“Why bother? There must be easier ways to get what we need.”
“Depends what you mean by easier. Easier things to grow? To harvest? To work and weave? To wear?”
“All of that. I never used to have to—”
“You did. You just forgot. Don’t feel bad. Lots of people forget that what they have doesn’t just appear when they need it.” She plunks down in the dirt and looks at me expectantly. “How much do you remember learning about the time before?”
I test the ground for dampness with one hand before crouching beside her. I prod the slick, golden inner layer of bark with mingled fascination and disgust.
“So, not a lot then,” she says.
Cadence snorts. “Try nothing at all. She never listens.”
Grace demonstrates how to break off the rough outer bark from its silky insides. She lowers her voice and slips into an odd singsong: “The people began to look down and in more than they looked up and out and so lost the way of seeing. And in the smallness of their vision, they did not see that they took too much and gave back less. And when their taking outstripped what could be given, the givers began to take back.”
She heaps the broken pieces of outer bark at the base of the bleeding tree and watches expectantly until I scrape together a few pieces and scatter them at the foot of the tree as well.
“She means people got greedy and stopped thinking about the consequences of their actions,” Cadence says. “The world returns itself to balance, and it’s better to be a part of the returning than the chaos destroyed in the process.”
I find a small stone on the ground and flick it at Grace. “Whatever. All I want is to get back what I’ve lost and stop the dying. That sounds like a good balance to me.”
Grace balances the stone on her dimpled knuckles and rolls it from index to pinkie and back. “I’m just saying the difference between a hero and a monster is whose dying you’re trying to stop.”
She flips her hand over, catching the stone. She bounces it for a moment, and then tosses it back to me.
I fumble. The stone falls in the dirt.
Chapter 13: Monsters
The bark is lighter once we’ve broken off the outer layer and folded it into loose packets, but added to the weight of our already overflowing baskets it means I’m already sweating before we’ve even lost sight of the harvested trees. The torn blisters on my fingers sting, and the relief I’d felt at leaving behind all the nosy strangers on the other side of the wall is ebbing into frustration. The forest is dirty and busy enough in its own way.
I bump into Grace’s back and nearly drop my basket. “Don’t tell me you forgot something.”
She cocks her head, listening to the wind tossing the branches, or maybe it’s small, scurrying animals doing whatever mysterious rustling-type things small animals do, or—
Oh. I can’t believe I forgot to worry about the locked-from-the-inside gates.
I square my shoulders and plant myself in front of Grace. I might not have my powers at the moment, but I’ve certainly been in more fights than her.
Or maybe not. There’s a burst of pain and my knees buckle. Did she just kick me?
She hits the dirt beside me, reaching to drag me down again when I try to rise.
“Just stay down and shut up,” she hisses.
“. . . Cadence?” I try, but she doesn’t answer.
I twist my shoulders to free myself from Grace’s death grip.
She pinches me hard. “Seriously. Stay. Down.”
I glare, but she’s too busy staring past me to notice. Her pupils dilate.
It’s too late. Whatever was coming for us is already here.
I screw my eyes shut for a moment, wishing. Hoping. Magic, Ash, weapons—oh, if only I had my threads . . . Then I turn to face the nightmare.
Only, it’s not.
It’s not Mara or any type of water monster I’ve seen, which makes sense since there’s no body of water in sight.
It’s hard to focus on it. The sunlight filtering through the trees seems to fall right through it, dancing as the wind tosses branches and shivers leaves.
Its flesh is a rich, ruddy brown and mostly hidden under shifting layers of green. Its head is covered with more of the same—a matting of leaves and twigs and moss softening its form. What face it has is broad, with gnarled, uneven features, and a seamed grain like exposed wood in place of pores.
It blends so well with the forest that it seems to step into and through the trunks of trees and thickets of undergrowth, as if it’s a ghost. Or, as if the forest is the ghost and it's the only real thing here.
