Aeralis (21 page)

“Borde, the scientist. He’s going to fix the gate and we’re going to get that device.” I hesitated, biting my lip. “But there are still many things to be done before you can be well.”

“Things?”

“Never mind that at the moment. Tell me more about your health.”

Ivy wiggled away, her face wrinkling in a scowl. “I’m perfectly fine. Everyone is fussing over me.”

“Everyone?”

She hesitated. “The Healers say I look ill. They’ve been trying to keep me indoors.”

“Why do they say you’re ill?”

She didn’t seem to want to answer that. “I’ve been fine,” she said.

“And the raccoon? How is he faring?”

At that question, her face fell, and she bit her lip and didn’t respond.

“Ivy. You have to rest.”

“How long until you go away again?” she asked, ignoring my words.

“Days, perhaps. Or less. There isn’t much time.”

“There never is,” she said sadly.

I hesitated, thinking of Aaron. I needed to tell her. “Ivy...I found...I found our father.”

Her forehead wrinkled, and then her eyes widened as she bolted up from the bed. “Our father?”

I winced at that descriptor. “He was in a prison camp outside Astralux. He’d assumed the name Falcon. We rescued him, thinking we were rescuing Borde.”

“A prison camp? I don’t understand.”

I tried to explain as best as I could about the fugitive, Aaron’s fall through the gate, and the subsequent need for a replacement. Ivy listened without comment until I’d finished. She took a deep breath.

“Where is he now?”

“Still in Aeralis.”

Her eyes shimmered with curiosity. There was no sign of anger or bitterness in her expression. “You’re angry,” she observed.

“Ivy,” I said. “He doesn’t want to see us. He doesn’t seem to even want to acknowledge us, let alone want to be our father.”

“It must be a lot for him to take in,” she murmured.

“He left us!”

“Not on purpose. Not according to his story.”

“Yes, but...” I searched for words to describe the turmoil I felt about the subject. “When he had the chance to come back, he didn’t.”

“These things take time, sometimes. People can’t just snap their fingers and feel the way they’re supposed to,” she said.

I sighed. Her words goaded me, but I couldn’t deny them. “Where do you get such thoughts, Wise One?”

She shrugged. “It’s happened here, hasn’t it? We have peace, and yet many of us struggle to leave our homes after dark. Despite the protection most now have against the Watchers, many still flinch and cower at the sight of them. Change is happening, but it comes with the speed of melting ice in early spring. Just a trickle at first.”

“Are you saying you think Aaron might change his mind about us?”

Ivy smiled in a noncommittal way. “I’m saying be patient with him. That’s all.” She paused. “Do you want him to?”

“I don’t.”

Ivy said nothing, but she looked skeptical.

“Anyway,” I continued. “It doesn’t matter now. I need to find Adam and discuss our plans going forward. Please rest while I’m gone.”

She settled on the bed with a sigh, and I started to leave the room when something caught my eye.

The journal. Borde’s journal. I would recognize it anywhere. But it looked newer, less cracked and faded. The leather gleamed as I lifted it.

“Don’t touch that,” Ivy snapped.

I opened the pages. Scrawl stared up at me, words written over and over.

What woven secret will keep you warm
?

Ivy snatched it from my hand.

“Ivy?”

“All right,” she said. “I’m forgetting things. My memories are hazy sometimes. The Healers say it could be the Sickness. I’ve been writing this journal to help me remember.”

“This journal...you?”

“What is it?” she stared at me.

I shook my head. “I...nothing.”

A shiver ran through me as she rushed to hide the book away.

Somehow, Ivy’s journal would pass through the portal and be found by Borde in the past.

I put the journal back under the bed without explaining and left the room, my mind churning with questions and thoughts.

~

Wind whipped my hair and stung my cheeks as I slipped down the path toward the Wanderer camp. Two sentries stepped from the trees to intercept me.

“I’m Lia Weaver,” I said. “I need to speak to Stone.”

They recognized me and nodded. One slipped away as I waited. After a moment, Stone appeared at the edge of the camp.

“Lia Weaver,” he said. “You’ve been gone from the Frost, I hear.”

