The Wood Queen

by Karen Mahoney

  “I don’t make mistakes,” Maker snapped.

  Her face heated. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry if I offended you …”

  Navin shifted beside her, but for once kept his mouth shut.

  Maker waved away her apology. “No matter. If you had offended me, you’d know about it young lady.”

  Donna leaned forward, begging him for the truth with her eyes. “So, you healed me … but you also did something else. What was it?”

  He fiddled with the cuff of his thick flannel shirt. “The markings healed your injuries, yes … but they also bound you.”

  “Bound me? Bound me how?”

  “They bind your power, child.”

  Donna frowned. “But … don’t the tattoos give me power? They make me stronger.”

  “Physically, yes. But without them, your true abilities would be so much stronger. Your potential has been deeply compromised.”

  She felt anger threatening to surface, but pushed it down. She had to know everything. “So, what about this thing that’s been happening to me, the—I don’t even know what to call it—the teleportation?”

  Maker shook his head. “That is not your power.”

  “But that’s what happened.”

  “The traveling is a side effect, just as your strength is a side effect of the iron tattoos I forged for you. I wanted you to have some protection.”

  Donna tried to take this in. Okay, so Maker had given her strength in order to … help her? Maybe that was true, but she still didn’t understand about the teleporting she could now do so dramatically. There was far more going on here and she was afraid that something would happen to stop her from learning it all. She needed to know it, if she was to have any hope of saving her mother.

  “So,” she continued, trying to put all the pieces together, “what is this power of mine?”

  Maker rubbed a hand across his eyes, looking as exhausted as she felt. “You can open doors between realms.”

  Donna stared at him. No wonder the Wood Queen wanted to use her.

  “What you’re experiencing right now,” Maker continued, “are the effects of having the binding I placed on you, ten years ago, broken. You’re … jumping between dimensions, for want of a better explanation. But for some reason, you’re only actually managing to move within our world, from one location to another.”

  Navin leaned forward. “What broke the binding you placed on her, sir?”

  “I suspect it was killing the Skriker that did it.”

  Donna’s chest contracted. There it was again, the reminder of what she’d done in the Ironwood. Defeating the Wood Monster had been the culmination of ten years of silence and nightmares—silence from the Order about what had really happened to her parents and herself a decade ago, and nightmares of the worst sort that plagued her childhood. When she’d rescued Maker and Navin from Aliette just two weeks ago, fighting and killing the Skriker in order to escape the forest, she had come full circle.

  Donna took a shaky breath. “What were we even doing in the Ironwood that night, Maker?”

  Real confusion filled his blue eyes. “The queen took us. You came for Navin—and for me.”

  “No, I mean before that. When I was seven.”

  He bowed his head, and for a long moment Donna didn’t think he would answer her. But then he looked up and nodded slowly.

  “Your parents were trying to smuggle you away from Ironbridge—away from the alchemists—without the Order finding out. Rachel had gotten it into her head that you were in danger.” His gnarled hands trembled and he placed them carefully in his lap. “She wasn’t wrong.”

  Warm tears ran down Donna’s face. Finally, after all these years of not knowing, here was the truth.

  “Don …” Navin put his hand on her shoulder, warm and steadying, just like him.

  But still, her heart beat wildly. “The Order found out their plans?”

  The old alchemist nodded. He looked like he’d aged another twenty years in the space of five minutes.

  “How?” Her voice was hard.

  “Patrick confided in Paige …”

  “She betrayed her own brother.” Donna wiped away her tears. Duty over blood; why was she even surprised?

  Silence rested heavily between the three of them, the only sound in the workshop the clattering of metal wings.

  Maker continued, his voice gruff as if filled with an indefinable emotion. “The Order of the Dragon tried to intercept them, of course, so your father led everyone into the Ironwood.” He took a deep breath and looked up into the rafters. “Things got very bad after that.”

  Oh God, Dad. Her eyes burned. “I can never go back to them, Maker.”

  “You have to.”

  “I mean it. Never.”

  His eyes were filled with a wisdom born of pain and too many years to count. “You have to, child. For your mother’s sake.”

  “Why would you do this to me?” Donna stared at her gloved hands, then back at Maker. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Why?”

  He sounded as old and exhausted as she’d ever heard him. “I did what I was asked to do. In some ways, that request saved your life. If we hadn’t bound your abilities, you might not have survived—it was too much for such a young girl.”

  She waved away his attempt to make his actions seem like less of a betrayal. “Who told you to do it?”

  Maker rubbed a wrinkled hand across his eyes. “Who do you think?”

  Donna felt her heart grow heavy with certainty, the familiar resentment already building. “Simon.”

  Maker looked surprised. “No, not him.”

  “Then who?”

  “It was your aunt who came to me with the request.”

  It was your aunt who came to me … The words rang inside Donna’s head, bouncing around so that she couldn’t make sense of them. She watched Maker’s lips move, tried to understand what it was he was saying to her, but nothing seemed to be working right.

