"Summerhome" by Ashley R. Wynn

Part 1:

Summerhome

Word Count: 1905

            As he did many nights, the elder appeared in Rosmarin’s dreams.  Flickering light from an unseen lamp made his lined face frightening.  Ancient lungs wheezed as he drew shallow breaths.  Rosmarin sat across a table from him, a small girl on a tall wooden stool. 

“Take this small plant with you, child.  It is dying.  You must make it green again and healthy enough to be returned to the Earth Mother.”  The elder fingered a withering yellow leaf.  It shuddered at his touch, broke free, and fell.  Frowning, he slid a wax-sealed roll of parchment across the rough tabletop.

            “Once you have done this,” he continued, “you must journey to the place on this map and release it to the Mother’s grasp.  The first moment it flowers, you must be there.”

            The scroll disappeared into the girl’s sleeve.  “Then will you teach me?”  Her wide black eyes were eager.

            The elder’s whiskers shivered, and Rosmarin was unsure of the authenticity of this smile, because the look in his eyes never wavered.  The hard lines around them were etched in the stone of childhood memory.

            “Perhaps, child.  If the plant survives.”  His voice was doubtful.

            Another sparse, yellowed leaf broke away and fell to the tabletop.

            He coughed violently, briefly, and stood.  “Go, child, and may the Goddess guide you.”

            As she often did, Rosmarin woke as she walked through the dream door, cradling the dying plant in her arms.

Rosmarin threw off her knitted blanket and crawled off her bed of furs.  She stood, yawned, and pulled her buckskin wrap from its deer antler hook.  The simple garment was a large rectangle of supple animal hide.  The narrow ends were fringed, but otherwise the soft wrap was undecorated.  The last piece of fringe on the top of one end was tied to the last piece on the top of the other end.  Rosmarin pulled it up her back and under her armpits, then twisted it half way around before sticking her head through the loop.  The familiar knot rested on the back of her neck, the loose fringe cascading around both sides of her neck, crossing over below her throat, and continuing to mid-calf, one side overlapping the other.

            The young woman dodged herbs and wildflowers that hung from the ribbed slats in the domed oval that was both roof and walls of her one-room summer shelter.  A reed mat served as her front door, made in the same fashion that the mats layered over the shelter’s frame.  There was large mat awning that could be stretched over the fire pit outside during light rain.  In heavy winds or storms, the awning could be removed and used to help seal the door. 

            Squinting her eyes as they adjusted to the morning sunlight, Rosmarin uncovered coals from the night before and coaxed a small fire to life.  Picking up a large tin kettle, she followed a narrow path through waist-tall grasses and shrubbery to the edge of the lake.  The water sparkled, silvery-green with only tiny waves formed by the gentle breeze.  Stooping to fill the kettle, she looked around the bank, at her bounce-hooks, dangling from half-submerged treetops.  One had bounced sometime in the night, the mechanical wheel jerking and reeling the hook and line into the air, bait eaten.  Three others had caught sunfish. And the fifth was still unwound, bait-covered hook still underwater.

            After returning to put the kettle on the little rack over the fire, Rosmarin collected her catches, and retrieved the four wound bounces.  She filleted the fish and dumped the guts into the midden, stirring them into the clay and detritus with a long-handled spade.  Occasionally the young woman carried buckets of mud from the lake up the path and poured them onto the giant compost heap if it began to stink.  Crows usually took care of anything else, from fresh fish guts to shiny mussel shells.  

            Next summer the midden would be her garden.  During the spring she had worked hard hauling bucket-load after bucket-load of mud up from the lake to cover her house and make it waterproof.   The ground under her house was mostly shale, and very difficult to dig.  About half way through covering the reed mats, she discovered that in order to have a garden at all this year, she would have to grow things in pots, like people in the city.   There was no way she could have hauled enough mud up for a garden like the ones she had before.

            By the time Rosmarin had the fish sizzling in her iron skillet, the water in the kettle boiled.  She poured the hot water over the crumbled leaves in a clay mug.  Morning tea perfumed the still air with its herbal aroma.

            Using her knife, Rosmarin flipped the six small fillets.  With spices and herbs from a pouch at her feet, she seasoned her fish before returning her attention to the tea.  Blowing on the hot drink, she watched the trees.  The wind did not move them.  The sky was clear and blue.  Feathery clouds were sketched across the horizon on the other side of the lake, capping the far away pines.  It promised to be a hot day, and the night sky would blaze under full moonlight.

            Game would move through the night.  The days were getting hotter, and deer loved to move under moonlight.  Sleeping through the heat of the afternoon and hunting that night was beginning to sound appealing.   Adding a little dry meat to her stores never hurt, and deer ribs spiced with ground peppers and other herbs was one of her favorite meals. 

            “It’s very rude of you not to offer me a cup,” a feminine voice fluted, as the smell of blooming honeysuckle teased Rosmarin’s nose.

