Faerie Winter

by Janni Lee Simner

  “You should have run.” I managed to get my boots buckled myself. “You should have run and kept the leaf safe.” Kept yourself safe.

  “You should have known better than to expect me to.” Mom handed me my coat. I stepped away from her to put it on.

  A hand snaked around from behind me. I felt a knife at my throat once more as the coat fell from my grasp.

  “Call her back, Summoner.” Elin’s voice had a feral edge. “Do it of your own free will or do it under glamour, it matters not. Waste no more time. Do it.”

  Mom stepped toward us, and Elin stiffened. She was frightened, I realized, frightened of us small, glamourless humans. Her voice thickened into a syrupy sweetness. “Do it now. Call my mother back.”

  “Stop!” I said while my thoughts remained my own. “Of course I want to call Karin back. I’d do more than that for her.”

  “Why would you?” Elin demanded, the glamour gone from her words. “Why should a human care for my people at all?”

  “I don’t know your people. But I do know your mother.” Karin, with her kindness and her teaching. I didn’t know who the plant mage had been Before. I only knew who she was now. “You have my word, Elianna. I’ll do all I can to save her. But I can’t do anything until you take the knife away.”

  Elin drew back, taking the knife—one of Karin’s knives, with a dark stone blade—with her. “I will kill you if she dies. Do not doubt it.”

  I ignored her and walked to the oak tree. Deep scores ran down the bark, and sap flowed slowly out of them. I’d done that, too. I forced the thought aside as I softened my gaze. I saw Karin’s shadow within the tree—head between her knees, hands pressed to the ground. I felt the spark of life that was Karin, fainter and colder now. She was still there. I put my good hand to the rough bark.

  The shadow looked up and shook her head—no.

  As a tree she will die, as all trees must in this dying land, and it will not be without pain. The Lady’s words, but Karin had said as much when we’d found the townsfolk changed.

  “What do you wait for?” Elin demanded. The butterfly was in her hair once more, but the wings had ceased their flapping at last.

  “I wait because I fear calling will kill her.” A loop of ivy hung from one of the oak’s lower branches. Its leaves were already brown, without Karin to keep them awake. One drifted to the ground, and Karin’s shadow shrank a little. I thought of the leaves I’d called from the sleeping maple seed, of how quickly they’d withered and died. I thought of the townsfolk in their trees, dying of winter as well. Winter would kill us all in the end, one way or another.

  I turned to the quia tree. The shadow that clung to it seemed sharper, more clear than both Karin’s shadow and the shadows of the townsfolk. It slept more lightly than the other trees, too, as if tossing in troubled dreams. I felt cold magic stretch between us once more. I hadn’t imagined it—this tree knew me. It remembered me.

  As I put my hand to the quia’s smooth bark, I felt something more—the sense that this tree’s shadow didn’t end with its roots but reached far deeper, looking to someplace beyond the human world to remember how to grow.

  I didn’t know if I’d been right or wrong to plant the quia seed and, in doing so, call winter into this world. I only knew that I had. “This is my responsibility.”

  “Liza,” Mom said. “Not everything is your fault.”

  “I know that.” The War wasn’t my fault, nor any of the things Mom, Caleb, and Karin had done during it. And maybe spring would still come on its own, just as it had Before, as the trees found the ancient pathways my people said they’d always followed to wake themselves.

  But every moment I waited, the chances that there would be enough life left in Karin’s tree to call her out grew fainter. Karin said trees died slowly, but I could see the shadow in her tree shrinking. I could wait on spring no longer.

  “I have to call it back,” I said.

  “No one can stop the worlds from winding down.” So much despair in Elin’s voice. She held her hurt arm close. “Grandmother said so, when we came to your world and found it as dead as ours.”

  “The Lady doesn’t know everything,” Mom said.

  “Careful, human.” Elin’s bleakness was tinged with disdain.

  Mom laughed, a wild sound. “I’m through fearing your people, Elianna. None can do worse to me than your grandmother has already done.”

  I kept my hand pressed to the quia tree. In the darkness, its shadow seemed more real than its bark and branches.