It looms over us, wafting sap, and pollen, and pitch, and moss, and the dry decay of last season’s leaves, and—
I sneeze. Leaves shower over us—a swirling whirlwind that first whispers and then tickles, and any moment now will scratch hard enough to draw blood.
I snatch Grace’s basket up and hurl it at the creature. It bounces off and rolls away, scattering its harvest.
“What are you doing?” Grace wraps her arms around my waist and drags me back down.
I struggle, trying to stand, trying to face down the monster. To at least do that much.
But it doesn’t seem interested. It leans past to peer at the length of inner bark now splayed over the ground, unraveling from our tumbled baskets. It drifts off to examine the tree we harvested from, running what seems to pass for a hand over the fresh, weeping wound.
Grace’s grip loosens. I wriggle out of her grasp and lunge for the blade that must have fallen out of her basket when I threw it. I plant my feet and hold the short, sharp-edged tool out in front of me with both hands, baring my teeth to keep them from chattering.
“You don’t understand,” she shouts over the whirlwind of leaves.
The green and brown thing looks from the tree to us. I brandish my makeshift weapon.
The leaves swirl faster, blocking my view. I slash, backing toward Grace, uncomfortably aware just how much longer that creature’s reach looked than my own.
Then the leaves drop, all at once.
I twist, dancing in a circle to try to get eyes on the monster. I narrowly avoid slicing Grace’s cheek.
“Give me that!” Grace wrenches the blade away. “Idiot. What were you going to do with that? Hack it to pieces?”
Her eyes are almost clear with fury—or, no, that’s not it at all. She sinks to the ground, still gripping the blade, tears streaking her cheeks.
“Um,” I look away, embarrassed for her. “It’s okay?”
“No, it isn’t,” she wails. “You—you thought it was a monster, and you were going to fight it for me even though you can’t fight and—and—you could have killed each other!”
I lean over and pat her on the head. It’s awkward. I pull my hand back quick.
“Lame,” says Cadence. “Your people skills are the worst.”
“Shut up.”
Grace cries harder, pulling her knees in and making muddy splotches on her increasingly dirty outfit.
“Oh. Not you. Cadence was being a pest.”
“Just saying it like it is,” Cadence snipes.
“What did I just say?”
“Like that tone’s ever worked for you in the past.”
“Could you not? It’s not a good time, okay?”
“It’s never a good time with you. You never listen, even though you know less than nothing, and all you ever do is make it worse, and—”
I ball my hands into fists and focus on the sharp pain of dirt ground into raw flesh.
“Don’t you shut me out—” she starts.
“Or what? What’ll you do, Cady. Oh, right. Nothing. Because you can’t. So, just. Shut. Up.”
“Are you guys always like that?” Grace is staring open-mouthed, tears forgotten.
I shift my weight. “Um . . .”
“So you don’t get along at all? That’s gotta suck. But I kind of get it—like me with my sisters.”
“You have siblin
gs?”
“Duh,” says Cadence. I ignore her.
“Two older sisters,” Grace says. “Jess is your age. Banshee, you know? She got sent out with Ash the day you guys got back, which must’ve made her year. She’s had a thing for him for ages. And then Steph’s a little younger. She just got back from a training mission today—I was camping out at her place in the dorms while she was gone, remember? They both suck, in case you missed that. Actually, you—uh, well, Cady— hated Jess when she was a kid.”
“Yup,” says Cadence. “Not too keen on Steph, either. Gracie was a little young to hate, though.”
Grace turns her basket right side up and starts repacking its scattered contents.
I follow suit haphazardly. “I can’t believe you guys bring kids out here. It’s like you’re trying to get them eaten.”
“Um,” Grace delicately tucks a bundle of curly fern heads to one side. “I think you’re misunderstanding something.”
“I’ll say.” Cadence sounds amused. “Go ahead. Why don’t you explain yourself?”
