There were far fewer lilies in their pools of pottery than there were in normal years. The waters were low and the lilies did not thrive. Tom had brought some of them back to Goldberry to save them from the winter, as had been his fashion from time out of mind, but he had to leave enough of them so they would return within their normal pools and streams in the spring. The empty vessels that would have normally held the white blossoms and their watery homes were stacked in the corner. Goldberry could see them if she looked, but she did not care to. This house they had built was their refuge out of the passage of time; when they left, the seasons came, the wood renewed. When they stayed, it was a shelter from weather and change and corruption.
Tom was out with the trees now. He had told her that he could hear their cries of thirst. Tom knew what to listen for, with trees. Even the trees who were not like the old willows could cry in this way; it had to do with how the trees obtained water. The thirsty trees became strange and the forest, already a dangerous place for some, became even more unwelcoming. The rains needed to come or the water needed to come up from below the ground. Goldberry had some link to both the water and the ground, but this was out of her control. She could feel the water and the trees that could tap that water with their roots had already done so. The rest were still crying out and she could not help them. They needed enough water before they went to their winter sleep.
Goldberry was the River's daughter, yet she did not control the river. Time would pass and the seasons would pass with them; the animals and plants she oversaw around the River would thrive under care or even benign neglect, but this year so many things were dry and parched and distressed and she felt powerless. The beavers dammed it, the humans outside the Old Forest took water from the River, yet she could not take it for the Forest itself.
For the first time since she could remember, she would go to the source of the River, to her mother herself, to ask for more water until the rains came. If the rains ever came. The house would remain safe, she knew, even if Tom or herself were out of it. Tom would return soon; the trees complained but never harmed him. He knew their songs. She did not know their songs but they knew her and respected her and she was traveling in the opposite direction of the very harmful trees.
Goldberry followed the path of the River; the wet-foot willows were drinking her mother dry with every day they lived, and these days more so. The rushes were few; the remaining birds were quiet. Early autumn should never be so still, and yet it was. The sunlight dappled the path and its brightness should not have been ominous, but it was. The sunlight meant that there were no clouds. No clouds meant no rain. The skies would not bring them water for another day. Goldberry walked on with a deceptively light foot. She would not harm this forest, but her heart felt leaden and she imagined a trail of decaying vegetation behind her with every footstep.
She at last reached the source of the River, her mother, her mother's heart and home and where Goldberry had been birthed from the union of water and earth and flora. She knelt at the bank and put her hands into the water. "Mother, if you can hear me, if you have ever heard me since I left you, please hear this. Our forest, our home, is dying of thirst. If you can spare more water, please, please do so; if I have ever wanted anything, I want most for this forest not to suffer and not to die. Help us."
The River-woman did not answer with words or water; the pool was silent and still and nothing would change. The rains would come to the Old Forest and the Withywindle, eventually; the snows would restart the life in the spring. But in the meantime, the forest would suffer, and parts of it would die, and until the freeze the trees would continue screaming.