Blightborn (42 page)

It keeps him moving.

Eventually, the sun comes up—morning over the Heartland—vented first through the dead corn and then up overhead. Hotter than he expected. Warm on his brow, sweat crawling across the bridge of his nose.

There comes a point where ahead, far ahead, he sees the air shimmer. And then as he walks, the shimmer begins to fade,
and in its place is a tall, white house, as white as salt, as white as bone.

Ahead, the pathway leads to a wooden archway. A trellis on which thin, curling vines grow. Vines with big, ostentatious leaves. And fat clusters of . . .

Grapes. He’s seen pictures of grapes. Drawings and paintings and photos in Pop’s old books. He rushes to them, suddenly aware of how hungry he is, how thirsty, and he reaches the arch and grabs at a dangling cluster. They feel cool in his hand, oddly full and satisfying, and just moving his fingers in and around the grapes feels . . . comforting somehow.

He twists one off, and the cluster springs back.

He’s about to pop it into his mouth when he thinks—

No. This isn’t natural. Don’t
.

He holds his mouth open. His tongue is wet with anticipation. He curses himself and drops the grape to the ground.

He steps on it. It gives way with a little
plop
, then soaks the dirt with purple. It kills him.

Instead, he keeps moving—

Into the garden beyond.

The garden Pop grew was nothing like this. This is an impossible place. He walks paths that are not so much ordered aisles as they are winding openings connected through a wild tangle of plants. Plump fruits hang. Wild flowers thrust up out of dense green. Scents compete almost violently for dominance: the spice of evergreen, the perfume of flowers, and a dozen other aromas Cael cannot even begin to identify.

It makes him dizzy. And giddy. And queasy. All in equal measure.

Ahead stands a black, twisting tree, the trunk warped and wound like a spring coiled by a divine hand. Sculpted almost. Red leaves shudder.

She steps out from behind that tree.

The wave of fragrance hits him almost before his eyes register what it is he’s seeing—the floral scent is almost narcotic.

His Blight-vine tightens. Excited.

Or afraid.

She strides toward him, her long, diaphanous gown trailing.

She’s beautiful. Young. Powerful. If this is the Maize Witch, she defies expectation. His image was of an old, haggard thing, a monster in the skin of a woman, long nails, sharp teeth, skin like the vellum pages of an old, worn catechism or maybe like dead leaves, like cracked earth.

She is none of those things. She’s long and lithe, skin like milk, eyes like spoonfuls of sky—

And she’s Blighted.

The undersides of her forearms are like the petals of white flowers.

Her eyebrows are small twists of pale vine.

A white rose blooms in the hollow of her neck, hanging like a brooch.

Suddenly, she stands before him. And she’s changing right in front of him—through her white-gold hair grow threads of green, filaments of life that appear and retract into her scalp. She raises her arms, and drupes of red and black berries unfold and dangle from the insides of her elbows before they drop off and land against the ground—falling, dissolving, rotting. She opens her mouth to speak, and Cael sees a pink tongue, a human
tongue, but then a tongue that splits in half and shows red pulp and sharp thorns, the halves of which braid together before becoming human once more.

“I’m glad you found me,” she says. Her hand finds his—he instinctively jerks away, but his Blight-vine coils around her wrist, pulling his arm back with terrifying strength. Her fingers entwine with his own.

“I don’t want to be here” is all Cael can say.

“A shame,” she says. Her lips turn as red as a bell pepper as they spread into a slow smile. “Because here you are. You must be starving. Let’s go inside. You may eat. I will talk.”

Cael’s never seen a plate of food this green before.

To get here, to this kitchen, at this table, the two of them walked through the garden, underneath other trellises—some lined with flowers, others with berries or grapes—toward the narrow, bone-white house. Up half-shattered stone steps (green shoots crawling through the cracks), through an unfinished wooden door that, even as Cael brushed past it, seemed to pulse with a kind of life.

Then through the decrepit building—where, too, the kingdom of plants reigns supreme. Thin little vines dangle from the ceiling; fat, fuzzy stems thicker than Cael’s wrist climb the walls, moored there. The floorboards buckle. The branch of a tree comes in through a shattered window and shudders as they pass.

