As he began to strum on his harp, he filled his mind with images of earth. Old crumbling stones and tangled grasses, wildflowers and weeds and saplings that put down deep roots, growing into mighty trees. The color of dirt, the scent of it. How it felt clutched in the hollow of one’s palm. The voice of branches, swaying in the breeze, and the slope of the earth as it rose and fell, faithful and steady.

Jack closed his eyes and began to sing. He didn’t want to see the spirits manifest, but he heard the grass hissing near his knees, and he heard the tree boughs groaning above him, and he heard the scratch of stone, as if two were being rubbed together. When he heard Adaira’s soft gasp, Jack opened his eyes.

The spirits were forming themselves, gathering around him to listen. He played and sang and watched as the trees became maidens with long arms and hair made of leaves. The grass and pennywort knotted themselves into what looked to be mortal lads, small and green. The stones found their faces like old men waking from a long dream. The wildflowers broke their stems and gathered into the shape of a woman with long dark hair and eyes the color of honeysuckle, her skin purple as the heather that bloomed on the hills. Yellow gorse crowned her, and she waited beside the Earie Stone, whose face was still forming, craggy and ancient.

As Jack played Lorna’s ballad he felt as if he was slowly sinking into the earth. His limbs were becoming heavy, and he drooped like a flower wilting beneath a fierce sun. It was like the sensation of falling asleep. He swore he saw daisies blooming from his fingertips, and every time he plucked his strings the petals broke away but regrew just as swiftly. And his ankles . . . he couldn’t move them, the tree roots had begun to take hold of him. His hair was turning into grass, green and long and tangled, and as the song ended he struggled to remember who he was, that he was mortal, a man. Someone was coming to him, bright as a fallen star, and he felt her hands on his face, blissfully cold.

“Please,” the woman said, but not to him. She beseeched the wildflower spirit with her long dark hair and crown of vibrant gorse. “Please, this man belongs to me. You cannot claim him.”

“Why, mortal woman,” one of the pennywort lads said from the ground, his words raspy as summer hay falling to a scythe. “Why did you sit so far away from him? We thought he sang to be taken by us.”