Silver Shard

by Betsy Streeter

  Monder turns and stares down at Helen with hateful fiery eyes. He knows this girl can’t hurt him now. Helen can’t even raise her arms. He hisses at her. “Kate Silverwood murdered her own family, and took away the one person—the one Tromindox—I cared about. Your mother is a lowlife murdering liar.”

  “I will never believe anything you say!” Helen screams, emptying her lungs. Her words sound garbled in her ears and her legs are filling with liquid lead.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” Monder says. “Your lovely mother, Kate Silverwood, should be the one in here—not me. That woman committed cold-blooded murder, and then she made sure that I was the one convicted for it. That I was the one blamed, banished for hiding Tromindox in human form among you. Accused of infiltrating the Silverwood clan. Go on, Helen, do the research. Look into your family’s storied history. You’ll learn what happened. Oh, unless you’ve bled to death first, in which case…I guess you won’t.” He walks back over to the skeleton, dangling the second fragment from his fingers.

  Helen lifts herself up on one shaking elbow, scraping her boots back and forth to try and keep conscious. She manages to get up on all fours and spits out a mouthful of blood onto the floor. It forms a puddle, and flows into the indentations in the stone…

  Scratched marks appear on the floor that clearly spell the word: NOW.

  Henry.

  Helen can no longer speak. She reaches out with her left hand, groping for the circle at the center of the floor. With her thumb she finds the edge of the round center stone. She flails her hand and feels nothing at first, but then her fingers hit an invisible object, heavy. She grabs at it with all her strength, closing her fingers around the handle of the Shard, now shining silver.

  Monder ignores Helen and pops open the box around the Chairman’s neck containing the other fragment. As he brings Helen’s fragment toward its partner, the broken edges glow brighter and blue lines of current jump between them.

  Helen rises up on one knee, then pulls her feet under her. She drags the Shard along the floor, sparks flying from its blade as it scrapes the stone.

  Monder hears Helen and turns. There, at the center of the room, he beholds a girl half bent over, one hand clutching a spine in her stomach, the other barely hanging onto the handle of an axe nearly the size of her whole body. She wobbles back and forth on her feet, unable to lift her eyes from the floor.

  The two fragments throw out orange rays of light as they meld together into a single portal. “You can’t lift that axe,” Monder says, turning his back on Helen to admire the now-complete coin. “That Shard is solid silver. It’s too much for you. Don’t be stupid. Many thanks to your family for bringing it, though. It will look very nice on display somewhere. Right next to this pretty coin. Perhaps I’ll include a plaque with the Silverwood legend, too. You know, as a nod to extinct species. That’s what you do, right? In your natural history museums?

  “Isn’t that paradoxical? That your storied family history will ultimately destroy you? Ironic, for time travelers. Your past catches up with you—quite literally.”

  As Monder watches the portal, Helen stumbles forward, nearly falling with each step, until she stands at the exact center of the room. The Shard’s weight tears at her arm muscles. Monder is right: She can’t lift it.

  Still clutching the quill in her stomach with her right hand, she tightens her grip on the Shard’s handle and begins to haul her body around in a circle.

  The axe drags around with her. At first the blade only wobbles around on the ground. But the edges of the round stone at the center of the floor guide Helen’s feet. She goes around once, twice, picks up speed, and soon the Shard lifts from the floor. Her fingers close around the handle. Her arm seems lighter. The Shard rises silently into the air, nearly reaching shoulder height. Black spots fill Helen’s eyes, but the Shard rises even higher as if powering itself, Helen’s hand guiding its path.

  And then, Helen lets the Shard go.

  The Shard cuts the air, spinning blade around handle. Monder never sees it coming. The axe cleaves Tromindox, portal, and skeleton and smashes into the wall.

  A deafening blast, and a wave of white-hot light burns Helen’s face. Cracking, crumbling stones fall all around her. She drops to her knees, then rolls onto her side, seeing every timeframe collapse into her mind at once: ruins, finished walls, ‘toms dropping from the sky.

  Monder is gone. The portal is gone. The axe is lodged in the charred remains of a wall, having cleanly and completely separated the skeleton’s head from its body.

  “Thank you,” Helen says. She rolls up in a ball on the circle at the center of the floor, and everything goes black.

  A mountain path. Helen sees bright green ferns growing in bunches close to the ground; moss droops from tree branches. The trail winds upward, switching back on itself again and again. She can smell rain in the air.

  As she climbs upward, the trees thin and big boulders appear. The path meanders more now, winding around and sometimes disappearing amongst the rocks. But it still rises toward the sky.

  Loose dirt and scree slide underfoot. The air is thin, the trees small and shrubby. Helen scrambles over granite, nearly on her hands and knees, and then a flash of light burns into her eye.

