Chapter Text
‘They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the parentage of magicians be true.’ —William Butler Yeats, ‘The Celtic Twilight’
The child fled into the cluster of trees, instinctively seeking cover. A dog barked on his trail. The same instinct led the child to a tree with a low branch. He scrambled onto it, but the next highest one was out of his most stretched reach. He strained towards it anyway.
A hand came down from above, clasped his wrist and pulled him up to sit beside a girl all green and brown and gold. The dog found the tree and reared up against it, bouncing and barking. The girl leaned forward and caught the dog’s eyes with her own. “Good dog. Go home.”
It stilled, sat, whuffed, stared up a moment. It trotted away.
The child gasped in a body-shaking breath. He squeezed up against the trunk. His fingernails dug into the bark. He stared at the girl beside him. ‘Girl’ was the only label he could think of. She looked girl-like, and taller than him. She wasn’t wearing clothes but she was wearing something on her body, though he could see patches of nut-brown skin. Her hair was bound up into loops and braids; it shone browny-gold where the sun dappled it through the leaves. Her eyes were large in her oval face: grey as rain clouds with the sun shining behind them.
He was eight years old as of yesterday. He hadn’t seen much of the world so far, but he knew he had never seen in it anyone like her, and yet somehow she was what she was supposed to be — someone you’d meet up a tree.
She held out a handful of berries cupped in a leaf. “May you never hunger.”
He was hungry. He took the berries two or three at a time. They tasted tarter than any jam he’d ever had, but he ate them all. The empty leaf fell away. Next she offered a golden lump, again wrapped in a leaf to which it was sticking. She broke off half and popped it into her own mouth. So he took the other half. He couldn’t mistake the flavor of honey, but it had flavor in it that he had no words for. Most of the firmer substance melted in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed the rest.
The grey eyes were expectant. She’d saved him, she’d greeted him, she’d fed him, now he was supposed to say the magic words: thank you. As if she were Aunt Petunia giving him Dudley’s cast-offs. As if she were Uncle Vernon letting him have a light bulb for his cupboard. He hated those words.
He licked at the remnants of honey in his mouth, and said instead, “May you never fall out of a tree.”
With a laugh, she swung herself from the branch and swooped up to another only to stretch herself out along it as casually as if she were on a bed. “A precious few bread crusts in your ashes, there have been. And not even a hair on your sack yet a war wound on your brow! I am lucky I am that the song of your two veins called to me, for you are a wonder.” She looked at him as if a light from him shone on her face. “If you say by what name you will know me, I will say by what name I will know you.”
Bits of metal glinted among the cloth and leather of her garb. One of her braids dangled down close to his face and from the end of it hung a blue thread tied about a stone with a hole in the middle. Sunlight traced down the braid dancing in the breeze, and the stone turned back and forth, flashing light from its middle. It was the last month of summer—yesterday had been his birthday, 31st July. Soon there would be school, which last year had proved to be full of people ready to believe him the troublemaker the Dursleys painted him.
“Summer. I’ll call you Summer.”
“If I be Summer, then you shall be Leaf.”
Better than Freak.
Summer flicked a bit of lichen at him. “Banish misfortune.”
“It can’t be that easy.”
“So says the unfortunate one, who bleeds and does not close the wound.”
That was obvious, but he didn’t understand why she would say it. “Is this about my singing veins?”
She laughed again, rubbing her cheek against the branch she lay on. “No and yes, and but yes again.” Summer’s eyes closed, she let her hair fall to the sides as if she was listening to something. Around the edges of her eyes he could see that the colour edging the lashes was more than a line of make-up. It was tiny figures, writing he could not read. “Leaf, if I should tell you things, then what you think you heard me tell you is what you think you know. A question is an open door: anything may go through. You must explain yourself to yourself,” she said coiling into a crouch as easy as a snake instead of the awkward levering a human would need. “You will see me again if you see me.” Summer straightened up and was gone as if a door that wasn’t there had closed between them.
He put his hand on the branch and wondered if he felt any lingering warmth there. Then Harry Potter climbed down from the tree and went back to the Dursleys’ home, hoping Marge Dursley had left and taken her dogs with her.
“Get out of the house. I don’t care where you go; stay out of trouble and be back by 4:30 to get supper started.” Aunt Petunia held the door open and locked it behind him. She was planning to have some of the mothers of Dudley’s friends over. He’d already baked biscuits for them and Petunia had already hit him with a wooden spoon for trying to take one to taste. Hunger aside, Harry was glad to be out of the house. He hadn’t been able to make it back to Summer’s tree, if it was her tree, if she was real, if he hadn’t gone completely mental, and if she was there.
