Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After

by Janni Lee Simner

  “Grow!” My own voice was strong and clear, magic burning my throat. So much magic, more than any one person was meant to hold. The seedling grew, its web of green grasping at roots, pulling at them. Its shell split in my hand. The flickers of green in the air grew brighter, but Rhianne’s roots held firm. “Grow!” I called again, and again, and again. The words tore through me as they spilled into the air. The seed shrank, as seeds did when they fed growing things. Something in me faded. My name. I’d have no way of holding my name once the seed was gone.

  I faltered at that, and the green web stopped its growth. To let go my name—I would truly be lost then, no hope of returning to life, no promises of what would happen when I passed beyond the gray.

  “You feel it, too.” No magic in Rhianne’s voice now. “You are a summoner. You no more want to let go than I do.”

  I’d already let go of so much: my father’s approval. The hope that my mother could protect me. My sister—my first sister—who I could not protect in turn. Knowing whose fault the War was. Thinking my people free of blame.

  There was sorrow in Mirinda’s gaze, as if she heard all I hadn’t spoken aloud. She seemed fainter without her magic, like a weaving worn through. Her mother had done so much, too much, to protect her, but Rhianne had failed, too, in the end. It wasn’t right.

  And nothing any of us could do would change it. The past was like fear. I could not let it control me. People failed me. I failed them. Knowing this, we kept fixing what we could. Sometimes by holding on. Sometimes—by letting go.

  I drew my hands apart, and I released the last sliver of seed I held. “Grow!”

  My name slipped from me as surely as the seed did. My shadow blurred and let go its shape, leaving behind only the faintest memory of who I’d been. The green web grew strong, pulling at the roots all around it. The flickers of green in the air lasted longer.

  The web wrenched the roots it held free at last. A stiff, icy wind gusted through the air, and the tree began to topple. I could not move. I could only let that wind blow me and the other shadows from beneath the flailing roots.

  High above, branches snapped and fell. Mirinda stepped aside, her hands outstretched. “Come here, Mother,” she said, and though her magic was gone, as the First Tree hit the ground, her mother’s shadow slid free.

  Rhianne seemed old, bent with age like no faerie folk I’d ever seen. She looked at the tree, at the gray and its shadows, at her daughter’s shadow last of all. I saw fear, regret, pain—I no longer remembered what those things felt like.

  Mirinda reached for her mother. “Shall we see what lies beyond this place?”

  Rhianne’s shoulders hunched further, as if beneath some great burden, but she took her daughter’s hand and whispered, “Go.”

  Another gust tossed me farther from them, lightly as a toy. “Thank you, Liza,” the younger woman whispered, but I didn’t know who she spoke to, or why. There was a moment’s fear, and then the wind took that, too. I flew on its dancing current, through a field that kept flickering: gray-green, green-gray. Laughter rippled through me. Letting go was all right after all. The wind blew me away, toward whatever it was that came next, and I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted to stop it. My shadow began to unravel, threads pulling apart, and that was right, too.

  Until one of those threads caught on something, stopping me with a painful lurch. A tree. Not Rhianne’s tree, but another tree, one that called to something deep inside me. I wanted to fight it, only I couldn’t remember how. I was finished. I was ready. I’d let go.

  Yet the new tree pulled on me, knew me. “Liza,” it said.

  Or maybe that was the man whose shadow stood beside the tree. I knew him as surely as I knew the tree itself—a tree I’d planted, a tree whose roots had always stretched beyond the gray. “Caleb,” I whispered. There was pain in his name. I was supposed to be done with pain.

  “There is not much time.” He carried something, something that also held a whisper of green. “Tell me, Liza. Do you want to go back?”

  “Back?” It took me a moment to work out what he meant. Back home, to the crumbling world where people held to each other, and failed to hold to each other; where all things wound down in the end. The laughter left me. In the world, there were small things to set right every day, instead of this one large thing I knew I’d done right once and for all.

  In the world, more than this tree and Caleb knew my name.