“Yes. Someone threatened my sister. I had to get something to save her life.”

He studied me. “And did you obtain this thing?”

“Not quite. Not yet.” I took a deep breath. “I have a proposal for you.”

~

Adam, Ann, and Borde were waiting for me when I returned. They sat around the grand table in the dining hall, hands clasped and voices only murmurs. I joined them, slipping into a seat as they glanced up at me. I could see the questions in their faces.

“Stone has agreed to join the Restorationist revolution, along with some of the strongest of his people.”

Adam nodded without saying anything. Ann sighed in relief.

“But we still have a problem we haven’t discussed yet,” I said.

Adam lifted one eyebrow, and Ann tipped her head to the side. Borde was muttering to himself, but my words made him pause.

“Borde, you’ll be here in Echlos when the palace coup takes place. Adam, you’ll have a place there. But what about me? I need to be there. I need to get that device.”

“Korr won’t want that,” Ann said softly. “He won’t like that you’re changing things on him, not at the last minute.”

“We need another promise to offer in order to convince him. Any ideas?”

They were silent.

“I have an idea,” a voice said behind us.

I turned. “Ivy, you’re supposed to be resting.”

She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe, ignoring me. “What do we have that Korr doesn’t?”

I locked eyes with her, lifting my eyebrows in surprise, and she smiled. “Exactly.”

“It would never work.”

“It will work, and let me tell you why.” She crossed to the table and sat, and we listened as she laid out the plan.

After several hours, eyelids began to droop and heads began to sag forward. We said goodnight, and the others got up to leave.

“Ivy,” I said, before she could slip away. “How is the raccoon?”

She paused and chewed her lip. I could tell she didn’t want to tell me. That was answer enough, but still, I needed to see.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“He’s outside,” she said quietly. “Behind the house, in the garden. The Healers wouldn’t let me keep him in the house for fear of contamination.”

Thank goodness for sensible people. I stood. “Show me?”

She led me through the kitchens and into the garden, where bare patches of mud gleamed in the starlight. The outline of a cage rose from the darkness beneath a tree. Ivy made crooning noises in her throat as she approached it, and then I heard her gasp sharply.

“What? What is it?” I was at her side in two strides.

“Something bit him,” Ivy squeaked, putting her fingers against the wire. “Look, his leg.”

The raccoon lay on the floor of the cage, its head down in misery. Ivy undid the latch to the door and reached inside. The animal was too sick to try to move away, and she stroked its head gently while singing softly under her breath.

Something fluttered beside her foot. A mothkat. I kicked at it, and the creature took to the sky.

“Poor fellow,” Ivy whispered. She looked at me. “I need to tend to this.”

“Ivy, it’s just going to die.”

“Please,” she said. “This world is cruel enough. We don’t have to be cruel, too.”

“There will always be plenty of wounded raccoons, Ivy.”

She stared at me stubbornly until I relented, and I stayed with the animal, making reluctant soothing noises, while she went for bandages and salve.

~

Later I found Adam by the fire in the parlor, after night had covered the Frost and wrapped the world in slumber. He sat cross-legged on the carpet, his arms resting on his knees, the firelight playing hide and seek with the shadows on his face. When he heard my footsteps, he stirred and turned to meet me.

“I spoke to the Healer,” he said when I didn’t speak.

I settled without comment beside him on the ground. “Ivy is in denial, and Jonn grows weaker every day. We are running out of time.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Adam reached over and drew me into his arms. I put my head on his shoulder and breathed in his scent of earth and pine. I didn’t know what this meant, only that I needed it. I shut my eyes and listened to the whisper of the wind at the windowpanes, the crackle of the fire, the beat of Adam’s heart.

“The gate?” I asked after a moment.

“Borde needs one more day. Then we must return.” He hesitated. “We could look for Gordon.”

“No,” I said sharply. “If he thinks he’s being pursued, he’ll infect Ivy.”

“If we could somehow make him talk...”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “Right now I want to find the device, not anger the madman further.”

For a moment, silence held us.

Adam shifted. “Do you remember the last time we were here in front of this fire?”