  Aunt Paige? Even after everything she’d read in Mom’s journal—and everything that Maker had just told her—she still found it hard to believe that the woman who’d brought her up for the last ten years could truly be such a stranger.

  The rushing sound in her ears increased, causing the ground to tilt beneath her feet. Donna realized that she must have stood up, but she didn’t remember doing it. She felt as though everything was happening to someone else and she wasn’t even here. Her body was present, but her mind was elsewhere—perhaps floating up among the rafters, alongside the clockwork birds as they clattered and squawked.

  Forcing herself to focus, she could just about see Navin’s shocked face through the halo of light that was growing around her. No, she thought. Not again—not now.

  Her friend’s lips were moving, but she couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one place she needed to be, only one way to bring Mom back.

  The queen had told her, Tomorrow night, we will meet in the Ironwood and you will open the gateway.

  So be it. Her decision had been made for her, perhaps even as far back as her seventh birthday when her supposedly impossible powers had first manifested—only to be magically bound by the alchemists.

  Reality shifted, and Donna fell.

  RACHEL UNDERWOOD’S JOURNAL:

  Oh, dear God, I never imagined I would pray ever again … but I’m doing it now. Patrick, my good-hearted, trusting husband, told his sister about Donna’s abilities. Paige knows everything.

  And now we are truly lost.

  Paige Underwood isn’t the sort of woman you reveal this kind of power to. She’s ambitious in the worst possible way. Oh, she hides it. She does very well playing moon sister to Quentin, doing her duty and taking a low-salary job in local government in order to get closer to the decision-makers of Ironbridge City Council. She is very, very clever. And she’s not afraid of hard work.

  These things make her dangerous, but of course … she is Patrick’s blood, and altho
ugh I know he agrees with me, he won’t admit it openly. At least, he won’t go against her—not in public.

  But to tell her. To share with her the terror I’ve been feeling, the dreams about Donna being taken from me. I don’t know if I can forgive him, no matter how good his intentions. Why did he have to tell her quite so much?

  Nothing will ever be the same again, and I’ve known that ever since Donna manifested the abilities that caused grown men to turn pale and look at each other as though we had a monster in our midst. Expressions of horror that soon turned to greed—a resource to be exploited is something the power-hungry Order will never give up on.

  They make me sick.

  My daughter was born different, yes … but that doesn’t make her any less human. In fact, I think what Patrick and I are discovering about Donna makes her more than human. I believe she has a tiny piece of the prima materia inside her—first matter, sacred to alchemists, and one of the building blocks of reality itself. I don’t know how or why; those things would need to be investigated, and I refuse to let her become a lab experiment. She is a person—the most important person in my life, and therefore to be protected.

  She’s still my little girl, no matter how different she might be, and I won’t let them take her from me. I’ll die before that happens.

  But the terrifying thing is Simon. That sly bastard knows that I’ll protect my daughter with my life.

  Just as they want to use Donna as the ultimate weapon against our enemies, so she—my own daughter—is such a weapon against me. How can I act against Simon when Donna’s life could be at risk?

  I can’t let them use her to further their plans. Once her power is fully manifest, it could be developed in all kinds of terrible ways. How easy it would be to enter the Elflands without needing to find the Old Paths—perhaps even to enter Faerie itself. I heard Simon saying it to Quentin, just last night. They were arguing, and the word on Simon Gaunt’s lips made my blood run cold:

  Invasion.

  Nineteen

  The early evening sky was already a blank slate of gray cloud as Donna headed into the Ironwood once more. Her only companion was a changeling girl who, at one time, had been somehow important to Xan.

  Ivy looked more fey than ever, almost as if she had given up on all previous efforts to look human.

  Donna raised her eyebrows as Ivy’s hair flashed from brown to green to orange before settling into a warm, autumnal sort of red. “Wow, I wish I could do that with my hair.”

  Ivy’s normally pale green cheeks flushed. “I’m not doing it—it’s just my glamour not working properly.”

  Donna snorted. “It’s broken?”

  Looking increasingly uncomfortable, the fey girl skipped ahead. “I’m just not very good at holding it.”

  Ivy was such a strange creature, but she seemed mostly harmless. Donna wanted to find out more about how she’d gotten caught up in Aliette’s games, but she felt too anxious right now to ask. She couldn’t afford to get involved in the changeling’s problems—she already had more than enough of her own.

  The moment Donna had arrived on the outskirts of the Ironwood, Ivy had appeared from nowhere, seeming almost desperate to hurry their progress toward wherever the queen was waiting for them. The girl had hopped from foot to foot while Donna tried to focus on not throwing up; the re-entry, after each journey-between-locations, seemed to be getting worse, and she wondered if there was something Maker could do to help her control it.

  As they walked deeper into the forest, Donna thought about how furious Xan had been when they’d first run into Ivy on the Common. Which of course made her worry about other Xan-related things—what was he up to right now? Seriously, maybe this was all too much for their budding relationship to survive. She’d seen his sweater in Maker’s workshop—they’d clearly been working on plans for his wings. Why wouldn’t Xan share that with her? And what else had he been keeping from her? Donna’s confusion was turning to anger as each moment passed, but she had to focus on the task ahead and try not to think about Xan. Now wasn’t the time to get caught up in her own personal drama.