They went from a dark living area to a white kitchen. White, clean, the tile cracked, the tiny threads of verdant life poking through.

She sat him at a table and returned with the plate, a plate heaped with raw greens both flat and curly, with sliced berries and apples, with seeds as green as the flesh of new wood. All of it drizzled with oil.

It’s a salad, he realizes. Sometimes Pop would try to make a salad with food that came in their provisions, but everything was always wilted. Or precooked. Or it had to be cooked just to be made safe.

Nothing like this.

The woman produces a wooden fork and hands it to him.

“I can eat this?” he asks, his stomach clenching like a fist.

“You can.”

“It’s weird.”

“Why is that?”

“Because . . .” His Blight-vine demonstrates by tracing circles in the air.

“Because you’re made of it, or it is made of you.”

He swallows a hard knot and nods.

“We eat of the world and what grows in it. Or from ourselves. Everything natural is food.” She smiles. “Put differently, animals are made of meat, and you’re made of meat.”

Permission enough. He stabs the fork down, begins eating like a starving goat. It’s bright and crisp, and the oil—
the oil!
—he doesn’t even know what it is, but it’s fatty and full and round. The crisp. The crunch. The juice from the berries slides over his lip, down his chin.

Heaven on a plate.

“My name is Esther Harrington,” she says. Her voice is sharp and clipped; it contains a refinement not present in Heartlander
speech. He thinks:
Empyrean sounding is what it is
. “The people here sometimes call me Mother.”

He mumbles around a mouthful of food, “You look too young to be anybody’s mother.”

She smiles. “Nice of you to say.”

“O . . . okay.”

“You
are
hungry.”

“Mm-hmmph.”

“I’ll talk. You eat.”

He nods.

“I am the one they call the Maize Witch, though I do not think the name is deserved. I despise the corn. And I am no witch. What I have is not magic. I am simply evolved. A product of our age. I am the way forward.
You
are the way forward.”

Here the food sits in his mouth as he stops chewing.

She must see the befuddled look on his face.

“We have been changed for a changed world. There comes a threat to our very existence, and we are the answer.”

“The Blight.”

“I do not think of it as the Blight. That is a crass name given by someone who thought it a disease.”

“Isn’t it?”

She laughs.

The Blight-vine shudders.

“Do I look diseased?” she asks. Sprouts of green thrust up from her fingertips, coil-whips of green that search the air and then retract. The skin shows no breach, no wound, as smooth as the skin of a baby.

“No. But it doesn’t look . . . normal.”

“It isn’t normal. It’s
exceptional
. That is the very definition of
exceptional
, isn’t it? To be the exception? To excel beyond the droll margins of normal? Normal is the curse. Being normal is the disease. We are special. That is to be celebrated.”

“I’m afraid of it.”

“Fear is good. Fear is natural.”

“I can’t control it.”

“You can. And I’ll teach you how.”

“But . . . those people. In the corn. They didn’t look like they . . . were controlling it.”

A grief-struck look crosses her face. “Think, if you will, of our relationship with fire. It seems a living thing. If we master it, it serves us: it cooks our food, lights our way, and when necessary, burns our enemies. But those who do not master it are burned by it. Burned alive and consumed. Those poor people were taken by our gift before they learned to control it. They are together now. At least they’re not alone. At least they have one another. And they still have their purpose.”

Cael doesn’t know what that means.

But it scares the hell out of him.

“Are you done eating?” she asks.

He looks down at an empty plate. He didn’t realize he’d finished. He nods gamely.

Then he realizes they’re not alone.

Standing in the doorway behind him are two more of the Blighted. A man in a ratty coat, his exposed chest a mesh of fibrous brown vines, his chin a small forest not of whiskers but of some sort of . . . hanging fungus. Next to him, a bald woman,
half her face consumed by a kind of hard-leaf scale that shudders and whispers.

“That’s Edvard and Siobhan.”

Cael offers them a small nod. They just stare in return.

“Let’s go out back,” Esther says. “I’d like to show you something.”

Another set of steps, crooked and crumbling.

Out back of the house is another garden of sorts.

But this one is far stranger than what’s at the front.

