Summary
The buried King Titus curses the moon goddess Seris, stealing her green-eyed children every twenty-five years to fuel his eventual resurrection. While a malevolent witch harvests these innocents for power, an ancient prophecy foretells the arrival of Anise, a “twice-marked” girl destined to destroy the god and end the cycle.
It is written, though few now living have read it, and fewer still would dare, that before Seris fell from the sky as a blue jay and was wrapped in the moth-eaten tunic of a shepherd, there was another telling. A telling older than the river Sil, older than the gorge where Titus lies as jade and stone, older than the first king crowned in the temple built upon his grave. The hexes call it the Green Telling. The coven, when they speak of it at all, call it heresy, and burn the lips that carry it.
Kaida, the first mother, set it down in her dragon-skinned grimoire, in the red-letter script that warns and tempts in the same breath. She wrote it the night her beloved dragon died upon her dagger, the night Seris came to her as a bird and bid her paint the talisman in its blood. For grief, the elders say, opens a door in the mind that joy keeps bolted, and through that door the first mother saw what was coming.
She saw the green.
When Titus, the King of Cronus, felt the small knife of Artur dig into the great throbbing mass of his heart, he did not die all at once. Gods do not. He died the way a winter dies, slow and grudging, surrendering its cold by inches. And in those final inches, as the jade crept up his throat and Neb’s tears began to fill the gorge, Titus did a thing that no telling outside the Green Telling records.
He cursed his daughter back.
Not with the curse of Isaura, which bound him to the hunt and to the chase of mortal women. No. Titus reached past Seris, past the murder she had done him, and he laid his dying will upon her line—upon every child she would ever shelter, every soul that crept beneath her moon for protection as the haflings of Ellsworth once crept. If I cannot keep my throne, he is said to have spoken, in the voice that was already half stone, then neither shall the moon keep her children. Every five-and-twenty years—a turning of her own pale face—I will reach up out of the gorge, and I will take one back to me. I will know them by their eyes. For my daughter’s eyes were jade, as I am jade, and the mark of her mercy upon them shall be the mark of my claim.
And so it was sealed. The green-eyed are Seris’s children—those she has hidden, those she has spared, those born under the cold lantern of her temple that has burned two thousand years. But what the moon goddess shelters, the buried god covets. Every twenty-five years he stirs in the gorge, and the black coach is seen jotting slow upon the dead earth, drawn by four mares with eyes of the deepest green—and a child of Jade is gone.
The villagers do not know this. They know only the pattern, and the pattern frightens them more than any telling could. A child with the wrong eyes, and a coach in the night, and a mother on her knees at the moat of Grenevale castle, shouting into walls that will not answer. They call it a curse, and they are not wrong, only ignorant of whose. They blamed Barnebus, the Fae-slayer, and said the fairy queen rose every quarter-century to avenge her death upon green-eyed innocents. They blamed the kings. They blamed the witches at the wall. Harolde the second of his name blamed the children themselves, and had them dragged from their beds and locked away, lists drawn up by candlelight, the children of Jade gathered like a harvest.
But the truth is older than any king’s list, and it is this: the children were never murdered. They were being collected.
For Titus, in the gorge, was not content merely to take. A god does not steal a thing to let it rot. He took the children down into the jade, into the green hollows beneath the river where the light of his daughter could not reach, and there he kept them—not dead, not living, but held, the way a seed is held in frozen ground. He fed on what made them his: the mercy in their blood, the moon in their eyes. And as he fed, he grew. Slowly. Patiently. A god has nothing if not time, and twenty-five years is a single breath to a thing that measured its life in the turning of stars.
This is the secret the coven keeps. This is why the requests are denied, why the river Bree must not be crossed, why no hunter may pass beyond the fringes of Prickly Hemlock on pain of banishment. It is not the fairies they fear out there. It is the gorge. It is what is growing in it. For every child of Jade taken back is a stone laid in the foundation of the King of Cronus’s return, and when enough have been gathered—when the count is full—Titus will rise again out of the green water, whole and terrible, and finish the war his daughter began.
Kaida wrote one more thing in the last red letters before the moisture took the page and blotted it to ruin. The hexes have argued over the fragment for a thousand years, for only a portion survives, and it reads:
A child of Jade, twice-marked, shall come. Not taken—given. Not held—free. Whom the buried god shall reach for and find the reaching turned against him. For she shall carry the moon and the murder both, the mercy of Seris and the blade of the first mother, and where she looks, the green shall answer.