  I felt my shadow taking on shape once more, a rough shape like a child’s smudged charcoal drawing. “I don’t know if I want to go back.”

  “Will you trust me, then, to know you well enough to choose for you?”

  Did I trust him? I couldn’t remember. I thought maybe sometimes I did. “All right,” I said.

  “Come, then.” His cold shadow hand took hold of mine. He stepped into the tree, and I followed, scraps of memory returning. I’d trusted him before, with more lives than mine, but I couldn’t puzzle out whether he’d been worthy of that trust.

  Green threads flared bright around me. “Our paths lie in different directions from here,” Caleb said. “Perhaps we will meet again, beyond the gray or—sooner.” He gave me a small, sad smile. “All may yet be well, Liza. Tell your sister—”

  But I never found out what he wanted me to tell her, because with a lurch the green gave way. There was time to grab a handful of threads in my hand, and then with a shudder, flesh and stone closed around my shadow like a scab over an old wound, and ice raised goose bumps on my human skin.

  A new voice spoke my name, and I knew him, too, as surely as he knew me. “Liza,” he said, over and over again.

  There was no magic in his call, but it did not matter. I held to that voice like a lantern in fog, until at last I found the strength to open my eyes.

  “Matthew,” I said.

  Chapter 20

  He looked down at me, face streaked with ash, mouth open. It took me a moment to realize that he was sitting on the ground and my body was draped over his arms. I reached up with my good hand and felt tears on his cheek. I brought my fingers to my lips, tasting their saltiness. “I’m Liza,” I said, feeling the name settle firmly back beneath my skin.

  “Yes,” Matthew said. I sat up, and he helped me to my feet.

  “Good of you to come back,” Elin said dryly.

  Matthew wrapped his arms around me. I inhaled a breath of cold, stale air. The smell didn’t seem as strong as before, but I looked around and saw we stood in a small island of life, a few scant yards across, darkness pressing in from all sides. The standing stone was gone. I wasn’t home yet.

  Tolven crouched beside his tree, rocking back and forth, chanting under his breath, “Green, green, green.” Beyond him and Elin, at the base of the First Tree’s stump, a woman lay motionless on the ground, arms outstretched, throat slit. Mirinda. Crimson blood stained her face and hands and soaked her dress, broken by a scattering of silver dust beneath the chain she wore. The colors seemed thin and pale as all the remaining world around us, as if color were an illusion—save for something bright that pulsed in my stone hand. I looked down and saw green threads, the threads I’d grabbed from the gray. Could the others see them, too?

  “So my grandmother was right, and the world winds down at last.” Elin lifted her head, facing that ending as surely as I’d faced the gray.

  Sound seemed as muted as sight. “Nothing’s winding down.” I looked from Mirinda to the First Tree’s stump. It held no shadow now. “The world—everything’s all right now.” Mirinda’s power had left me, and my voice was hoarse, as if I’d used too much of it in the gray.

  “Your world, perhaps,” Elin said. “But that does us little good here. If anything remains of the Realm beyond this small space where we stand, I know no way to reach it.”

  “The dark isn’t moving any closer,” Matthew said, holding me still. “That’s something.”

  “It is not enough,” Elin said. “Not when our most basic powers fail us, sight and sou
nd losing their very sharpness.”

  Those gifts included not only long life, but night vision, and distance hearing, and silent walking, and all the ways in which we are both harder to hurt and harder to heal. Sound, sight, smell—they weren’t only muted by the darkness pressing in on us. They’d dulled because Rhianne’s gifts had left us at last.

  Including glamour. I turned in Matthew’s hold, grabbed his head with my good hand, and drew him toward me, kissing him hard and fast, feeling his lips warm against mine. We pulled apart, breathless, and I looked into his eyes. They were bright, but there was no hint of glamour there. He traced a finger along my lips. I hadn’t told him to do that. I hadn’t even wished it, though once he did it, it was exactly what I wanted.

  “It really is all right,” I said, and Matthew nodded.

  “You two have the strangest idea of what all right looks like.” Elin stared into the dark. Silver threads streaked the emptiness.

