“There are the monsters you’ve probably read about in books,” continued Evangelyne. “Vampires and ghosts and demons. There are imps and redcaps and will-o’-the-wisps and sprites like dear Halflight.”
“Dragons?” asked Milo hopefully. “Are there dragons?”
Evangelyne looked at him like he was crazy. “Dragons? Dragons aren’t real. Don’t be silly.”
He said, “Oh.”
“Our ancestors learned how to move between those worlds. Not just between different versions of Earth, but into stranger places. There are kingdoms in the morning mist. There are the realms of faerie and the ghost worlds. There are worlds that hide at the bottom of wells and inside thoughts and behind doorways in dreams. I know that must sound like mystical nonsense to you, but it is the world as we have always known it. It’s what’s real to us. Do you understand?”
Milo nodded. “Kind of,” he said.
“Some of us learned to move between those worlds,” continued the wolf girl, “and for a long, long time our world was the infinite lands of darkness. Our greatest sorcerers and witches, the elves and faerie folk, built doorways that connected the many realms.”
All Milo could say was, “Wow.”
“The world you know came later. Your cities and nations sprang up so fast, though, and you grew in such numbers that soon this world”—and here she tapped the hard reality of the table—“became crowded.”
“Too crowded to share,” said Oakenayl bitterly.
“Why?” asked Milo.
“Because your kind don’t want to share it,” replied the oak boy. “You never did. As soon as you discovered fire, you began to burn us. When you forged iron and bronze and steel, you cut us down. When you invented guns, you hunted us.”
“That’s not—” began Milo, but he couldn’t finish his protest because he knew that there was some truth in this. He’d read books about the witch trials and vampire hunters; about silver bullets and stakes and garlic.
Evangelyne nodded. “Because we’re who we are, your kind thought we were evil. To us the word ‘monster’ means the same as ‘different’ or ‘individual.’ To you it stands for something to fear. Something to hate. Something evil.”
Milo could not meet her eyes. This was hard to take.
“Be fair, Evangelyne,” cautioned Halflight. “The people of the sun did not invent evil.”
“No, but they treated us as if we were evil. They were evil to us.” Evangelyne paused, head tilted as if listening to her own words. “But you’re right. I’m not being fair. Evil isn’t something that belongs to one species. There are evil ones among us too. Killers and haters.”
“They started this war,” growled Oakenayl. “They began hunting us long before we turned to hunt them.” He made a fist that was all knots of wood, and as he clenched it, the wood squealed like a voice screaming. “You even cut down the living trees to make your spears and stakes. You built pyres from young trees to burn us.”
Milo felt his face grow hot. He wanted to say that it was all lies, that it wasn’t how things were, but Milo could not sit here with these creatures and lie. He could not.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thick with emotion, his heart heavy with shame and grief.
“Sorry?” began Oakenayl as if he was offended by the word. Instead Evangelyne touched his shoulder and he fell silent.
“This is what your people have done, Milo,” she said. “We are not saying that you have done it.”
“No,” Milo said, “but none of ‘my people’ are here. No one else is going to say it, so maybe I should. I’m sorry. All of that was wrong. We shouldn’t have done it. It was bad. It was . . . evil.”
Halflight came to his defense with a smile and a shake of her fiery hair. “Not all of it was done out of malice, Milo. Much of it was done from fear. Your kind hate what you fear, and you attack what you hate. It’s a mark of the people of the sun. Maybe that’s how you survived those days when you huddled in caves and were hunted by tigers and bears. Maybe hate is your weapon. It seems to be.”
Milo put his face in his palms. “That’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
A sob broke in his chest.
They waited in silence.
Finally, little Halflight spoke. “He weeps for us.”
No one spoke.
“Has any of them ever wept for us before?” she asked the others.
Still no one spoke. After a moment, someone placed a finger under Milo’s chin and raised his head. At first he thought it was Evangelyne. It wasn’t. Nor was it Mook.
