“That’s not your fault,” Matthew said gently.
“Tell her,” Kyle said.
Matthew turned to me. “Kyle says he’s sorry he got angry and he’s sorry he made you run away.”
“Kyle.” Speaking hurt, but this was too important. “Matthew’s right. None of this is your fault.”
Kyle stuck out his lower lip, and I knew he didn’t believe me. He sniffled. “I’m not angry anymore,” he said.
“I know.” Throat aching, I looked at Mom. “Neither am I.” Mom would stay or she would leave, and I could no more decide for her than for anyone else. I could only find a way to live with what she decided.
“Lizzy—” But Mom couldn’t seem to find words to go with that.
Mirinda reached for Kyle’s butterfly again. It burst into flame, and the toddler burst into tears. She didn’t know yet that some things couldn’t last.
Her tears stopped abruptly, as baby tears did. Mirinda looked up, toward the quia tree, tottered forward, and fell. Mom swept her from the ground. Mirinda hung limp in her hold, and my breath caught, but Mom didn’t look frightened. “Mirinda!” she called.
“Not again,” Kyle sighed.
I followed their gazes and saw a scrap of shadow running circles around the tree. Rinda could control her own shadow, I realized. Just like summoners long ago.
“She always comes back,” Mom said. “But it can take a while.”
Rinda stopped to put her shadow hands to the bark. She giggled, and then her shadow reached into the tree. “Mirinda!” I cried, afraid she’d lose herself to that tree, but she stopped, hands in just past the wrists, to look up at us curiously. “Name?” she asked.
Trees had no names, save for the First Tree, which was also Rhianne—but Rhianne was gone, surely she was. I unfocused my gaze and looked at this tree’s shadow, looked and looked until my eyes threatened to cramp and at last I saw the fainter shadow within it.
Not Rhianne’s shadow. This shadow looked down at Rinda as if he’d never get enough of looking at her. I swallowed hard as I moved to my sister’s side. “Caleb.” It wasn’t only trying to speak that made my throat burn.
He nodded soberly. My legs threatened to give way, and Matthew laid a steadying hand on my shoulder. Our paths lie in different directions from here, Caleb had said. He couldn’t come back, but he’d come as far as he could.
“Allie told me about Kaylen,” Mom said softly. She didn’t understand. She knew the name I spoke, not the shadow I saw. I took the coin from around my neck and hung it from a low branch, my eyes on that shadow.
“Should I try to call you out of the tree?” I asked him, but as I spoke, I knew, as Rhianne had not, that sometimes things really were over. Caleb knew it, too; he shook his head, no.
Mom gave a little gasp, and I knew she’d worked it out. She walked toward the tree, slowly, steadily.
“Do you want me to send you on?” I asked Caleb. Again he shook his head, then moved his lips, as if trying to say something. Whatever it was, it was beyond my human hearing.
“Not now,” I said. A nod. “Not ever?” Caleb shook his head. “You’ll stay for a time?” I asked, and he nodded.
“This is not possible,” Elin said, while Tolven simply stared at the tree. Caleb knelt down to squeeze Rinda’s shadow hands. Rinda leaned forward to wrap her shadow arms around him, everything but her legs disappearing into the tree.
“Kaylen.” Mom couldn’t see him, but she set Rinda’s body down, and she pressed her hands to the smooth trunk. Caleb stood, Rinda’s shadow arms still around his legs, and pressed his hands to Mom’s, though neither could push past the bark between them. I brushed my hand across my eyes and found them damp.
“You did what needed doing, Kaylen. I know that.” No tears in Mom’s voice. She’d had a year to accept this, as I had not. “I’ll honor and mourn that all my life. We had one good summer together.” Something in her voice caught. “It will have to be enough.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, not knowing if I spoke to Mom or to Caleb. “I never meant for this to happen.” My own voice broke, and Matthew’s arms wrapped tightly around me. “Never.”
Caleb held his hands out toward me, but I could no more push through the tree to reach him than Mom could. “Thank you,” I whispered instead. “For sending me back.”
