Read Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘The River Has Roots’ Excerpt, See Cover Reveal

An Excerpt From The River Has Roots
By Amal El-Mohtar

Here is a secret that isn’t, really, for everyone knew it even if they didn’t understand the custom: the Hawthorn family’s true work was to sing to the willows. By ancient treaty this was only required four times a year, at the turning of the seasons; by long-standing tradition, it was done every day, at sunrise and sunset, the way one bids one’s family members good morning on waking and good night before bed. Just as beekeepers tell their hives all the news in thanks for honey, the Hawthorns sang to their trees in thanks for their translations. But none had ever taken to the task quite so vigorously as Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn, the latest daughters of that house.

When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.

Esther was two years the elder, with hair dark as the December of her birth, and if this story were a folk tale or an old song, she’d be certain to have a disposition as frosty; Ysabel was the younger, and because her own hair was bright as king’s coins or summer corn, you might think she was given to chatter and merriment. But this was not the truth of them, singly or together. Esther was thoughtful and gregarious, and while Ysabel had a laugh loud and easy as barrel-tumbled apples in the fall, she was in fact very shy.

They loved each other utterly, and everyone in Thistleford knew it.

Though their voices had the sheen of grammar, Esther and Ysabel were not themselves grammarians, and in truth, they felt nothing especially uncanny about their home. The silver-green of willow leaves was familiar comfort to them, and they read their moods like weather. The willows themselves felt like ancestry, like kin. They cherished the Professors in particular, for their height and their shade and the sound of the wind rustling through their leaves like chimes—but they loved them even more for the stories told of them, and how they came to bow their leafy heads together over the River Liss. Their father told them that the Professors loved each other in a forbidden love, and they were driven from their homes into the river, and conjugated into trees; their mother said they’d made some great sacrifice for the good of their families, given themselves to the river in exchange for a secret gift. But whatever details blurred and shifted in the telling, the fact that the Professors had been and still were lovers never came into dispute; they had professedtheir love, hence the name.

From their earliest days, Esther and Ysabel never shirked their duty, singing the required hymn with great solemnity at the changing of every season. Strange to tell, it wasn’t in English; they couldn’t say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it. Their mother told them that her parents had thought it was Welsh, until the day a Levantine wood-worker staying with them in the spring said it sounded to her like Arabic, but a dialect she’d never heard. Either it was older than her, or from a place she’d never travelled (“or,” their mother said, ruefully, “my accent was too atrocious to understand and she was too polite to say so”).

But the wood-worker was able to explain some of it; it was, their mother told them, a song about the North Wind opening doors and carrying messages to and from a beloved in exile. So the girls knew it as the Professors’ Hymn, and though they didn’t really understand it—they argued, sometimes, about whether the North Wind wasone of the lovers, or merely a messenger—they enjoyed improvising harmonies into the repetition of nonsense la sounds in the long refrain, inflecting it slightly differently depending on the time of year, and how likely the North Wind was to blow.

As Esther and Ysabel grew, as singing became their favourite pastime, they began to play with adding new material to their repertoire. It did the trees no harm, and seemed even to do them some good; their parents observed small shifts of colour in bark and leaf, though any other effects were too subtle to track without a grammarian. But if any grammarian would stoop to such common work, instead of the fire and crackle of conjugation in the king’s service, they hadn’t yet wandered towards Thistleford. Or if they had—and only one had—they tended towards Arcadia, and never came out again.

Used with permission from TorDotCom Publishing, an imprint of Tor Publishing Group; a trade division of Macmillan Publishers. Copyright (c) Amal El-Mohtar, 2025.

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar will be released on March 4, 2025. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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