Aluminum Leaves

by Marion Deeds

  He ran his fingertip over the smooth surface.

  “It’s an opal. They’re fragile.” Erin leaned forward. “Don’t touch the others, okay? There are some more farther back. They…have some different properties. You need to be careful with those. He looked up at her, questioning. She jerked her shoulders up toward her ears. “There’s a lot in there. Even when I understand the words, I don’t always understand the meanings. Like there’s talk of hybrid…” She stopped. “Of breeding two different elementals together, like fire and air.”

  “That’s madness. Who would do that? Earth and fire fight. Fire shuns water, it consumes air. Elementals don’t breed like animals anyway.”

  “How do they breed, then?”

  “Fire elementals live in emberbeds, usually deep in the earth. They grow in colonies and when it’s time, the flames turn glorious colors—lavender, orange, gold, green—and then the jovenes, the young ones, split off, but they stay on the emberbed for two years. That’s why it’s strange the two who followed you are so young.”

  “It says things like, ‘quartz and copper will contain a fire elemental.’ No one would do that either, would they?”

  His face got hot. “People would do that.” He folded over the pages methodically and found two more of the rounded stones in the borders. He was careful not to touch them. “These stones must have an important meaning,” he said.

  “The collar is set with opals.”

  “Then it cannot be from my world.”

  “Really? It controls elementals.”

  It was his turn to shrug. “We have no such stone here that I’ve ever seen.” He wanted to stay, to look at the pages, to see if there were words he could read, but he closed the book and handed it back to Erin. “Let’s get going,” he said, rising to his feet.

  She couldn’t deny the relief she felt when the book was back in her messenger bag and the bag on her shoulder. She helped push off, water soaking through her shoes, and climbed in.

  “We have about two leagues to go before we need to beach the boat,” he said as he rowed. She nodded, although she knew he couldn’t see her. A league, about three and a half miles. Or maybe not, if the words stayed but measured different distances.

  The sun was high overhead when they came to a pier and a shack. She tied up the boat while Trevian spoke to the woman inside. Then he led the way down a narrow, rocky track. She looked around. A steep gray cliff rose to her right, and the trail switched down along a reddish hill. The river showed ruffles of white, and she heard a distant, steady roar. There was no shelter, no protection, if the hounds appeared again.

  She lost track of how long they walked, or how far. The knapsack rubbed against her shoulder blades. Once she stopped and took it off, slinging it instead over one shoulder. They moved down into a wooded valley. Water chuckled somewhere nearby, and in the shadows she saw spots of light, gold and blue. “There are those things,” she said. “Sprites.”

  “You always find them near water,” he said. “In the town where we are headed, the lake used to have a vast marsh at the west end, and at night it glowed like a golden carpet.”

  “Did you grow up there?”

  He gave a short laugh. “No. I grew up in a down-mountain city.”

  “White Bluffs.”

  Without turning around, he adjusted his pack on his back. “Yes. White Bluffs. I visited Merrylake Landing often though. Every year in Nueve my father would take me to the Merrylake Fair. It lasts a sennight.”

  “What’s a sennight?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “It’s a measure of time. Seven nights.”

  “A week,” she said.

  “Not weak or strong, just a measure.”

  She didn’t explain. “What was the fair like?”

  “Merrylake Landing was a kind of crossroads when the lake was full. It sits, sat, at the edge of the lake and between two mountain passes. People from the south and the north brought goods. We brought up wool from the flatlands, and shipments of black rock.”

  “A trade fair, we call that.”

  The sun peeked in between the branches of the trees—deciduous, Erin thought—with pale bark on their trunk and long narrow bluish leaves that ended in a needle-like point. She didn’t recognize the variety. Maybe they were unique to this world. She could see well enough to know that Trevian was following a trail, although it was a narrow one.

  “Beyond this grove there is an albergue, or there used to be,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A travel house. We can shelter there for the night.”

  The trees thinned. Erin wondered what was happening at home. Were the fires contained? Had they found her parents’ bodies? Her throat ached, and she stopped, reaching for her water bottle. She couldn’t afford to think about them now. If Trevian’s uncle knew the purpose of the book and could help them decipher it, she needed to focus on that. That, and nothing else.

  Trevian slowed and pointed. Across a narrow clearing hunched a simple stone structure. It had three walls and a metal roof. There was a fire-circle picked out in rock, and a spring bubbled up a few feet away. On the other side of the shelter a rough metal lean-to covered a slit-trench latrine. Erin slipped her knapsack off her shoulder and stretched. “Do we have to worry about predators?”

  “Earth elementals frequent this altitude, but there should be few this time of year,” he said.

  “Wolves? Bears?”

  “There are wolves in the plains north of here,” he said. “I don’t know what the other animals are.”

  “Large, clawed, they sleep during the winter?”

  “Could you mean osos?”

  She nodded, as if they were common creatures. He’d never met a person who had seen an oso.

  “How much farther to do we have to go? Are we a third of the way there? Halfway?”

  He stowed his knapsack and knelt to unbuckle the bedroll. “A little more than halfway.”

