Heat came into Darius’s face at those words. “Okay,” he said. “Yes.”
Ian smiled at that, but there was sadness behind his eyes. “Come, friend. We have spent enough time among the dead, even for necromancers such as we. Let us see what the living have to say.”
Darius hesitated, the book in his hand much heavier than it should be, given its size. But the king had exited already, and Darius hurried to catch him.
25
THE HEALING
“This seed is full of magic,” he said. “It will bring blessing to the people of the Sunlit Lands.”
FROM “THE PLANTING OF ALUVOREA,” AN ALUVOREAN CREATION TALE
Madeline woke to find herself still asleep. That’s how it felt, coming to this strange in-between space, where her mind—her soul? her self?—interacted with other people, completely apart from her body. It had happened before, back when the Garden Lady had disconnected her from her suffering body long enough to let her say good-bye to Jason and Darius in visions before she left the Sunlit Lands. Something like it happened every time she connected to someone to try to heal them. She knew she wasn’t truly disconnected from her body. She wasn’t traveling anywhere, she was just connecting with others near her. Someone had said to her once, “Maybe the human soul is bigger than the body.” It felt more like that. She was still tethered to the blood and bones and flesh of her failing body, but she was somehow free of its constraints, too.
Patra Koja was with her in this liminal space. He inclined his head to her when she became aware of him. He had placed Gilenyia’s body (or an image of that body?) on a long white table. The Elenil woman looked peaceful. “She is far gone down a difficult path,” he said. “I cannot wake her here. At least, not until we have worked some small healing.”
“Why did you want me to come here? Couldn’t you have done this yourself? Couldn’t you have done it from a distance?” Madeline was reminded of the first time she had seen him, in her dreams, when he had been deep in salt water.
He grunted. “I brought you here to learn, just as I sent your friend to Arakam to learn. But first we must save your Elenil friend.”
She wasn’t sure she would describe Gilenyia as a friend, but she knew what he meant. “How does this work?”
Patra Koja gestured at the prone Elenil. “How does a plant grow? The sun, the water, the minerals in the soil. So it is with magic. We take what is present and use it to create growth, to bear fruit, to make life.” He put his hand over Gilenyia’s wound, and a green light came from beneath his hand. Gilenyia began to breathe more easily, and the flesh closed up over her wound.
Amazing. Patra Koja did not seem weaker or even tired after this. “Why would the Elenil do any other kind of healing? Is this harder to do?”
“Not at all. But like any resource, it must be used in moderation, not for every whim. The Elenil, rather than respecting magic and using its resources for all people, continually steal from one another and create a new status quo. They keep Aluvorea from its regular cycle of renewal so they can keep control. Magic has been corrupted. It must be flushed out of the Sunlit Lands and reborn.”
Madeline put her hand on Gilenyia and felt the magical interface necessary for healing the way the Elenil did it. She could also feel what Patra Koja had done, could see the places where he had knit together the muscles and flesh, had repaired broken veins, had even created an increase of blood production. She recognized the green power at once. “This is the same thing the Queen’s Seed is trying to do in my body.” She opened her eyes and looked at the strange plant man. The branches on his head quivered. “Has the seed been trying to heal me?”
Patra Koja nodded. “It has been extending your life, but it cannot heal you. The magic that is killing you is moving too fast.”
“What? The magic that’s killing me?”
“Yes. Elenil magic is the source of your illness.” He studied her. “I see its mark on you from an early age. I do not know why it took so long to begin to corrupt your health. Perhaps something about the agreement that brought it into place.”
“Agreement?” What did this mean? Surely he wasn’t suggesting that she had somehow made a deal that allowed her to be sick. If she had, she had been tricked, and she wanted to talk to someone about changing that. She couldn’t imagine what she had possibly been given that would be worth this. “I didn’t agree to this.”