  “Spring has been late before,” Mom said.

  Would the other trees follow the quia into spring, as they had followed it into winter? “I don’t know how much time the others have. Would you keep me safe and lose them all?”

  Mom didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. I looked down, ashamed. Wasn’t that what I’d wished of her before this all began? That she could have stayed with me, kept me safe instead of protecting others?

  “Do what you need to.” Mom rubbed at the arm I’d bitten. “I don’t know as much about magic as Karinna and Kaylen, but I’ll keep watch as best I can.”

  I swallowed hard. “Thanks, Mom.” My breath puffed in front of me. The ground would freeze again soon.

  Mom looked at Elin. “Promise you’ll not harm my daughter should she fail.”

  Elin laughed bitterly. “Why should I make any promises to humans?”

  “Because Liza won’t do this thing unless you do.”

  I would do this thing no matter what—but I didn’t say so. I couldn’t lie, but my mother could. “Promise,” I said to Elin, “that you won’t harm me or Mom or anyone from my town.”

  Elin stalked to Karin’s tree and leaned her head against it. “I do this for you, not them. I do not understand why you care for these humans so. I will never understand it. I will never understand why you did not take me with you when you went away to fight.” If Karin heard, she gave no sign. She’d drawn her shadow arms around herself, and her head was bowed once more.

  Elin turned back to us. She’d been crying again. “You have my word.”

  The moon was higher now, but I could still see the pinpricks of stars, like light through old nylon. I rubbed at the leather around my wrist, feeling stone and skin to either side of it. Matthew and Kyle were both out in that darkness. Even now I chose who to save.

  I returned my good hand to the quia’s trunk, shivering as my skin touched the tree’s cold shadow. All this long winter I’d been cold. I wasn’t sure I remembered what spring felt like, let alone how to call it.

  My dead hand weighed me down. I focused on the quia’s shadow and the restlessness that slept within the tree. “Grow,” I whispered to it. “Seek air, seek sun, seek life!”

  The quia’s shadow pulled at me, urging me toward the same uneasy sleep in which it already rested. I pressed my feet firmly into the mud and felt again the way the quia’s shadow stretched beyond its roots, deep into some other place—into Faerie? Did Karin’s world remember the green my world had forgotten? The Lady had said nothing grew there, but perhaps some thin thread of spring remained. “Wake!” I called to the shadow’s roots—to that place beyond its roots. “Grow! Seek air, seek sun, seek light!”

  I called again, and again. I couldn’t call my mother to me, nor Matthew, either, not always. I couldn’t call Johnny back, or the others I’d lost, even before this long winter. But I could do this. I could call spring. “Grow!” I saw, somewhere beyond sight, the way the quia’s shadow twisted into a dark rope reaching down out of this world. I saw the thinnest thread of green snaking through the darkness, answering my call. I reached for that thread with my magic, pulling it toward me. “Grow!”

  Something pulled back, something gray and dying that also answered my call and chased after the green. I held to that thin thread, but the harder I held on, the harder the grayness pulled me in turn, urging me deep into the earth, beyond the earth.

  Light drained from the world around me, moon and sta
rs fading to dead gray coals. This wasn’t Faerie. Even the desolate Realm the War had left behind held more color and life than this.

  Yet I’d been here before. I’d called Caleb back from this dead land where nothing grew. I’d thought I’d escaped it and brought him and the quia seed both back with me.

  I thought of dead fields and bare trees, of white bone and gray ash. No one could escape such a place, not for good. All things wound down in the end. I was human. I would die. How could I ever have imagined otherwise?

  I tried to think of green things, of living things, but green was only a word, and I no longer remembered what it meant. Winter and death pulled on me. I couldn’t fight their wordless call. I closed my eyes and let dead branches wrap around me. I wasn’t cold anymore. It wasn’t such a bad thing after all to see the worlds wind down.

  “Quit it, Liza.” A boy’s voice, from somewhere behind me. Something about that voice made me angry. It had always made me angry.

  “Go away.” There was no power in my words—in me.

  “Nice try.” The boy spoke in front of me now. “Too bad I’m through with the whole disappearing act.”

