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The earth is not speechless. The trees forgive and outlive terror.
- Tara Bray "Listen"
We feel him before we hear him. The human boy wrapping a hand around bark, pleading for help, asking for us. But we are as helpless as he is, stuck somewhere between waking and forgetting. Over the years we became only leaf and twig and not us any longer. Preserved as a bug in resin. Our mouth has grown shut and our hands are empty.
In the face of our silence, he draws a weapon from his back and readies for the oncoming storm, the pounding hoofbeats he cannot see. There is only leaf and twig to offer him and so we do, dancing our green in the breeze, letting in the sunlight. We have little else.
If it does anything, it does not protect him. His bark is pierced, dripping sap but he wounds back until he is again the only thing left in this stretch of us. Greedily, we drink from enemy and boys sap alike. What else is there to do but to take him into us? We give him peace, in these last moments. Stretch our voices as he gets closer to our dreaming.
𖣂
Elsewhere, there is Aslan. He has been walking across our spines for several days, scattering like birds once the Pevensies search him out. Now however, Queen Lucy has laid her eyes on him, and he has become flesh and blood once again. Will this be our awakening, we wonder but no longer hope. If there is a chance, it lies in the little Queen’s hands.
𖣂
He listens to her, as he has never listened to us, as she always has. With a great roar, he tugs on our branches, pulling us toward waking. Some of us come back to movement in a great groaning, lumbering toward the battlefield to stretch our arms into weapons. We stay, however. Send a nymph drifting south to the battle-bound Pevensies.
We cannot heal him, but we can stopper up the bleeding until others can. We stretch out our branches, sharpening the ends and sew up his wounds. The barbed bolts we needle out and press between our palms until they can do no more harm. Not yet dreaming, his mind wanders our way, sideling toward us like one beast to another. It is as much gratitude is he is able, but it is more than enough. We could not sew up Narnia when the parasites wormed our organisms out and uprooted all that grew here. But we can sew up him, he who is trying to do the same with Narnia.
𖣂
They arrive together, like us as much a whole as individuals. The High King lets out a keening, falling to his knees beside the boy as her of the glistening sea’s hands shake on the bottle of evergreen.
He of the woods leans down to inspect our snaking threaded wood and murmurs his thanks, as ever most reverent. The Southern Sun gently lifts the boys head up, readying his gaping mouth for the kiss of fruit distilled. What speaking they all do passes beyond us as quickly as the wind, but cordial administered, the boy seems to be coming back to wakefulness. Cautious, we retract the thread.
“Peter,” the boy repeats, his mouth worrying the name of our High King. They have become grafted together, limbs growing fused so there is nothing between.
𖣂
There are still wounds, of course, in the after. There will be no rotting from the inside, no crawling death, but they will remain puckered and red and angry until they are healed the slower way. We are not much help for that. Long ago, we learned our lesson when our threaded branch became a sapling and grew inside the boy we healed. His sister, with her sharp dagger, had to dig it out before she gave him another drop of healing. They had learned their lesson too, when the scar did not heal alongside the sickness. The white scar is still scratched across his chest, stretching downwards like a gnarled twig twisting up toward his neck.
So, this time, he of the northern sky takes his hands to the healing. They say the hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and certainly he proves it so. Under his care, the boy’s wounds shrink and dry, leaves in the turning of seasons, and eventually fall away to new skin. His scars are neat, and this is not a memory we hold of the High King’s skills. In the beyond he has learnt it. Saliva, the poor mans salve, he uses well past the scars need his attention. But we see each kiss bring the other boy to life underneath them and so this must be healing. We take note, for the future.