Yews

Overview

Yews are the dark trees of the cradle-web's burial grounds and old woods, evergreen, slow, and very long-lived. Their wood makes the best bows, and their leaves and seeds kill: cattle that browse a yew die, and so do children who chew the seed. Because they stand in burial grounds, live longer than anything else there, and are poison, folk say the yew drinks from the dead.

Appearance

A yew is broad, dense, and dark: a short, massive, often fluted trunk, frequently hollow in old trees and seeming made of many trunks grown together, with reddish, flaking, purple-brown bark that peels in thin strips. Its crown is a low dome of dark, almost black-green foliage, the needles flat, soft, and pointed, glossy above and paler beneath, in two rows along the twigs. In autumn the female trees carry single seeds, each set in a bright, waxy, scarlet cup open at the end, like a small red bead with a dark eye. Under a yew the ground is bare and dark, and the air smells faintly resinous.

Habitat and Range

Wild yews grow in the understorey of old woods and on steep limy slopes through the cradle-web, often alone. Planted ones stand in the burial grounds of Human villages and towns, beside shrines, at crossroads graves, and in old manor grounds; many burial grounds have one tree older than the village's records.

Behaviour and Temperament

A yew grows very slowly and almost never dies of age. Its trunk hollows from the inside, its limbs touch the ground and root, and an old tree can become a ring of trees around an empty centre.

Life Cycle

Yews live for thousands of years. Birds eat the red cups, which are the only part that is not poison, and pass the seed. A tree bears from a few decades old and goes on bearing.

Uses and Dangers

Yew wood is hard, heavy, and springy, the heartwood orange-red and the sapwood pale; a bowyer cuts a stave from the trunk with both together, sapwood on the back and heartwood on the belly, and a yew bow outshoots any other. Lords grant yew rights carefully, and a district's yews are counted. The wood also makes tool handles, pegs, and the posts of graveyard gates.

Leaves, bark, and seed are deadly. A few mouthfuls of the leaves stop a horse's heart, and cattle and horses that reach over a burial-ground wall die where they stand; a child who swallows the chewed seed can die in an hour, with a slow, stumbling heart and cold limbs. Burial grounds are walled partly for this reason.

Lore and Belief

Basin folk hold that the yew in a burial ground drinks from the dead below it and keeps their memory, and that cutting it severs the village from its dead. Funeral processions walk under it, mourners lay yew sprigs in the coffin, and a cut yew branch is set on a grave to keep the dead from walking, though it is the rite and the grief, not the yew, that keeps them quiet (see Hostile Remnants). Wood Elves, who return their dead to living ground among their groves, call the Human yews the trees that watch instead, and say it kindly.

Yew is also the bowstave wood, and in a war year lords' men come to cut the burial yews for bows; more than one village has fought its own lord's men in the graveyard to keep them.

Where It Appears

• Poison Herbs