She rolls back onto her heels.
“Huh. You really are broken.”
I swat her outstretched hand and scuttle backwards on my hands and heels. “Go away.”
The girl laughs. “Cool. Monster-bait talks.”
“Steph!” Grace cries.
“Chill. I’ll stay. Seems fun.” She bares her teeth at me. It’s not a friendly expression. “Heard what you said, ’bout beating the best of us by the end of next week. That’ll be me. You’re welcome to try today if you’d like a head start.”
I curl tighter. Then uncurl into one of Grace’s defensive postures, feet braced, elbows out. Steph whistles.
“Wow, you’re all mouth, arent’cha. That’s the worst stance I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something with Gracie here.”
She jerks a thumb at her red-faced little sister. I take advantage of the momentary distraction to try a surprise attack. Only, I’m the one who goes sailing through the air. Again.
“Nice try. Crappy form. Go again.”
I could roll in the dirt in a ball of pain. Instead, I dive at Grace’s stupid sister again, and again, until she works up a sweat and my head’s spinning too hard for me to stay on my feet.
“Not too bad,” my new tormenter says. “If you were, like, six. Maybe. No talent, of course, but you’re persistent. You might make it into the babies’ class now. Same time tomorrow?”
I spit in the dirt at her feet. She laughs. I glare.
Then I nod. “Tomorrow.”
Steph swaggers off.
I flop back down, sweat plastering my hair and clothes to my skin. “Seriously?”
“I didn’t have anything more to teach you,” Grace says. “It was either get beat down by Steph on your own time and maybe learn something, or in front of the whole class, with Auntie Rocky gloating from the sidelines.”
“I don’t like your family.”
Grace nods understandingly and helps me up. “Follow me.”
She trots off, braids bouncing. I limp after her, too sore to protest.
She leads me to the wall and unlocks the small side gate we used last time.
I make a point of looking back over my shoulder. I’d been thinking more along the lines of a bath and something to eat, maybe even going over some of those moves Steph showed off and trying to figure out how they’d worked if I had the energy after dinner . . . But Grace steps over the threshold, tosses the key at my feet, and sets off into the forest.
I could lock the door behind her and head home. Except there are monsters out there, and even my rudimentary fighting skills have to be better than hers. Or, about the same, apparently. But still, two incompetents wandering in the forest are better than one, right?
Cursing with a selection of the interesting new words I’ve picked up watching the trainees, I stagger through the gate, lock it behind me, and jog after Grace. I snag one of her braids and give it a tug.
“Ouch?” She cuts her eyes at me but keeps up her pace. “Don’t be mad. I want to show you something.”
“I want to sleep.”
“No, you don’t.”
Since she’s right, I keep my mouth shut and focus on cataloguing bruises as we make our way through the woods.
It’s not the least pleasant thing I’ve done all day. If I didn’t have to be on alert for monsters, or creatures, or whatever, it might even be kind of nice. There are bright wildflowers scattered around, and a whole lot of shades of green that I’m starting to be able to tell apart, and if there’s quite a lot of suspicious rustling, I can chalk that up to wind in the trees and harmless little forest creatures.
The rustling gets louder. I snatch at Grace’s sleeve, but she just tugs it out of my grip and keeps going. And then we break through the trees.
It’s a stream, complete with a small cascade rippling down from higher ground. It’s strangely peaceful—and apparently, free of monsters.
Grace gives me this crazy huge grin and walks backward until her heels are teetering over the bank. Then she drops, folding into a serene puddle at the very edge of the stream. Her pale eyes, the exact soft green and brown hues of the burbling water reflected between dark lashes, flutter closed. She seems to breathe in the breeze, and the rushing water, and the fresh, clean scent of this place, and grow larger with it. Brighter.
Mist creeps across her skin, paling its surface with a faint silver cast.
“Hi Cady.” It’s barely a whisper, too quiet to hear over the small waterfall if I hadn’t seen her lips move.