But Grace just shrugs and finishes filling her basket. She hefts it easily, but I groan when it’s my turn. It’s a good thing we don’t have all that far to go.
Twigs crack, each footstep rustling through drifts of old leaves and new growth overtaking the path. My skin itches with drying sweat and the dirt kicked up by the whirlwind. The basket feels heavier with each step. The adrenaline that propelled me between Grace and that monster is draining fast.
“You know I fought back home, right? In—in the city, I mean.” I plod along for a bit before continuing. “Ash explained how there are different monsters, how they emerged as the time before ended. How they were tied to the damage we caused—people, I mean. Back home, we have the Mara—dream-eating monsters—that live in the fog, and other water monsters too, though I don’t know as much about those. We saw some more on the journey out, different kinds of water monsters, I mean, but I haven’t actually seen—what do you call this kind? A tree monster? A forest monster?—well, I haven’t seen that before, but the ones I have seen . . .”
“What?” Grace says after a few moments, a few more steps closer to people and protection.
“I’ve seen them kill people. Lots of people. Strangers and—and not-strangers. Um. Friends. Or something. And I almost got more killed the last time I tried to fight, which is why I’m here, to get those abilities back. But when that thing came at us, I just—I couldn’t watch them take one more. Not in front of me like that.”
Cadence snorts. Grace is silent. I can see the wall through the trees now.
“Thank you for telling me.” Grace pulls the key over her head, and pauses until she has locked up and replaced it on the hook on the other side. “I feel kinda bad for saying this now, but you should know—that wasn’t a monster.”
Chapter 14: Trainee
I stare at the gate and wonder if Grace’s sanity got locked on the other side. I don’t remember her hitting her head.
“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” Cadence chides.
Like she has room to talk.
“No, listen.” Grace steps closer, bumping me with her basket. “It’s an easy mistake to make. Ask almost anyone and they’d probably say the same as you. But think about it. It didn’t hurt us.”
“It tried.”
“That whirlwind? You scared it, that’s all. Think of it like a wild animal.”
I stare, blankly. That was no squirrel. Cadence laughs.
“Um, or . . . Think about if someone came up to your door and knocked, and then when you opened it they were pointing a knife at you. It looks like they’re there to hurt you, but maybe they wanted to borrow a sharpener, or show off their new knife, or sell it to you, or something. Okay, it’s not a great analogy, but you get the idea.”
“There was a monster. It attacked us. I tried to fight back. You got in the way. Nowhere in that do I remember knocking on a door.”
Grace sighs and mutters something about letting Gran sort me out later. I trail along after her, trying to work out what monsters have to do with animals and stupid people who open doors to knife-wielding strangers.
She must be taking a different route back; we’re spending longer than we did on the way out in the above-ground-building zone that sits at the base of the towers and giant trees, and along the outer perimeter of the city. Long stretches of wavy, layered earth walls, weathered copper, and age-silvered wood cast shadows on the path. The walls are thick enough to muffle shouts and clacks of impact until we turn a corner.
Grace nods at the sunken courtyard. “Thought you might want to see. Go on, you can get closer, just as long as you don’t step into that flat bit.”
“What is it?”
“Halfway between the class you should’ve been in, and the one I’d be in if I weren’t me.”
It takes little more than a glance to identify the huge courtyard as some kind of training grounds. But these kids aren’t learning how to scrub floors or monitor screens like we did in Refuge. This has to be one of Nine Peaks’ classes for dreamwalkers. And right now, they’re learning to fight.
The inner walls are latticed. Plants grow right up them and along the long beams that span the entire width of the courtyard, casting mottled shadows and shading the trainees as they sweat and struggle below. Earth slopes from ground level down to a rectangle of lighter stuff—maybe sand? Each impact raises a puff of dust.
There are more people moving than I can easily keep track of, but the grounds aren’t limitless—no more than a few dozen would fit in here. These kids, like so many in Nine Peaks, all look very different at first glance. But after a few moments, I change my mind.