“No, no. I should have said that more clearly. This is an agreement that was made when you were young . . . perhaps even before you were born. It is not uncommon in some magical circles to do such things. It was an agreement made between two or perhaps three people, that much is clear. I have sent out my magic to identify them and bring them here. It is a massive amount of magic, but if you are truly the annaginuk, then what little magic we have managed to save will soon be returned to the sea.”
Madeline tried to follow all that and didn’t quite manage it. “If it was before I was born . . . who would have had the right to speak for me?”
Several leaves fell from Patra Koja’s face. His eyes were sad. “A parent, I would say.”
A parent. Of course. Madeline wanted to feel rage, anger, or even surprise, but she felt only a tired acceptance. She had barely seen her dad since the sickness started, and her mom vacillated between intense overinvolvement and happy-faced denial. “Why are you bringing them here?”
The plant man crouched down so his face was even with hers. “For closure. So you can speak to them of this agreement they have made, and perhaps discover its origin.”
Her face flushed. “For closure.” Those two words filled her with anger, which was ironic, given that realizing her own parents were responsible for her illness did not. “Because I’m dying,” she said, her voice flat.
He put his green hand over hers. “I do not see a way that will not be true, Madeline Oliver. Death comes for all. Today or tomorrow or years from now. You have walked far down that path already. Would you wish to walk it again?”
This was true. As her breath waned, everything became more difficult. Just sitting somewhere. Walking was the most painful thing she had done in her life. She could scarcely eat anymore. She was tired. More than tired, even with the Queen’s Breath. In moments like this, when her mind could act in the near absence of her body, she had a brief memory of what it was like to live.
“No,” she said honestly. “But I’m not ready to go, either.”
“That is the way of it,” Patra Koja said.
The magical interface with Gilenyia drew Madeline’s attention. This Elenil woman would live for hundreds of years . . . had already lived so many years more than Madeline. She could feel the connection and knew that Gilenyia could do nothing to stop her from changing it . . . from using Elenil magic to take what she wished, much in the way the Elenil had done for centuries. She could take Gilenyia’s health as her own if she wanted.
“It is not wise to use Elenil magic in this way,” Patra Koja warned.
“Will you try to stop me?”
“No,” Patra Koja said. “Do as you must. I will only bear witness.”
She knew in that moment that she could do it. She could take a hundred years from Gilenyia. She could, for that matter, simply take Gilenyia’s breath. Gilenyia was not conscious, not able to stop Madeline. She explored Gilenyia’s lungs, marveled at the way they expanded, that the branching passageways delivered air so effortlessly. She could take that. She could make herself well, at least for a time, and no one would stop her. She knew already that if Gilenyia died while Madeline had her breath, Madeline would keep it forever. There was no one to see what Madeline chose, no one to tell her that this would be an evil action. A life for a life. And didn’t Gilenyia, the Elenil healer, make choices like this all the time, letting Scim die so Elenil could live? Wouldn’t this be a sort of justice? She could move her curse, let it settle into Gilenyia’s body. She could leave then, leave this all behind. She would have no obligation to continue here in the Sunlit Lands, no n
eed to help the Aluvoreans with their broken magic system, no need to fight, no need to think about these things at all. She could go home, finish high school, be normal, maybe even be with Darius again if he would take her back.
This was the choice she had made her whole life, she realized. That simple question, What would it take to be normal? To be normal meant certain sacrifices had to be made. You had to keep your mouth shut. Don’t bring up hard things or questions that make people uncomfortable. Don’t worry so much about how exactly you got your beautiful life, just take it. Don’t think about who else might have paid the price. She could be forgiven for doing the same thing everyone else was doing.
Not that everyone else was stealing their breath from another person. But it wasn’t her fault that she had been cursed with this breathing problem. It wasn’t her fault, and she didn’t deserve it. She was a better person than Gilenyia. She was! She was certain of this. She felt the change in Gilenyia’s breathing, saw her convulse, her body straining for breath. She felt her own body, far away, take a deep breath, pure oxygen entering her system. It was luxurious.