  The tree of silver reaches for the sky from between the rocks. Its twisted roots embrace the granite. Light bounces off of it and scatters in every direction.

  But as Helen draws closer, she can see that many of the roots are not roots at all but wires that snake up from the ground and choke the trunk. Thick tubes strangle the branches. Jagged metal restraints, bolted deep into the wood, disfigure and split the bark. This is merely the smothered shape of a tree.

  Helen reaches out to touch the tree, desperate to find living tissue in-between the many tubes and restraints. When she lays her hands on it the tree’s inner life unfolds, thousands of years gathered up within its rings. Memories and images of time and space unwind, layer after layer, a spiral spinning back to its earliest life deep inside.

  Helen sees a young child pulling down a leaf, embarking on a journey through time. There is a couple escaping into the future with their first child. The Book of the Future. . A branch, lying on the ground. The Silver Shard. Countless passages, journeys out and back again, layered on top of one another. A life with branches upon branches, roots reaching down into the Earth. She sees a tinkerer repairing tears in the fabric of time and a scribe making intricate maps by candlelight.

  Bolts come loose and metal restraints peel away from the tree’s trunk. The wires and tubes relinquish their hold, unwind, and dissipate or slither back into the ground. Leaves unfold and the bark breathes free again.

  Helen watches a single new leaf sprout from the tiniest branch.

  Helen’s arm feels heavy. She struggles to lift it. Perhaps it is broken. Maybe the Shard blew it to bits.

  She looks down to find that it is not her arm imposing the weight, but the round head of her brother, fast asleep next to her in the hospital bed.

  “Hey, Henry,” Helen says, patting his white-blond mop of hair. “I can’t move.”

  Henry’s head pops up.

  “Helen! Helen! Helen! Helen! Helen’s awake!” Henry shouts, jumping down off of the bed and running toward the door.

  “We’re right here,” Kate says, unfolding herself from a square chair in the corner. “Henry, come back. Don’t alarm the staff.”

  “How are you feeling, kid?” Gabriel asks his daughter. His face looks gaunt, like he hasn’t slept in a long time. He stands by the bed and brushes her bangs with his fingers.

  “Okay,” Helen says. She becomes aware of the bandages wrapped around and around her torso. She is delighted to see there is no quill sticking out of her.

  “You got totally stabbed!” Henry says, as if this fact confers upon Helen a very special status. “I made you something.” He crawls around under the bed, rummaging. When he re-emerges, he’s got a piece of paper. He hands it to his sister.

&n
bsp; It’s a drawing of Helen, but this time there are no spots or fangs. She’s flying; she’s got a cape—like a superhero.

  “Wow. Thanks, Henry,” Helen says, and gathers up her brother in her arms.

  “I drew it when I was in the little room,” Henry says.

  “I will keep it forever,” Helen says.

  “Hey, she’s up!” Christopher and Daniel come through the wide hospital door, careful to close it behind them. They don’t want to raise questions. Not everyone knows they are here.

  Christopher grabs his bass from the corner. “I wrote you a song,” he says.

  “Oh, my god!” Helen says.

  “Wait, I haven’t played the song yet,” Christopher objects. “You can be amazed in a minute.”

  “You cut your hair!”

  Daniel stands at the foot of the bed, saying nothing. He looks down. “Yeah, I did,” he says, running his hand over his now-short brown hair. It’s cropped close on the sides, but he did leave a bit of a mess on top. He’s got a lightning bolt worked into one side. And a start on a goatee.

  Helen stares at him. “The dreads are gone!”

  Daniel can think of nothing to say, so he repeats, “Yeah.”

  “I like it,” Helen says.

  Daniel brightens. “You do?”

  “I do; it looks good,” Helen says. “I mean, it’s your hair. You know, I mean, I don’t have to approve or anything. But it does. Look good, I mean.” Helen attempts a lighthearted laugh but her stomach hurts too much.

  Henry, Christopher, Gabriel and Kate swivel their heads back and forth as if watching a tennis match. This is good.

  “Anyway, I’m gonna go soon,” Daniel says. “I’m gonna study to be a Watchmaker. You know, pick up the skills. There’s a lot of work to do out there and almost nobody to do it. I talked to my uncle and he says go for it. So I’ll be an apprentice for a while.”

  “That’s great,” Helen says, nodding. “Really. Great.”

  “Okay, can I play my song now?” Christopher says. He puts a foot up on a chair and begins strumming.

  Christopher teaches everyone the lyrics, which change every few minutes, and the tune, which also changes, but soon everyone is singing along—quietly, so as not to disturb anyone outside.

  Helen and Kate sit together on the roof, legs dangling over the side. Car horns and engine noises echo up at them from below.

  “You know, in a way, you’re lucky you came back injured,” Kate says to her daughter.

  Helen looks surprised. “Why?”

