by Hanna Howard
The rebel men cast Elegy looks of alarm, and several stumbled in their haste to retreat.
“Linden Hatch is an elf from the northeast,” Yarrow went on, frowning at them, “whose family was murdered in the overthrow. He left this camp with me ten years ago for the purpose of traveling south to watch over one of the girls the resistance thought to be the missing sunchild.”
All the men were gawking now, looking from Yarrow to me, and back again.
“And in case you haven’t already guessed,” he said, gesturing at me, “this is that girl: Siria Nightingale, princess of Luminor, the last sunchild in Terra-Volat.”
I blushed as the rebels stared at me, and in their silence the chorus of insects and birdsong around us grew much louder. One of the men turned and disappeared into the trees. The scarred, sandy-haired rebel cleared his throat and strode forward to lift a lock of my hair, which he examined. He then took hold of my wrist—Linden started, but Yarrow held up a hand—and raised it to eye level while he peered at the freckles. Then he spat on his thumb and rubbed it hard over my skin, as if trying to scrub away paint.
It was much like the treatment I had received from Iyzabel’s soldiers, though in reverse.
“Satisfied?” I said, tugging my arm away.
He didn’t seem remotely abashed. “Yes,” he said, bowing deeply. “Thank you, my lady, for permitting the impertinence. I had to be sure.” He turned to Yarrow. “We sent scouts below the mountains near two months ago now, hoping to aid the princess when she came. No one scented a hair of you, though.”
Yarrow frowned again, but before he could reply, sounds of snapping branches came from the brush behind him. A moment later, three more people crashed into the clearing, with two fumbling to restrain the third: a tall young man with black hair.
“Get off, Reef,” he was saying, trying to shrug out of their grip.
But the man called Reef had caught sight of me and relaxed his hold. The black-haired man pulled free and looked up.
I stared. There was something eerily familiar about him . . . about his long nose, the shade and shape of his hazel eyes, his mouth . . .
He stared back at me and took a slow step forward, gazing intently, as if he was afraid I might disappear if he blinked.
I took a guess. “Eamon?”
And then the mouth that was so similar to mine broke into a wide smile, and he charged forward with a roar of delight.
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Is it really you?” he cried, seizing my hands in his broad ones. “My sister? Helena!”
My hands stiffened in his, and I felt suddenly very foolish. In my weary, dull-witted state, I didn’t know what to do with the name that was both mine and not mine. Though I had imagined this moment many times, I had never thought of the inevitable confusion over what I should be called. As I tried to assemble a response, confusion crept into his face, followed by a look of comprehension. He squeezed my fingers.
“Oh Light, I’m sorry,” said Eamon, eyebrows bunching. “I should’ve realized you wouldn’t stay Helena. Never even occurred to me.” He gave an apologetic smile. “Tell me, then: What’s my little sister called now?”
The tension wound tight throughout my muscles eased. His little sister. I had an older brother. Amazing how you could know a thing in your mind, but not understand it until it was standing before you. I smiled back, lips trembling.
“Siria,” I said. “Until a few weeks ago, the only name I’d ever known was Siria Nightingale.”
And then something crumbled inside me, and I fought to hold it up, acutely aware of all the people watching us. I did not want to cry in front of them. But I had a newfound name, and a newfound brother, and once we had been part of a family together. I’d had a mother and a father who loved me, who wanted to spend time with me, who had named me Helena. And a sister. I’d had a sister too, I remembered with a sudden, piercing sorrow.
I blinked rapidly, trying to bring Eamon back into focus. He was still smiling, but his eyes—exactly the same shade of hazel mine had been before I transformed—had grown very bright.
“Siria?” he said, and I nodded through half a laugh, half a sob. He laughed as well. “It’s so wonderful to finally meet you. I’m Eamon.”
“I know,” I said, and my tears came at the same moment his did.