“Hi Gracie,” Cadence says.
Grace just tapped into the dreamscape.
I have the sudden urge to shove her into the stream.
“Cole’s annoyed,” Cadence says.
If Grace answers, I don’t hear it. Her face is still, under its faint silver covering.
“Yeah, she’ll wait . . . I know, right?” Cadence laughs. “Okay, but if you’d seen . . . hmm. Uh huh. Seriously? Wish I’d been . . . Okay, yeah. Yeah, I hear everything she does, so . . . Cool, go for it. I’ll be here.”
Grace’s eyes open. The mist fades back under her skin. She grins. “She’s really there!”
I dive back into the forest.
“Wait,” she crashes after me. “Don’t be like that. I can be friends with both of you like this.”
I turn on her, and she almost falls over trying to reverse direction. “You said you couldn’t do that stuff. I thought you were locked out, like—”
Like me.
“I can’t. Usually. Except for in that one spot. Even there, the connection’s weak. I couldn’t do what you did, Cole. I can’t fight. I can barely communicate. If Cady weren’t so strong to begin with, she probably couldn’t even hear me. But if even I can cross over to the dreamscape like this, maybe there’s something, or somewhere, that’d boost your connection too.”
“A magical forest stream is hardly going to help me fight the Mara.”
“But something else might,” Grace says. “Like a certain type of wood, or a rock, or—”
“So, what? I should wander the forest touching everything to see if it can unlock my powers?”
I slap the nearest tree in frustration. And, if I’m honest, hope.
I’d be happy to tuck a few twigs in my pocket if that’s all it takes to get back everything I’ve lost.
Chapter 17: Talisman
I stomp through the woods, hefting stones, thwacking branches, and splashing through puddles while Grace watches for traces of mist.
It’s infuriating to be wasting time looking for a magical solution instead of getting back to my real training. Except—Wasn’t magic what I’d been missing all along? If I could get my ability to tap the dreamscape back, I wouldn’t need to bother with boring training and stupid challenges and impressing those idiots in Nine Peaks anyway.
“Not that.” Grace unexpectedly smacks my reaching hand. “Those burn.”
The leafy green thing in question doesn’t look any different than a dozen other bushes between the trees, but I plant my palm on the rough, thick trunk behind it instead. “This isn’t working.”
She shrugs. “It could take a while. Or it could all be a wasted effort. It’s not like I’m an expert.”
A stone. A twig. A mushroom. I paw through the forest floor, discarding one bit of junk after another. We’ve already tried hanging out by a couple different ponds and streams, and wasted too much time sitting at the side of Grace’s little cascade waiting for something to happen. Trying to make something happen.
But between Grace’s vestigial talents and my own brief and untutored experience tapping into the dreamscape, I’m not sure we even know what we’re looking for.
Cadence, on the other hand . . .
She sighs. “Don’t you think I’d have helped by now if I could? The only path I know besides being a natural like me”—I swear she pauses to bat non-existent eyelashes before continuing—“is to get into dreamwalker training, and you didn’t even qualify for that.”
> “Maybe we’ve just been trying the wrong things,” I say, without much hope. “Or looking at it the wrong way? Obviously, this is a weird case. How does it work for normal people?”
“It doesn’t.” Grace has been following my half of the conversation, and chimes in. “Normal people can’t dreamwalk. Most can’t even see creatures, never mind fight monsters.”
“So what’s different about the ones who can?”
“It’s partly hereditary,” Cadence says. “The ability is passed down over generations. It’s a whole thing. People get weird about it.”
“What is the dreamscape?” Grace asks overtop of her. “Where do you go when you dreamwalk?”
“Cadence says access to the magic is hereditary,” I tell Grace.
She holds a finger up. “I’m not adopted, so there’s more to it than that. Hang on—. We’ll come back to that. First, answer my question.”
