contour of Hild's face.

"Mind if I ask what your world was like?"

Hild had been so many people in her time, so many different roles, had taken on so many different mantles, that at times it had been difficult to pinpoint which one -- if any -- was Hild herself. Difficult to name what was Hild, if not this or that at a given point in time. She lost herself on a regular basis, back home, had to. She could never be what she wanted to be, not fully, not without losing something in the process. The idea of that loss of self struck her as less important than Effy seemed to think. It would not have registered so with Hild.

But she would not, necessarily, have preferred to lose the memories. She had a healthy fear of losing this place which had given her so much, but the fear was not paralyzing. Were she to go back home, she would prefer the thoughts not to prevent the loss of self but to prevent a loss of others. The memories themselves deserved to be remembered, if not by Hild than by the others who lived them. But if all disappeared, they would all be lost.

"Hmm. Well, you might call it the Dark Ages, if you're of the same world and of the time I think you are." There was a manner about modern people, a casualness that spoke of less restriction in behavior and in thought than would have been allowed in Hild's day, by any, a casualness that Hild had tried to adopt, though in some ways it was impossible to take on fully. There would always be something of the uncanny in her.

"Northumbria. England, some six hundred years after the birth of the Christ god. Supposedly. I am niece to the king, so my life was not very much like any other's. It was very different from this and yet not. Slower in the every day, but dangerous, always."

"I'm fairly familiar with the textbook version of the Dark Ages," Effy concedes, though she's under no illusion that the textbooks cover the true experience of the time. There's only so much that can be kept of history, especially from the times when it was harder to document, to keep records. But even now, Effy thinks that there's so much of any time that gets lost in the years and decades to come. Because not everything is deemed worthy of being a memory to keep.

Because there's only so much that the mind can hold before it starts to spill over and away. Little details, like the snails that slowly drag their heavy loads, easily spotted on the trails leading to Harley's house. Or the way that new paths fork out from the brooks after a heavy rain. Things like the smell of the smoke and petrol as one makes their way to the center of the city.

Things that are hard to put into words, that can't be captured in pictures, and that will one day fade entirely into obscurity, unless Mother Nature so happens to preserve them.

"And somewhat familiar with Northumbria as well," she adds, her eyes taking on a keener interest. "It's certainly about as safe here as a place can be while supporting such a diverse population. I've hardly ever heard of people like us, people from other worlds, passing away here." She leans her head against the trunk of the tree. "So, is being a niece of the king something you like to talk about? Or should I be filing that away as background knowledge?"

The fact that Effy knew something of Hild's time was of interest to her, but not something that she would question. Enough texts had passed her gaze for Hild to know that what they stated was mostly guesswork, built off of bits and pieces of rich and full lives found abandoned in graves and dirt and peat. Many only knew the name "Dark Ages" and made assumptions off of this. Hild did not want to have to counter every wrong presumption that Effy might repeat with a correct answer. Pedancy like that annoyed her.

Hild would counter her, lightly, thoughtfully, on one point. "Isn't disappearing something the same as dying?" she asked, head tilted. "Before you, I hadn't heard of anyone retaining their memories in coming back here. That's years of people coming and going, here and not, and when returning, returning as a new person. The departed continue to live, but what's the difference to our hearts, left behind?" There was some solace to be taken in the thought of those who had left continuing to live in another world. But what was the idea of heaven if not the same cold comfort?

Kicking her legs out idly, Hild gripped the branch beneath her, feeling cracked bark beneath her palms and a few ants skittering up her pinkie finger. She did not dislodge them, but followed their path with her eyes only to see if there were more.

"It is and isn't," she replied. "To be honest, I did not spend much of my time as a proper princess. I was his seer as well, you see."

"The difference is knowing and not knowing," Effy says, the corner of her lips lifting. "Far different to know a person has died than to not know at all what's come of them. Some say that everyone who leaves here goes back home, but who really knows if that's the case? It's what we want to tell ourselves, probably because it's... the most predictable answer, isn't it? If we knew and loved someone here, we probably know something of the world they would go back to, if indeed they're going back to their own."

Effy's eyes follow a couple of leaves as they shake free of the tree, fluttering down in quick, erratic spirals, landing a fair space apart.

"Sometimes not knowing means you can't rest your mind about it."

The mention of seeing draws fascination in Effy's eyes, and she leans a little closer, movement given away by the rustling of the leaves. She's never had a drop of magic in herself. Not of that sort, at least — and it feels as unattainable as it has been absent in her life. All inevitably honing her curiosity.

"And can you actually? See more than the rest of us can?"

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wild sage growing in the weeds

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