I forgot everyone else as my brother pulled me against his chest, and I clung to him as I wept, as if he might keep me from drowning in the joy and grief now thundering through me like the currents of competing rivers. There was something so familiar about him, even about the sound of his voice, that made me feel calm; that, even as sobs shook my body, seemed to encase me in warmth, like someone singing a lullaby. I wondered if his voice was anything like our mother’s, and if it was her I recognized in him: the voice that had woven through my growing bones and knitting fibers in the womb and sang to me in the first unremembered months of my life.
When at last he released me, I turned to my friends, uncertain how to proceed. But Eamon took the lead.
“My sister’s companions?” he said with another warm smile, stepping toward them and shaking hands with Merrall and Elegy as I introduced them.
“And this is Yarrow Ash,” I said. “He’s—” I broke off, another wave of tears blurring my eyes as I caught Yarrow’s familiar gray ones behind the old spectacles.
“Siria’s become like a daughter to me over the years,” he finished for me, his voice gruff as he shook Eamon’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Crown Prince.” I expected Eamon to wave down this formal address, but he seemed not to notice it.
He turned to Linden, and I felt heat rush into my face. How in dark night to introduce him? “Surrogate brother” seemed wrong, and “best friend” wasn’t quite enough. Yet I could hardly call him “the boy I had fallen wildly in love with a few years ago, and who probably, maybe, hopefully, loved me back.”
“Linden Hatch,” said Linden, sticking out his hand with a grin before I could attempt to sum him up. He and Eamon were precisely the same height, though my brother’s build was thicker than Linden’s wiry frame. “Your sister’s my favorite person in the world.”
I blushed, my stomach swooping at his words. His grin widened as he caught my eye, the dimple pressed hard into his cheek, and Eamon threw his head back and laughed.
“I like an honest man,” he said, clapping Linden on the shoulder. “Or elf. Best of luck to you, friend.”
I felt dazed, but there was no time to gather my wits, because Eamon was naming the rebels around us, and there was more handshaking to be done. Every time I caught Linden’s eye, a wicked smile flashed across his face.
Once everyone in the clearing had been formally introduced—including Sedge, the man with the scarred face, who seemed to be a leader of sorts—the resistance party led the way west, toward their camp. The sun had long since taken any trace of light with it beyond the horizon, and the forest was dark but for the glow of lanterns as our procession wound between trees, around thickets, and over chattering streams.
When we came to the edge of the resistance village, I did not recognize it as a living space. The people had disguised their homes so well that when Eamon gestured to an enormously thick maple tree and said, “That’s one of the watch houses,” I thought he was making a joke, and laughed.
“She doesn’t see very well in the dark,” said Linden, obviously trying not to laugh himself. “Sunchild, you know . . .”
“I can see perfectly w—” I began, but Linden pulled me a few feet closer to the maple until I could see that the trunk had a large gap at its base, where a moss-covered structure had been built to look like an extension of the bulbous roots. I stopped in surprise.
“And look up,” said Linden, brushing my arm with his forefinger and making my skin tingle.
High in the branches, I could pick out a second structure, which had been built around the growth of the tree, ingeniously settled in the natural nooks of the branches that appeare
d sturdiest.
“Oh,” I said.
Eamon chuckled from behind us. “Farther in, they’re less heavily disguised, but all our buildings try to work around the trees that already exist. Wood nymphs helped a good deal with construction in the beginning.”
We jogged to catch up to the others. The path seemed to follow a broad sort of lane that wound along the forest floor like a village main street. More houses were discernible now, and as Eamon had said, every structure I saw was built either around a trunk or in the branches of the trees.
“This is the East Lane, since it feeds from the eastern pass,” Eamon was saying. “But there are a lot of us—near a thousand now—so people live all over the forest. The village goes on for miles.”
Lanterns bobbed on hooks outside most doors near the heart of the camp, and smoke issued in curls from chimneys, making me think of comfortable evenings in Yarrow and Linden’s cabin. I gazed around as we walked, and had just turned to ask Eamon where we were heading when I caught sight of a face in an upper window—a little girl—who shouted at the sight of us and disappeared again.