  She copied his actions, laying out her bedroll across the firepit from his. She was watching him sidelong. He kept his head lowered, trying to ignore the discomfort he felt too, even after two years living rough. He imagined what Ilsanja would have said, had they still been pledged, to the idea of him sharing a shelter alone with a woman. “We won’t need a fire,” he said just to fill the silence.

  She sat cross-legged on the bedroll, smearing more unguent on her burns. “I’m about out of bandages,” she said. The soiled strips of tan fabric lay next to her. “What should I do with these?”

  “Bury them in the latrine. I have some clean cloths if you need them,” he said, remembering the folds of clean cloth underneath his sister’s letters at the bottom of his sack.

  “Hokay.” She pressed another pair of strips over the burns. She lifted her head and reached for the spike. “They’re here,” she said. He heard it too, then, the crackling hiss. He got to his feet to stand slightly in front of her.

  At the tree line, earth, twigs, and stones swirled up from the ground, flying together to form the canine shape. For an instant, he saw the translucent flame at the construct’s center. Its eyes glowed blue. The second one appeared behind the first, its head lowered. Once again, the two creatures paced back and forth, crisscrossing. Then twigs and clods of earth dropped to the ground, and then they vanished.

  “Why don’t they attack?” Erin looked at him narrow eyed.

  “I don’t know. Obviously they are weakened, and they must be in pain.”

  “Why?”

  He waved his hand, momentarily at a loss for how to speak what was as obvious as breathing. “Earth. That must hurt them.”

  She stepped away from him, and her grip on the stake shifted slightly. “So? I’m more interested in how they are tracking us.”

  “Did they taste your blood?”

  She shook her head. “Well, not literally, not mine. They certainly tasted my family’s blood when they killed them.”

  He nodded at the welts on her arm.

  “The
y didn’t draw blood,” she said. “I notice they don’t attack you. They like you.”

  “They attacked me at my claim.”

  “No, they attacked me. You got between them and me.”

  “It’s this charm I carry,” he said. “It’s powerful.”

  “That’s convenient,” she said.

  “I am a fool,” he said. “I should have bought you a charm in Lily Bend.”

  She moved away without answering. He went to get water, and when he returned, her bedroll was farther away from his. He decided to make no comment about it. “Do you want a fire?” he said. “Normally I would not have one—”

  “No.”

  “Very well.” He sat down and took out some dried fruit. After a moment, she handed him another of the chewy bars she had shared by the river. The sounds of their chewing and the soughing of wind through the branches were the only things he could hear. He wanted to ask her if they could look at the book some more, but the appearance of the hounds had changed something. He concentrated on eating. He did not understand why she had turned against him, but there was nothing further to be said about it now.

  Chapter Six

  Later, he went out to use the latrine. Perhaps he was not as attentive as he should have been, or perhaps it was simply that his luck had turned. He had an instant’s warning before the earth liquified under his right foot and cold stone teeth closed around his ankle.

  He drew his knife and plunged it into the moving earth as he sank up to his knee. Fool, he cursed himself. The earth elemental drew him down, and the blows of the knife merely slowed it.

  “Trevian!” Erin ran across the grass, the book under her arm, the stake in her hand.

  “Stay back!” He drove the knife in again, but while the steel blade clearly hurt the thing, it did not let go.

  She fell to her knees and stabbed the heaving soil with the stake. The ground around the elemental shivered. She pulled it free and struck again.

  The grip on his ankle eased. He fishtailed backward as the ground rose, club-shaped, the curved top ringed with jagged teeth of white quartz, and struck Erin in the chest, knocking her over.

  “Erin!” he shouted. He stabbed the back of the elemental’s head, but it ignored him. It curved up over her, its mouth open.

  She squirmed backward. The stake lay on the ground, and she pulled up the book, frantically turning pages as she dodged the elemental’s thrusts. Trevian shouted and stabbed at it again. It curled back toward him. He scrambled for the stake.

  Erin cried out something about a well and a door. She slammed the open book down on the elemental’s head. The earth around them shivered like sand. Trevian, the stake raised, threw out his other hand for balance. She lifted the book, and he saw the rocky tail of the elemental vanish upward into the pages, like a lizard into the maw of a hungry dog.

  The earth stilled.

  “What…” he said. “Where—”

  She closed the book. “I sent it… I don’t know where. Away. God, I hope there weren’t any people there.”

  “I don’t…” He clutched his ankle, rocking back and forth. “I—It went into the book. It went into the book.”

  “What was that?”

  “An earth elemental.”

  “It tried to swallow you.”

  “I told you they eat us.”

  “I thought that was a figure of speech.” She picked up the book. “You’re bleeding.”

  “It bit me.” He put some weight on his foot. The ankle held. “What kind of charm is that? What kind of charms do you wield?”

  She shook her head. “Not me, the book. Remember how I told you to be careful of the stones? Two of them take things places.”

  “Did you, can you travel that way? Are they like fronteras?”

  “Grandmother said no, and I’ve never found anything in the book that contradicted her.”

