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Who can say if it is more manly to play flag football and fish and swim in frigid lakes with unknown muddy depths, than to immerse yourself in a new culture and set about meeting its representatives? Sports made Dickie wheeze, and something in the North Carolina air had aggravated his allergies, so he spent all his time with the old Cherokee woman who cooked and mended for the campers, hearing the tales of her ancestors. His only hikes were to the library to check out books on Cherokee history.
    â€œWhat on earth is a Cherokee spirit doing in England?” Phyllida wondered.
    â€œAnd what did it mean about waking him up?” Meg asked. “I don’t think I woke anyone up.”
    â€œYe killed me,” a rough voice said. Bran stood in the doorway, half in vivid sun from the garden, half shadowed from the kitchen. He had an uncanny knack for hearing everything that was discussed on the Rookery grounds and appearing without warning.
    Meg hung her head. It didn’t matter that she had entered the Midsummer War to save Rowan or that Bran would have killed her (or would he?) if she hadn’t loosed that temporarily fatal arrow. And it hardly mattered that they had all brought Bran back to life afterward. She had taken a life, and what’s more, had found it surprisingly easy. She still remembered her sense of resolution when she marched up the Green Hill, the certainty of her fingers when they released the bowstring, the sureness of her aim, the power she held within her that night … and she fought those memories. It wasn’t right that there should be any feelings other than sorrow and shame associated with the Midsummer War.
    â€œYe killed me,” Bran said again, “and brought me back to life. I was the Midsummer sacrifice of the seventh year. I was supposed to die, for the land.” Or I was, thought Meg. “That’s what it’s all about, ye know. Since the hand of man first set a seed in the earth, blood has been shed to keep the earth fertile.”
    â€œThat’s crazy,” Silly said.
    â€œThat’s what fertilizers are for,” Finn said with contempt. Bran looked at him like he didn’t belong in the conversation.
    â€œWhat d’ye think makes the best fertilizers? Bones, ground up … blood meal … manure … all things from the body of a living beastie. Man or beast, life must be given to the soil, or it will not give life back. Every seven years a man is slain on the Green Hill so that things will stay the same—the corn will grow, the hops will sprout, the apples pip. But it didn’t happen that way this time … and things will not stay the same.”
    â€œI messed it up, didn’t I?” Meg asked, miserably. “You mean, now things won’t grow?”
    â€œThe barley’s high, and you ate gooseberries yourself yesterday. Of course things are growing, ye daft girl. The blood was shed, the sacrifice made. That part was taken care of. But ye did something else too. Ye brought the dead back to life. That doesn’t happen, or if it does, so rarely it becomes the stuff of legends. If killing can bring life for seven years, what have you wrought with resurrection?”
    Meg had no idea, but felt a little shiver of trepidation at the thought.
    â€œBran,” Phyllida said severely, “tell us clearly what you mean, please. What has happened?”
    â€œDaughter, I don’t know.”
    â€œBut you said—”
    â€œI don’t know, I only feel. There’s something stirring in the earth.” Meg had visions of worms writhing under her soles. “I thought at first it was only me, that I wasn’t quite used to the world yet, the world above the fairy lands, or the world beyond my own death. I’ve had this feeling, like something waking up, something moving and stretching for the first time in centuries. And Meg’s the one who changed everything.”
    Meg