A moment later she and her family spilled out onto a high porch, the father still clutching a leg of some roasted meat, and I heard the girl say, “There! That one!”
Face hot, I looked straight ahead. As we passed other houses, more people came out, their whispering like a strong breeze through tall grass. I had the uncomfortable idea that many were not retreating back into their houses but trailing after us instead.
“Eamon,” I whispered. “Are they following us?”
“Yes.” He sounded solemn. “You can see why, I’m sure. We rarely have visitors, and your appearance . . . well, it’s bound to cause a stir. The sunchild story is a bit of a legend here.”
By the time Sedge led our group into a wide clearing, the crowd behind us had swelled to the size of a small army. Another man had joined our party as we walked, but he stood beside Yarrow with his head bent, speaking with him in low tones.
Thick clover blanketed the ground here, and a great, wooden pavilion loomed to the right, encircled by glittering lanterns on poles and lit by a roaring fire in a pit. The pavilion was as big as the dining hall at Gildenbrook, and I could see one long table inside it, dark and glossy in the firelight, surrounded by wooden benches and chairs.
“Gather up, please!” said Sedge, motioning for us to cluster around him. “You too, nosy busybodies!” he shouted to the crowd. “Can everyone hear me?”
There was a chorus of assent. I craned around to see the people behind us, surprised to find they encompassed all ages, from infants to the nearly infirm. Most wore rough, homemade garments like Yarrow’s, but some of their clothes appeared to have been crafted by a more graceful hand—like Linden’s—and these, I could tell, were nymphs. Quite apart from their clothes, these folk flashed periodically with evidence of their power—shades of blue glowing in the cheeks of the naiads, tree-bark lines racing over the skin of the elves, and sourceless breezes fluttering the hair and clothes of the winged pixies—magic apparently more frequently accessed here than anyone would dare below the pass. But all the people here were markedly different from those below the mountains, and not just because of their clothes. Their faces were fuller, alive with color you never saw below the mountains, even in the far north. In Umbraz every face looked as if it had been dusted with ashes, no matter what skin tone a person had. Here, the faces radiated depth and life, boasting a clear spectrum from flushed peach to burnished copper to deep, glowing sable, and they seemed healthier, stronger . . . happier. By comparison, everyone else I had ever met looked like a ghost.
“Our guests have traveled a great distance to get here,” Sedge was saying. “And while I feel certain they will want to join us in celebrating their arrival, I suspect they might prefer to rest first.”
A smattering of chuckles came from the crowd.
Sedge threw a glance at the older man talking to Yarrow. He was tall and very lean, a bit like an aged scarecrow, with skin like cracked leather and hair sticking out in silver tufts beneath a buckskin hat. “Tomorrow night . . .” said Sedge, and the scarecrow man gave a barely perceptible nod. “We will meet here.” He raised his arms. “To feast, dance, and celebrate our guests. Please bring food to share and spread the word. We will begin at sundown. Good night!”
I felt a tingle of unreality at his use of the word sundown. Like the sun was not a fable here, but a presence. Like they had access to it; real, direct access to an unveiled sun.
A shiver ran the full length of my spine.
Soon, so would I.
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CHAPTER
The crowd scattered back into the trees, and Sedge gave our group a rueful smile. “I hope you don’t mind a bit of a party on your behalf.”
Linden laughed. “I think you just used the word feast. You couldn’t keep us away with a pack of dragons.”
“Speaking of food,” said the scarecrow man, turning away from Yarrow and addressing the rest of us. His voice was raspy, but slow and calculating, as if he weighed every word. “I imagine you are hungry now. If you don’t mind waiting in the pavilion, I will see to your supper and lodging for tonight.”
“Thank you, Briar,” said Yarrow, and though his tone was light, the crease between his wiry brows did not disappear. “We would be grateful.”
We wandered into the pavilion and took seats near the far end of the table, closest to the fireplace. Sedge went to build up the fire, and Yarrow watched him work with a distant, abstract expression.
