Through the fogbank, Joya could barely make out some source of illumination. It was milky, almost like clouds strewn over the expanse of their sky, casting about an intermittent, ghostly light. She could also see flashes of lightning. Is it storming, or is that natural?
“But the stories can’t be all true, can they?” Jovian asked.
“Use your eyes, Jovian,” Joya said. “What do you see? Do you think anything good could come out of there?”
He swallowed hard.
Angelica shook her head.
“But it tempts us,” Joya said. “It wants us to come inside.” Her palms itched where the white stigmata marked them. She tried to push the thought from her mind, but when she ignored the itching it only grew worse. Rubbing and scratching wouldn’t make the sensation go away, and she cursed silently.
“What do you feel?” Jovian asked.
Joya shook her head. Can’t they feel it? she wondered.
“Where do you think Grace and the others are?” Angelica asked, looking behind them. How she could turn her back to the shadowy fogbank Joya couldn’t imagine.
“Probably a long way behind us,” Jovian answered. “The Shadows Grove brought us here; Goddess only knows how far we’ve traveled.”
They were still in the Sacred Forest, that they knew, because the Shadows Grove couldn’t travel outside the forest and it had deposited them here moments ago. But if Joya had to guess, they were on the edge of the forest, because the trees were thinning down to saplings and brush.
“Is Grace okay?” Angelica asked again. “What happened to her?”
“She’s possessed,” Joya told her simply, rubbing her hands on her gray riding dress. She gave a look back to where the horses were tethered, but they didn’t seem to be fazed by their proximity to the Shadow Realm.
Their fairy guide, Tegaris, flitted about above the horses, and the Germinant Gob stood silent sentry, watching the LaFayes at the border. Their entourage wouldn’t be coming into the Shadow Realm. Their guidance ended here. But Uthia had said she would come along with them. The dryad made mention of something she needed to do in the Shadow Realm, as if she traveled there regularly.
“How do you know?” Jovian asked their older sister.
“What other option is there?” Joya asked. “She certainly isn’t acting like herself, she was using wyrd proficiently enough to shame a sorcerer, and she attacked us.”
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Angelica asked her.
“How am I to know these things?” Joya asked. “I do know that we’re stalling. Where we need to be is home, and either we travel all around the realms, bypassing the Shadow Realm, or we go through.” She pointed at the fogbank, as if her finger was a compass directing their way home. The prospect of going through the Shadow Realm finally sunk in for Joya, and she felt her heart quicken, thundering through her ears.
Joya didn’t want to go around, however — she wanted to go through. Every fiber of her being wanted to sink into the embrace of the shadows, and that scared her more than the fleeting faces she saw rippling the surface of the darkness. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Angelica nodded.
“Jovian, can you get the horses?” Joya asked.
At the sound of a struggle Joya looked behind her. The horses wouldn’t budge.
“They don’t want to go,” Uthia told them, stepping out from the thicker forest. The white of her bark skin was near-dazzling to the eye after so long staring at the Shadow Realm.
“What do we do with them?” Angelica asked.
“My shepherdess sisters will tend to them,” Uthia answered. As if her proclamation had summoned them, more of the dryads stepped out from deeper in the forest, their bark-like skin dappled in morning sunlight. Joya watched the tree-women surround the horses, like a forest come to life in pines, oaks, and hemlock, coming to care for the creatures.
“Joya?” Jovian asked.
“They’ll be fine,” she told him. “We need to get home, and we can’t be fighting with horses every step of the way.”
Reluctantly Jovian relinquished the reins to three separate dryads. He stepped back, a lump in his throat. For some reason it felt like he was giving up the last thing he had that tethered him to home, to his old life. A life before he had found out he was half angel, a life before he found out his mother, who died in childbirth, was the mythic Sylvie LaFaye, who’d given up her life so that he and Angelica could live.
Angelica placed her hand on his shoulder. No doubt she was feeling the same way. Who knew if these were his emotions or hers? Ever since their single-minded joining in the Mirror of the Moon, they had been growing closer. Their time in the Shadows Grove hadn’t helped that at all.
But it was strange. They didn’t need to talk to each other mentally any longer, because often their thoughts were so seamlessly matched that there was no need for words.
“It’s hard for me too, Jovian,” Joya said from behind them, her gaze fixed on the shadows. “But we can retrieve them as soon as we find Amber.”
She still clung to that hope, but Jovian wasn’t sure he could any longer. It was nearing winter. Even now snow was starting to fall, melting into the mud of the forest floor and making it a soupy mess.
No, it had been too long. Amber wasn’t in the care of Porillon any longer, but they hadn’t seen her for months now, and he could almost believe that Amber was nothing more than a figment of their imagination, a part of their past lost to them just as the horses being carried away now.
He steeled himself and turned away from the horses, leaving Angelica to watch their retreat. Along with the dryads, the Germinant Gob left with little more than a nod of farewell, and Tegaris faded up into the growing daylight, seeking some home in the trees where he could go into suspended animation for the duration of the day.
Jovian held out a hand, pushed it toward the fogbank, and hesitated. What if there was something on the other side waiting to grab him, pull him in and devour him? He was being silly, but with the way Joya was studying his hand, she might be thinking along the same lines.