Instead Oakenayl looked him in the eye. He looked at the tears on Milo’s face, and there was conflict in his eyes. Though Milo found it hard to read the expression of a face whose skin was bark and wood grain, he thought he saw regret there.
“Not in my lifetime,” he said. “Not one tear.”
Milo sniffed and wiped his eyes.
“I lost people I care about too,” he said. “My dad a couple of years ago. My friends today. Shark and Lizabeth and Barnaby. Bunch of others. I can’t even process it yet.”
Halflight flitted near him and sniffed at the wet places on his cheeks. “Tell him the rest, Evangelyne.”
“Sure. Waste more time talking. Then we need to stop talking and do something,” said Oakenayl, slapping a woody palm down on the table.
“Mook!”
“Hush, then, and let me speak.” Evangelyne took a breath. “Because your kind wanted us to be monsters, Milo, that’s what we became. Feral and strange. Vicious, at times. As you hunted us, some of us hunted you. It became very bad, and it stayed bad for a long time. Over time, as Oakenayl said, we turned and began to hunt you. We were very good at it too. Some of us became as bad, as vicious, as you humans. They became so frightening that now they are all that you know of. Because of them, we became the reason your people are afraid of the dark. They are the reason you fear the shadows. They are the things that go bump in the night.”
Milo felt the room grow quiet and cold around him. It wasn’t fear. Or, it wasn’t only fear. The room was actually colder. As the strange girl spoke, her breath plumed between them as if each separate word revealed a ghost. Milo kept waiting—wishing, hoping—that she would burst out laughing the way Barnaby had done. The way Shark would after a practical joke ran its course. The moment stretched. It became excruciating as he sat there waiting for none of this to be true. There were already enough monsters in the world. The dark was already dark enough.
“Are you afraid of us now?” she asked calmly. The candlelight constantly shifted the shadows on her face, changing her expression, giving her a hundred different faces, none of them truly human.
“Yes,” Milo managed to say. “Of course I’m afraid. I’m so scared I want to run and hide. Is that what you want? Are you happy now?”
Her icy gaze held for a moment longer; then she looked away. “There used to be whole villages of werewolves. Castles filled with vampires. Forests where elves and sprites and faeries lived. Caves where trolls and ogres made their homes. But even before the Swarm came, those villages had become only memories. The castles are in ruins; the graveyards are filled with silent bones; the caves belong to bats; and nothing but fish swim in the lakes. Except for those who escaped to other worlds and the few left here, the rest are gone. The world has fewer shadows in it than it had before. Do you understand?”
Milo said that he did, but asked, “Why didn’t you escape?”
“This is our world too, Milo Silk,” said Halflight. “Even when humans crowded us out, we still loved this world. We loved it first and we will always love it. Some of us do not want to leave it.”
“Even now, when it is being torn apart,” said Oakenayl, nodding.
“Even now, because it is being torn apart,” corrected Evangelyne. “It would be like betraying a friend who needs you. It would be like leaving our mother to die alone because we did not care enough to protect her.”
They all looked
sad and weary. Mook clanked his rocky fists together.
“Mook,” he said glumly.
“Besides,” said the wolf girl, “now, even if we wanted to, we can’t.”
“Why not?” asked Milo gently.
“There was a time when all doors were open to those who knew how to find them. We had keepers—door wardens—who guarded those doors,” explained Evangelyne. “They knew the secrets of moving between worlds. Your people destroyed many of those keepers.”
“How?”
“Maybe they didn’t know that’s what they were doing. Doorways are hidden, and the wardens aren’t exactly like sentries standing guard. Not in the way you think. A keeper might have been a certain tree planted from a magical seed. Or a waterfall whose waters were snow pure. Or a circle of twigs that the wind could not blow away. Each was placed there using great magicks.”
“Old magicks,” said Halflight. “Magicks the like of which have mostly faded from the world. The faerie folk knew some of them. So did we sprites and water witches and dryads. Each of our kind had their own special magic, and there were magicks known only to the oldest and wisest of us.”