  I knew him, but I couldn’t call up a name. I curled up small among the branches, not caring as thorns dug into my skin.

  “And you complain I hide too much? Seriously, Liza, enough of this. Get up.”

  “I want to sleep.” I was warm and I was safe. Why couldn’t this nameless boy leave me alone like everyone else? Dimly I remembered that he’d never left me alone when I’d wanted him to.

  “Okay, let’s try it this way.” Didn’t he ever give up? “Open your eyes.”

  “Will you go away if I open my eyes?”

  The boy laughed at that, though I couldn’t imagine what was so funny. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Fine,” I told him. It took a long time—my eyelids were as heavy as if they’d turned to stone, and even once I got them open, I struggled to focus on the boy who stood slouching before me. “Johnny.” He was as colorless as everything else in this place, but he looked real, not like a shadow. That wasn’t right. “You’re dead.”

  “And you’re not. So you’re going to get up, and you’re going to get yourself back out there.”

  I drew the branches closer around me. “Can’t.”

  Johnny rolled his eyes. “This is Liza, who went off into the deadly forest all alone and came back alive, who saved her mother even though she wasn’t supposed to have any magic? Do you have any idea how tired I am of hearing about how brave you are? The least you could do is live up to it.”

  I wasn’t brave, and I hadn’t been alone. Someone had been with me on that journey, but I’d forgotten his name as well. My chest hurt. I didn’t want to hurt. What was the point of pain when worlds were winding down?

  “I know,” Johnny said, though I hadn’t spoken aloud. “Been a rough week for both of us. Come on.” He held out a hand.

  He made everything sound so easy—I reached out and took his hand. His fingers were ice; I gasped at the cold that knifed through me. It turned to a painful tingling as dead branches fell away. I tried to burrow back down among them, but Johnny wouldn’t let go.

  “Sorry, Liza. You don’t get to take the easy way out.” He smiled sadly. “Only I get to do that. Promise me you’ll take care of Kyle?”

  Kyle—there was pain behind that name, too. “I promise.” The words came easily. I already had promised that, hadn’t I?

  Something stabbed at my eyes—light? Johnny shrank from it. “Also, tell Matthew it wasn’t his fault, okay? He’s like you and Tara—he always blames himself. Tell him.”

  “All right.” I was standing. When had I gotten to my feet?

  Johnny laughed softly. “So now you have no choice. You have promises to keep out there. And so I get to go. Thanks, Liza.”

  The light was growing brighter. Suddenly I wanted light, wanted color, more than anything. “Come here,” I whispered, and I felt that light pulling on me, as strongly as the gray had. I wanted spring. I needed spring. “Seek air, seek light, seek life!”

  Light and color flooded me—too much. I staggered and fell to my knees, but I kept my hand pressed against the quia tree. I was surrounded by color: pink sky, orange dawn, a snaking green thread that yearned toward me. I stood and pulled that thread, pulled it with all the magic I had. For a moment I saw Johnny, a shadow once more, watching me. “Seek rest,” I told him.

  “Already planning on it,” Johnny whispered. Then he was gone, and bright leaves were uncurling all around me—on the quia’s branches, on sumac and blackberry, on the brown oak nearby. I needed to do something once I woke the oak tree. What was I supposed to do?

  “Karin!” I called. “Karinna, come here!”

  Sunlight spilled like liquid fire over the horizon. It had been night when I’d started this. How long had I been here? I kept pulling on the green, pulling it out of a land beyond both my world and Faerie, a place where nothing grew—the place where all growing began. The thread thickened into a green rope. The rope grew slippery, seeking to escape my magic’s hold. For an instant it did escape, and I slid after it, back down into the gray—

  Then Karin was pulling the rope alongside me, and her magic wrapped around mine, adding its strength. Leaves exploded to life all around us. Brambles tangled my ankles. I ignored them. Nothing mattered more than holding on to that rope. We pulled harder, Karin and I, pulled the green out of quia and blackberry and sumac, out of trees farther and farther away. I pulled something more out of some of those farther trees, too, something human only I could call.

