A Way between Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Philip blew out a tight breath. “We’ll just have to hope we’re welcome, then.”

  Griffin clambered to his feet with a yawn. “I have to tell Fi we’re leaving. She needs to know about the soldiers taken from Earth. She deserves to hear that they are headed straight for Vinea.”

  “Okay,” Katherine said. “But be quick. We’re leaving for Maris as soon as we’re done here.”

  8

  FI

  DON’T LOOK DOWN. Fi balanced on a single leaf, her toes curled away from the ragged edge while Ness watched from the solid ground of the gardens. Solid as anything on Caligo, anyway.

  The leaf was only as big as Fi’s feet. If she moved in any direction, she’d be stepping onto thin air. Sure, the fleet was always around to keep people from falling. But Fi didn’t like putting her life into the hands of strangers.

  “Concentrate,” Ness said, loudly enough that her voice carried across the space between them. “You can do this.”

  Sweat began to trickle down Fi’s spine. It itched. She wanted to reach back and wipe it away, but if she twisted like that, she’d fall for sure.

  Ness held a stack of the broad leaves. Her face blank, she tossed the topmost one over the edge. It floated, lazing downward. Without any ground to land on, it kept falling, growing smaller and paler as it drifted through the mists.

  Fi wiped a trail of sweat out of her eyes. She was supposed to hop across the leaves like stepping stones, but no one was going to magick them into place between her and the garden. She had to do it. As if she could—as if that was even possible.

  Ness lifted another leaf from the stack. She drew her hand back.

  “Stop!” Fi shouted. “You’re going too fast. I can’t—”

  “You can.” Ness’s voice was as calm as ever. She flung the leaf into the air, and like the last, it began its tilting fall. “Reach out. Let the green in you call to the green in it.” The leaf continued to drop. “Listen. Can you hear it? Can you feel it beneath your skin?”

  Fi screwed her eyes shut. All she could sense was frustration, building like a thunderstorm inside her. She couldn’t do this. Ness and the others were wrong, and they were wasting their time on her. She wasn’t a greenwitch; she was a spy. She should be on Vinea right now, working for the resistance.

  Eb had taken a blow that was meant for her. He’d died, for what—so she could mess around on Caligo while the real fighting raged on Vinea? Hot air flared Fi’s nostrils. Her eyes snapped back open.

  Ness held a third leaf between her fingertips, her eyebrow cocked, asking a question neither one of them needed her to voice. She opened her fingers and the leaf fell, leaving only five left in the stack. If Fi was going to set them in the gap between her and the gardens, she’d better figure out how before they were all gone.

  “Just—wait!” Fi jammed her fists against her eyes so she didn’t have to watch that leaf swish downward. Shut up. Shut up. The frustration didn’t go anywhere, but the rest of the noise in her head dimmed a little. Breathe.

  Anger simmered along her skin. This was never going to work.

  But then the wind shifted, wafting the smell of the musky blooms in the vertical gardens past her. There was houseleek, and rockfoil, and lungwort spilling over stout containers, and climbers winding up narrow trellises, gathering honeybees and hummingbirds from the farthest stretches of the city in the sky. The scent of growing things put her at ease, and her breaths finally slowed, the hammering in her ears fading.

  The smell hung in the air until the anger was gone too, until the leaf beneath her feet seemed wide as a field of clover. Mist coated Fi’s skin. The chill breeze teased the ends of her hair. She could feel it all. And then, suddenly, there was something else. It wasn’t a noise. It was somehow behind the other sounds and beyond anything she could touch.

  With her eyes closed, life bloomed all around Fi, pulsing green like an army of marching ants. The leaf beneath her feet glowed, and the veins winding through Ness, and the tangle of the vertical gardens, and the leaves in the greenwitch’s hands, and the next one that dropped away from the rest.

  Stop.

  Fi’s eyes shot open.

  The leaf hung in midair, unhindered by the mists or the breeze or, apparently, gravity. A faint glow, paler green than the greenwitches’, rose from Fi’s skin.

