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Years later, when Mara died, the town made a small funeral by the sycamore. No one tried to use the grove as a final supplier; they did what communities do with the dead: they spoke their names until the bones could not be fooled. A small child, perhaps the one who had once dared a run at dusk, left a drawing at the grave — a crude scrap of paper with a tree and a house and a person holding a name. The drawing was the town's new primer: a thing passed down that would not be bartered, because it had been drawn with deliberate hands and witnessed.
They called the place the grove no more than a grove. The words became less magical and more exact: Lathen Grove, the sycamore place. The cursed phrase the map had given — be grove cursed new — became a proverb, then a proverb turned into an admonition, then into a line of a play that teenagers mouthed over their packets of sweets. Language, like the town, evolved: once a wound and then protection. be grove cursed new
They each received what the grove offered, which is to say they received the correct shape of their longing and the exact calculus of what it would demand. Jory came back swollen with a companion whose charm convinced everyone he met that Jory had been given the right to speak more loudly. But the companion never slept and so Jory could not sleep either, and his life collapsed into exhaustion. Sister Ellin's sermons gained luminous clarity, but with them the congregation found themselves with fewer questions to ask; devotion hardened into a brittle certainty. Tomas found the river, but he found it as a reflection and could not feel the current under his feet. Years later, when Mara died, the town made
Mara felt the weight of the question like a plank across her ribs. She saw, suddenly, not only Avel but all the people who had used the grove as a shop that sold them short. She imagined a town where each bargain slotted a small hole into the whole of speech; sentences would be missing verbs, congregation speeches would fray, the seamstress would not be able to count to enough to finish a garment. The town would become, slowly and then suddenly, a people with fewer verbs, fewer names — a village that could not remember how to ask. The drawing was the town's new primer: a
Halfway through the day the grove gave her a house.
News of Mara and the map moved faster than she did. It threaded through the market and the chapel and into the hush of kitchens. People gathered by the road to watch her enter the trees, to see if she would emerge as others had — gaunt, emptied, or never at all.
As for Mara, she aged like a house with a good foundation. Her hair threaded silver; her hands grew the soft, papery skin of pages. She taught until she did not need to. People began to write maps that were not meant to be followed; they were meant to be read aloud at gatherings so that they might resist the grove's seductions by naming them precisely. Children learned the grove’s legends as bedtime stories with careful footnotes. They learned the phrase the map had taught them first: Be grove cursed new — and they learned to say it like both a warning and a riddle.