Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (2 page)

“Wait,” Karin said. “First, tell me, Matthew. How are Tara and Kaylen?”

“They’re fine,” Matthew said, not hesitating this time. Tara was my mother, and Kaylen—or Caleb—was Karin’s brother.

“And the baby?” Green ivy poked out from beneath Karin’s sleeve. Only a plant speaker could wear living plants safely.

“Also fine.” Matthew sipped his tea. “Caleb thinks she’ll arrive early. Less than a month. I’m to tell you both that if you want to be there for her birth, you should come soon. Within a couple weeks.”

“A girl, then,” I said.
I had a sister once
. But that seemed long ago, and this child had little to do with that one.

“I get to come, too.” Allie glanced at Samuel, who once hadn’t been willing to let his daughter anywhere beyond the Wall. “Dad agreed. Healing without a watcher is dangerous at any time, and, well, we all know how far Caleb will go to save Liza’s mom.” Caleb’s magic was for healing, and Allie was his student, just as I was Karin’s student, though my magic wasn’t as close to hers. “If there are two healers there, Caleb won’t be tempted to push too hard, even if something goes—but nothing will go wrong. You know that, right, Liza?”

The tea burned my tongue. No one ever knew nothing would go wrong, not for certain.

“We will hold with all going well,” Karin said, as if
she could read my silence. The ivy crept down her arm to wrap around her fingers. “Now, what is this leaf that concerns you?”

“Not just a leaf.” Matthew rubbed at the scar around his wrist as he held his mug. “I saw … there were places, in the forest, that didn’t smell right. Where things had gone all musty and wrong. A leaf I nosed at fell apart at my touch. Other leaves—it was mostly leaves. But also a sapling whose branches were crumbling away on one side, leaving a pile of gray dust.” He swallowed. “And a pair of empty boots, as far apart as a man might stand, filled with the same dust.”

Allie rubbed her arms. “That’s too, too creepy.”

Samuel frowned into his untouched mug. I edged closer to Matthew, remembering a shivering leaf, a whisper of cold. “There was a leaf in his fur. It crumbled when I picked it up.”

Karin set her tea quietly aside. “Give me your hand, Liza.”

The gray leaf hadn’t hurt me, not that I could tell. But I put down my mug to set my hand in Karin’s. She drew it to her face and held it there with a listening look I’d come to know well. “I smell it still.” She let my hand go. I no longer smelled anything, but I couldn’t smell as well as Karin, either.

“I do not know what this means.” Karin stroked a green ivy leaf. “All I know is that I’ve caught this scent once before: in Faerie, right after the War.”

Once, I believed time fell into two simple parts. There was Before the War with the faerie folk, when few humans knew magic was real, and there was After, when that War had destroyed the human world, and the few who’d survived struggled to stay alive amid the deadly magic the War had left behind, hoping all the while that the faerie folk who’d slaughtered so many of us would never return. I was born After, but not long After, and I grew up in the shadow of the War.

Now it seemed my life held many Befores. Before my father set my baby sister out on a hillside to die for showing signs of magic, and Before I sent him away for it. Before my mother ran away and I found her in Faerie, where I learned that humans had sent killing fire to destroy the faerie folk as well. Before I called a dead seed from a gray place to grow into a tree using my magic, and in so doing called autumn and winter back into my always-green world. Before Karin and I called spring to follow winter through that same tree, a calling that nearly killed us and during which the newborn plants found Karin’s eyes and took her sight.

Before I met Karin and Caleb in the first place and
learned not all faerie folk were monsters. Before I met Karin’s mother and daughter and learned some faerie folk were monsters after all. It was Karin’s mother, the Lady who ruled Faerie, who’d turned my left hand to stone even as she died. Before Mom had become pregnant once more, this time by Caleb, whom she’d loved before the War, and Before I’d come here with Karin to learn more about my magic.

I moved closer to Matthew. He wrapped his fingers around my stone hand, as if it were no different from my living one.
Before the Lady used faerie glamour to force Matthew to do her will, and Before he was nearly trapped as a wolf forever because of it
.

“Liza,” Karin said, “what do your visions show of this crumbling?”

“Nothing.” I was a seer as well as a summoner, but I’d had far fewer visions the past few weeks. I’d hoped that meant I was gaining control over when they came to me at last, though Karin said it would be some years before I could call visions entirely at will.