  Trevian eyed the book sideways. “Can it get out now?”

  “No.” She stood up. “At least, I don’t think so. Let me look at that bite.”

  He had a hundred questions, but he got to his feet and hobbled after her. His iron club lay by his bedroll where, like a fool, he had left it. “You seem very calm. Have you used it this way before?”

  “You think this is calm? I call this numb. I’ve never used it. I didn’t know if it would work, it was just the only thing I could think of.”

  “Well, you saved my leg and possibly my life,” he said, “so I am glad you tried it.”

  They examined the wounds, which were not bad. His boots had protected him, and only two fangs had punctured the skin. She smeared the clear salve on the holes and covered them with two smaller strips of the strange sticky bandages.

  “Do things emerge from the holes in the book?”

  She pressed the last bandage into place. “There is nothing in the book about that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t understand all of it,” she said. “There’s a bunch of poetry. Like this one.” She recited.

  Gold calls them, fire, earth and air,

  But if you call you must be ready,

  Loomin tames and holds them steady

  And copper bears the charm.

  “Does that mean something?” she said.

  He nodded. “It’s an easy way to remember the various metals and how they interact with the elementals. Gold can be used in amulets that summon or tether an elemental, especially air elementals or fire elementals.”

  She looked up from the book. “You know a lot about elementals,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Fire elementals in particular. And they don’t attack you.”

  “I’ve told you why,” he said.

  She pulled the book away from him. “I think that’s enough for now,” she said, closing it.

  “You decide again that you mistrust me?”

  “I want to trust you, but there are too many things you’re keeping from me. Too much about fire elementals that you’re keeping from me.”

  He straightened up. “You are a stranger, and you accuse me, when I have saved your life.”

  “And I saved yours just a while ago, so maybe we don’t need to keep score.” She pushed the book back into her satchel.

  Black dots swam before his face. The familiar anger rose up in him, choking him. Judged again. He forced the anger down. It had been years since he had felt its pressure, since the last time he’d faced his father. “You do not have the right to demand my secrets,” he said. “My life is not a decorative garment for your comfort.”

  “I don’t need to know about your life,” she said. “I need to know how you know so much about the magical things that are trying to kill me. That killed my family. And why you won’t take me to White Bluffs, which is probably the place where I can find real help.”

  “I believe my uncle knows more about metal charms than anyone in White Bluffs,” he said. “I swear this.” The anger burned away, leaving its usual residue of shame. “As for fire elementals, my family made its fortune capturing and containing them.”

  “You said your father mined blackrock.”

  “He did, first. His first fortune. Then he discovered an emberbed of elementals in the mountains and contained them.”

  “Why?”

  “For their energy,” he said. “The city of White Bluffs glows at night like a full moon because of the energy we draw from our captured fire elementals.”

  “You control them? Like the ones coming after me?”

  He shook his head so vehemently that his hat spun to one side. “Nothing like those creatures. Ours are held in the cages of loomin and quartz you spoke of before. We use copper lines to draw their power into the city. It not only runs lights, but the city’s forges and printing presses as well, and the water pumps for the canals.”

  “They’re power plants,” she said. She stared at him, her eyes shifting from one side of his face to the other. “You’re embarrassed,” she said.

  For a mome
nt he couldn’t answer. “I am ashamed,” he said. “I’m a fool to be. There’s no harm in it. We keep them fed. Elementals aren’t like us; they don’t reason or feel as we do.”

  “That’s what we said about practically every animal species,” she said, “and we were always wrong. Is this why you won’t use sprite lamps?”

  “Everyone uses sprite lamps, even I,” he said. “I just use them sparingly. Sprites seem to be vanishing.”

  “So why aren’t we going to White Bluffs? Why this little abandoned town in the mountains?”

  “Because I believe Uncle Oshane is there. And I, I ran away from White Bluffs. I defied my father. That was a small thing. But I abandoned my pledged bride, an honorable woman who did nothing wrong.”

  “Oh.”

  “I could face my father at the landing of the city center canal with my head high,” he said. “But I don’t, I, I would prefer not to meet the woman I wronged.”

  “Yes, that could be awkward,” Erin said. “But there’s got to be a university there, or magical experts? A library?”

  He blinked, wanting to look away from her steady gaze. “There is a library, and an office for the Copper Coalition, but it is mostly a counting house. The nearest university is in Duloc. And my uncle has prospected for charms, for magic, for as long as I’ve been alive. I think he is the one who can help us.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “He’s not a copper-hunter like you?”

  “No. He prospects, of course, but his interest is in charms. He has old notes and journals from my grandfather, his father. Some of them, anyway. He knows much about elemental magic.” He reached up and touched the charm on his hat. “He gave me this. You’ve seen how strong it is.”

  She looked at the hat, chewing on her lower lip. “Where are you from? Your father, your uncle, where were they born?”

  “East of here, in the flatlands. They were sheep-people, like my mother’s family, but Fergal, my grandfather, was restless…and strange. He took his family west. I guess after a while my grandmother could take no more of it because then it was just Fergal, my father, and my uncle Oshane.”