by Lisa Lowell
Yeolani had no answer for her. Instead, he simply scooped Rashel up, baby on her back and all trekking toward the farm. When they had left behind the main gawkers and were on the final path toward the cabin, he put her down again and then advised her, using his Wise One instinct to try to teach her.
“Our magic is all about wishing and your thought process. For a while, you are going to have to concentrate on the fact that you are not walking on the ground. You are walking on shoe leather.”
“Shoe leather?” Rashel’s tone grew dubious.
“Just try it. You are not walking on earth, which will sprout just about anything to please you, oh Queen of Plants. You are walking on shoe leather that doesn’t care about you at all. No barefoot in the fields for you, my love.”
Yeolani’s playfulness eased her tension, and Rashel tried it. “Shoe leather,” she whispered to herself as she took a step into the farmyard and then looked behind herself to check. “Shoe leather, shoe leather.” She made a few more tentative steps, and whenever she did not think strongly about shoe leather, daisies or dandelions sprouted up with abandon. “Go away,” she growled under her breath, and they were obedient, but it was frustrating.
“I won’t be able to go anywhere,” she groused as they finally made it to the cabin door.
“That’s fine by me,” Yeolani chuckled and scooped her up again and carried her into their home. “I’ve no intention of letting you go anywhere for a while anyway.”
That night, the dream came slithering. Rashel did not find it alarming at first, but the fairies plagued her, buzzing and whispering to her of crocus and ivy. She tried to shoo them away without actually waking, but their humming dissolved into a low hiss that shook Rashel’s bones. The images with the dream remained dark, like she wandered a forest, only there were no trees, just the cold dark broken only by the feeble glow of her fairy escorts and edges of dark in shadow.
Then the hissing grew deeper. The fairy lights went out like snuffed candles. Rashel was plunged into absolute darkness. In her dream, she froze in alarm but felt herself drifting through the inky darkness as if she were on a barge, floating toward the danger. Something in her resonated; something here smacked of evil.
“You’ve come back,” the voice slithered through her mind. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Rashel woke screaming in terror.
Yeolani took over an hour to calm the baby back to sleep and listened as Rashel spoke of the dark dream. “It cannot be real,” she rambled. “There is nothing that dark. Why is it, the day I become a Wise One, I have such a horrific dream?” she asked, not really wanting or expecting an answer.
“At least you didn’t kill any fairies in your dream,” Yeolani replied as he paced the cabin floor with the baby while Rashel huddled under the blankets. “It’s unfortunate, but dreams for a Wise One are important and about as useful as a barrel of fish. Apparently, you need to learn something from it.”
Seeing the rejection on her face, Yeolani stopped pacing with Nevai, laid him back down in his cradle, and came to Rashel’s side. “You’ve got an idiot for a husband. What can I do to make you…?”
“Can you make me stop worrying about my magic? I’m afraid of what I’m capable of, yet I want to be able to experiment. I’ve not even started to learn about it. It’s haunting me already. Do you hear that?”
Yeolani could hear nothing except the rattle of branches in the wind. Was a late storm coming in off the mountains?
“No,” Rashel answered to his unvoiced question. “That’s me. The trees are responding to my eagerness and concern. They’re coming closer. They feel like they need to come to protect me from exploring whatever is in the dark dream.”
“Shall I call Honiea? Perhaps she can give you something to help you sleep.”
Rashel shook her head and wordlessly curled up in Yeolani’s arms, but in her unshielded thoughts, she defiantly refused even his aid. This she would have to face alone, and she knew it. The dark was coming for her and the bold defiance in her relished the challenge.
Dawn came late, and they all slept well into the morning. The cows’ complaints at being penned eventually awakened Yeolani, and he looked bleary-eyed at the window, wondering where the daylight had gone. The cabin was still dark; no light came in to wake them.
“Rashel?” Yeolani shook his bride awake. “Look at the windows.”