She grabbed his wrist.
“We do this together,” she said.
Angelica joined them, wiping a tear from her eye. Joya stepped between Angelica and Jovian and linked hands with them. Uthia was at their back.
“Are we ready?” Joya asked.
They only nodded.
Joya took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped into the cool embrace of shadows.
Suffocation. That was all she could think of. She fell to her knees, losing her grip on Angelica and Jovian, and pressed her hands to her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Joya struggled, fighting against the blind panic in her body, the burning in her lungs. She scrambled to her feet and tried to retreat to the safety of the Realm of Earth, but the shadows wouldn’t let her go. She pressed against them, pushing against the boundary, trying to get to the sweet, fresh air of the Realm of Earth, but the fogbank was like a solid wall behind her, keeping her inside the Shadow Realm.
Relax, her Aunt Pharoh spoke to her from the medallion around her neck. It’s testing you. You are from the Holy Realm, it needs to make sure of your intentions. Relax and it will be over soon.
Easy enough for her to say. Joya forced herself to relax, and when she did she could feel the shadows swirling around her, like fingers touching her, rubbing over her flesh, exploring the recesses of her mind.
The burning came to her palms again, and the darkness abated. She gasped for breath. Falling to her knees, Joya drank in the thick air of the Shadow Realm.
She crawled forward and saw Angelica and Jovian on the ground beside her, holding their throats, their eyes screwed shut.
“Stay calm, let the shadows see what you are inside, then you can breathe,” she conveyed the message of the medallion. She wasn’t sure if it worked or not, but while they finished she took a moment to look around, wondering how on earth she could see Angelica and Jovian if this realm wasn’t supposed to
see the light of any day.
High above her, in a tree impossibly green with life in the darkness of the perpetual night of the Shadow Realm, Joya could see light that came from some kind of white flower. Above the canopy of the trees, she saw those opalescent clouds racing over the black expanse of sky. She tried to see stars, but knew that was impossible. Still, Joya tried to find something, anything inside the Shadow Realm that she recognized from the Great Realms.
Uthia moved through the fogbank with ease, stepping over the struggling Angelica and Jovian and coming to rest beside Joya.
“How is it that you’re able to be here so easily?” Joya asked.
“This forest we are inside is an extension of the Sacred Forest. We dryads don’t know boundaries as you humans do. The Sacred Forest is our home, though on this side of the border it is called the Haunted Forest.”
The name made Joya shiver.
“So those must be ghost lights?” Joya said, pointing up at the white flowers. Angelica and Jovian gasped for breath.
Uthia looked up where Joya pointed. “Those lights up there?”
“Yes,” Joya confirmed. If they were ghost lights, they acted nothing like she had seen them act before. For one, these lights were stationary, almost like little suns strung around in the branches of the trees.
“Those are called sunflowers. They aren’t like the sunflowers you are used to,” Uthia told Joya, as if she needed the clarification. “They’re used as a source of lighting here.”
Jovian and Angelica righted themselves, took a few staggering steps, and sank to the forest floor beside Joya.
“We will come along more patches of them. Honestly, they are weeds — they grow everywhere here. You can eat them to replace the vitamins from the sun, or rub them on your skin, but you will glow for a time after you rub their oils on you.”
Joya was fascinated.
“I thought this was supposed to be a barren, haunted land,” she whispered.
“Don’t let your guard down, sorceress,” Uthia told her, casting her black-eyed gaze around at the encroaching shadows. “This is still a poisonous land, but like most poisonous things in nature, it has a dazzling beauty.”
Joya couldn’t help think the softly glowing flowers strung through the darkness were the most romantic sight she had ever witnessed. She lay back in the dry grass and stared up at the lights swaying here and there in the branches, trying to imagine what the flowers actually looked like, but having a hard time seeing past the glow of their petals.
It was also hard to imagine that it was day still, and not nighttime.
“Uthia, do you know the way home?” Jovian asked.
“If we keep going straight that way,” she extended a twig-like finger in the opposite direction from where they came, “we will come to the Holy Realm. I’m not sure where your home is.”
“Well, then we travel straight,” Joya sat up, pulling her focus from the contemplation of the flowers dancing in the branches above.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Uthia told them. “That would take us to the Haunted Graveyard, and that isn’t a place anyone wants to travel to.”
Joya had heard Rosalee mention her husband traveling that way for graveyard dirt, which was supposed to keep the breed of dalua-dog called hecklin at bay. The thought made her skin crawl. They were in the home of those chaos hounds.
“I see by your eyes that you recognize the dangers lurking in this land now?” Uthia asked.
“Yes, the…” Joya looked around at the branches, remembering how in the Sacred Forest, when the Well of Wyrding was contaminated, uttering even the name of a creature would draw its attention to you.
“No worries sorceress, the well has been purified. The Sacred Forest will no longer conjure whatever beast you mention,” Uthia said with a flip of her hand.
“We might have to venture into the Haunted Graveyard after all,” Jovian said, following his older sister’s train of thought. “We don’t have any graveyard dirt with us, and if that’s the only way to keep them at bay…”
Joya nodded. “That’s what I was thinking as well.”