  “Because if you hadn’t been injured, I would have injured you,” Kate says. “I didn’t know whether to hug you or strangle you. What possessed you to take off with the fragment by yourself like that?”

  “Monder said not to tell anyone or he’d kill Henry,” Helen says. “And it was my fault Henry got taken. I’m the one who let go of him. I had to be the one to try and get him back. And then when I did find him it just turned out…complicated.” She looks down at the street below.

  “Look,” Kate says, “I am the last person to second-guess anybody when they are forced to make decisions under extreme pressure. Your father and I both have had to make impossible choices many times. We’ve had to go with our gut, and do the best we could with what we had. Sometimes it feels like that’s all we do. And I admire you, Helen, for doing what you felt was the right thing.”

  Helen looks up. “Really?”

  “Yes, really, when I am not considering strangling you,” Kate says. “Helen, I want you to remember this: We are a clan. We are a scattered, chaotic clan. We have almost been destroyed many times. We don’t all think the same way—in fact, we rarely do. But that’s our advantage. It’s not a weakness. Remember that. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Helen says. She sits quietly for a moment. “Mom, I saw the tree.”

  “What do you mean?” Kate asks.

  “The Silverwood tree. I saw it, more than once. It was being attacked, Mom. It had these restraints on it. Like someone was trying to strangle it to death with wires and things. It was kind of more of a machine than a tree.”

  “Really,” Kate says, considering what her daughter has said.

  “Yeah, but the last time I saw it, the bolts were coming off, and it was breaking free. I reached out and touched it, Mom. In my dream. What does that mean? That I saw the tree?”

  “You don’t see the tree,” Kate says. “The tree sees you.”

  “What does that mean?” Helen asks. “I saw…”

  “You saw a reflection,” Kate says. “Helen you are getting older; your abilities are expanding. Your perspective is expanding. You and your brother, you both have the Vision. Two different versions, but it’s there. And Anna was right, the Vision is very strong. You saw the tree looking back at you, telling you about where you are in your life and in the clan.” She puts a hand on Helen’s shoulder and smiles. “I don’t know exactly how to interpret what was reflected to you. You have a long distance to go, but you are on your way.”

  “There is a lot to learn, and so many people you haven’t met yet,” Kate adds. “Guild. Watchmakers. You need training. Your brother needs training. Shoot, I need training. We’ve got to manage your capabilities, give you control.”

  “What will Anna do?” Helen asks. “Where will she go now that she’s not on a hidden ship in the middle of the ocean?”

  Kate lets out a sigh. “Anna has always operated on her own wavelength, done things her own way. I suspect she’ll continue on her journey by herself. That’s her personality. But I’m sure we’ll see her again. Next time we need to track down a crazy mythical weapon of some kind.”

  “I want to know what happened when I was a baby,” Helen says. “Why you and Dad jumped into the future with me.”

  “That would be one of those decisions I was referring to,” Kate says. “Your father and I were in an impossible situation, and we did the best we could. We found out that someone we cared about was not who she said she was. We had reason to believe that the Tromindox had infiltrated us, that the clan itself was in danger of extinction. Banishing Monder and escaping with you was our best chance at survival. Or so we thought at the time…” Kate falls silent. The two of them sit for a long moment, together in time and space.

  “You know, there have been times when humans and Tromindox have tried to make peace,” Kate says.

  “Seriously?” Helen asks.

  “Really,” Kate says. “But it has always ended badly. The two species simply cannot grow to trust one another. It is a predator-prey relationship. That’s the nature of it. Every time we attempt to evolve beyond that, things get complicated. Or fall apart.”

  “Sometime I’ll explain it all to you,” Kate continues. “For now, I think we should go camping and forget about responsibilities for a while.”

  “Okay,” Helen says.

  Mother and daughter return from the roof to their new apartment where Gabriel and Henry have pitched a tent on the floor and Christopher is making pancakes while Clarence naps in a patch of sun.

  The Author

  Betsy Streeter grew up amongst cows, wineries, and physicists on a steady diet of Star Trek, The Muppet Show and Atari games. She did her high school FORTRAN homework on a Cray. After a journey she calls “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride Through Corporate America” during which she also bacame a syndicated cartoonist, she emerged as a novelist and fantasy artist. She is the author and illustrator of the science fiction serial Neptune Road and several spinoff stories. Her work travels the world in many forms including books, magazines, pixels, a science exhibit on black holes, and at least one tattoo. Her debut novel Silverwood was an iBooks Best New Fantasy Pick and topped its categories at major retailers. She lives in Northern California with her husband, two loud kids, two peculiar cats and a mellow but hungry tarantula.

  The Silverwood Series

  Silverwood

  Book 1

  Silver Shard

  Book 2

  ...look for more titles com
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