Overnight, the openings had been completely sealed with what appeared to by ivy leaves. Not a drop of light filtered through. Curiously, Yeolani walked to the door and tried to open it, but physical strength could not pry it open. “Don’t you think you’ve overdone it a bit, my love. It’s more root-bound than hermit’s hair,” he added before Rashel had even risen to see for herself.
“This is ridiculous,” she declared in frustration. “Someone is going to notice if I don’t get control of myself. Very well, let me see if I can bring this down as I did with the footsteps yesterday.”
Rashel stood in her nightgown in the center of the room, concentrating on making the ivy withdraw. As she worked, a few beams of light made it through the panes of glass. However, Yeolani watched in awe as floorboards began to bud and stretch forth small branches like they were living trees again. Her efforts to stop the growth on one front only encouraged it elsewhere. Yeolani scrambled to retrieve the baby when his wooden cradle began rocking with the walls sprouting branches.
“Rashel, you’ve got to stop,” he told her when a full blanket of grass began growing up to his knees. “You’ll have us root-bound and buried like a corpse.”
Rashel opened her eyes and dropped her arms in failure. “What am I doing wrong?” she cried.
Something in Yeolani’s heart almost broke. He remembered his mother’s tears after she’d had to deal with his father. Yeolani could not bear a woman’s tears, even those rooted in frustration. He thought hard about what he could do and felt a wave of relief as an inspired Wise One idea came. First, he needed to calm Rashel.
He gave Nevai to his wife and invited her to sit. He had no idea why her magic was so strong and coming without her wanting it, but he would follow the instinct. He let her rock the baby, and the leaves at the windows parted as if they now knew she had other interests. Next, he conjured a bottle for Nevai as well as a sumptuous breakfast for the adults.
“You don’t need to do this,” Rashel began, looking at the juice and bacon with wonder. “I’m the one who needs to learn how to do magic.”
“You must be calm, or it won’t work,” replied Yeolani. “Either that, or I’ll need to conjure a goat next to take care of the grass in here before we can get to the outhouse.” He grinned at his joke, although she did not share his enjoyment at their predicament. Then he sat down beside her at the table and brought out his compass.
“It’s your compass, not mine,” she protested, but she sounded calmer as she began to feed Nevai.
“And it’s a good place to start. I don’t know if it works only for me, but we need guidance and to get away from here. You’re right, someone is going to notice if the cabin is suddenly covered in ivy and the forest closes in overnight. It’s worth the try.”
He opened the compass and watched as the arms spun. The north arm stilled first and then the free arm turned to the southeast, away from them both.
“What’s in that direction?” she asked.
“Thankfully, not the sea. I’ve no idea,” Yeolani admitted. “I don’t feel any prompting to go that way, not like I did when I was responding to the Siren. Here, you hold it. Do you feel anything?”
He transferred the compass into Rashel’s hand. The arms spun again, helping them both feel that perhaps it was at least acknowledging a new person and would act accordingly. Then the arm settled again, pointing southeast.
“Do you feel anything?” Yeolani asked again.
Rashel concentrated. “I hear something. The voices…there are…voices of something… many somethings.”
“Is it the same as from your dream?�
� he tried again.
“No, the grass…it’s afraid. It is calling me. Grass? There are no other plants nearby. Just leagues and leagues of grass, and they…they all need me?”
“Can you sense where they are?” Yeolani asked as quietly as he could, hoping not to interrupt her focus.
Rashel’s eyes grew dark with anxiety. Yeolani could sense her trembling, and the baby grew restless again, sensing her discomfort. “There is no way I can go there. I cannot even keep the plants here from going wild. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Yeolani tried to smile, to make an off-hand remark in response to her obvious frustration at using magic, but only one thought came to him. “My father, such as he was, gave me only one good piece of advice. When I was nine, I was ordered to climb to the crow’s nest, the very top of the mast on that boat, but I was too scared. He simply told me, ‘if you’re scared, then don’t look down.’ ”
A strange expression came into Rashel’s eyes. “I’m not afraid,” she declared. “I want to try it all. I’m rash, remember? But the plants are out of control. Why won’t they obey me?” She glared in annoyance at the grass growing up between the floorboards and the branches of newly sprouted trees tapping on the thin cabin door. The fierce, mother bear Yeolani remembered arose in her again.