Twice-marked. The hexes could never agree on what it meant. Some said it was a child with two green eyes, while others of the line bore only one. Some said it was a child of Jade who was also of the Brown line, the line of Barnebus who slew the queen—mercy and murder bound in a single small body, the very thing the fragment named. Some said it was nonsense, water-rot and wishful grief, the ramblings of a woman who had just killed the thing she loved.
But the imp knew. The imp, who had stood at the festival and charged a girl on all fours, and felt something rest upon her dim green eyes, fell to his knees and fled. He did not have the words for it, but he had the feeling, and the feeling was older than he was. There’s something strange about her, he told his mistress, the green woman who wore stolen youth like a glove that would not stay on. And the green woman, who was herself a child of Jade once—who had escaped the coach, who had hidden in the wood, who had learned to peel the years off other people’s children to keep her own withered flesh from greening back to the truth of itself—the green woman did not understand what she had found. She thought she had found a savior. A source. A long black lock of hair to drop into a russet pot.
She had found the twice-marked.
And the Juniper tree knew also, in the way that trees know, slow and rooted and certain.
For the Juniper is no ordinary growth. The villagers think it a thing of the green woman’s making, a horror that drops rancid figs wearing the faces of the donors—red hair, blond, brown, black as night, every shade of eye but the one peculiar emerald that would give the witch away. They are wrong, as they are wrong about everything. The Juniper grew first in the gorge, in the green water, from the very heart of Titus, where the jade is thickest. Its roots drink the held children. Its fruit wears their stolen faces. Every fig that ripens upon its drooping limbs is a child of Jade rendered down to sweetness and offering, and when the green woman speaks the words—
Little precious, little one, Nimble tooth and olive tongue, Fankle wart and garlen goose, Finder’s keepers, lips be loose—
—She is not making magic. She is borrowing it. She is reaching, as Titus reaches, into the harvest of the gorge and plucking what the buried god has grown. She does not know whose orchard she steals from. She thinks the tree is hers. But the tree answers to the green water, and the green water answers to the thing beneath it, and the thing beneath it has been waiting, patient as winter, for the count to come full.
There is one face the Juniper has never grown. One fruit it cannot bear. The face with the emerald eyes—the true green, the moon’s own green, the shade of Jade itself. For that face is not a thing to be harvested. That face is the harvester’s undoing, written into the red letters before the water took them, twice-marked and given freely, carrying the moon and the murder both.
The green woman fed the tree a thousand children and never once grew that fruit.
She is about to learn why.
Far from the gorge, in the second house on the fifteenth row of Huntsman Square, a girl with eyes the color of Jade lay poisoned in a guild that her ancestor built upon the body of a queen. A grackle had tapped at her window, and she had told it another time, lil guy, and it had spread its mangy wings and flown toward the Ember forest, toward the wood, toward the wall, toward the place where the river Bree runs black past the den of the green woman and the gorge of the buried god beyond.
The grackle was an omen. They had said as much—an ill-omen, born of a father’s desperate wish for a third child, a wish that opened the same door grief had opened for Kaida, and let the green telling in.
Anise did not yet know that she was the twice-marked. She knew only that she dreamed of hounds with reddish-orange eyes that hunted her across a foreign landscape of azure and violet trees, and that the hounds were not hunting to kill her but to catch her scent—to find her, to know her, to be certain. She knew only that creatures fell to their knees when they looked into her eyes and fled. She knew only that she wanted, more than the Brown name or the hunt or the seven years of apprenticeship, to be a hexe—a practitioner of light, a giver and not a taker—and that this wanting felt less like a choice than a remembering.
It was a remembering. The moon was in it. The murder was in it. And somewhere beneath the green water, an old god who had been dying for two thousand years felt a child of Jade he could not reach, a child given and not taken, free and not held—and for the first time since Artur’s small knife found his heart, the King of Cronus knew fear.
The count was nearly full. The coach would ride again.
And this time, the green would answer.
Tags
Fantasy, Prophecy, Jade, Moon Goddess, Buried God, Curse, Magic, Harvest, Twice-marked, Mythology
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