They climbed.
They gathered.
They lit something bright enough for another hill to see.
I turned toward our bonfire.
A child was holding a stick near the edge of the flames while an adult kept one hand firmly on his shoulder.
Two women were sharing a blanket.
Someone passed a cup to the older man.
There was laughter again now, low and ordinary.
Nothing about the gathering looked grand.
That made it feel older somehow.
No one appeared to be reenacting history.
Nobody was dressed for a performance.
They were simply doing the thing itself—standing outside on the longest evening, near a fire, with other people.
The woman beside me must have noticed my expression.
“You were expecting something more ceremonial?” she asked.
“I think I was.”
She smiled.
“That’s the mistake people make with old traditions.
They think ancient means complicated.”
The music came back.
It was so faint that I wondered whether I had imagined it.
Three or four notes drifted from the direction of the hawthorn.
The smile disappeared from her face.
The tree stood perhaps fifty paces from the fire, alone where the hill began to slope toward the lower field.
In the last light, its branches formed a tangled silhouette against the sky.
I listened.
Another note.
Then another.
There was something almost playful in the melody, as if whoever was making it expected us to come closer.
I remembered her fingers closing around my wrist earlier.
“Do you really believe there’s something there?” I asked.
She kept looking at the tree.
“What I believe doesn’t matter nearly as much as knowing when to leave something alone.”
“That sounds like a convenient answer.”
“It is.”
She turned back toward the fire.
“Convenient answers keep people from doing foolish things.”
The older man overheard and laughed.
“Young people always want folklore to behave like a court case,” he said.
“Evidence on one side, nonsense on the other.”
“I didn’t say nonsense.”
“You were thinking it loudly.”
That drew a few smiles from the people nearest us.
I felt heat rise into my face.
The woman spared me by changing the subject.
“Hawthorn has never been treated casually in Irish tradition,” she said.
“Especially a lone tree.
And midsummer was already a boundary time.
Put the two together and people paid attention.”
“To what?”
“To what they couldn’t explain.”
The music stopped again.
No one moved toward the tree.
That restraint interested me more than fear would have.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody crossed themselves dramatically.
