The Roots Answer
The answer came not from the spirits but from the oak itself, in the deep of winter when the ground was iron and the sky was the colour of a bruise. Sorcha had been sitting with her back against the trunk for three days — she no longer needed to eat, which was the price of the fourth miracle, the one that had turned the winter mild — when the tree opened. Not visibly, not in a way that anyone watching would have seen, but she felt the bark soften behind her and the heartwood shift, and suddenly she was inside, or the tree was inside her, and the distinction had ceased to matter.
The oak showed her its memory. It had stood for nine hundred years, and it remembered every druid who had served the grove, and every bargain they had struck, and every price they had paid. The prices were not punishments — they were transformations. Each druid had given up some piece of their human self and received, in exchange, a piece of the green world, until the last of them had stepped into the trunk of this very tree and become its heartwood, and the grove had flourished for a generation on the strength of that gift. The spirits were not collecting debts. They were offering an invitation.
Sorcha stood in the snow at dawn and looked at the village below — the smoke from the chimneys, the cattle in the fields, the children walking to school along the path that wound through the trees she had