  “You don’t have to shout, you know.” A wry smile curved Ness’s lips.

  “I didn’t shout. I just thought—wait. I did that, didn’t I?”

  “The green did that,” Ness corrected. “You asked. Well, you demanded, and it obliged. Try again. But gentler this time.”

  Fi closed her eyes and the pulsing trails of green life flared once more to light. She didn’t know how she’d made that leaf stop its fall. She had no idea how it worked at all.

  Help me?

  “More specific,” Ness instructed.

  Up?

  The leaf began to float upward, like one of the fleet’s boats, until the edges brushed against Fi’s fingertips. She crouched down, setting it on the air in front of her. She looked up into Ness’s face, questioning.

  “Again.”

  So she tried a second time, and a third, until the leaves filled in the gap between Fi and the gardens. The mists swirled through the gardens, rustling the needles high in the larch trees into a smattering of applause.

  Ness nodded approvingly. “The only thing standing between you and the full power of the green magic is yourself.”

  Ness didn’t know Fi very well, not yet. She probably hadn’t even meant to phrase that last bit of encouragement like a dare. But a dare was all Fi heard. Her face grew hot and her mouth clamped shut. She lifted her chin and stepped across the air with nothing but a trail of wafer-thin leaves to keep her from falling.

  9

  FI

  FI’S NEXT LESSON was a variation of the last. This time, rather than calling the plants to her, Ness instructed Fi to ask that they lift her high above the gardens. So she approached the ring of wispy larches with her question. In answer, the trees bent gladly toward her, and she hopped from one bough to the next, rising upward in a languid spiral. The view from the crown was dizzying, the islands dim shadows floating above and far below Fi’s perch.

  When Ness told Fi to calm her nerves or quiet her mind, it never worked. But up in the canopy, with the wind whipping the sleeves of her stola, the tang of pine in her nose, and the rough bark beneath her bare feet, Fi’s worries slipped away. She didn’t need to go looking for the green, it was simply there, in every fluttering leaf, in the cascade of life in the gardens below, in the air that flowed through her lungs.

  “Ness!”

  Fi startled, crouching low to the branch beneath her and wrapping her arms around the narrow trunk. The oldest greenwitch stood below, a withered woman named Val whose veins had already begun to dim. She beckoned frantically, shouting again. “Ness, come down from there. Quick!”

  Fi and Ness scurried out of the tree. When they reached the ground, Val herded them toward the boats, her face grim. “We’ve been in contact with the resistance. Soldiers have been pouring through the portal into Vinea. They burned through the wildlands and stole the children we hid on Somni—the ones we think will become greenwitches.”

  “No.” It was barely above a whisper. “But how? Why?”

  “We don’t know—not what the priests want from them, or how the girls were found. Maybe their veins began to glow when they returned home, and it made them easy to single out.”

  Ness frowned. “And if the same happens to Fi when we take her through the portal?”

  The rest of the women emerged from the gardens, encircling Val like the petals of a pine cone around its core. When two or three greenwitches stand near, the glow of their magic brightens the space between them. But when a dozen come together, the light changes—the air becomes charged like a sky split by thunder, and pale as the moment before a twister dips out of the clouds. It’s why the greenwitches were so easily hunted
down when Somni invaded. It’s why Fi and the rest of the children were in such danger on Vinea, where the green pulsing through the wildlands nurtured the magic within them.

  Val’s voice trembled when she spoke, but not because of fear. It was age that shook her, that rattled the truth loose. “We’re going to lose Vinea if we don’t act quickly.”

  “I need more time. Fi isn’t ready.”

  Val pursed her lips. “We simply don’t have it.”

  “Now? We’re leaving now?” It was what Fi had longed to hear. It was all she wanted, to return home to Vinea. But— “I need to say goodbye to Griffin. I need to thank Katherine.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  “After everything we’ve been through, I can’t just disappear. I need to tell him that—”

  “Fionna. If we had even an hour to spare, we’d use that time to teach you, to somehow prepare you for the war we’re sending you into.” Ness bit her lip, and what Fi saw on the greenwitch’s face caused a seed of worry to burrow into her.