But where did it end? If she took Gilenyia’s health, why not take it from others, too? How long until she had some other physical malady she didn’t want to live with? She knew that if she took Gilenyia’s breath it would not be the end. Two choices stood before her now: to live or to die. To take a life or lose her own. To become someone else, someone unrecognizable, so she could continue to live, or to be herself and cease to be.
Patra Koja said nothing. He stood, watching, still and quiet as a tree. She turned her back so he could not see her face. She thought of her parents. She did not, in this moment, blame them. Maybe they had faced a choice as difficult as this one. She knew in a flash of insight that it was her mother who had made this deal, who had allowed Madeline to be cursed. She didn’t know how or why, but she could feel it in the moments of strange grief and defensiveness in her mother’s interactions with her over the years. Little comments that made sense now. “I’ve done so much for you” and “you should be thankful” and even, sometimes, strange moments when she said “I’m sorry” when she had done nothing wrong, and Madeline’s father would bustle her off to another room, another chore, another activity.
But this had never been Madeline’s way, to take things from others. To steal, to harm, to kill. She thought of the painful decision she’d made to save Jason’s life by killing a Scim. She had tried to keep from thinking about it, and with everything else going on—Shula coming home with her, and trouble with Yenil and school, and, of course, dying—she had managed to keep it stuffed down, hidden away. The Scim had a name, she knew. Night’s Breath. Gilenyia had forced her into the decision, but Madeline had made it. She had chosen to let that Scim die so Jason could live. She had killed him, and she might as well say it plainly. She did it for the right reason, though, even if Jason didn’t see it that way. So she wanted to say it wasn’t her way to steal or harm or kill, but when it came down to it, she had done all those things. Had done all of them and had managed to avoid feeling bad about it, mostly.
She was in that place again.
Gilenyia was going to die. If Madeline did nothing, she was done. Why should she let the Elenil’s breath go to waste? If Jason were here, she thought he would encourage her, tell her that he wanted her to live, and that was more important than what happened to Gilenyia.
No. That wasn’t true. And if she could do nothing else for Jason, she could show him the respect of being honest. Jason didn’t like the fact that she had killed Night’s Breath to save him. He wouldn’t be on board with killing Gilenyia to save Madeline, and she knew that for a fact because he had told her how proud he was that she had chosen not to take Yenil’s breath. It would break his heart, but he would tell her not to kill Gilenyia. And Darius, she knew Darius would tell her to do it . . . but this was exactly the sort of thought she kept telling him he should lay aside, that he was better than that, gentler, kinder, more righteous.
She couldn’t go back and change things with Night’s Breath (and she wasn’t sure she would want to). But she could make the right choice now. In fact, if she was dying (and she knew she was, there was no mistaking it these days) then she should see if there was something she could leave for Gilenyia. Some little gift. An apology of sorts, for considering murdering her.
But first she had to give Gilenyia back her breath. Back in her body, Madeline took a deep inhalation of fresh air, savored it. She was thankful for it. Gilenyia writhed, gasping for air. Madeline gave it back to her and watched Gilenyia’s breathing go panicked for a moment, then gradually relax.
A weight of sorrow pressed down on Madeline. She shouldered it. This was a burden she would not have to carry long. It was her friends, her family, her loved ones, who would carry it soon, and this both added to her sorrow and lessened it. She reached out into Gilenyia’s body again, looking for some small blessing she could leave her, and found it almost immediately. Gilenyia had lost the ability to have children. Perhaps had never had it. But Madeline could see this was not the result of some physical issue but a magical one. There were knots of power in place to prevent Gilenyia from having a child. Madeline’s body, even breaking down as it was, still held the potential to birth a child—a potential she would never have a chance to use. So with the skills of Elenil magic that Gilenyia herself had taught her, Madeline took the knotted mess of magic inside Gilenyia into herself. She looked at what remained in Gilenyia, and confident that it had worked, she broke contact with the Elenil.