Caleb nodded, acknowledging that. Rinda’s shadow released him. She slipped out of the tree, giggling, and reached up for me. I pulled away from Matthew to lift her shadow into my arms. The shadow was cold, but it was a cold I’d learned to handle long ago.
I have a sister now. The thought seemed strange as the year I had lost. I knelt beside Rinda’s body. Caleb watched us, his smile no less real for the sorrow it held. Rinda’s shadow slipped from my arms to settle back beneath her skin. Her whole body shook with more giggles as she toddled to her feet.
I laughed, too, only it turned into a sob, and then somehow we were all holding each other, my mother and my sister and me, one giant crying hug that seemed to go on forever. Mom pulled Kyle and Matthew in, and Kyle’s cat pulled itself in, climbing up the back of my pants leg with needle-sharp claws. Only Elin and Tolven remained apart, silent.
When we pulled away from one another at last, Elin asked stiffly, “Tell me, Tara. Have you had any word of our people?”
Mom nodded. “They’re doing all right. Winter was hard on them, but it was hard on us all, and they made it through. If they sometimes make for uncomfortable neighbors, well, that would hardly be the greatest challenge we’ve faced since the War.” She laughed uneasily. “Though some in this town would argue that.”
“Neighbors?” Elin said.
“Clayburn,” Mom told her. “They had to go somewhere, and with winter coming, there wasn’t much time to choose. And there were houses there that could be rebuilt, and some rations already in storage.” Mom gave Elin a hard look, a measuring look.
“Yes,” Elin said sharply. “I am well aware of these things.” Clayburn was the town she’d destroyed.
“What about Allie?” I said. “And Karin?”
“Both fine. They’ve gone home to Washville, though Allie spends a lot of time in Clayburn now. Karin, too.” Mom smiled then. “The world might have been ending, but Allie made it here in time to see to Rinda’s birth, though she has both her town and what remains of Faerie to look after now.”
Dusk was fading, taking the color with it. Elin turned to Tolven. “We should go. It’s a long walk to Clayburn.” She sounded wearier than I’d ever heard her.
Tolven looked to me. “By the bonds between us, Liza, might we find a resting place here tonight?”
“We do not need their help,” Elin said.
“Even so, you could hardly be blamed for wanting rest before facing the Court and all its politics.” Mom laughed again, and something in her relaxed. “You’re both welcome to stay the night, Elin.”
“You would risk that?” Elin said. “After all I have done?”
“Would our town allow it?” I asked, not sure, for a moment, whether I wanted them to or not.
“I’ll not ask permission to invite guests into my own house.” The steel in Mom’s voice surprised me.
“In that case,” Elin said softly, “it would be an honor to accept.”
I looked at Elin, and she looked at me, and something passed between us. “If the world ever needs saving again,” she said solemnly, “I shall remember to seek you out, Liza.”
“And I you,” I said, knowing the words for the sacred vow they were.
Kyle knelt in the dirt, digging; the cat had crawled onto his head. Mirinda sidled up beside me, reaching for my stone hand as tentatively as she’d reached for the butterfly. Her fingers wrapped around it, and then the shadow of her hand moved beyond her skin and through my stone. It was easy, feeling her shadow fingers so clearly in mine, to tighten my hold on her in turn, and as my shadow hand moved, my stone hand moved with it, and I knew it truly wasn’t dead after all.
The
light was nearly gone, but the night seemed to glow silver still. Kyle stood, both his hands covered with ladybugs, and looked right at me. “Home,” he said, and it was clearly an order.
I laughed, and then I was crying all over again. “Home,” I agreed.
Matthew reached for my free hand, but Kyle grabbed it first, and ladybugs crawled between our palms. Matthew shrugged and took Kyle’s hand instead, while Caleb kept watching us all. Rinda waved shyly at him. She would know him, and he would know her, at least this little bit.
We walked down the hillside together, Mirinda’s shadow hand in mine, all of us matching our pace to her toddling steps, until at last she demanded I carry her. Kyle’s ladybugs crawled from my hand into her hair. She laughed again. She liked to laugh, I could tell.