They all wear their hair cropped or scraped back and tied down tightly. Even the braids are somehow caught close to the head, not loose like Grace and Susan’s. The kids all wear close-fitting clothes in dark shades, too. Like Ash, but not identical to his. It’s not quite a uniform, then. And they all seem well muscled and confident, even graceful in their movements, though there’s a whole range of sizes and shapes tossing each other around in the ring.
I squint, trying not to see Ash in them, setting my teeth against the hollow, left-behind feeling these strangers have unexpectedly triggered. They don’t look all that much younger than me, despite Grace’s claims. I’m suddenly very conscious of my shapeless, borrowed clothes, my increasingly soft build since leaving home, my ragged shock of hair, well littered with bits of tree and dirt.
But even without all their training, even looking like this, feeling like this, I fought back the Mara. My shoulders straighten. I unknot my fingers from the hem of my shirt.
Cadence snorts. “You think they haven’t seen battle? I guarantee you every one of these kids has taken down a monster or two by now. Their trainers will have made sure of it.”
Heads tilt across the ring, curious, bored, even irritated gazes swinging our way as she speaks, silver in their eyes. Silver all around them.
My shoulders slump. “Oh.”
An adult strides toward me from the other side of the grounds, cutting straight through the crowd. The teens in her path jerk back to their practice with self-consciously upright posture, but the ones on the fringes watch from the corners of their eyes.
Their trainer plants herself in front of me. Hard faced, deeply tanned, deeply scarred, and deeply irritated-looking. I think I remember her from the council meeting when I first arrived. And the un-welcoming committee at the gate.
“Who said you could come here?” she demands.
I start to turn toward Grace and catch myself just in time. It takes an effort to keep my hands loose and relaxed at my sides. “No one.”
The trainer’s gaze flicks to her anyway. Then back to me. “This isn’t your class.”
I fold my arms. “So I hear.”
Her scars twist in an interesting way when she scowls. I catch myself staring and switch to eyeing the kids training. It’s not what I’d pictured. Some stand or sit alo
ne, eyes closed and motionless amidst the whirlwind of activity. Others are paired up, trading blows in acrobatic-looking flurries. Still others seem to practice against an invisible opponent or fend off multiple attackers.
There are weapons and bare hands, dark skin and light, and everywhere I look, shimmering, mist-covered forms. It’s chaotic, and bewildering, and some part of me unexpectedly longs to dive in headfirst.
“You like that?” the scarred trainer asks, dragging my attention back to her narrowed eyes. “Good. If you get started now, you might be able to join them in a decade or so.”
Cadence bristles. “If it were me, I’d teach her a lesson . . .”
For once, we’re on the same page. I cast an ostentatiously dismissive sneer at the training grounds, and something truly ridiculous flies out of my mouth. “Won’t need a decade. Won’t need a month. Two weeks and I’ll beat any student here.”
I swallow a gasp and set my teeth against the inevitable slap.
But instead, the trainer smiles instead, slow and twisted. “I look forward to it, dreamweaver.”
I show my teeth in a vicious grin, fighting to keep my knees locked. What did I just do? Those trainee fighters suddenly look a whole lot more intimidating.
I turn on my heel, wobbling just a bit as I march back to Grace. And right past her, and around the corner. Which I promptly collapse against, panting.
Grace races after me, dragging bark in her wake. “That was so cool! You just—and she—and then the look on Steph’s face!”
Cadence laughs. I feel ill.
SUSAN LAUGHS TOO, WHEN Grace tells her—possibly because the story comes complete with a re-enactment starring Grace in every role, including an improbable inner monologue by the head trainer, Rocky. Who also happens to be her aunt, as well as one of the Council of Nine, captain of the guard, and the one who flunked her out of training in the first place.
I turn my back on the both of them and twist wet strips of tree until my fingers bleed. I can’t afford to waste another second.
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