  I looked at the green threads in my stone hand, and I reached my flesh hand toward that dark. “Come here.” The call scraped my throat like broken glass, but silver threads flowed into my outstretched hand. Icy threads, numbing my fingers—I drew my hands together, and the green threads’ warmth made the silver easier to bear. I held both hands out to Elin, offering her silver threads from the world, green threads from someplace beyond the world. “Can you weave these into something that will lead us through the dark?”

  Fear and hope flashed across Elin’s face, making her seem terribly young. “I can surely try.” She plunged her hands into the light I held, and it wrapped around her wrists and fingers, flowing from me to her. She brought her hands together, and the strands tangled like unspun wool. She ran her fingers through them. Breath by breath, the shimmering fibers aligned themselves, silver and green, warp and weft.

  The chill faded from the air. Rough fibers turned into a slowly brightening weaving as Elin pulled row after shining row tight. Matthew’s eyes seemed huge by its light. Elin held the weaving out toward the dark as she worked. The darkness retreated as that weaving grew, as surely as it had at the crossroads. The open space around us grew as well, but there was still no clear way through the dark beyond it, and the unwoven fibers in Elin’s hands were running out.

  “Come here!” I carded more silver out of the dark and passed it to her. Her weaving grew thinner, weaker. She needed more green as well.

  Tolven stumbled to his feet. “The tree!” he cried.

  I looked at his tree, felt the green life within it. “Come here!” That life flowed toward me like an unfurling seed, turning to thread in my hand. I gave that to Elin, too. “Come here!” Every call sent pain stabbing through my throat, but I did not stop. I called all the light I could, silver and green, and passed it to Elin. The pain spread, and my legs threatened to give way, but I felt Matthew’s hands on my shoulders, steadying me. I leaned against him as I fed Elin bright threads that thrummed with life and power. Sweat trickled down my neck. When had the air grown so warm?

  “Come here!” Tolven’s tree came undone as I called, strand by green strand. Elin wove with fierce intensity, her face wild by the light. Her weaving shimmered and danced as she cast it out into the dark, danced the way my shadow had danced when it flew through the gray.

  The green in Tolven’s tree ran out, and he fell wailing to the ground as trunk and branches crumbled to gray, but there seemed no end to the silver I called. “Come here.” The dark retreated further, letting in something new: blue sky, yellow sun, brown earth. I called those colors to me, too, felt their life and light as well, and knew they came not from Faerie, but from my own bright world. The land around us blurred, and the dust of Faerie fell away as I drew that place of life and light to us. Elin’s hands faltered, as if she realized what I did—that we weren’t saving Faerie but abandoning it—and then she turned to the work with new intensity.

  I kept calling the things of my world to us—bright things, shining things, broken things—and Elin accepted them, weaving the last threads of her dying world in among them. My voice faded to a burning whisper. Elin’s weaving found its way to a river—the River—and darkness rolled away, leaving behind blue-green waters beneath a high sun, waters that flowed south with nothing of death in their voice. Faerie was gone. This weaving was for my world, the human world, a flawed thing filled with crumbling holes into which Elin wove her bright cloth. The shimmering threads stretched farther and farther, out into that world, threading their way into earth and sky, rivers and stars. Seasons flowed, one into another. Time lost meaning, became one more thread I gave Elin to weave. Something sparked, and the weaving caught life, spreading by its own power into all the places Elin couldn’t reach. Shining threads slipped from her fingers, and her eyes reflected their light. Bright light, so bright that in it I saw—

  Karin and Allie and Nys, leading the faerie folk through the forest, winding their way around the crumbling and the dark, stopping at the top of a hill to look back as all the silver brightness drained from the Arch, leaving behind dull tarnished metal, even as another light, a brighter light, found its way into the very fabric of the world—

  Allie, an older Allie, her hair more clear than red, walking a winter path from town to town, another girl from her town—Kimi, a plant speaker with green vines wrapped around her arms and neck—by her side—

  Karin standing by the Wall that had protected that town for so long, only something had changed, making it seem no more than a tangle of overgrown weeds, no magic left in it. “The Wall has served its purpose,” Karin said. “It is time for us all to learn to live without it—”

  The oldest Afters from my town, Hope and Seth and Charlotte, standing before my town’s Council. “They’re not going,” Hope said. “Not Ethan, not Tara, not Tara’s daughter, not my son. You will live with our magic, or you will live without us all—”

  Myself, heading into a winter forest to find Matthew—

  Matthew, heading into an autumn forest to find me—

  Home, I thought. I want to go home. Caleb had chosen right, after all. I wanted to live in this bright, broken world as long as I could.