  “We give her the word to defend herself,” Val said. “Only that. And then we leave.”

  Ness nodded, her eyes wide. She crouched until her eyes were level with Fi’s. “Listen, and watch.” The next time her voice sounded, it was deep in Fi’s mind.

  Shield me?

  Ness’s words reverberated through the gardens. The ring of stools collapsed, the vines untwining quick as writhing snakes. The vertical gardens trembled, then collapsed as, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, Ness was hidden from view.

  “Ask!” Ness shouted over the whipping air.

  Fi wet her lips. Shield me?

  Instantly, she found herself in the eye of a second storm. The gardens were destroying themselves, bit by bit, to answer her call. Every last ounce of green in the city in the sky rushed through her. For the first time since she’d felt the green magic inside her, a thrill chased down Fi’s skin.

  Maybe it didn’t matter that she didn’t know enough, that she wasn’t half as powerful as this fight needed her to be. The green was strong. So much stronger than she’d ever dared to dream.

  10

  FI

  FI TOOK HER place beside Ness in the lighthouse tower. Greenwitches surrounded her on the watch room landing and lined the stairway leading to the lantern room, ready for the moment the portal opened.

  Ness held up a tunic for Fi, who stepped out of her worn stola and lifted her arms over her head. The tunic slid over her skin, dropping past her torso with a shiver. She turned to one side, then the other, relishing the way the supple fabric brushed against her thighs. From one angle, the leaflike plates seemed as green as an evergreen bough. From another, they gleamed almost silver, like mosses dripping off tired branches.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She stared down at her arms, where a tiny glow touched the mists hovering around her. She bit her lip. “Do you think when I get home I’ll glow like a greenwitch should?”

  A frown tugged at Ness’s mouth. “We don’t really understand how your time on Somni altered the way the green works in you. You’re different, it’s true. But you’re one of us, all the same.”

  Fi glanced back over her shoulder, out the watch room window, to the little floating island where Griffin and his mom were staying. She wished she could have seen Griffin one last time. She wished she could have gotten another one of Katherine’s hugs. Maybe then she’d feel a little more like she was ready for whatever waited for her on the other side of the portal.

  The lens groaned as it stopped turning. The greenwitch at the front of the line stepped up to the glass. Her tunic fell like plates of armor across her torso, and she stared forward, unblinking, as the curved brick walls of the tower began to shake.

  Some of the women hadn’t been home to Vinea in decades. Fi had only been away a little more than two years. But what if when she crossed over, the Vinea she remembered was gone? What if the resistance had already been defeated?

  Fi ground her teeth together as the first greenwitch’s tunic began to shimmer, the edges going translucent before she was sucked through the portal. The woman behind her stepped forward and then she, too, was gone. The line shrank until Fi and Ness were the only greenwitches left in the lantern room.

  Fi eyed the Levitator, trying not to flinch while she waited for him to send her through the portal. The glass spun in front of her, beautiful and terrible at the same time. She had half a mind to jump through herself and take her chances. “Just get it over with already.”

  He actually smirked.

  Ness grimaced. “What she means to say is, Thank you.”

  “Yeah. That,” Fi mumbled.

  “The child and I go through together.”

  The Levitator nodded. “Does she know?”

  Ness’s eyes grew wide. She didn’t answer.

  He spoke again, this time locking eyes with Fi. “Does the girl know she’s the one you’ve been waiting for?”

  Shock swept the impatience from Fi’s mind. She opened her mouth to ask what he meant—who was waiting for her? And why? But that familiar feeling of her insides being yanked to the outside eclipsed everything else. Light flared, and then suddenly everything went dark.

  11

  GRIFFIN

  GRIFFIN GRIPPED THE edges of the boat as it lurched away from the platform, shimmying into the mists that swept toward the vertical gardens. He was scared for Fi—he wouldn’t put it past her to do something rash when she heard about the soldiers from Earth headed to Vinea. She’d do anything to save her home world.