A leaf curled around Karin’s finger. “Would you be willing to seek those visions for us now?”

“I’ll try.” I took the mirror Karin had given me from my pocket, pressing the catch against my dead hand to snap the plastic case open. I steadied my breathing as Karin had taught me, and then I looked into silvered
glass more perfect than anything humans had craft for now. The glass cast my own reflection back at me, brown hair streaked with clear locks that hadn’t been there a year before, dark eyes large in my suntanned face.

“Focus on the future, if you can,” Karin said.

I thought of home, and of the ordinary tasks Matthew and I would return to there: gathering firewood, carding wool, tracking and hunting game—silver light flickered in the glass, went out. I knew well enough I wasn’t much of a bow hunter anymore, though I’d been practicing with my stone hand all spring and summer. I kept staring at the glass, thinking instead of Mom, the baby, and Caleb, of Kyle, the young animal speaker who also lived with us now.
Home
, I thought.
Show me home
. I’d learned so much during this time away, and home had not always been kind to me, but with each passing month, I yearned all the more to go back there.

The mirror grew bright again, but reluctantly. I stared into that brightness. The images came slowly, as they never had before, hazy and blurred as if viewed through fog—

Matthew and me, Karin and Allie, walking the path to my town—

Me hugging Mom, wrapping my hands around a belly grown large with the baby within—

Matthew’s grandmother, Kate, standing with Karin
beside a larger mirror, one tall enough to step through—the mirror through which I’d taken Mom out of Faerie and through which Karin’s daughter, Elin, had fled back into it. “You must break the glass,” Karin said. “Now that we know there are survivors in Faerie, there’s no telling who else might find their way through.” “I know,” Kate told her, “but the mirror saved Matthew and Liza and Tara. Are we sure this is over? Are we sure it won’t be needed again?” Kate pressed her lips together, as if unhappy with where that thought led—

I came out of the vision to find Matthew, Allie, and Samuel all staring at me. Often someone needed to call me out of my visions, but this vision had released me on its own.

“What did you see?” Karin laced her fingers together, and the ivy vine twined up her other arm.

“Not much.” I slipped the mirror back into my pocket. “All of us reaching my town, me hugging Mom, you and Kate talking about her mirror.”

“That discussion took place before we left Franklin Falls.” Karin frowned. “Tell me, Liza. What is the furthest you’ve ever seen into the future?”

“No more than a few weeks.” My visions had always seemed more concerned with present and past. “I thought it was because I was new to my magic.”

“As had I.” Karin rested her chin on her hands. Thin
green tendrils crawled up her neck to weave themselves into her braid. “Yet in all other ways, your power has grown quickly. And once before I have seen visions cling closely to the present, not only for new seers but for all of them, as if any more distant future were too uncertain for their sight to pierce. Only once—just before the War.”

I picked up my mug. The tea had grown cold. “The War’s over.” It had to be over. My world nearly hadn’t survived the first time.

“There are many things that could make the future unclear. A war is but one of them.” Karin shook her head, and the ivy tendrils scurried out of her hair. “Perhaps I worry needlessly. But I would examine these dead leaves and gray dust for myself. I do not think we should wait two weeks to go to your town. I think we should go as soon as we can.”

We left two mornings later, just long enough for Karin to instruct the other plant speaker in her town—Kimi, a friend of Allie who’d come into her magic shortly after I had, and who, like me, was Karin’s student—about maintaining the Wall. Samuel almost didn’t let Allie leave after all, and only agreed because my vision showed she would, one way or another, and because, he said, he trusted Karin, Matthew, and me to look after her.

“I don’t need looking after.” Allie wriggled out of his
final hug, just beyond the Wall. “Besides, Liza knows it’s usually me saving her anyway.”

I adjusted the pack on my shoulders. “Let’s hope no one needs saving this time.” I wanted to go home, and hold those I cared for close, and know they were all safe. I wanted to no longer fear, deep down, that that was too much to ever hope for.