“Then we travel straight,” Uthia said. “And we skirt the edges of the graveyard.”
Joya wasn’t sure how long they had traveled — maybe a few hours — when they came across the first ground patch of sunflowers. She couldn’t imagine something more beautiful if she tried, the way the weed grew at the base of a giant tree and wound its way up into the branches, where the tree was carpeted with the flower.
Uthia didn’t look as happy, however.
“The weed is pretty, but it kills trees when it is allowed to flourish like this. Someone will be along soon to harvest this crop. For now, we can do our part.” She motioned them forward. “Pluck a flower at the base, and either rub it along your skin or eat it. I would suggest eating it; you don’t want to walk around this realm shimmering like a beacon to whatever creature would have you for dinner.”
Joya plucked a flower as close to the base of the petals as she could. As the flower came away from the plant, it lost a bit of its light. She sniffed it, and was greeted by a heady, soapy smell, almost like plum blossoms. Joya placed the flower on her tongue. It was bitter, and her first reaction was to spit it out, but Uthia was nodding, so Joya chewed a few times and swallowed.
“They don’t taste very good; I think it’s because of the oil of the petals,” Uthia said. The dryad plucked a flower from the vine and twirled it in her white fingers. The oil of the flower tinted her fingers, and where it rubbed, an iridescent glow spread across the bark of her hand. As Joya watched, Uthia’s skin seemed to drink it in. Before long the glow was absorbed into her skin. “Dryads,” Uthia said, “require different sustenance than humans.”
“Like plants?” Angelica asked, jamming a handful of the flowers into her mouth. Her face screwed up at the pungent taste of the flowers, and she chewed several times before taking a painful-looking gulp.
“Yes,” Uthia said. She plucked a few more of the sunflowers and started rubbing them into the vines and leaves that cascaded from her head like hair.
Joya could feel the flower traveling to her stomach, like a pleasant warmth spreading through her. Surprisingly, it took the edge off her hunger too.
“They are great food for travelers. Here, have some more.”
As she reached for more, Joya noticed the luminescence on her fingers, where the oil of the flower had rubbed off. After five or so more flowers, Uthia told her she could stop.
“A few flowers a day should replace what you would normally get from the sun,” she told them.
“Joya, is this flower in your herb book?” Angelica asked, tentatively taking another flower from its vine. She didn’t eat this one, just looked at it.
“Do I have time to look?” Joya asked, and Uthia nodded.
She took the book out of her pack and sat down, thumbing through the frail pages until she made it to the “s” section. It wasn’t there, and Joya made a mental note to add it that night when they settled in for bed.
But as they started travel again for the day, Jovian wondered how long this near-peaceful feeling would follow them. They had three possessed women after them, as well as Porillon, and the as-yet-unseen dark forces of the Shadow Realm. For some reason the thought made him think of the Pale Horse, and the battleground of bone it rode upon.
The day passed in silence. The truth was that all of them were far too engrossed in this alien realm to speak. Occasionally they would tap each other and point off into the distance, where the sunflowers were illuminating a strange creature or beast they had never seen before. Once spotted, the beasts would normally flit or lumber away. They saw other strange things, too. Through the day they had spotted fairies like Tegaris, but the size of a gnome, with wings as large as an eagle. There had been a herd of deer that could stand on their hind legs, and who had one single horn curving up from the center of their head. There were also pixies the size of Angelica’s hand who lived in th
e trees, and even more things Angelica couldn’t completely explain.
There was also the darkness, always present, always pressing in on them. Angelica began thinking of the darkness more as a being rather than an atmosphere. It seemed to shift and move just out of her sight, always making her feel on edge when they left one pool of sunflower light and headed for another, as if something lurked in the darkness, waiting for the right time to pounce.
“Border wards,” Uthia said, noticing the uneasy set to Angelica’s shoulders and the skittish glances she cast at the shadows before leaving one puddle of light.
“The same we ran into before? That made us stop breathing?” Jovian asked.
“Yes, the same. You are strangers here — the border must keep watch on you, make sure whatever it felt that let you pass was true, not a farce.”
“I don’t want to know what would happen if it considered us a threat,” Angelica shivered.
“You really don’t,” Uthia agreed.
Out of the corner of her eye Angelica saw Joya grimace and itch her palms furiously.
That night — or maybe it was day, Angelica couldn’t really tell — they made camp at the base of a large tree, sheltered in the light of the sunflowers. Uthia gathered flowers for their dinner while Jovian hunted for something to eat to supplement them. Uthia cautioned against taking life or spilling blood in the forest. Jovian couldn’t tell if it was Uthia’s aversion to his hunting her charges, or if there was something about the Haunted Forest that would react badly to his killing.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about something for a while,” Angelica said once they had settled down around the fire. Joya was taking notes in the back of her herb book about the sunflower, even trying, poorly, to draw an image of it.
“Wait a minute — you think?” Jovian asked.
“Very funny. But seriously, if we are anakim, we can’t be the only ones, can we?”
“I never really thought about that,” Joya said, frowning at her pitiful sketch.
The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Page 24
