We were walking for another hour after that. There wasn’t any kind of path or trail, but Mum kept on steadily, as if she knew where she was going, although as far as I could tell, no human being had been this way in at least a decade, and possibly not even a deer. It wasn’t anywhere she’d ever brought me before. All the overgrowth curled slowly out of our way the whole time, and closed back around behind Orion, bringing up the rear, the faint pallid shimmer of Mum’s light making a circle round us.
But it wasn’t anything like moving through the forgotten places, halfway in the void. It was the opposite, as though we were moving deeper into the real, into a place that didn’t want to allow any magic at all, and was only grudgingly letting us slip past while it looked the other way.
The brambles finally let us out into a small clearing with the last traces of an ancient roundhouse standing: the upper half of the wall rotted away but the round stone ring of the foundation remaining. The doorway was still there, two big stone slabs and a third across the top. The roof was long since gone, but in its place a massive old yew tree was standing next to the foundation, almost bent over the walls. Two large branches were spread out over the top of the walls, sheltering, with a third low one stretched across the doorframe blocking the way in. It was too shadowed to see inside.
I knew at once that someone had lived and died here a long time ago. Someone like Mum. Someone powerful, who’d lived here all their life, offering that power to anyone who came to their door, but who had made a choice not to use it for themselves when death had come knocking on their own door. Someone who hadn’t taken the enclavers’ bargain, maybe even before there had been enclavers to offer it. I knew, because it felt just like the yurt, only deeper.
“I’m sorry to ask,” Mum said. I’m not sure if she was talking to the ancient yew, or to the hut, or to the spirit of that healer who’d lived here long ago. To all of them, I think; this was a place of power, of generosity, of life, and you couldn’t pick it apart into one single thing. They were all a part of it. The healer had built the hut, and planted the yew, and the stone walls and branches had sheltered and shaded her and those who’d come for healing, and now they still remembered her, long after she’d gone out of the world and all human memory. “But I can’t do this alone. Will you help me?”
She turned and gestured to Orion, and everything in the clearing drew back from him somehow, the same way Mum had recoiled, an instinctive flinching: twigs and leaves curling away, the yew itself going still despite the stirring wind. For a moment, nothing moved, and I felt the visceral refusal. I would have yelled, but there wasn’t anyone for me to yell at. I understood what Mum had found here, how she’d connected to it, but I couldn’t do it myself. If I yelled at the tree, I’d just be random noise in the forest, nothing that the tree would understand or even notice. What was here couldn’t have been yelled into submission, or taken by force. Some greedy idiot might have come here and sucked the mana out of the place, and left the tree dying and the rocks crumbling away, but they couldn’t have made it heal them or anyone else.
But Mum stood there looking up at the yew with her hands spread open and said, “I know. I’m afraid too. But he didn’t choose it. It was done to him.”
There was another unbearable endless silence, and then the branch in front of the door slowly creaked up and out of the way. Mum turned to Orion—the first time she’d looked at him since he’d come out of the car, and her whole face flinched all over again. Her voice barely made a whisper. “You have to go inside,” she said to him. “No one can make you. You have to choose to try.”
Orion stood there as if he hadn’t heard her. He was still only looking at me. “The hut!” I said, and pointed with both arms. He slowly turned his head to follow the gesture and looked at the mystical ruined hut as if he hadn’t really noticed its existence before now, and when I went over to it and made even more exaggerated gestures of GOING IN, through the doorway, he finally took a step or two towards it. I started nodding wildly like someone encouraging a toddler or a puppy, yes, well done! He kept coming until he was just before the threshold.
I was so relieved to have got him that far that I didn’t realize he was getting near me until he was there, right next to me, and he looked at me and wasn’t Orion at all. He was only hunger, a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied and that was only following me round because it wanted to swallow me up, and was hoping for a chance: was this one?