Birdie's Book - Andrea Burden [41]
I opened my eyes. The knothole had grown, and as I watched, it grew even more until it was an arched doorway with a small door—an actual wooden door! The door grew and deepened in color. It was now a robin’s egg blue—the exact color of the front door to my old house in Califa.
A rusty key protruding from the keyhole turned on its own, and the door swung open. Inside was pure darkness. The ferns parted so that I could step through.
But I didn’t want to go inside. It was like with the bugs on the bridge—I couldn’t make myself. How would I do this without Kerka?
Behind me came the sound of wings, growing louder and louder. When I turned, I was staring into a pair of ancient eyes. The eyes were in the small face of an old woman, and the face was on the head and body of a giant gray-black crow. The crow woman put her head back and howled like a wolf.
All I could do was stare in horror, but then my brain registered it. The crow woman was a banshee! My mother had told me the Irish legend of this ghost woman when I first started loving fairy tales. The banshee was sometimes a crow, I remembered, and sometimes a ghostly hag—in this case, she was both. But no matter what shape she took, if the banshee wailed, it meant one thing: Someone was about to die.
“Death began when the stone was broken!” the banshee wailed. “It was I, the crow, who found it and brought it here to the tree! Then all became death, death, death!”
As the banshee’s gray-black wings began to beat at me, I wondered if I was the one about to die. But I couldn’t let it happen—I just couldn’t!
I had nowhere to run but into the Shadow Tree, so that is what I did, right into its inky blackness. The door slammed shut behind me. I could still hear the screeching howls of the banshee on the other side.
Suddenly in the darkness I saw that a light was growing. I had put my hand on my heart, truly by accident, and now I was emitting a golden green light. It was crazy to see my skin glowing and lighting up the dark inside of the tree. I put my hand in my pocket to check if my half of the Singing Stone was still there.
When my finger touched it, I realized something amazing, and I wondered how I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe being in the tree is what helped me, or maybe it was the Singing Stone. In any case, what I realized was that the tree was not evil; it was in pain! It needed healing, and who better to do that than someone from the Arbor Lineage, a fairy-godmother-in-training with green magic—in other words, me!
The fairy queen had given me Mo’s entry in The Book of Dreams, something to remember, she had said. Mo’s entry was “The Green Song,” so I decided to sing it to the tree itself. I just made up a melody, but it all fit together seamlessly, like magic.
As I sang, my own glow filled the space even more. I could see a spiral staircase leading up. I sang, holding the half of the Singing Stone in my hand, and climbed the stairs (which were disgustingly covered in the black ooze).
Gradually, I felt the tree relax. Then, all of a sudden, the tree let out a long sigh; it was like a child finally falling asleep. I sang “The Green Song” very softly, and listened. I swear I could hear the Shadow Tree’s breathing, deep and low.
I kept singing as I climbed up, up, up. At the top of the stairs were passages that twisted left and right, up and down. It was all much larger than it had seemed on the outside.
“Kerka?” I sang her name among the other words of the song.
“Birdie? Is that you?” I heard Kerka’s voice faintly calling from the right-hand passage.
“Kerka!” I sang. “I’m coming! Kerka, keep calling! Don’t stop!”
Kerka called, and I sang more softly so I could hear her. I walked along the passage. The tree walls didn’t seem so black now, but more like a rich green. Just as I noticed that, though, I came to a low, arched door, from which Kerka’s voice was coming.
I ducked under the arch and through the door into a small dark room, which my glow instantly lit. It was filled with sticks and shiny blackbird feathers