  He banged his palms against the wood. “Come on, can’t you go any faster?”

  A gust of wind ruffled the sleeves of his stola, wafting a flotilla of airborne spiders overhead, silver against the black of space. Griffin ducked, wincing as a few of their parachute trails snagged in his hair. When the boat finally pulled up to the gardens, he didn’t leap out as he’d planned. Instead, he gripped the sides of the boat, astonished. The gardens were a wreck, the trellises collapsed, and the trees naked of their leaves.

  There was no one in sight, not anywhere. Had Fi left? Without even saying goodbye? Griffin stepped gingerly out of the boat and onto the uneven ground. It looked like the floating island had been hit by a tornado. Whatever life had held the place together was missing. The plants seemed to droop, flat as day-old soda. And that, more than anything else, convinced him—the greenwitches were gone.

  It hit Griffin like a brick. He couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said to Fi, but he knew it wasn’t anything like what he would have said if he’d known that would be the last time they ever spoke. Years ago, after his mom’s funeral, after all the relatives whose names he could barely remember had boarded airplanes back to the distant corners of the country they’d come from, Griffin would lay awake at night, trying to remember what had been the last thing he’d said to his mom. Had he held her tight enough? Had she known how wholly he loved her?

  The thought had tortured him, all the long years before he’d discovered that Katherine was still alive, imprisoned on another world. He’d sworn that he would never feel that way again, that he’d tell people what they meant to him every chance he got. But this one had snuck up on him. How much Fi meant to Griffin had snuck up on him.

  And now it was too late.

  * * *

  When the boat dropped Griffin back home, the Levitator was perched on a pillow in the center of the room, his attendant Leónie hovering over his right shoulder.

  “She’s gone!” Griffin’s voice broke. “You should have told me. You could have given me the chance to say goodbye.” He kicked the wall, his foot punching a jagged hole through the woven mat. Griffin looked up, sheepish. But instead of scolding, his parents came to stand beside him; his dad’s arm dropped onto his shoulder and his mom’s wrapped around his waist.

  “We deserved to know,” Katherine said.

  The Levitator sat back in surprise, and his palms opened, cupping pools of mist. “I don’t know what you expect
ed me to do—the greenwitches left quickly when they heard. You can understand why, I’m sure.”

  “Look,” Griffin said, his frustration spilling over. “You have to do more.” Fi was headed straight into danger and he couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever they faced, they needed each other’s help. “It isn’t enough, just to watch the rest of us struggle. Yeah, we’re grateful that you pull people out of bad situations sometimes. But sometimes isn’t good enough.”

  The Levitator shrank away from the rebuke. “Honestly, I don’t know what more you want from me.”

  Philip cleared his throat. “Well, to start, if we’re able to bring the song back to Earth, we’ll need help spreading it over the globe. I don’t have any idea how to do that. Do you?”

  When the Levitator didn’t answer, Philip continued. “This is exactly the kind of thing the Society of Lighthouse Keepers is best at. They could help us.”

  “You want me to bring one of them here? I don’t know. It’s one thing to grab someone who’s already moving through the portal and redirect them. But to snatch an unsuspecting person who’s not even involved in this conflict—”

  “No one is uninvolved,” Katherine interrupted. “Not anymore.”

  The Levitator winced. He played with the strands of spider silk at his elbow. “I’ll think about it. And while I do, there’s one more thing you need to take care of before you leave.”

  “What do you mean?” Griffin scowled. He was done trusting this kid.

  “You’ll be able to speak with the Marisians when you meet them—the portal will prepare you just as it did when you journeyed here. But there is one more protection Caligo can offer, and you would be unwise to leave for Maris without it.”

  The Levitator tipped back his head to speak with his attendant. Leónie answered in a terse whisper and a hushed argument began. At length, Leónie pivoted to acknowledge the Fenn family, a sour twist pulling at her mouth. She extended her arm toward the open air, where a pair of boats bobbed, waiting. “Follow me.”