In the middle of the town, the sutvithr tree still stood, the white bark peeling off of its trunk to reveal the red pulp beneath, its bare branches drooping until they nearly brushed the leaf-covered ground below. It still bloomed, even though everything else around it was dead, as if it were draining the place of life. Said to have been planted by Interis, the goddess of hearth and home who wove the loom of fate, it was around one of these trees that every Fielding town was built. Sibba gave it a wide berth before dismounting and leading the horse further along the path between the fallen houses.
Leaving Gerd with her reins draped over the rotting remains of an old fence, Sibba untied the shovel and spade and carried them against one of her shoulders. She followed an overgrown path to the third gathering of stones that had once made up the foundation of a small house. The walls still stood in places, jagged shards of wooden planks covered in moss and vines. Sibba touched a post and shivered. There was more than a cold wind biting the air here.
She walked around the stones to the garden in the back and took another path through the trees. Aeris followed, hopping from treetop to treetop, the beating of her wings the only sound. As always, Sibba's footsteps were silent and her breath was calm and controlled as she wound around the thicker tree trunks in this part of the forest. These trees had stood against storms for hundreds of years and their roots ran deep. Some of them were wider around than three men. Sibba sneaked around each one carefully, like someone might be waiting for her on the other side.
Once she had counted off twenty yards, she turned west and followed the coastline until the cliffs came into view. Sibba's eyes scanned the horizon. There, just before her on one of the many rocky ledges, three trees formed a triangle. She hadn't realized how anxious she had been until relief washed over her. It had been five years, after all. There had been countless storms and any one of them could have disfigured the landscape. She didn't think she would have known the spot if not for the three sister trees.
“Darcey,” her mother had said, her hand on the smaller of the trees, somehow thriving in the shade of the two larger ones. “Carys.” The second tree, the one closest to the edge, was thin and gangly, but tall, defying logic in its height. “Jamisen.” Her mother had stood a long time staring at the Jamisen tree, her eyes cast upward into its branches. It was taller than any of the nearby trees, its branches reaching far over the cliff and back into the forest that it had left behind.
Even though her mother was not with her now, Sibba made sure to follow in her footsteps, touching and naming each tree in turn. The names belonged to her mother's sisters, aunts that she had never known. Maybe she would travel to Casuin when she left here and seek them out. Maybe there was somewhere out there that she could call home after all. She leaned her cheek against the rough bark of the Darcey tree, longing for the embrace of her mother. Then she stepped through the trunks, into the small clearing between them, and began to dig.
When they had originally buried the hoard, it had been spring and the ground had been soft and supple beneath their blades. Now each strike of the shovel rang out in the silence, the frozen ground giving way only reluctantly. Her muscles ached as they repeated yesterday’s work. Stab, scoop, throw. Over and over. In spite of the cold, Sibba began to sweat and shed her furs a layer at a time until she was in only tight, brown breeches and a loose tunic. Unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched, she stopped every few strokes to look behind her, back toward the spirit village. Of course, she saw no one. But even Aeris was quiet and watchful.
The wooden box was not buried very deep. In their first days on Ey Island, Sibba had been obstinate and mean, and Darcey had been tired. It had been a quick job, and they had not bothered to revisit the site since. It shamed her when she remembered how she had treated her mother—like it was the woman's fault that her husband had been unfaithful. Many chiefs had multiple wives, but Darcey would not be one of them. To her, there was one god, and there would be only one husband. And so she packed up her things and went in peace, Sibba scurrying behind her. Part of Sibba had thought that her father would follow, but of course, he hadn’t. A Fielding would never beg. And so her resentment grew and festered, and Darcey was the only one there to receive it when it boiled over.
The iron bands around the box were cold to the touch. She lay flat on her stomach and used both of her hands to lift the heavy box from the ground. Some had accused Darcey of leaving Ottar with part of the clan's hoard, but it was all hers. Most had been gifts for her at her wedding, but some of it had come over with her on the ship that had brought her from Casuin. In spite of its disastrous end on the western shores of the Fields, much of the envoy's belongings had washed up on the beach and been recovered though the same could not be said for the lost crew.
What was her mother like before the tragic voyage? All Sibba knew was the little that Darcey would tell her. That her sisters had put her and their mother on a ship to save them from the violence and sickness that had been ravishing her home country. Darcey had contracted the illness and survived, but her mother had not, dying when they arrived in Ottar. She taught Sibba the Casuin tongue and their strange religion, but she never taught her the history. Sibba’s questions were met with distant stares and pursed lips.
Tumbling end over end as Sibba heaved it over the edge, the box fell open and spilled its contents into the dead grass at the trees' roots.
“Gods,” Sibba sputtered, her mouth feeling frozen as she spoke for the first time in hours. She scrabbled on hands and knees to the bits of metal—mostly silver and iron, though some gold glinted in the afternoon sun. They were small tokens, jewelry and armbands, hammered iron, broken blades. Sibba gathered it all back up, dropping it noisily back into the box and snapping the lid shut.
She had just finished filling the hole and had turned to pick up the box when Aeris swooped down from the treetops and alighted on top of the box.
“Here you are,” Sibba teased, poking at her with the spade, “now that the work is done.”
The bird ignored her and hopped to the ground, pecking at something in the roots of the smaller Darcey tree. Sibba watched with amusement until Aeris finally lifted her head. Clasped in her beak was a circlet made of fine pieces of gold and silver wire wound together to look like roots. As they wrapped around the circlet, they grew thicker and swept upward into branches. There were no gems but the piece was obviously valuable.
“What is that?” Sibba plucked it from Aeris's mouth and examined it closely. Even though the circlet had been under the ground for years, it still shone as she held it up to the sunlight. She rotated the band in her hands, wondering how she had never seen it before. It was too large to be an armband and didn't open for it to be a collar. The only thing that made sense was that it was a crown.