When Mari leaves the building, no one waves goodbye. It’s bad luck, they say, to watch a blade-bearer leave. Especially one who might not return.
        Mari doesn’t mind. Everyone knows the rite is dangerous business, and she’d never ask for special treatment. But that doesn’t stop her hands from shaking as she treks across the grassy field outside her home, aiming for the edge.
        She wraps one around the cross-body strap of her satchel, runs her fingers across its hempen threads, and remembers all the women who have made this journey before her. Were they all so nervous? And who was the first to understand what was required of her?
        It could not have been a simple truth to find.
        The way Mari’s grandmother tells it, no one was prepared for the Greening. Before, people lived hard, tiresome lives, forever toiling in service of the terrible tyrants whose excesses polluted and poisoned the Earth. By the time anyone lifted their heads to realize what doom was circling in upon them, the planet was already awake. Already angry.
        The Green consumed everything—asphalt, concrete, iron, steel. Cities burned. Authority collapsed. And when the trees fell quiet and the vines stopped thrashing, the world had reclaimed itself from humanity’s clutches.
        It must have been soon after that, Mari imagines, that the first child was born into this new and verdant existence. That the rite became necessary.
        Approaching the edge of the field, she steals a glance over her shoulder. A brown brick facade stares back at her, its windows pointedly empty, and a breeze moves through the ivy clinging to its face and sides. Her grandmother says it was a civic building, once, a place for strangers to gather and file bits of paper into stacks the size of a man. Now, it’s just home—Mari’s, and many others’, too.
        And if she wants to keep it that way, she has to keep going. So Mari turns away and slips through the tree line into the endless thicket her people call the Wild.
        This is a frightening place, full of hungry beasts and unforgiving foliage, but Mari isn’t scared. Her people are careful. They take only what they need, sometimes less, and always with an equal exchange. Fell a tree, plant a seed. Kill a buck, feed its mate. Never give the land a reason to be cruel.
        Mari moves unhindered through the underbrush, silent as a field mouse. The canopy is full of wind, and she twines through the twisting shadows, listening to the sound of the rustling leaves. If she closes her eyes, it’s almost like they’re sighing. Or maybe whispering.
        It’s an hour before she finds the marker—a boulder five times her size and covered in lush emerald moss—and follows its darkest face north. In another ten minutes, she spies her destination: a spot of sun amid the midday dusk. A grove. Mari emerges into the light once more, blinking against the glow until shapes and colors tighten into proper forms. 
        Everywhere she looks, there is Green. A circle of lichen-clad trees frames the clearing, each taller than her home and so thick that four men could not clasp arms around them. Underfoot, the grass is lush and soft as freshly washed hair. Flowers dot its rolling waves, bursting pink and yellow and blue, and perfume the air with gentle sweetness. But Mari did not come here to admire the Wild’s untempered beauty, so her eyes skip across the clearing and toward the looming shape at its center.
        The Old Mother.
        For as long as Mari has lived, she’s heard stories about this tree. The eldest among her people say it’s as big as one of the old-world city-towers—steel monoliths that pierced the very sky above—and seeing it now, Mari believes them. Its gargantuan branches are twisted and gnarled as thrice-broken limbs, heavy with bunches of long red leaves; its knotted roots spider out in all directions.
        Mari’s heart thunders in her ears. Her mother said it would be beautiful, and it is, but not like she expected. Where other trees are elegant or impressive, the Old Mother is imposing. An austere authority.
        Mari needs no instruction. She comes to the base of the tree and kneels, slipping her bag off her shoulder. Her hands work without prompt, and soon everything she needs is laid on a cloth before her: a bundle of herbs, her grandfather’s flint striker, a boiled rag, a tiny bowl, and her blade. Its honed edge sparkles like ice in the summer sun. Mari’s gut twists as she wipes her sweating palms on her tunic.
        “You can do this,” she whispers to herself.
        She inhales slowly. Exhales even slower. Then, Mari sparks the striker and sets the herb bundle alight, letting its acrid smoke plume up around her face. Memorized words roll off her tongue.
        “Ancient Mother, heed my plea. A new soul-child longs to breathe. Ancient Mother, your mercy extoll. Another life is breaching the caul.”
        Mari circles the herbs before her, around her head and hands, then places them in the bowl to burn. Fanning vapor up into the tree’s expansive embrace, she watches the branches begin to shiver.
        “Ancient Mother,” she continues, “in your wisdom judge me true. I offer this…” Mari lifts the knife from her cloth. She swallows a mouthful of air, lungs going ragged. “I offer this lifeblood as tribute to you.”
        And with a whimper, Mari draws the tip quickly against her forearm and pulls away a crimson stripe of blood. Ignoring the sting, she lets beads of it roll down her wrist, her fingers, until one lone drop falls unfettered onto the nearest root.
        She holds her breath.
        Then, as if stirring from slumber, the tree gives a great creaking shudder. Mari’s lips drop open, but before she can react, a grasping tendril bursts from the soil and wraps itself around her wrist, tethering her firmly in place. A scream rips its way from her throat.