  Now was the time to open the door to Faerie. She had been born with the power to send the wood elves home, freeing the remains of Ironwood Forest from their influence forever. And freeing the alchemists from the need to tear down the remaining trees and stand constantly watchful, in case the elves returned to their child-stealing ways.

  Fear sat like a stone in Donna’s stomach, but she tried to remember that she was doing a good thing—something that nobody else in the Order was capable of. Surely this was a course of action that could only bring positive rewards for the alchemists. Maybe they would even reconsider their decision to send her away.

  Donna swallowed past the tightness in her throat. She knew it was unlikely that the alchemists would change their minds about her, especially if Simon Gaunt had anything to do with it.

  And ironically, if she did manage to send Aliette and her people home—and the queen returned the elflock at the root of her mother’s cursed psyche—she would get her mom back just as she was about to move thousands of miles away. Unless, of course … maybe Mom could get custody back. In theory, Donna might only have to wait long enough for her mother to cut through the Order’s red tape, and the objections they were bound to voice, before she could come back home.

  She followed Ivy deeper into the forest.

  Donna looked around the clearing, wondering, far too late, if this was all some kind of elaborate trap. She was out here, in the middle of freaking nowhere, following a changeling girl who was under orders from the Wood Queen. It was dangerous and, if she were honest with herself, pretty stupid.

  But what else was new?

  Winter branches like long arms with jagged fingers reached for her as they stepped off the path and into the circle of trees.

  “Here?” Donna asked.

  “Her Majesty should be here,” Ivy replied, looking scared.

  Then the Wood Queen appeared from a tunnel of leafless trees, flanked by two dark elves. The creatures scuttled along, bent low to the ground, their twiglike hands almost touching the ground. They looked even less human than they had just weeks ago, and Donna couldn’t help but be shocked by their appearance.

  Was this what Aliette meant when she said that her people were dying? It was as though they were becoming fully transformed into creatures of the earth. They barely held a humanoid shape, and their eyes were empty black sockets.

  The Wood Queen, now that her elegant elfskin was no longer in place, looked mostly the way Donna remembered. She was tall and straight, with nut-brown skin; her face was a roughly hewn wood carving. Her clothing rustled and crackled, for it was made purely of the forest, and her twiggy fingers pushed mosslike hair behind her shoulders in a strangely human gesture.

  Her lipless mouth smiled wickedly at Ivy, who seemed almost forgotten as she cowered at the edge of the clearing. “Child of the fey, you may leave us. Your debt is paid.”

  Ivy’s huge eyes widened. “Your Majesty, am I truly free?”

  “You are. Walk not in the Elflands again, and you will remain that way. Do you understand?”

  Donna watched this exchange with interest. She was surprised to feel a huge burst of relief on Ivy’s behalf—it must be amazing to be set free of enforced servitude.

  The girl bobbed a bizarrely old-fashioned curtsey and then, with a final terrified glance at Donna, ran away faster than the human eye could follow.

  Aliette used leafy fingers to detach a thick lock of dull red hair from her belt.

  “As agreed, here is what I took from the alchemist called Rachel Underwood.”

  Donna’s fingers closed over the grisly artifact. She couldn’t repress a shiver, even though it was her own mother’s hair. “Just like that?”

  The queen’s face twisted into what could only be described as a smile. Wood splintered around her mouth. “It was our bargain. We do not go back on our word, Iron Witch.”

 
; There wasn’t really much Donna could say to that, given what she’d done with the elixir.

  She swallowed. “What should I do with it? How do I get my mother back?”

  “Burn it and scatter the ashes over running water, two nights from now when the sky is dark and the moon is new.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It is as I tell you. I will break the curse tonight, but Rachel Underwood shall not awaken until the new moon, when you release that.”

  Donna tucked the elflock safely into her jeans pocket. She felt excitement beginning to grow, but she refused to allow it to cloud her mind. This was so very far from over—she still had to uphold her part of the bargain, and she had a horrible feeling things weren’t going to be as easy as Aliette and Newton would have her believe.

  She wished that Navin were here.

  Her mind immediately flashed on an image of Xan, remembering how they’d faced down the dark elves together the last time she was in the Ironwood. Shaking her head with frustration, Donna gritted her teeth against a sudden wave of sadness. She was alone this time, and that was just fine. She’d been alone before, and had no doubt that she would be again—if she even survived this night.

  Donna listened carefully as the Wood Queen told her exactly where the doorway to Faerie was located. She still had to figure out how to use the power that apparently existed inside her—to access it and open a door to another realm when she barely understood what was happening in the first place. But if she failed, Mom would die, and that was something that Donna couldn’t allow.

  Failure simply wasn’t an option.

  She gritted her teeth, pulled off her gloves, and faced the expanse of dark trees. The night sky above seemed to press down on her—reminding her of the lucid dream in which she’d heard her mother’s voice—but she shook off her remaining doubts and focused on the depth of her feelings.