The tree by the Stone pulled and stressed above them, even its massive trunk beginning to move before the power of the wind, so that the ground beneath them began to shake and shudder with the stress of the roots pulling through it.
In among the roots of the beech by the Stone, the surface of the pool of trapped rainwater where Bracken had taken a drink earlier that day began to shake with the straining of the tree in the mounting storm.
Boswell approached the Chamber of Echoes slowly, feeling the power of the storm above shaking the tunnel walls all around him. The sounds from the Chamber of Roots were so massive that they drowned out the patter of his paws on the tunnel’s floor but he went calmly, now at peace with himself.
When he stood on the threshold of the Chamber of Roots, which was in violent and dangerous motion everywhere, with crashing of chalk subsoil from the roof above and tearing and crunching across the floor as root fissures heaved and widened before him in clouds of dust and soil, he felt nothing but peace.
The light of the Stillstone led him through the roots safely and beyond to the buried part of the Stone itself.
Down into the depths beneath the Stone he went, the roots of the tree now pulling and straining about him, some twisting under windstress off the tunnel floor and then whipping or crashing down again, while others, enwrapped about the Stone, were pulling at it, pushing it under and around so that the very Stone itself was beginning to shake and move, the tilted end now rising higher above Boswell and then sinking ominously down towards him.
Deep under its lowest part crouched Bracken and Rebecca, the light of the Stillstone filling their fur with brightness and turning everything it touched into white.
As he went forward to this most sacred of places, Boswell sought to see what he had looked for for so long: the seventh Book. The Stillstone was there, but where was the Book, where was it hidden? His eyes cast about into the shadows caused by the Stillstone among the shifting roots and into the recesses of the burrow in which Bracken and Rebecca crouched together.
Rebecca turned to him and looked as if she expected to see him there with them both, as if she could read his thoughts. There was no need for words, even if words could have been heard in the increasing sounds of rootstress and strain as the very world they were in seemed to be swaying and pulling and collapsing, and they were the only still things in it.
She looked at him as he at her and knew he was wondering where the Book was. ‘Don’t you know?’ she seemed to be saying without saying a word. ‘Oh, Boswell, don’t you know?’
Bracken turned to him, a look of unutterable joy about him as the Stillstone glimmered and shone brighter about them and cast its light on to Boswell’s fur. ‘The Book’s here, you have it, you have it,’ Bracken was thinking, and Boswell had no need to hear the words; he knew them. You have it, it is yours already.
The light from the Stillstone shone fully now on Boswell, whose fur seemed as white before it as that of Bracken and Rebecca.
The Stone above them began to move more and more, pulled and pushed by the roots of the tree that, high above where Comfrey and Tryfan waited and prayed in the storm, was caught more and more strongly by the wind, and its aged roots began a battle through the night against the storm’s might.
Now the Stone moved on the surface. A gap between its base and the surrounding soil appeared that widened and narrowed to the swaying of the tree above it. The ground began to tremble and Comfrey began to pray aloud.
Among the roots beneath the great Stone in the silence created by love, Bracken turned to the Stillstone and took it up. Its brightness did not fade nor did its glimmering cease as it had when he had touched it once before. Now its light travelled into his paw and from there to his body and over his fur and into his eyes, and where his other paw touched Rebecca’s its light travelled on until both seemed aflame with the Stillstone’s light and there were no words, they were beyond words as Bracken joyfully passed the Stillstone to Boswell of Uffington.
