Chapter 173 Second Epilogue

Chapter 173 Second Epilogue
Second Epilogue

Rowan
The mint is winning.
Every spring, I watch Mumma threaten it. Every summer, it spreads. Every autumn, she cuts it back with the same hard look she gives court messengers who arrive before breakfast. Every winter, the mint sleeps beneath the cold earth. Mumma says that’s when it is plotting its escape.
Then the warmth returns, and there it is again.
Green mint everywhere.
I trail my fingers through it as I walk the lower garden, humming along with the Fleetwood Mac song crackling from the old tape player tucked into the basket at my hip. The thing barely works anymore, but Dad says he will find me another one when that time comes.
The garden is wild now. I still remember when things were neat and contained. Now things grow where they like, and Mumma makes sure the paths stay clear.
I bend to cut a few sprigs of rosemary, tuck them into my basket, then move on to the sage. Menace’s daughter, Ruin, watches me from beneath the bench with narrowed golden eyes and a stolen biscuit between her paws. She has three tails, one torn ear, and the moral compass of a beetle.
“That better not be mine,” I tell her.
She blinks slowly.
Definitely mine, then, but I let her keep it because I value my fingers.
The song changes as I reach the rowan sapling near the far edge of the garden. It is not really a sapling anymore, though Mumma still calls it one. Its branches have grown high enough to throw shade over the grass, leaves fluttering softly in the breeze. Red berries hang in heavy little clusters, bright against the green.
I reach for the chamomile beneath it.
Then I stop.
The mushrooms are back.
A perfect ring of them pushes through the grass just beyond the rowan’s shadow.
Small. Pale. Smooth as bone.
I stare at them, and the Fleetwood Mac tape crackles behind me, suddenly thin and far away.
Every year, Mumma plucks them out, but much like the mint, every year, they return.
Last year, once I had turned sixteen, she had finally started telling me about the doors that fairy rings are.
I’ve grown up knowing two sides of a road, and all the things that come with being half mortal and half fae. But fairy rings were always the one thing they told me I needed to be older to understand.
I’m older now, and I understand that a fairy ring isn’t like the roads Hollow Hill commands. Fairy rings are the doorways our worlds create when they are trying to take you where you need to be.
Apparently, I am still not old enough to enter the ring.
But the mushrooms disagree.
They have been disagreeing louder lately.
I step closer, and the air changes at the edge of the circle. It always does. But I won’t tell Mumma that.
The garden behind me stays warm, full of rosemary and sun and Ruin chewing my biscuit. But the air above the mushrooms feels cooler. Thinner. Threaded with something that touches the inside of my ears before it touches my skin.
Then the song begins.
It rises from inside the ring, low and soft and impossible, a man’s voice woven through the grass.
No one else hears it.
I know because I have asked my cousin before when we were playing here. He then went and told my parents, like the brat he is, and I ended up getting a very long talking-to.
They told me a lot of things, but none of them sound convincing when the ring is singing my name.
Where is the love, where is the light,
where is the heart that bears the fight?
I have called through root and sea.
Little Rowan, answer me.
The male’s voice is beautiful and warm at the edges.
It sounds young, but ancient, and also lonely. It draws me in and makes me want to stay. And on days like today, when no one is watching, I like to sit and listen. I like to imagine that the person on the other side is waiting for me.
So I sing back. Barely louder than the breeze moving through the rowan leaves.
I don’t know the words until they leave me, but they come anyway, slipping from my mouth as if they have been sleeping in my bones.
Root below and sky above,
show me where the lost things love.
Road that waits and ring that gleams,
tell me what you call in dreams.
The male voice rises to meet mine. Our melodies twist together in the air above the mushrooms, his low and mine lighter, threading around each other until the garden seems to hold still to listen. The rosemary stops moving. The lavender hangs heavy and sweet. Even Ruin stops chewing.
Then the ring begins to glow.
The pale caps of the mushrooms shine at their edges, faint and silver, as if moonlight has been tucked beneath them even though the sun is high. The grass inside the circle bends without wind. The air thins further, and for one heartbeat, I see something between the stems.
I narrow my eyes and lean forward, catching a glimpse of a shadowed path, dark trees, and water shining black beneath a sky full of stars.
And someone standing at the far end of it.
My breath catches.
The figure is tall and blurred, nothing more than shape and silver, but I know he is looking at me. I know it with the same certainty I know my own name.
The basket slips from my hand and lands softly in the grass as I take another step closer.
The song warms.
Another step.
The mushrooms tremble.
My toes reach the very edge of the ring, and all I would have to do is lift my foot.
Just once.
Then, clear as if she stands behind me, I hear Mumma’s voice.
Don’t enter the fairy ring, Rowan.
I freeze, and the garden rushes back around me.
The sun. The herbs. The old tape player. The rowan tree casting shade over my shoulders. The warning that has followed me through childhood, through every story, every lesson, every time Mumma brushed dirt from my knees and told me that wanting something did not mean I had to answer it.
I close my eyes and suck in a breath through my nose.
I love my mother.
I understand her fear.
I even understand the warning.
But the voice beyond the ring sings my name again, softer now, almost pleading.
Rowan.
My eyes open.
I look down at the mushrooms, at the circle that has returned every year, no matter how many times Mumma pulled it from the earth.
Then I look toward the house, where I know she will be waiting for me to return.
My heart twists.
“I’m sorry, Mumma,” I whisper.
Then I turn back to the ring.
“The world is calling for me.”