Rashel stood up. “Here, take the baby.” She then reached out her arm.
“Just don’t look down,” Yeolani called to her as she disappeared in a shimmering green light, the way Honiea often departed. His new wife already had a way to travel instantly. He was jealous, as well as alarmed.
“Rashel?” he called, stretching his mind toward hers. He wasn’t surprised to find her to the southeast, but how far away floored him. He had to use his own sense of the plains to recognize his new wife had traveled five hundred miles from where he sat, leaving him to tend the hungry, stinky baby.
20
Demon Dust
“What did I just do?” Rashel asked Yeolani instinctively across the distance. How far, she wondered but could not calculate. Instead, she looked around in awe. The sun shone down noon high, and she saw along the horizon no sign of the mountains, the forest, civilization or anything else she recognized. As far as the eye could tell, in every direction, she saw nothing but green waves of grass. This was Yeolani’s world. He was the King of Plains. Why had she been called here?
“You went to where the call drew you – halfway to nowhere in the southeast,” Yeolani answered, and she could have wept in relief at hearing his matter-of-fact reply in her mind.
“How far away am I? And how did I do that?” she asked in wonder.
“You handed me the baby and went to answer a distress cry from the grass. I’m very impressed because I’ve been doing this for over a year and still do not have a way to travel as safely as you just did. So, who needs your help in the middle of nowhere?”
“How would I kn…” but Rashel stopped as she felt the earth tremble beneath her feet. An earthquake? She had experienced them a few times before, growing up at the base of the Great Chain Mountains, but out here with no frame of reference, she could not be sure this was real. No trees swayed without wind. The dishes on their shelves were not there to dance about and topple down. Where were the voices that had called her to this spot? Was it the snake-like presence from her dream, shaking the earth?
As if on cue, Rashel heard again the wailing voices. “Help us!”
Rashel looked down at her feet in wonder. The grass? On the walk home yesterday, the crocus flowers obeyed her when she called on them to disappear. The trees and ivy grew up to protect her in the night. Now, the grass called on her to protect them…from what? From her dream about a voice in the depths? All she could do was ask.
She leaned down toward the ground, and feeling a bit self-conscious, she whispered, “What is harming you, my dears?”
The grass, the combined entities speaking as one voice, could only give her an impression, but she felt it like the many-toned voices of the fairies that hovered above her, invisible in the spring sunlight, encouraging her. If she wanted to understand, she must concentrate.
From miles around where she stood, the voices whispered. “The demon dust in the dark.”
“The what?” Yeolani asked from far away, in an alarmed tone. “Demon….I’ve only encountered one. I haven’t taught you about shielding. They’ll take you over if you’re not careful. I cannot come there. Someone has to look after Nevai.”
Rashel nodded, trying to reassure him that she was safe, but her focus grew elsewhere. Her mind filled with an impression of sharp, edged stone in the dark and water below. Some cold presence poisoned the world above, seeping evil coming up from a pit. A noxious presence oozed through the cracks and seams below to kill the grassroots. She sensed it through this unspeakable link with the web of grass below her feet. For miles around her, she felt its terror at the demon dust.
Rashel always tried whatever she dared, all her life: riding a bull, running a farm single-handedly, raising a baby alone, even becoming a Wise One. She determined to live up to her nickname: rash. So why not confront a demon? She began walking forward, feeling every blade of grass below her bare feet. No crocus rose to greet her now. The earth out here on the plains could not support it, not with the terror lurking below. The hem of her nightgown brushed along the fresh spring blades, bowing to honor her as she passed. Rashel communed with the grass, lifting her face to the welcome sun.
And then she fell.
