Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Sorrowmire smelled of wet ash and drowned flowers.

They reached it on the second evening, after a day and a half of wading through fens so thick with fog that the sun turned to a smear of pale grey. The mire stretched out flat and dark to every horizon, dotted with stumps and stagnant pools and the crooked ribs of long-dead trees. Nothing moved. Nothing sang. Even the water seemed to hold its breath.

“It’s worse than the Gallows,” Fel muttered.

“I recall being more impressed by the Gallows.”

“You’ve never been to the Gallows.”

“I have read about it,” said Vili, with dignity. “I gathered it was worse than this.”

They found the willow at dusk.

It stood in the exact center of the marsh on a low hill of black earth, and Fel felt the breath leave his lungs as he looked at it. It was the size of a cathedral. Its trunk was thick as a tower and pale as a bone, its branches drooping in long, heavy, endless curtains of grey-green leaves that trailed all the way to the ground. From every leaf, every twig, every dying bough, thick black tears of sap fell one by one into the earth below, and the sound of them, drip, drip, drip, filled the air like slow rain.

Fel knew that sound.

He had lived his whole life next to it.

The Willow’s Drip.

He shook his head, hard. “Stay behind me.”

“I will not.”

“Then stay beside me and be quiet.”

They crossed the last stretch of bog with their swords drawn, Fel with a blade in each hand, and Vili with Chimera shaping and reshaping in his silver hand. The mist thickened around them. The dripping grew louder.

The first Weeper rose out of the water without a sound.

It was a tall, thin, hunched thing made of black peat and rotting reeds, shaped like a mourner in a hooded cloak, and where its face should have been there was only a dark, wet hollow. It lifted a long arm, and the fingers ended in thorns. Then there was another beside it, and another, twenty, thirty, forty, rising out of the pools in a silent ring, their hollow faces turned toward the two boys.

“They are not fast,” said Vili.

“They don’t have to be.”

The first Weeper lunged, and Fel took the thorn-fingers off at the wrist with Krashing Fyr, spun, and drove Falling Star through its chest. The peat shuddered. It didn’t bleed. It only wept, a thin black fluid that ran down the blade and stank of sorrow, and the thing collapsed into mud.

Behind him, Vili raised his halberd, and a wave of gold sand swept across the bog, cutting the Weepers’ legs from under them. Where the sand touched them, they froze. Where they froze, Fel struck. It was clean and quick and ugly, with none of the poison of the Trial of Three Doors, and for the first time since the Ossuary, they fought in step. Vili’s sand made walls; Fel’s blades found the gaps. Vili called warnings in a high, tight, precise voice, and Fel obeyed them without arguing.

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By the time the last Weeper fell, both of them were breathing hard.

“That was,” Vili panted, “almost pleasant.”

“Don’t say it.”

“It was efficient…”

Then the willow began to speak.

It did not speak in words. It spoke in sound and scent and light. A wave of grey-green leaves stirred, and the mist parted, and the mire around them faded like a painting washed with water. Fel found himself standing on a stone street, in the rain. He smelled clove. He smelled beer, and spices, and warm bread.

And there she was.

She stood in the doorway of the Willow’s Drip, tall and lanky and grey-haired, with her arms crossed and one eyebrow arched.

“Fel,” said Tori. “You’re late.”

He could not breathe.

“You’re late for supper,” said Historia Lunasterie, laughing, and the sound was so real he could feel it in his teeth. “Orcus is furious. Come inside, you idiot. Come inside and eat.”

He took a step. Then another. His sword fell from his hand.

She’s dead.

He knew. He had known since the moment she pressed the pouch into his hands. He had seen the smoke. He had seen the fire. He had run and run, and he had never even turned around.

“Tori,” he said, and it came out a whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have stayed. I should have…”

“Fel.”

“I ran. I left you there. You put your hand over my mouth and told me to go, and I went, I never even…” The tears came, hot and helpless, and he made no move to stop them. “You took me in when nobody else would. You didn’t have to. I never said thank you. I never said it once.”

She did not answer. She only stood in the doorway, smiling, with the rain falling behind her.

“I love you,” said Felanor TeneDente, twelve years too late, to a tree.

The rain stopped.

The street dissolved into mist. The doorway closed like a curtain. Fel was on his knees in the mud of the Sorrowmire, his sword in the muck, his face wet, with the black drip of the willow falling all around him.

And the sap on the nearest branch had gone clear.

It ran down the bark in a single bright, shimmering thread, pure as spring water, and Fel stared at it through a blur of tears, and did not move.

“Vili,” he said hoarsely. “Vili?”

The golden boy was on his knees six paces away. His eyes were open, his face white, his silver-wired hand clenched around Chimera so tightly that the wire creaked. He wasn’t seeing the marsh. Whatever the willow had shown him, it was terrible. Fel caught a few whispered words.

“…six of them. Six. And not one of them looked… I waved. I waved every time… I only wanted one of them to…”

“Vili.”

“I was seven. I was seven years old and I stood at the top of the stair and none of them, none of them…” His voice cracked. “Please, do not… I am here.”

Fel crawled over the mud and took hold of the other boy’s shoulders. “Vili. Look at me. Look at me.”

The blue eyes swung around, wild and wet.

“I’m here,” said Fel. “I’m here. I see you.”

Vili made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. Then he folded forward, and Fel caught him, and neither of them said anything for a very long time.

The sap was harder than the grief.

It ran clear from a single knot in the willow’s trunk, a thin, precious thread of silver-green that dripped one drop at a time. Haruvael had given them a cup of pale wood, small as a thimble, with a warning that it must not be spilled, not touched by any hand, not brushed by a single hair of the willow’s black tears.

“I can shape a channel,” said Vili. He stood a little unsteadily, his eyes red, chin high. “A sand spout. It will guide the sap without touching.”

“Can you do it?”

“I can do anything.”

He raised Chimera. A thin golden thread spun out from the blade and curved toward the trunk, and it wavered, wobbled, and collapsed, scattering grains across the bark. A single drop of black sap splashed into the cup.

“No,” said Vili. He sounded stricken. “No, no, no, that is not, I did not…”

“Empty it.”

“My fingers, they do not…” He stared at the wired hand. “The horn is stiff. I am too slow. It is a small thing, it is a cup, and I cannot even…”

Fel tipped out the tainted drop, wiped the cup clean, and put it back in the crook of the willow’s branch. He knelt in the mud and took Vili’s wrist in his hand.

“Again,” he said. “Slowly. Don’t push. I’ll hold the cup.”

It took them three hours. Fel’s arms shook, and Vili’s silver fingers trembled, and the thread of sand rose and fell and rose again. Twice it broke. Once Fel almost dropped the cup. But at last, in the pale, unhurried light of dawn, the little wooden thimble filled with a clear, bright liquid the color of new leaves, and Vili’s sand curled away from it like smoke.

Neither of them said a word. They only sat back in the mud, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the willow’s black tears turn slowly to green.

Behind them, in the mist, the dripping had stopped.