Work Text
This is the place to the rain falls, and does not drown the sun. Look to the north: there is a kingdom there. You wonder, sometimes, if it has ever seen unfiltered daylight. (You are young, still. You know no better yet. You have never yet been to the dark forest, and that’s all right.) Look to the east: your homeland always does. The yellow-plate sunflowers point the way, taller than you and resolute, and when your mother tucks one into your hair, you smile so truly and so long that your cheeks ache with it. Look to the east: there are wide plains and coppiced groves, fields your cousins have tilled and fields your cousins have burned to keep invaders out. They told you, once, that in the heat of the summer the sun almost does that second job for them, that keeping the irrigation-ditches carrying water from the little calling-creeks is the most important part of all. There are many fields in the east, but you think most of your food comes from the hidden-fields in the groves and the gardens in the town. Look to the south: there, the hills your brother said Strangia-the-midwife who’s the best-read person in town said were called Petite Montagne; there, east of there, the little forest between the hills where everyone says fairies live; and beyond that, the mountains. You have never been to the mountains. You’ve heard that it snows more than it rains there. You’ve heard that the creeks to the east keep the fields green by the grace of that melting snow, melting when the sun comes out in force to bargain for those same meadowlands it burns. Look to the west: you usually don’t. There are more hills to the west, grown over with trees that make the sunset feather-light as it stretches out a soft farewell. There are more hills to the west, hills where no one grows a hidden garden, because it doesn’t rain on the other side of them. This is the place the sun loves; this is the place that loves the sun, that watches so raptly the eastern sky. This is the place where the sky is blue and bright, where things grow tall and grow green and grow strong roots, strong roots that no fire can ever, ever touch. You are so young yet, and you know that. You know that there’s nothing to be afraid of. This is the place the rain falls. There is no life if there is no water, and there is so much life here that you swear, swear on the garden where your grandparents lie buried, that you can feel it growing up beneath your feet as you walk, sometimes. You can hear its leaves rustle—you can hear its insect-drone, its calling kestrels and low croaking frogs in the millpond—you can hear it breathe, right when you breathe. You can hear its heart beating, in between adventures when you are still and quiet. This is the best place on the face of the earth. You know that, know it with a certainty that has nothing to do with your senses. This is the best place, because it loves itself and you and each other and the world and all the things that grow within it. Your big brother looks at you funny when you say that. You’ve never been to a funeral, he says. You haven’t. That sounds like the funeral prayer. Who’d you get to teach you that? You squirm out of his grasp; because no one taught you that, it’s just obvious. This is the best place, because it loves you, and you love it back. One day, you will be older, and you will go to too many funerals; and though Amber tells you that maybe it’s just all too many words, maybe the prayers don’t mean anything, maybe nothing grows back in gardens but herbs for the pottage-pot, you’re not sure. Don’t you feel it? You want to ask. There is something reaching up beneath your feet. There is something in Amber’s auntie’s garden. There is something in the rainfall; something in the scorching-sun that does not feel like it burns your skin at all anymore. There’s something listening. Your home is a place with deep roots. This is the place where the rain falls. This is the place that expects—that receives—nothing more eternal than sunrise. This is the place that nurtured you. This is the place that you know, in a way beyond words, will always save you—this is the place that you will always save. This is your home; and when you are older still, old enough that your name is your own even if your body isn’t, old enough to appreciate how easily your people take to knowing a Pearl instead of a Rowantree, and older still than that—when you are fourteen years old, your home takes its own name and unfurls it like a banner, like the green leaves of summer: and you find yourself, fifteen years old, the first Queen of Gilded Helianthia. This is your home. You love it with all of you that there is: from taproot to bee-borne blossom. You love it, and when you tend to your garden, when you hear the humming of the bees, when you weave a crown of sunflowers, when you are taking in the grain, when you sink your bare feet into bare earth— When the rain falls, and the sun shines, and green leaves shoot from roots no fire could ever touch, you know that it loves you, too. This is the place where the rain falls. (This is the place you grow.)