She stumbled, and Patra Koja caught her, lowering her to the ground. She had never felt so weak in this dream state, this mental space, before. She could not imagine it was a good sign. “I do not know if this thing you have done is a kindness or a cruelty,” Patra Koja said. “Though I can see in all your heart you meant only kindness toward the Elenil.”
She did not have the strength to answer this. “Patra Koja,” she said. “If I enter your mind, can I see the state of Aluvorea? Can I see why I am needed, and what I may be able to give to this place?”
“Indeed,” he said gently, and he showed her.
She could see it all. The many trees and plants that came from Earth—maples and redwoods and plum trees and dogwoods and evergreens—as well as the distinctly Aluvorean plants: stone flowers, faerie’s bells, addleberries, firethorns, and many others. She could see an island—the Queen’s Island—and upon it a throne, and upon the throne a desiccated corpse from long ago, so old that it should have turned to bones and dust by now, and upon the brow of the corpse, a crown, polished and nut brown, and branches growing from the crown. It had woven branches at the bottom and then a profusion of wild growth at the top, reaching upward, and there were gems and strange images and reflections somehow set in the branches. One oval gem seemed more mirror than stone, and Madeline could see herself in it, she thought, cloudy and distant. The water around the island was a brackish, silent lake, and this felt wrong. It had once been a river, she knew, that flowed south through all of Aluvorea. The carnivorous forest was wrong. It should have never grown so large. The firethorns burned too hot to the east. They should not have been isolated and corralled as they had been, should have been allowed to thin themselves through the rest of the forest, to burn down the dead trees and underbrush and create rich soil for those which remained. The dragon, Arakam, stirred beneath the waterfalls to the north. She could see it all, that the healthy parts of the forest were smaller, that Aluvorea was shrinking. It had been, once, a great primeval thing that spread all the way through the Wasted Lands and went to the doorstep of Far Seeing. Now it retreated from encroaching desert.
“I see,” she said, and she did. For now she saw the way the magic had been cut off, prevented from doing what it was meant to do. Aluvorea drew her magic from the deep places of the land. Madeline saw it like an orb, with the land in the center and chaotic water beneath. From that came the magic, which the trees brought up through their roots and spread
through the land. Then the magic returned to the sea, in time, and was renewed and then came again. But the Elenil and the Scim had broken this cycle. They had stopped it, built a sort of magical dam, and now it had gone stagnant and strange.
She could get it started again. She saw how to do it. She would go to the island and take the Heartwood Crown and put it upon her own head, and she would reset the magic of the world. Not as punishment. Not for justice. As a gift. An extravagant gift.
She opened her eyes. Her physical eyes. Tried to breathe.
“Patra . . . Koja.” She was covered in vines.
He was chest deep in the water. He came to the edge of the makeshift raft he had made. “Annaginuk. What do you bid of me?”
“The two . . . your magic . . . seeks. Have you . . . found them?”
“Yes. I know their names.”
“Is one . . . my mother?”
“Yes.”
She thought about that for a moment, but it was so hard to think now, so hard to do anything but push through the pain. “And my father?”
He shook his head. “It is an Elenil.”
“Can you . . . bring my . . . mother?”
“I have enough magic to bring two people here,” he said. She noticed that his leaves, which had been bright green when they arrived, were brown and yellow and orange now.
“My mother . . . and Yenil,” she said.
“What of the Elenil?”
“Name?” she asked.
“His name is Hanali, son of Vivi.”
Madeline closed her eyes. She had thought it might be him. She didn’t understand what this meant, but it was too late now. She didn’t want to see him. Not now. Not this minute. “Leave him . . . be,” she said. “Bring Yenil . . . instead.”
“So be it, my queen,” Patra Koja said.
Shula was at her side, stroking her brow. David came near and, with her permission, began to cut away the vines holding her down with his knife. When she was free, David helped prop her up against Shula, her head elevated so she could get the best breath she was able. David, always a kind soul, sat beside them, his legs crossed, his knife in hand. Gilenyia slept. Patra Koja waded through the water.
The Heartwood Crown Page 27