We set out, Karin and Allie, Matthew and me, into the morning chill. High clouds streaked the predawn gray, promising more rain in a day or so. Karin swept the path in front of us with her staff as she walked; her other hand lay lightly on Allie’s arm. Oak and maple leaves grew along the staff’s length, along with tendrils of wild grape that stretched on ahead, warning of rises and falls and rocks in the trail. Karin wasn’t wholly blind. Her plant-speaking magic still saw the shadows within all plants. Before dawn, those shadows weren’t strongly bound within stem and leaf. When a length of kudzu sent its shadow snaking out onto the trail, Karin’s gaze focused on it.
“Day comes. Seek rest.”
At her quiet words, the shadow hastily retreated.

As we left the town behind and the path wound deeper into the forest, I released Matthew’s hand and slipped in front of Allie and Karin, while Matthew remained behind them. We kept watch as we walked on.

An elm shadow swiped at us from above.
“Go away!”
I said. The elm’s shadow obeyed me almost as swiftly as the kudzu had obeyed Karin. As a summoner, I could command the shadows in all living things, but with less subtlety than Karin’s deeper control of plants. There were only plant shadows in the forest today, though. We were not close enough to winter for shadows of the dead to roam these woods.

The gray sky lightened, and the tree shadows settled more firmly within bark and leaf. Living vines and branches still grabbed at us, because no plant was wholly tame since the War, but so long as we kept to the center of the path, those were easy enough to avoid. Color seeped into the world, revealing a green forest broken by patches of fiery red and orange.
Autumn
. This year autumn was coming on its own, a slow change that needed no command from me. I only hoped spring would do the same.

As the sun rose, Matthew and I switched places, because we had less need for my summoning to protect us by day and because even as a human, Matthew had something of his wolf’s sense of sight and smell. His ponytail flopped over the top of the pack Samuel had loaned him. Karin slowed a little as the path became more uneven, and for the first time in months, I heard her faint footsteps as she made her way along it.

Allie reached for the sky, as if she could touch it. “I’m not stupid like a year ago, when I ran away to follow you
guys. I know how dangerous things can get, but I don’t want to ever live only behind the Wall again. I love this world. I do.”

Karin used her staff to push a stone from the path. “This world is a good thing to love,” she said soberly.

I loved the world better when I could keep an eye on it. I continued watching and listening as we walked on.

Karin slowed her steps. “Ahead of us.”

Matthew came to an abrupt halt. “This one wasn’t there before.” His voice tightened around the words. A squirrel lay by the side of the path, its fluffy tail twitching, its head pillowed on a pile of gray dust.

Just a dying squirrel
, I thought, and then I saw what was missing. Its front and back paws. The tip of its nose. Only the thing’s shadow was whole. As I moved to Matthew’s side, I smelled the same stale scent I had from the leaf, stronger now. My good hand reached for the hilt of the knife I wore, though I saw nothing to fight here.

“It’s awful!” Allie’s voice rose. “It’s—it’s not dead. It should be, but it’s not!”

Karin gripped her staff. “Tell me what you see.”

“A squirrel.” I forced my voice to stay steadier than Allie’s as I described it to Karin. Matthew knelt beside the creature, carefully not touching it. There was no blood, just that stale gray dust.

The squirrel’s tail kept twitching. All at once Allie
darted forward and pressed her hands to its side. There was a flash of silver light. The squirrel’s shadow flickered and went out, and its fluffy tail fell still.

“Allie!” I grabbed the back of her shirt one-handed to pull her away. Matthew scrambled to his feet, reaching for Allie’s shoulders, looking her over.

Tears streamed down her face. “I had to! It was hurting so much.”

“Kaylen has surely taught you not to throw yourself into any healing without first determining you can do so safely.” Karin extended her staff toward the squirrel, and a green tendril snaked into the dust. The color began to drain from it. Karin made a harsh sound, and the tendril fell, half green, half gray, from her staff. The gray half crumbled into more dust. “This one is newer than Matthew’s leaf, I think.”

Allie backed away from the squirrel. We all did. I thought of the gray leaf caught in Matthew’s fur, and I shivered. I scanned forest and trail but saw nothing that could have caused this.

Karin turned back to the path. “I suggest we keep walking.”

A mile on I found a half-crumbled sycamore leaf by the side of the trail. It didn’t affect Karin’s staff when she poked at it, so she moved to the sycamore tree beside it, putting her hands to the furrowed brown bark.
“This tree remembers cold. A time when the midday sun wasn’t strong enough to warm its leaves. It would rather not remember.”