Harry checked his route. The neighbours hated children cutting through their yards, but if he went out into the street he risked Dudley and his gang spotting him. He had to get down to the park, across the playground, and into the little wood. He peeked around the corner of the house. Were there watchers? The woman next door glared out her window at him. There was nothing for it but to try Mrs. Figg’s. He walked to the front of the house and looked both ways for the enemy. There were children a couple of blocks away, and yes, that was Dudley. The best thing about Dudley’s size was that he wasn’t much of a runner and he was easy to spot from a distance. It helped, but the faster ones in his gang were happy to catch Harry and hold him for Dudley.
He’d just have to do this the hard way. Harry openly crossed the street, cut through a yard where one house was for sale and the other was usually empty and trotted down Wisteria Lane to Mrs. Figg’s, in plain sight of everyone. He knocked on the door.
Mrs. Figg and a cat opened the door. “Oh, Harry Potter. Was I supposed to be minding you today?”
“No, Mrs. Figg. I thought I’d ask you if you needed any help around the house or in the garden.”
Others in the neighbourhood didn’t trust him enough for this. Perhaps they thought he’d ask for money, or worse, steal. Only Mrs. Figg had enough optimism to accept these offers.
“I suppose I can find something to keep you busy for an hour.”
It was litter boxes again. It was always litter boxes. At least he got a sandwich out of it, though a piece of limp plastic-like cheese between two limp slices of bread was… was food. Even so, Harry had a hard time getting it down his throat. When he stepped outside again, Dudley’s gang was gone. It was near to lunchtime and none of them cared to skip a meal.
There was a girl gang in the play area of the park: a handful of older girls trying to put make-up on each other. Harry circled around them. Girls that age were terrifying. They turned their heads to track him like buzzards looking for the dying. Harry followed the edge of the wood away from them. If they decided he would make a good chew toy he didn’t want them knowing which way he was headed. At last, he got out of their sight and was able to turn into the wood. This was not the direction Harry had come in the wood when the dog chased him. None of the trees looked quite right. He kept looking for that kindly low branch but couldn’t find it.
He could call out. Sound like a mental case. Boy, 8, found chatting with trees.
A bee buzzed by his ear. What had Summer said? If you see me.
Harry looked up into the nearest tree. One step left and he’d be in Summer’s shadow as she sat astride a bough, ten feet up. Next to a bee hive. With a bee, and another bee, and more bees.
He didn’t care. He held his hands up to her. She reached down to him. Her arms didn’t suddenly stretch, but however it happened, Harry found himself sitting facing Summer on the branch.
“Why don’t the bees sting you?” He didn’t want to be stung, but he wanted Summer more.
“I know how to talk to the bees.”
“What do they say?”
“Bzzzzzzzz hmmmmm bzzzz.” Summer laughed. She pulled an apple out of some recess of her garb and polished it against a leather patch on her thigh. She took a bite, offered it to him, and they shared it back and forth. Sometimes a bee came to investigate the smell of apple juice. Harry sat as still as he could and watched a bee on his hand and felt the tiny feet on his skin. “The apple was tasty.”
“That was the tree’s doing, but I am glad to have shared it with you.”
“If I was a good listener, could I hear my singing veins?” Harry tensed up. It felt more important in his ears, the question, than it had on his tongue.
Summer’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “A young serpent, it is, green as a Leaf. Your mother and father are those two veins, which gave you all the blood of their ancestors, ‘whatever is begotten, born, and dies’.
“You knew my parents?”
“I have answered thrice already; I am not an oracle nor you my python. You don’t even offer to trade.”
Harry had to admit it sounded fair. All he’d given her was a name. “I didn’t mean to be rude. You should ask me questions or to do something for you.”
“Recite a poem for me.” A bee flew onto her nose and crept down to the sticky corner of her mouth.
Marvel of marvels, Harry managed to scrabble a poem up out of his memory. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.” He was pretty sure there was more but at least that bit rhymed.
Summer smiled and the bee flew away. “What’s the best thing to put in a pie?”
Pie. He’d like to put a pie in him. Harry could swallow one whole. His mouth watered. He’d even try rhubarb, whatever that was. The pie hovered before his mind’s eye, big bites tearing through it.
“My teeth.”
“What is it that, the more you take away, the more it becomes?”
Harry didn’t even need to think twice. “Hunger.”
She reached out and pulled him close. Summer smelt like apples and dry grass. “There are all kinds of things you may eat, and some that may whet your appetite instead of satisfying it. Eat, but pay attention to what you eat. Nothing costs more than attention, in the having of it or the lack.” Her lips pressed feather-light on his eyelids.
When he opened his eyes he was standing on the ground. There was another apple in his hand.