  The visions faded. Matthew’s hand slipped into mine, and I wrapped my fingers around his.

  “It is done.” Elin’s eyes remained bright.

  Beside her, Tolven struggled to his feet. “This is the human world?”

  “It is,” Matthew said.

  “It seems a good place,” Tolven told him solemnly.

  Shapes came clear. Blue sky. Red leaves. A sloped hillside, on which we stood. A tree—an autumn tree, a living quia tree—upon it, just a few paces away from us, leaves burning with autumn fire. That tree knew me, and I knew it, as surely as I knew, deep down, that its roots stretched only into brown earth and the green beyond it, and held nothing more of gray death.

  But I did not know the toddler who looked up from beneath the tree, saw me, and burst into startled laughter.

  Chapter 21

  The child ducked her head, suddenly shy, and turned to look at a second, older child who hid behind the tree. That child I knew, though he was taller than I remembered: Kyle.

  Elin pulled her feather cloak about her. “Everything’s changed,” she said.

  “The trees are not green.” Tolven looked all around. “But they are well, and whole.”

  Elin grabbed both his hands. “And so are you,” she whispered.

  “And so am I,” Tolven agreed, and leaned his head on her shoulder.

  The world seemed so bright, like new-forged steel, silver threads still shining at the edges of my sight. A leaf fell from the quia tree and blew toward us. I released Matthew’s hand to catch it, and it did not dissolve to dust. It was an ordinary autumn leaf, no more, no less.

  That was when I heard someone else, breathing shallow breaths, watching us. I turned. Mom. I could not seem to speak.

  “Tara,” Matthew said.

  Mom didn’t move. She stared at us, while behind her the sky blazed with dusk
. The child moved to hide behind her. There’d been no child this age in my town when I’d left.

  My stomach did a little flip as suspicion crept into my thoughts. It was Matthew who spoke the suspicion aloud. “How long have we been gone?”

  Mom’s breathing sped up, and her face paled. “A year. I thought you were—we all thought you were—” I feared she might faint, she looked that stunned.

  The baby crept out from behind her, a baby with ordinary brown fuzz on her head and a hint of silver speckling her eyes. I knelt to look at her. “What is your name?” The words burned my throat. I’d called so much.

  The child looked down, still shy.

  “It’s Mirinda.” Mom’s voice shook. “Rinda for short. We wanted you to name her, but you didn’t come back, and Karin—she said it was an old name among the faerie folk, and that it had been out of use long enough to bring it back.”

  “Mirinda’s a good name.” My voice was hoarse, used up. I wanted to go to Mom, but I couldn’t get my legs to close the distance between us.

  “A year,” Matthew said, his voice strained. “A whole year. Gram—”

  “She’s fine,” Tara said. “We need to tell her you’re here—” But she just kept staring, as if afraid we would disappear if she looked away.

  Kyle came out from behind the tree, a butterfly trembling on his fingers and a yellow cat winding around his legs. Mirinda reached for the butterfly, then drew back, as if uncertain.

  Kyle saw Elin and stuck out his tongue, saw me and turned swiftly away.

  “Kyle?” Was he as angry at me now as a year ago?

  Kyle marched up to Matthew, as if he were the one safe person here. “You brought her back,” he said.

  “We brought each other back.” Matthew’s gaze took in Elin and Tolven as well as me. “All of us.”

  Kyle’s face scrunched up. He whispered something I couldn’t make out. Matthew leaned down, and Kyle repeated it.