“What happened?”
Oakenayl ground his teeth. “Forests were cleared to build cities. Mountains were leveled to make roads. Waterways became polluted, and the spirits within them sickened and died. That’s what happened.”
“Oh,” said Milo, deeply sorry that he’d asked.
“Our elders—parents and others who tended to the youngest of us,” said Evangelyne, “tried their best to push back. Some even lived among you, blending in, trying to influence you to be kinder to the world in which we all lived. Sometimes they succeeded. Many times they failed. With each new failure, they became more disillusioned and sent more and more of us away into shadow worlds.”
“Not all of us left,” said Halflight.
“Some of us didn’t want to go,” said Oakenayl. “Some of us wanted to stay here and fight back.”
“Against the aliens?” asked Milo.
“Against you.”
“Oh.”
Evangelyne said, “My mother and aunts stayed to fight the Bugs. So did Oakenayl’s father and Mook’s whole family. We’re here because they stayed.”
“The Nightsiders fought against the aliens?”
Evangelyne paused. “We started to, but then the Huntsman came.”
Milo swallowed hard.
“We believe he was created to hunt us down,” said Halflight. “That was part of a prophecy.”
“From the witch?”
“Yes. Evangelyne’s mother had a dream a few months ago. A dark dream filled with horrors. The Huntsman and his pack came the very next day, and with them legions of shocktroopers.”
“What happened?”
“Whole forests burned,” said Evangelyne. “Mountains were torn down to find the Nightsiders. The Huntsman set traps, and he threw the full weight of the Swarm against us.”
There was a dreadful silence.
“I never saw my mother again,” said the wolf girl. “I never saw another of my kind again.”
“Nor I,” said Oakenayl.
“Mook.”
“I . . . I’m so sorry,” said Milo.
They sat together in wretched silence.
Into the silence, Evangelyne spoke. She raised her head and in that moment truly did look older, more majestic. More powerful and far more dangerous.
“The orphans of that slaughter found one another,” she said. “We formed an army. We are going to fight back. Today we tried to lay a trap for the Huntsman. To get back the Heart of Darkness and to claim revenge for what that monster has done.”
Her eyes faltered and fell away.
“But we failed. The Huntsman lives . . . and the Heart of Darkness is lost.”
A horrible thought blossomed in Milo’s mind. “Wait. Today . . . you tricked the Huntsman into coming down and chasing you?”
She nodded. “We tried. We let ourselves be seen. We know he’s trying to find Nightsiders for capture and study. To use us to unlock the secrets of the Heart.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Milo sharply, “but did you deliberately set your trap near our camp?”
Evangelyne said nothing, but her eyes grew wide as the implications sank in. Mook looked down at his rocky fists; even Oakenayl turned away as if ashamed.
“We thought the Huntsman would come down with a few shocktroopers,” said Evangelyne, barely able to look at him. “We never—ever—thought the Swarm would send an entire assault force. We . . . did not know they would attack your camp.”
“Didn’t know or didn’t care?” asked Milo bitterly.
No one answered him.
He sniffed and wiped tears from his eyes. “Everyone I know is probably dead,” he said softly. “All of my friends. Everyone. Maybe even my mom, if she came back while the Bugs were still there.”
He buried his face in his hands and wept.
He cried for a long time. Grief was like a knife stuck deep in his chest. Halflight came and sat on his shoulder. After a while Mook placed a heavy hand on Milo’s back.
“Mook,” he said sadly.
Evangelyne touched the tears on Milo’s cheeks and then stared at the wetness on her own fingers. There were tears in her eyes too.
Finally Milo pulled himself back from his pain. He knew that he would have to plunge into that icy water again, but not now. Not now. There was too much to do. He wiped his face on his sleeve and blinked his eyes clear.
“You’re trapped here now?” asked Milo thickly. “On this world?”
“Yes.”
“And all your parents are gone?”
“Yes.”
“Like mine.”
