The Price Of Green
The first miracle cost her the colour of her eyes. She woke the morning after the bargain to find the blight retreating from the hazel trees at the grove's edge, their leaves uncurling green and glossy as though spring had come in October, and when she looked at her reflection in the well, her eyes — which had been her mother's brown, warm and ordinary — were the silver-white of birch bark. The village noticed. They whispered, as villages do, but the water ran clear again, and the whispers carried gratitude along with their unease.
The second miracle cost her the ability to sleep indoors. When she tried, the walls pressed close and the air thickened and her lungs seized as though the house itself were rejecting her. She moved her blankets to the grove and slept beneath the oak, and the tree bent its branches over her like a canopy, and the rain did not touch her, and she dreamed in the language of roots — slow, patient dreams that spanned centuries and concerned themselves with the movement of water through stone. The rowan recovered. The ash put out new growth. The village prospered.
But the price steepened with each asking, and the old gods were not cruel but they were exact. When the lord's men came to fell trees at the grove's southern boundary, Sorcha asked the spirits for protection, and the men's axes shattered, and the boundary held, and Sorcha lost the sound of her