A hole in the middle of nowhere opened up below her. Rashel plunged down, involuntarily screaming as she went. With a splash, she landed in the chilled water and gasped as she bobbed back to the surface. Her underdeveloped magical instincts did nothing to help her. Instead, she tread water and tried to think. Hadn’t Yeolani said something about a cavern, or was that Honiea? Rashel looked up in the shaft of light above her head and saw the edges of the hole through which she had fallen lined with crystals that she recognized.
Crystals? Like the one Yeolani had given her? Her first impression formed a guess that these must be the source of the poison. How could that be? Yeolani’s crystal had been a tool and a safe one at that. Even as she watched, Rashel witnessed the crystals lining the opening grow to cover up the hole she had fallen through. The feeble light in the cavern disappeared.
It was her dream.
A dark, cold, and hissing voice celebrated the light’s failure. Still, Rashel felt no fear, at least through the bitter cold. Her last glimpse of escape closed on the sunlight above, and she wished for the fairies’ return. They could at least light her way to a bank. “Yeolani, which way to shore?” she called, hoping to hear his comforting voice again, giving advice.
There was no answer. This did not alarm her much; the excitement of falling and the cold seemed to combine into a numb carelessness. Perhaps she was too new to magic, not powerful enough to reach him from here below the ground. She was no longer officially on the plains, so maybe he could not hear her call. In any case, Rashel selected a direction and began swimming, grateful she’d learned that skill early in her life when her parents realized she had no fear of physical danger, especially of the river.
The frigid water began to soak into her bones as she swam. Her head throbbed with the rattling of her teeth, and her muscles began seizing up, making the effort to keep her head above the surface difficult. She coughed suddenly as she gasped in a mouthful of the bitter water. Was she going to drown? Her mind was not making sense as she swam in the dark.
Then the voice growled again above her in the abyss. Rashel couldn’t think. The terror did not impact her, but the cold would shake her to death. Her magical mind reached out, found a patch of algae clinging to an unseen shoreline and pulled herself toward it. Thankfully, she reached some kind of rock where Rashel’s frozen legs failed her. She collapsed on a bare rocky shore on the edge of the water.
What to do now? “Yeolani!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs, straining with mind and magic, while her voi
ce reverberated around the chamber. A shower of loose bits fell on her head from the sheer power of her cry. Yet Yeolani did not respond.
Instead, something deeper and wilder replied. “?”
It didn’t quite have sentience, not yet. Something in the dark stalked her, a sinister combination of snake and crystals. Rashel had come brazenly into its dark place, without a plan or even a kernel of training. She deserved what she encountered there in the lonely dark.
No, that’s not me thinking. That’s something else, she told herself. With the last dregs of her energy, Rashel forced herself to sit on the rocky bank and willed herself into warm dry furs. To her surprise, she got what she wished. Abruptly, she curled up in thick quilts and a wool dress with a cape and cap of some fur she could not identify, it was so soft.
How had she done that? Rashel had no idea, but obviously, someone was looking over her or she would have died of hypothermia within moments. It took even more time to fight back the exhaustion and desire to sleep that descended on her, but the rumbling of the demon dust shook her free from that.
“What are you?” Rashel called out to the essence she could only sense with her magical mind.
The tentative touch of anger and greed pushed back. It wanted her. She had a body made of more than dark and stone. It craved something more, anything more than what it possessed. Rashel knew she was completely out of her depth here. If Yeolani could not hear her or had not mounted a rescue, she would have to save herself, for this thing would find and consume her eventually.
Well, what did she know? The compass had directed her here, not unlike it had done for Yeolani, guiding him to the Siren, guiding into a trap. Rashel had some magic powers – to travel to where the plants called to her, to conjure something she needed, like the life-sustaining warmth of dry clothes she enjoyed. She had been able to call to Yeolani before the hole sealed up. What other magic had she witnessed from Yeolani? The healing of her rapist and the Life Givers brought to mind the fairies. They had been the very first magic she had noted, even before she knew magic existed. They had hovered around her all through her childhood.