“There’s so much I want to know,” said Eamon with a small laugh. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
I smiled. “Neither can I, frankly.”
Yarrow turned to look thoughtfully at my brother. “It’s been a long wait for you, I suppose. And with less and less news as the years have gone on?”
It was an odd question, I thought, but Eamon nodded. “When I was young, people were constantly going and coming, planning and scouting and bringing news, but there’s been less of that most recently. I used to wonder why, but Briar explained we had to wait for my sister to turn sixteen before we could help her.” He smiled at me, affection warm in his hazel eyes. “I’ve never been good at waiting. I used to try to sneak out at night, to run away and find you. But I always got caught, and eventually they posted guards around my rooms and barred my doors and windows.” He laughed ruefully. “I guess they didn’t want to have to rescue two Luminorian royals from the Witch Queen.”
Careful to control the light swirling beneath my skin, I reached for Eamon’s hand and squeezed it. He clasped my hand in both of his and held it tight.
Briar returned in three quarters of an hour, during which time Linden and I summarized our two-month journey for Eamon, who proved a rapt and invested audience. Three other people came with Briar when he arrived: a tall, white-haired elf woman and two men bearing smoked ham, cheese, crusty bread, and apples.
“This is Freda,” Briar said in his raspy, measured voice while we helped ourselves to the food. The wood nymph smiled at us, eyes kind in a wrinkled mahogany face. “She has volunteered her house for you to sleep in. It’s just off the East Lane, and near the river, for the naiad’s use.”
“What added protection have we given our borders for the night?” said Eamon.
Briar frowned. “Do you think our border guard insufficient?”
I was surprised to hear scorn in Briar’s voice, but Eamon either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “My sister just told me they’ve been pursued by Iyzabel’s forces nearly their entire journey—even as far as the mountain pass. Siria is the most wanted person in Terra-Volat, and if any of the queen’s men find this place, they’ll raze us before we have time to dust off our swords.”
Briar scowled, and I wondered suddenly if he, at least, was not pleased the Crown Prince had grown up to be a man to whom leadership was a natural quality as much as it was a birthright.
“I told you to send out scouts, Bria
r,” said Yarrow, almost indifferently. “That soldier who got away at the pass will have gone back for more of his men. They’ll be at your borders within a month, and they’ll tear apart the forest to find you. This safety you think you have is an illusion.”
“Paranoid nonsense,” scoffed Briar. “In fourteen years, we’ve never been discovered. Why should they find us now?”
But Sedge was looking at my brother. “We’ll reinforce the guard tonight,” he said, and Eamon nodded his approval.
Briar flushed, looking irritated.
We left the pavilion in the dying light of the fire and traipsed back down the path that led to the village lanes. My brother fell into step beside me, but I strained my ears to hear what Yarrow was saying to Linden just ahead of us.
“. . . too comfortable,” I heard him mutter. “Pigheaded. It’ll be their doom.”
I glanced at Eamon, but again, he didn’t appear to be listening.
“What was it like, growing up here?” I said.
He smiled at me and puckered his dark brows in thought. “Lonely at first. Scary. And I missed everyone terribly.” He shrugged. “But I got used to it, and eventually I heard about how things were below the mountains, what sort of life you were probably living. So I stopped feeling so sorry for myself.” He winked, but there was something sad and slightly bitter in his expression. “Still. You’re here now, and that’s what matters, eh?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t exactly sure whether I agreed.
Freda’s house turned out to be a one-level cottage built into the low branches of two thick trees, about six feet above the ground. A winding staircase twisted up from a covered garden into the house itself, which was entirely wooden with a thatched roof and open, curtained windows. Everything inside was ingeniously constructed out of natural material, from the grass-woven mats to the woolen blankets and tree stump tables.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much room,” said Freda, after we bade Eamon goodnight and piled through the front door. “But I do have one bed, a cot in the bedroom, and the settee out here.” She smiled kindly. “There’s food in the cupboards, and more blankets in the hall. Please make yourselves at home.”