  Each pull drained something from me in turn. Leafy branches circled my waist, my chest, but I didn’t stop. We needed the green. We needed light and life and growth. Thorns pierced my skin, drawing blood. Through the branches, a hand grasped mine. “Spring,” Karin whispered. There was so much joy—so much light—in that word. “This world will hold a time longer yet.”

  I looked for Karin, caught a glimpse of green vines flowing up her neck, of thorns reaching for her eyes. “I’m … glad,” I managed to say. Green leaves sprouted between our fingers, pushing our hands apart. Tendrils wrapped around my ears, flowed over my face. I couldn’t see Karin anymore. I could only see green growth all around. I ached with the brightness of it.

  “Enough.” Karin’s voice was fainter. “Leave be.” She spoke to the plants now, not me. “Let blood and bone go. Seek soil, seek water, seek—”

  My ears rang. Very far away, someone called my name. I struggled toward the sound, but the plants were too strong. They dragged me down, and I fell into the green.

  SPRING

  Green light burned against the insides of my eyes, spreading through my arms, my legs, my thoughts. Green things whispered to me, speaking of hunger and soil, of pounding rain and searing sun. Pinpricks of pain raced along my body, thorns being torn away.

  “Hang in there, Lizzy. I’ve got you.”

  I tried to put a name to the voice, but I couldn’t think through the whispers and the light.

  “Wake up, Liza!” A child’s call—it had no power over me. “No sleeping! Wake up!” The child began to cry.

  Darkness threatened at the edges of the green. I fought it. I wanted light. I wanted spring. A wolf howled. I tried to answer it, but darkness closed in around me, darkness and ice.

  “Come here, Liza.” A cold voice—the Lady’s voice. “The worlds wind down, and no mere human shall escape their fate.” I had no choice. I followed her down into the endless dark, knowing that winter took everything in the end.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, Liza.” A girl’s voice. Silver light flooded my sight, chasing the dark away. “I tell you and tell you that you can’t leave us but you just—don’t—listen.” The light grew colder with every word, a cleaner cold with nothing of darkness in it. My arms and legs tingled, as if thawing after a walk in the snow. The tingling hurt—I bolted upright, fighting it, sending new pain through my shoulder, over my torn and ble
eding skin.

  “Stay still, Liza! Caleb’s with Karin, so I’m on my own, and I don’t want to push too hard—” The girl drew a gulping breath.

  I knew her then. “Allie?” That made no sense. Why was Caleb’s student here?

  “Please, Liza,” Allie said. She eased me down again. “I know this is hard. Don’t make it harder.”

  “Allie, how—”

  “Later,” Mom said. I knew her now, too. “There’ll be time later.” Mom’s hand grasped mine—my right hand, because something was wrong with my left—as Allie’s light washed over me again. Too cold—I screamed, and for a time I did nothing but scream. After that, I heard someone crying, and I didn’t know whether it was Allie or me.

  “You’re going to be all right, Liza. You know that, don’t you?” Allie sounded so tired. “Only you need to rest now. I’m sorry, but you do.” The darkness that wrapped around me was warmer now. Gentler. I fought it, but it pulled me under just the same.

  * * *

  I woke to a feather mattress beneath my back and a dull aching pain that filled my whole body. From someplace out of sight, I heard talking.

  “You said you could heal her.” Elin’s voice was bleak.

  “And so I have.” Caleb’s voice, hard and grim. His being here made no more sense than Allie’s being here.

  “Why should this world be saved,” Elin demanded, “while ours falls to dust?” Caleb had no answer for that.

  I opened my eyes. Light stung them. Bright afternoon sunlight, shining around the shutters of Kate’s bedroom window. From a chair at my side, Mom reached for my hand. Her face was covered in scratches, her arm bandaged, her wrist in a splint. “You’re hurt,” I said. Why was she hurt? The plants hadn’t attacked her.

  They had attacked me. Memory returned slowly, in tattered bits and pieces. Karin and I had called the plants back into the world, but then they’d attacked, because that was what plants did when they were awake.

  In a chair at the foot of the bed, Allie jerked awake, and she hurried to my other side. Mom released my hand.