I suddenly wanted more than anything to keep her safe enough that she’d always laugh without fear, wanted it so badly it made my chest hurt.
Beyond the hillside, wilder trees lined the path, and their shadows reached for us as we walked. I couldn’t know about always, only about right now. So right now I used my magic to keep the shadows away—to keep those I cared about safe—all the way home.
Chapter 22
Green buds were everywhere as Allie and Matthew and I reached the outskirts of Clayburn. Spring was coming on its own this year, a change as gradual as autumn’s coming had been. Mom said it had been so last year as well, but I hadn’t been here, so all through the day’s walk, I’d marveled at how much more slowly and shyly spring arrived when no magic compelled it, until Allie said, “That’s what you get for being gone so long.” Last fall I’d thought she would never forgive us for letting her think we were dead a whole year, as if we had done it on purpose.
The black dust was gone from the paths between towns, or else melted with winter’s snow into the soil. The faerie folk had rebuilt most of Clayburn’s houses, with strange round angles only those accustomed to building with magic would think to use, but a few remained burned and broken, because Elin had insisted, when she returned, on that reminder of those who had died here.
That she’d gotten her people to agree was a sign that they would accept her power, but not so great a sign as tonight would be.
Karin met us at the edge of the town, dressed in a scuffed brown leather vest and pants, a quia leaf pattern embroidered with green thread beneath one shoulder. I’d only seen those clothes in visions: they were the clothes Karinna the Fierce had worn into battle. A circlet of hawthorn and ivy was wrapped around her loose hair, and a long knife hung at her side.
“I’m glad you could come,” she said, and her smile was not fierce at all. It was the smile of the woman who’d let Matthew and me into her town when we’d needed rescue, though she hadn’t known whether we could be trusted. “You are well?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice hoarse. Allie had done what she could for it, but it had never returned entirely. “Rinda’s fine, too.” Karin visited her niece as often as she could. “And Elin?” I asked.
“A part of her yet wishes I would change my mind, and a part of me does not blame her,” Karin said. “We have talked much these past weeks.”
“I’m glad.” I’d been talking a lot with my mother, too, though I suspected those talks were easier. Mom had decided to stay after all. She said she’d realized it wasn’t only Rinda who mattered, but all of the other Afters, and also that if her daughter could help weave an entire world back together, maybe she could find courage enough to help look after a single town.
Her staff in hand, Karin led us to a house near the edge of Clayburn, where we changed out of our travel clothes. I put on leather pants and a sweater and the owl-feather cloak Elin had gifted me, and I pulled my hair, which had gone completely clear in the gray, back from my face. I slung my bow and arrow in their cases over my shoulders and sheathed my knife at my belt. Karin had told me it was fitting that I be seen as the warrior and hunter I was. I still hadn’t the skill I once had, but as I gained more control over my stone hand, my arrows flew closer to true.
Allie wore a long white coat over her jeans—it had belonged to her mother, who’d been training to be a doctor, Before—along with the medical kit Caleb had given her when she’d come into her magic, so that she could be known as the healer she was. Elin’s gift to Allie was inside: bandages that did not require knots to hold themselves firmly in place.
Matthew wore his deerskin pants and jacket and said he didn’t need to be known as anything but Matthew. He didn’t have any gifts from Elin, because only those who’d eaten of the quia seeds, or who were descended from those who had, were supposed to be invited to this ceremony. It had never occurred to those who’d decided that that the seeds might one day lose their power, or that those who ate them might include humans. Elin had said that if I chose to bring my consort with me, it certainly wasn’t her place to refuse, which was her way of inviting Matthew without breaking any rules.
Karin had to leave before us, but she and Elin had food sent, a stew of old carrots and dried goat jerky that held none of the rotten sweetness of the meals we’d eaten in Faerie. One of our gifts to Elin had been crop seeds from both my and Allie’s towns, which would help make next winter less hungry for Clayburn than this one.
