The Grey Trees

“Into the Grey Trees he went, ne’er to return. He had reasons good and true, but it did not stop us his neighbors from a’weepin’ and a’beggin’ he give up the notion altogether. Have a drink, lad, and lay down to sleep. In the mornin’ nothin’ seems quite so miserable as in the night ‘afore. But he kept dry and wakeful, and went into the Trees. And naught have seen him since.”

It was his betrothed who led him there, him being Panni Hogrewth. His intended, Uise Redcrown, had taken offense at some joke he’d made about her family, just a night before their wedding. That was one telling. The other telling is she went to break wands from the willows and weave him and her crowns for the ceremony, for they were both poor children (but who isn’t in Titch-Tah village, I’d like to know?), and the feast would be poor fare, bread and berries and old wine, and the dress would be tattered, and he would be off to the King’s camp in a month’s time (for the war had not ended then, nor has it yet). Panni hoped to do some deed of valor for the King, since he was called into battle among our lord’s own company. He thought he might find fortune and favor through battle-bravery. To kill a captain or lead his fellows to capturing some hill. But his fate lay in the Grey Trees.

They were willows, and beautiful, yet no birds nor beasts sheltered in them. Every man and women and dog of Titch-Tah knew why. The gree-granle, bone-ghosts, dwell in the Grey Trees. Go there and they shall take of you and you shall know a short and miserable end. So all peasants were told, and told to their heirs, and ancestors and generations to come keep the warning alive in an unbreakable ring of legend (or truth, might we say). The gree-granle make slaves of any fleshly thing that wanders into their dominion. They were here before man, and will be long after.

A rabble of drunken lads tried one hundred years ago to set the willows aflame. To rid themselves of the treacherous sight and save future souls. But the trees would not light. And every man in that mob took terrible sick the following day. But shrewd folk say it was to their drinking it could be blamed. Shrewder people say nay, for these men all died young.

The folk of Titch-Tah village held a funeral with two boxes after Panni chased Uise into that bleak brake. The village wiseman said that there could be some encouragement in the fact that both were together there, that perhaps they spent their weary days in one another’s company, as they’d hoped to had they remained in the living world. And Panni had escaped sure death in the war, so there was that comfort.

Panni’s mother, who’d ever doted on the boy, tells a different tale. She did not attend her son’s funeral.

“My Panni would have been a hero in the war, had he gone. He’d have been a wealthy man upon his return. Wherever he went and whatever he’d do, t’would turn out better than you know. He is now King in that Grey Willowwood. I know it. A year after he and his maid disappeared, I found a willow braid on my doorstep. In it were ten gold grains and a babe’s rattle, made of gold the same. T’was the very day old Hilbert saw a hind go loping into the Grey Trees. No soul, none of my neighbors, ever saw any beast go into that wood. So I know the hind was an errander, enchanted, from my son. She in the night brought the treasure to me, to warm me in my grief, and tell me that he was living. That I had a grandbabe somewhere in those trees we dare not tread. That was the best Panni could do for me. For King he must be, yet even their King they will not give leave from their fey realm.”