Tall human shapes stand out over the garden. Like the little corn-husk dolls Merelda used to make, bound together with thread or dry silk-fiber. But these are huge—Cael barely comes up knee-high to these dry, dead giants. No plants grow over them, but he can see that they’re hollow, and he spies flashes of green within their heads and chests and bellies.

Some of them are men. Others are women.

He knows this because they are anatomically correct.

Which causes a bloom of blush in his cheeks.

Esther pulls him by the hand into the garden.

Edvard and Siobhan follow behind. Close.

“Do you believe in the gods?” she asks him.

“The Lord and Lady? Jeezum Crow?” He shrugs. “I guess. Same as anybody. They took away the churches when I was a kid. But sometimes we’d still pray, and Pop liked to leave things for the votaries.”

“Did you know there are gods older than that?”

He shrugs. He doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t know anything.
She’ll think I’m stupid. And she’s beautiful. And she smells nice, too
. In fact, he’s having a hard time thinking of anything but her.

“The Empyrean above us worship sky gods and goddesses. Deities of the clouds and air, of wind and sun. For some it’s cursory. For others it’s very real, part of their faith. But they only see one part of it. Other gods exist. Gods of the earth. Goddesses of vine and root. Deities of the land.”

Cael could listen to her speak day and night. Something about her voice. Something about her perfume. He feels like a bee that can’t quit visiting the same flower, like a drunk man who can’t quit drinking.

“I thought you said you didn’t believe in magic.”

She smiles as they keep walking toward a pair of buildings—long buildings made of dark wood. “I don’t. What we are isn’t mystical but natural. And it is the oldest gods, the primordial ones, who gave it to us. I found these gods in the DNA of plants. But I found them in our DNA, too.”

“Oh.” He feels so stupid around her. So small. He just wants to stand here and let her tell him things. Fill him up with whatever he’s missing.

“I’ve been watching you.”

“H . . . how?”

Her hand closes around his. Tendrils creep from her fingertips and begin coiling up his forearm toward his shoulder. He feels a rush of heat and excitement—his heart starts rabbit-thumping in his chest. “I’m a part of you. I can feel you through our shared gift. One day you’ll see.”

“I want to see.” Does he? Want to see? Could he mean that? It feels suddenly like he does. He feels drunk. But clear, too. Clearer than he’s been in a long, long while. Awake and alert and . . . and
aware
.

They walk between the two buildings. She tells him this is where her people stay. Those who never could master their gift and those who came to her before it was too late. Like him, she says.

“I can help you.” Her tendrils wind around his wrist again and again. “I can make you whole. And then together we can help the world and those in it.”

“I want that.”
I want to be whole
.

“I know you do.” Her thumb gently strokes the side of his hand.

But there’s something else. Something he wants to tell her. Except he can’t find the thought—it’s like reaching in a cloud to try to find a single drop of rain. He sees faces gauzed by the fog of memory.

“There’s something,” he says, “something I have to do.”

“But you can’t remember what it is.”

“No.”
I only want to be right here, right now
.

“You want to help your friends.”

“My friends.”
Gwennie. Lane. Rigo.
“My sister.”
Merelda . . .

“I can help with that, too,” she says. They leave the space between the two buildings, feet stepping in soft grass—

There, in the lot beyond, two platforms. Landing platforms. Like the one at the end of Boxelder. One platform sits empty. On the other rests a small open-air skiff. Four people, max. But it’s nicer than the corn-boats they use here in the Heartland.
It’s got hover-rails propping it up and gleaming propellers on the back.

On the side of the boat is the Empyrean sigil: the Pegasus.

“You can take that skiff,” she says.

“Thank you.” The words come out of him with a desperate urgency—the gratitude of a starving man given food, a drowning man given a mouthful of breath. “But I don’t want to leave here. I just . . . I just got here.”

“You’ll be back.” She lets go of his hand, her tendrils recoiling—and he’s suddenly filled with a ragged emptiness that he’s never felt before. She lifts her fingers to his head, and the loneliness is quashed. Shoots and tendrils caress his hair and his scalp, and crawl along the top of his ear like a worm seeking ingress. “But there is something I need you to do.”