Evangelyne gazed at him with her pale eyes. “Yes.”
“Look . . . I need to tell you guys something, but I have a couple questions first, okay?”
“We didn’t bring you here to interrogate us,” said Oakenayl.
Milo looked him straight in the eye. “Who cares? You guys are in trouble, and so am I. You guys lost everyone you loved, and so did I. You guys have some powers and some knowledge . . . so do I. Maybe we should, I don’t know, work together? Am I the only one who doesn’t think that’s a bad idea?”
Oakenayl snapped his mouth shut and glared.
That was fine with Milo. He could deal with glares.
Halflight and Evangelyne exchanged a brief look.
“What are your questions?” asked the sprite.
Milo took a breath. “That pyramid—what was it? Was that one of those doorway things?”
“It was a door warden,” corrected Halflight. “It protected the last known door to the worlds of shadows. As long as it remained, all that was required was for us to unlock the spells that would open it.”
“Could you?”
“Yes. We all know the spell of opening.”
“Good, then all we need to do is rebuild the pyramid, right? I mean, you guys seem like you can do magic, right?”
The tree boy almost smiled. “Can you build a kite?”
“Sure. Everyone knows how to—”
“Can you build a spaceship?”
“Um . . . no.”
“It’s like that,” explained Evangelyne.
“Oh. Ouch.”
“If it were that easy, we would be doing it already,” said Halflight. “The door warden was constructed with magicks. Very old and immensely complicated. It took some of the most powerful Nightsiders a year, from winter solstice to winter solstice, to complete the ritual of making.”
“Oh.”
“There is one slight hope, though,” said the sprite. “All great spells are recorded in case there is ever a disaster. In case the magic needs to be redone.”
“Great! Where’s that stuff kept?”
Evangelyne sighed. “The secrets were recorded in the Heart of Darkness,” she said.
Milo bent forward and banged his forehead on the table. Twice.
&nb
sp; “We have some magic,” explained Halflight, “but like all things, there are levels and levels of it. I can do some simple spells, a few glamours, cast a few brief illusions.”
“Illusions?”
“Yes,” said a very tall, exceptionally beautiful red-haired woman who appeared out of absolutely nowhere. Milo jumped out of his chair. The woman turned into a silver-maned unicorn, who winked and then vanished. In its place was the little sprite on her hovering hummingbird. “They are illusions. You see them, but there is nothing actually there.”
“How long do they last?”
“A few minutes at most. I am getting better at it, but so far . . . they are fleeting phantoms. And they require much of me,” she said wearily. “Mostly I can create fireworks. My mother, though, she was very old and very powerful. She could transform dust into living creatures. She could take a handful of straw, throw it into the air, and turn it into an eagle. That’s magic.”
Milo grunted. The demonstration of Halflight’s powers had planted a tiny seed of an idea in his mind. “What else can you guys do?”
“None of us are as powerful as our elders,” said Evangelyne. “I become a wolf, but that wolf is only a wolf. It’s not stronger than a regular wolf except that I heal faster and my senses are a little sharper. Lycanthropy doesn’t come with any other special powers.”
Milo looked at Oakenayl. “How about you? I saw you torn apart and now you’re all together. That’s got to be serious magic.”
“I’m a wood spirit,” said the oak boy. “Even this body is not who I really am. I can inhabit some growing plants. If they’re destroyed, then I abandon the debris.”
“So you can’t die?” When the oak boy didn’t answer, Milo looked at Halflight. “Can he?”
“Don’t answer—” began Oakenayl, but the sprite ignored him.
“Yes, he can,” said Halflight. “Fire will destroy any of us except Iskiel.”
“Wait . . . Iskiel. That’s what you called the big salamander,” Milo said to Evangelyne. “What happened to him? He’s not dead, is he?”
“No, but he was hurt. His body was destroyed, so he let it burn. He’s like a phoenix in a way. It’ll take him a few hours to make a new one.”
The Orphan Army Page 18