            Burning tea made the young woman grunt in alarm as it sloshed from her mug.  Angered by the pain, Rosmarin sucked on reddening fingers as she faced her unannounced guest.

            “As is sneaking up on someone having morning tea,” the words snapped out of Rosmarin’s mouth as she got a good look at the rising welts on her hand.

            “I made plenty of noise on my way here, thank you very much.  You looked like you were deep into mooning over some way to slaughter some poor forest creature.  It’s no wonder you didn’t hear my approach.”

            Not for the first time, Rosmarin wondered again at Nyll’s magical capabilities.  The dryad often seemed to read Rosmarin’s mind whenever they met.  Nyll had been the product of Rosmarin’s initiation rite into the clan of the Treow[1].

            Each initiate had been given a test before being accepted into a family of the Treow clan.  No two initiates had the same trial.  Rosmarin’s dream washed back into her mind.  The elder had sponsored her rebirth into his family, and supplied her with a quest to save a dying plant.  Or so Rosmarin had thought in the beginning.

            The little vine was nearly leafless by the time Rosmarin had discovered that it was dying of neither natural causes, nor parasites, nor some other man-introduced poison.  Once she found a witch woman to remove the curse, the plant had nearly died.  With Rosmarin’s delicate touch and all the knowledge she had gained in the gardens at the manor house that employed her family, the sprout survived and thrived.

            Once the climbing plant had been put in the ground at the appointed spot near the northeastern edge of the Wailing Wood, Rosmarin had waited there for two lunads[2] before it bloomed.  She had watched the petals of the tremulous yellow flower open one early summer morning.  Once the first bud had fully opened, Rosmarin was struck by a panicky thought-- The elder had not told her what to do next.  As anxiety roiled in her belly, and other blossoms opened fully, the air around the climbing vine began to shimmer and glow.  Rosmarin watched, awestruck as the sparkling mist coalesced into a vaguely human shape.  The green-skinned yellow-haired female was so tall and narrow, that any elf standing beside her would feel short, lumpy, and fat.  Rosmarin had had no idea that the elder’s plant had been a dryad’s surrogate.

            “That tea must have addle-leaf in it.  You haven’t heard a thing I’ve told you.”  Nyll curled up beside her at the fire, and took away the mug of tea.

            “Is that not cannibalism?”  Rosmarin asked as Nyll sipped her tea.

            “What?  Drinking tea?  Have you ever seen me eat meat, Rosmarin?”

            “Well, no, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat at all.”

            Nyll laughed.  “Dryads don’t eat meat.  We take our nutrients from the sun, water, and earth as plants do.  Sometimes we take our nutrients from plants, as a mistletoe, moss, or mushroom would.”

            “What about the pitcher plant?”

            “Oh, well, there are always exceptions.  Besides, would you really call a fly carcass meat?”

            Rosmarin pondered the thought for a moment before asking, “What was it you were saying before?”

            “Oh, yeah.”  The dryad laughed again and handed the warm mug back to the Treow initiate.  “The elder says that it is time for the next phase of your training.  We’re to meet one of the Treow’s freelance agents for instructions.”

            “Not a full clan member?  But why?”

            “The elder said; that’s why.  There are some things that our freelance agents find out that a clan member would never hear about.”

            “Oh.  Well, when do we leave?”

            “As soon as you’ve gotten together the things you need.”

            “What will I need?”

            “How should I know?  I packed as lightly as possible.”  The dryad gestured to a small sack at her side.  It was shiny and pale gray.  It reminded Rosmarin of a spider’s cocoon, but only if the spider was planning on dining on something the size of a bobtail cat.  Rosmarin could not begin to fathom what a traveling dryad would need to carry.

            A sudden barrage of thoughts came out of Rosmarin’s mouth.  “Where are we going?  How far away from your vine is it?  What if you start pining?”

            Nyll shoved her braid back over her shoulder.  Tiny tendrils of loose hair coiled in a frame around her face.  “No worries.  The elder gave me this.  It’s an cone from the Ghost.”

            The Ghost was the heart tree of the Wailing Wood, and was magically linked to every living being that belonged there.  The fat gray cone lay in Nyll's palm, tightly closed.  As long as Nyll stayed close to the cone, the communal life force of the Ghost would keep her in connection with her honeysuckle vine.  Rosmarin mentally marked it up as another sort of symbiotic relationship.

            “We’re not walking to the meeting place, by the way,” Nyll told her as she tucked the cone away.  “Luckily there’s a huge larking tree we can sylff [3]through.”

            Rosmarin stood, dusting her legs and doeskin wrap.  “I guess I’ll start getting things together.  I need to cache some things so that some hungry animal doesn’t come rip my little house apart.  I guess I’ll just have to let it to the mice, birds, and wasps.  I can take most of the herbs, I think.  Maybe trade them somewhere. . .”

            As the young woman entered her mud hut and her voice trailed off, Nyll called out, “Don’t bring any iron.  Or you’ll get a nasty shock.”