Nys came, well past sunset, to lead Allie, Matthew, and me to an open clearing, lit by a full silver moon above and by hundreds of green and yellow fireflies around us, coaxed to life out of season. Beyond the clearing, a spring river flowed swift and loud at the base of limestone bluffs.
At the clearing’s center, Karin sat on a chair made from the same limestone, living vines and carved leaves both adorning it. Elin knelt at her feet, her hair pulled back in a silver butterfly clasp. The weaver wore a long green and silver dress, bright colors that echoed the threads woven into the world around us. I could still see those threads of magic and light, in stray moments when I’d almost forgotten to look for them, and I knew Elin could, too.
Nys left us a few paces from the throne, for that’s what it was. “It is good to see you well,” he told me before slipping away, but there was no warmth in his words. We were not friends, any more than he and Elin were. It was Elin who would have to work with him, though.
Tolven slipped into place beside us with an easy smile, his tunic and pants the same colors as Elin’s dress. Other faerie folk entered the clearing around us, silent as gathering humans rarely were, save for the sound of their steps against the soft earth. Tolven stood near the throne for many reasons, but I suspected one was as protection, because any fey who mistrusted the three humans in their town would nonetheless hesitate to offend Tolven, whose magic had kept them alive since the War.
Some of the faerie folk stumbled and had to be supported by others. Fire fever still lingered among them, but slowly, carefully, Allie was doing what she could to heal it.
Once the clearing was full, Karin lifted her head to the sky and sang, the same wordless song Elin had sung for Caleb, only now there was no sadness in it. The sounds were not sounds human voices could make—the faerie folk had their mysteries still—but Allie hummed along. After a moment, so did Matthew and I, though my rough voice marred the perfect notes.
Surrounded by that song, Karin drew Elin to her feet, then felt for the arm of the throne to give her daughter two things: a shining black stone from Faerie, streaked with silver, which Nys had granted to Karin in another, more rushed ceremony performed on a forest trail, one in which Karin had officially taken her mother’s place as heir; and a bright green quia leaf from a descendant of the First Tree, which I’d granted Karin with no ceremony at all when she last visited and which she’d kept alive with her magic ever since. Elin accepted them both. Karin opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, a spark that held the faintest echo of stone and leaf leaped from her to Elin.
Tolven laughed. “It appears the magic is more eager than the pace of the ceremony that accompanies it,” he said.
Elin’s eyes grew wide. “The Realm is not gone,” she whispered.
“I can feel it all around us, in the very fabric of this human world.”
“Yes,” Karin said soberly. “That weaving was well done, Daughter. You and Liza have brought our two worlds back together, as they were always meant to be. And now the Realm is truly yours, for I hear its voice no longer.” Karin lifted the circlet from her head, and for the first time, her steady hands fumbled.
Elin helped her mother set the circlet in place on her own head. “It is all right,” Elin said softly, as if believing it for the first time. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Karin raised her voice and said, loud enough for those at the farthest edges of the clearing to hear, “I hereby relinquish all claim on the Realm and its people to my daughter, who has been with you through the fire and the crumbling, as I have not. See to it that you are worthy of the gifts she brings you.” Karin stood, and Elin grabbed her mother into a hug that I suspected was not part of the ceremony at all.
There were cheers after that, and Elin took her place on the throne. Tolven led Karin back to us before taking his place at Elin’s side, as was appropriate for a queen’s consort. He and Elin exchanged the briefest of smiles before Elin turned to the faerie folk who lined up to approach her throne and give the oath she demanded of them, as was now her right.
Nys approached Elin first, and I was close enough to hear him say, “I do this for Kaylen more than you. You will not find me an easy ally.”
“I am well aware of that,” Elin said. “I welcome your oath just the same, and your help in the years ahead.”
So Nys repeated the words Elin had chosen, words that had never before been spoken to a ruler of Faerie by her subjects:
Blessed are the powers that grant me magic.
I promise to use their gift well.
To help mend my world,
To help mend all worlds.
And should I forget to mend,
Should I refuse to mend,
Still I will remember
To do no harm.
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