“It’s . . .” It felt like travelling, like that time when Ash had been in the infirmary, and then suddenly in Freedom when I’d needed him. But, thinking back, there had been people around at least some of the times I’d tapped in, people who would have said something if I’d suddenly vanished and reappeared, so my body had to have stayed in one place.
Whenever I’d seen Ash, or Susan, or even Grace, briefly, draw on the magic, they went all silver, but they mostly hadn’t actually moved, so—“We don’t go anywhere, not really.”
“Wrong,” says Cadence.
“Actually, we do and we can,” says Grace. “Just because your body stays in one place doesn’t mean the rest of you isn’t travelling. And just because dreamwalkers don’t often fully move through the dreamscape to another location doesn’t mean they can’t. So, if the dreamscape is a place both the inner self and the whole self can travel through, what is it?”
“You know this,” Cadence says unhelpfully.
I think about accessing the dreamscape—back when I could. “I was on the rooftop of Refuge, mostly. At night. There were stars out. But, also other places. Sometimes right nearby, other times on different floors, or outside the tower entirely.”
Grace’s eyes gleam. “Refuge? Is that a place in your city?” But she shakes off her curiosity with a visible reluctance. “You’re being too specific. The dreamscape might appear as familiar places, or take you to different locations, but that’s not what it is.”
“She’s not gonna get it,” Cadence says, forgetting Grace can’t hear her.
But Grace seems to have arrived at the same conclusion. “It’s okay. The answer isn’t that simple anyway. Gran explained about monsters, right? How they happen at the edges of us and other, when we warp what was already there? It’s kind of like that. If the regular world can be defined as what exists outside of us, the dreamscape is what’s inside. But not just inside you, or me, or Cadence, or whatever. It’s like insideness itself. All the insides of everything at once.”
Which makes about as much sense as wandering through the forest tapping trees to see if they grant me magic. So I huff at her and dart away down a faint track in the woods, slapping my hands against everything I come across while Cadence snickers and Grace puffs along in my wake.
And then, unexpectedly, the trees become familiar. My fingers hover above the newly scarred trunk where we harvested the bark only a week ago. Nearby is the smaller tree my forgotten mother planted. This is where that monster—creature—appeared.
If anything out here is magic or can give me back what I’ve lost, it’s this. My hands tremble, first brushing the rough, fragrant bark and, when nothing happens, tapping, pressing, digging in as if I can rip what I need from its heartwood.
My nails sting with splinters. Sap gums my fingers.
I work myself in closer—feet braced between roots, bushes scratching my knees, both hands pressing into the trunk. I lean my forehead against the long scar, inhale the clean scent of sap and silently beg, Here, please, let it be here. Give me back what I need, so I can escape this place so full of everyone’s memories but my own. Give me back myself so I can go home and do what I was meant for. Please, please, please.
Begging gives way to raging. I claw at the living wood—pounding, tearing, kicking—until I’m left clinging to the trunk, sobbing like a child, afraid to let go, whispering: sorry, sorry.
And it reaches back. Not to draw me in, but to push me away.
Grace gasps. A branch-like hand pries me from the tree, thrusting from the trunk like the ghost of the tree is bursting out.
I land in the dirt, hard. The creature looms over me, the one we met in this wood a week ago or one very like it. It has the same gnarled features set in an alien expression that defies interpretation. Its makeshift covering flutters as it moves, shedding bits of moss and leaves that drop soft and green and land brown and crisp. The smell of growing things in the sun sharpens and deepens around us, spicy and honeyed at once. It makes no sound, but for creaking and the susurrus of murmuring leaves.
It doesn’t move to attack—so I do. I jump to my feet and draw on everything I’ve learned from Steph, from watching the trainees at their drills, and from practicing alone in the dark for hours on end. I scream silently with each blow: give it back.
And, immovable as the tree before me, the creature takes my blows and my words and grants nothing in return but a steady rain of dead leaves and withered moss, though it grows no less for it.