I nodded. It had been the night before he’d left for Aeralis, leaving me behind to manage the Frost alone. Much had changed. Yet here in this place of memory and shadow, so much felt the same.

“Lia,” he said. The word rumbled against my cheek as the tenor of his voice changed, roughened. I opened my eyes and drew away, facing him. His eyes were dark and full of secrets.

“This is not the time,” he said. “Nor the place, but when you left the Thorns and went out into the streets of Astralux alone, I felt as though a part of me had been ripped away.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, and he turned his head to look at the fire instead of me.

“I’m sorry that I followed you, interfered with your plans. I should have spoken to you directly. It wasn’t honorable to your intelligence and strength—to your freedom of choice in the matter—for me to treat you that way, as if you were a subordinate or a child. And I want to treat you honorably. You deserve that from me.”

I was still, listening.

Adam turned his head and met my eyes again. Frustration flashed across his face, a rare show of emotion. “I am not the kind who makes long speeches. I don’t have any polished poetry to recite for you, not like—” He stopped again and shook his head as if clearing it. “When you are with me, I feel as though I can breathe again after holding my breath for too long. I just want to see you safe and happy, and your family safe and happy...everything and everyone you love safe and happy.” He held my gaze. “Everyone,” he repeated.

My chest rose and fell as I breathed.

Adam paused. “I just wanted to tell you that I wish you happiness with Gabe, if that’s what you desire.”

I reached out and took his hand. “Adam.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t try to explain yourself, please. I’m not seeking some kind of declaration from you. Like I said, this is hardly the time or the place. Your family’s lives are at stake. We’re in the middle of a mission. This isn’t the time to make decisions about matters of the heart. I only want you to know where I stand.”

“Adam—”

He put a finger to my lips. “Not tonight.”

He rose and left me sitting there, filled with confusion. Part of me wanted to run after him and demand that we talk further, but I wasn’t the kind to run after people, and Adam wasn’t the kind to waste his words.

Every single one he’d spoken to me was precious, and I remembered them as I stared into the fire and listened to the wind until finally, sleep stole over me and lulled me unconscious.

TWENTY-TWO

IT HAD ONLY taken Borde a day to reprogram the gate. A day too short, a day too long. We had no time, and yet my heart throbbed as if bruised at the thought of leaving Jonn and Ivy again.

Adam, Ann, and I met Borde at Echlos in the evening, before the first stars appeared on the horizon. Adam carried a lantern, and Ann’s eyes were wide and her lips were pale in the light of it. She’d never made a jump before. I reached out and found her hand as we reached the lowest level of Echlos, where the gate waited. She squeezed my fingers hard without speaking, and we walked the final steps together, connected by warm flesh and hope.

Energy crackled in the air and danced along the hairs of my arms. Sparks sizzled on the snow. I tasted it on my tongue and felt it in my blood. The sleeping eye was awake and open, watching us.

It was time.

There would be no goodbyes. We didn’t have the luxury. I’d left Ivy a note explaining that I would be back soon. We’d slipped from the village without fanfare.

“Ready,” Borde shouted, scurrying across the expanse of the room toward us. Wind blew through the hole in the ceiling above our heads and whipped his hair back. His scars gleamed in the near-darkness. Behind him, the gate gaped, a maw of glowing energy with a pinprick of blackness in the center.

“I’ll go first,” Adam said, and handed me the lantern. He stepped toward the darkness and the gate swallowed him whole. I bit my lip as he vanished in the span of a blink.

“I...I should go next,” Ann said. Her voice shook faintly.

“It’s just a moment of falling,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

She released my hand and stepped forward. A rush of wind and burst of energy, and she was gone, too.

A memory tickled my mind. I turned to Borde.

“Before I left your time and returned to mine, you tried to tell me something. What was it?”

Borde sighed. “I was having second thoughts about sending the Sickness back in that box.”

I was silent. If only he’d been able to stop me. Would any of this have happened?

“What if we simply used the gate to go back to that moment? What if I could undo it all?”

“We can’t change the past,” Borde said firmly. “What is done is done.”