        But the tendril—a root, she realizes—takes no pity upon her. It worms and wriggles her arm, its touch a strange mix of warm and cold, hard and soft, until it finds the gushing cut and squeezes. Mari lets out another cry as pain radiates through her, trying and failing to slow her rushing breaths. Blood dribbles in thin rivers across the tree’s vice-tight tether, and to Mari’s horror, the root drinks.
        She utters a breathless curse. Her knuckles go white around her knife. She’s ready to cut herself free, ready to run, when a bodiless voice echoes in her ear:
        “Put it down, child.”
        Shock loosens Mari’s hand. The blade tumbles away. She blinks into the grove, seeking a mouth and finding none.
        “Who… Who speaks to me?” she whispers.
        “The Wild,” the voice replies. It isn’t loud, but neither is it quiet. It is not male nor female, young nor old, but something more and different from it all… Something Mari does not understand yet cannot escape. “The Green.”
        Mari’s eyes float upward once again, into the boughs overhead, and suddenly it is clear to her.
        “You are The Old Mother,” she says.
        The tree sways. 
        “That is what your kin name me. What did they name you who trods upon my roots?”
        Mari’s head spins. They warned her something strange would happen, but no one said it would be like this. Is she dreaming? Has the Green killed her already and sent her to the world beyond?
        “I am Mari,” she answers, because there is nothing else to do. A resonant hum shakes the air about Mari’s head.
        “Who labors?” the tree asks.
        “M-My sister, Ada.”
        “Her first?”
        “Yes.”
        The tree squeezes harder, drawing out another gush of blood, and Mari gasps through gritted teeth. The root devours every drop.
        “Your kin—what do they number?”
        Mari tells the truth. “Ada’s babe makes us one hundred and seven.”
        There is no immediate reply. Mari’s gut twists from pain and apprehension both. It’s as if the tree is studying here, taking her measure.
        “Do you know why you undertake this rite?” it asks finally.
        Mari nods as if it can see her. Maybe it can.
        “It is repayment for our past,” Mari says. “Each time a child is born and our number increases, we are called to pay blood to the land that sustains us.”
        “Your past…  Tell me, child, what you know of it.”
        A thousand stories run through her head at once—all those nights her grandmother spent at her bedside, whispering history lessons disguised as fairy tales.
        “I know we… We humans did terrible things. We killed too many animals, burnt too many trees, wasted too much food. We made poisons and spread them everywhere. I know that the fish died, and the eagles, and all the butterflies, too.”
        All true—but there is more. Always more.” The root about Mari’s wrist pulls her closer to the base of the tree, missing or ignoring the way her breathing stutters. “This place was once a wetland. We trees stood half-submerged, roots bare to the water, and the bluegills swam through the gaps in us. Frogs burrowed in our mud, and herons dug to find them. In the morning, the egrets in our branches sang their croaking songs, and when the sun set, fireflies danced in pairs over the swamp lilies.”
        A breeze slips through the grove, and the voice in Mari’s ear sighs, soft and wistful. Her heart ties itself in knots.
        Then the root constricts, writhing like a boa around a muskrat, and the woman it is consuming lets out a panicked scream.
        The tree goes on, louder now and fiercer, too: “But humans came. You saw this place and named it your own, and like all of your beautiful possessions, you relished in its ruin. You did not merely kill, burn, poison—you slaughtered. You mutilated. You stripped us of our wood, our animals, even our water, and when you had reduced us to naught but ash and dead soil, you suffocated the Earth under tar and metal. The Wild witnessed. The Wild remembers.”
        “Please,” Mari begs. Tears prick at her eyes. “Please, we have changed. We are not the ones who did this.”
        Fear beats through her like rain through linen. Part of her expects this is it—that the tree will decide she isn’t worth keeping and crush her into pulp, or maybe just keep drinking. She’s already getting dizzy. The leaves are shaking their scolding faces down at her. Mari’s eyelids flutter as she tries and fails to blink the image away.
        “Are the living really so different from the dead?” the tree asks.
        She can only answer one question with another.
        “Would the dead have done this for you?”
        Mari gestures to her arm, to the root that is killing her, taking her as recompense. To the knife and its stained edge. The tendril shudders in place. The air in Mari’s ears is wordless for a long, aching moment. She bleeds and bleeds.
        At last, the tree says:
        “No, child. They would not.”
        The root releases her, and it’s as if Mari has stumbled out of a trance. All at once, there is no voice, no anger, just a giant tree in a beautiful meadow, soaked with golden sun and flower-scented wind. She is alive. She is alone.
        Breathing hard and fast, Mari pulls her arm to her chest and fumbles for a cloth to staunch the bleeding, then waits until her body stops shaking before she drains her waterskin and pushes herself to her feet. The return journey is a blur of brown and gray and green, green, green.
        But when the Wild deposits Mari back into her field, back in sight of her brick and mortar home, a sound lifts her glassy eyes to a window on the second floor:
        A cry. Brittle and small, an eggshell of noise, but bright and clear all the same. Mari smiles, and the smile becomes a laugh. Carried forward on mindless legs, she throws her arms wide as she runs, calling and waving as faces appear behind every weathered pane of glass.
        This time, they all wave back.