When I am exhausted and my attacks limited to hanging from its limbs and trying to drag it down with dead weight, it gently shakes me to the ground. And then the monster of the forest holds something out: a knotted lump of silky-grained, red-brown wood twice the size of my closed fist.
By the time it lands, heavy and unexpectedly warm in my cupped palms, the creature has dissolved to nothing and Grace and I are alone in the woods once more.
Chapter 18: Belonging
We take the knot of wood back to Grace’s cascade. Side by side, eyes closed, we listen to the rushing water. And we reach for magic.
But when I open my eyes, only Grace is silvered in a thin sheen of mist.
I hurl the useless bit of wood into the stream and watch it bob away on the water.
Then I wade in after the stupid thing, grumbling with every slippery step at myself, at tree-monsters and their wordless cursed gifts, at gross, messy, impossibly inconvenient nature in general. I’m drenched to the hips by the time I catch it again.
Grace is still where I left her at the side of the stream, though not, as far as I can tell, chatting with Cadence this time. I stretch out on the bank to dry in the sun, one hand on the damp bit of wood that fits itself so perfectly to the shape of my hand, and breathe through the panic.
What if I never get my magic back? What if it’s just not possible?
I’ll have my revenge against Refuge no matter what happens. The Mara’s hunger is unstoppable; eventually, it will devour even its servants. Maryam’s corrupt reign will fail. But Ange and her family, and all the others besides, will die too.
I’m supposed to save them. I’m the only one who can. It’s what I’m meant for. And yet, every time I try to fight for them, return to them, get the power to save them, I only seem to get further from my goal.
Ash is gone. Sent someplace I’ve never heard of and could never find, I’m sure, even if someone had bothered to tell me where he’s gone. Without him, I don’t know how to get back home, how to cross the barrier and return to my city, how to fight back against the Mara without being able to see and manipulate the threads, or against Refuge without the ability to stop the monsters.
I shiver, despite the sun overhead. But even in the midst of horror, I know there’s a warm bath and a soft bed waiting for me, and that’s perhaps what I’m most afraid of.
I didn’t return to the welcome Ash had promised—that homecoming was always meant for Cadence. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here for me. Nothing to tempt me into comfortable complacency.
I palm the knot of wood and fit my fingers in
to its satin-grained twists and grooves. I could belong here, with Grace, and Susan—even Steph seems to be warming up to me. Well, perhaps not. But I could learn to grow things. Get better at weaving. Maybe even earn my way into training. Not in a week, but eventually.
I’d work my way up to going on missions, eventually. Probably. There’d be other cities to save. Ash would return, and I might eventually forgive him for leaving, for abandoning his promise, if it meant I could go with him. Even if I can’t get back to what I’ve been, to the kind of power that stops monsters in their tracks, I’m sure I could learn enough to help.
I could make a place for myself here.
I roll over and gag, hanging my head over the bank and spitting bile. The vision, all soft and content and comfortable, turns my stomach and sends me trembling with revulsion. I wipe my mouth, shove to my feet, and hurl the knotted bit of wood deep into the forest where I’ll never have to look at it again.
It bounces and crashes louder and longer than I expected.
Then it flies back out of the trees and bumps to a stop at my feet.
“Really, flame?” says the forest. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
I kick the possessed thing back the way it came and yank Grace to her feet, dragging her stumbling behind me before she’s had a chance to shake off her trance.
“Cole, no!” the forest calls behind me, and then curses.
“Who was that?” Grace pants, struggling to keep up. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
I tighten my grip. “The woods are haunted.”
We’re both wheezing by the time Nine Peaks’ wall comes into sight, but I don’t slow until we reach the gate. I snatch the key over my head and fumble it three times before it clicks into the lock.
Once inside, door safely slammed to and locked behind us, we both collapse.
Grace hangs her head between her knees, heaving. “What did you see out there?”
“I didn’t see anything. I heard a ghost. Not that tree-looking creature or monster or whatever. Someone I knew.”
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