Aeralis (4 page)

“I don’t want you to go.” The words ripped themselves from me in a moment of sheer weakness.

Adam’s eyes fluttered half-closed, and his lips pressed together in the way they always did when he wanted to speak but refrained from doing so. I saw frustration—and understanding—mingled in his eyes.

I brushed past him for the house. Adam remained outside. I shut the door behind me and leaned against it. I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself, but my throat was squeezing too tight.

How could the Trio ask Adam to walk away from the Frost when it was as weak and new as a fresh-born baby?

~

After shutting myself in the room I shared with Ivy, I took the paper from the place where I’d wadded it into my belt and put it in the drawer of the bureau beside the bed. I fell back against the quilt and stared at the cracked plaster ceiling. Slowly, my vision began to blur, and I heard her whispering to me. My mother. Her voice was soft and warm, and I felt whole and well for the first time in weeks.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You’re strong, Lia. You’re a Weaver.”

“I miss you, Ma,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”

I turned my head. She sat on the bed beside me, and she was so beautiful even in the darkness. Light glimmered like stars in her hair, and her smile was pure grace. She opened her mouth to speak.

“Wake up, Lia.”

It was Ivy’s voice.

I lifted my head from the pillow and squinted at Ivy’s face in the near-darkness of early morning. I’d been dreaming.

My limbs still ached with weariness, and my eyes were gritty with sleep. “What is it?” I curled my fingers around the edges of my pillowcase and wished for sleep, because with sleep came oblivion. With sleep came dreams.

“It’s Jonn. The Healer says to come.”

Jonn
. The fog of sleep vanished. I threw back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed as dread sunk into my gut. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. They only said to fetch you at once.”

She darted from the room like a nervous bird, and I followed, my mouth dry and my breath snagged in my throat.

Adam was waiting outside the door to Jonn’s room, conversing with one of the Healers, a young woman. I slowed as I reached them, Ivy at my back.

“How is he?” The words stuck in my throat. I forced them out.

The Healer spoke. “He’s awake.”

Ivy gasped. “Awake? As in he’s getting better?”

I made no sound. Awake, as in
not dead
. I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall.

The Healer didn’t smile. Her mouth moved, but I no longer heard what she said. My brother was awake. That had to mean something good.

“Can I see him?” I found myself asking, interrupting her.

The Healer looked at Adam before replying. “We do not know everything about the cycle of the disease, but from the books you’ve provided for us from the Ancients, his period of contagiousness has passed.”

I already had my hand on the door.

“Wait,” Adam said, and his voice broke through to me. “Lia, you...you should listen to her.”

I looked at the Healer, impatient.

“He is awake,” she said, “but he is not recovered.” She paused, seeing that I didn’t understand. “He is still dying, Lia.”

All the air sucked from my lungs as the words hit me, a punch in the gut, a bruise forming around my heart and spreading to my limbs. I breathed in and out, a raspy sound in the sudden silence. Ivy’s hands grabbed for me, and we swayed together in silence, two sisters absorbing one terrible blow. I was glad she was with me in that moment; I didn’t know if I could have faced it alone.

Ivy whispered, “Please, can we see him?”

“Yes, but don’t overtire him,” the Healer said, and this time her voice was gentle. She’d delivered her hard news; now all that was left was helping us put ourselves back together. “Go one at a time. It’ll be less overwhelming for him that way.”

“You first,” Ivy said, and I turned the knob and went into the room. The door clicked shut behind me.

I was alone with my brother.

My eyes crawled over the floor, the walls, and the window before landing on the central thing: Jonn. He was swathed in quilts to his chin, his body just a narrow bump beneath the covers. He looked young, fragile, like a little boy waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight. At the sound of my footsteps on the wooden floor, his eyes fluttered open. He looked at me and tried to smile, but his mouth seemed broken.

I took a few steps, breathing the stale air that stank of sickrooms and sweat and uneaten soup. Each step took a lifetime. Each step, time bled away too fast.

Dying
.

I reached his side and stopped. My hands hovered over him, and I was reluctant to touch him and aching to at the same time. I rested one hand hesitantly over the lump of his shoulder beneath the blanket.

“Jonn,” I said gently.

His voice was just a croak. “Lia.”

Silence hovered between us as I sank down to the chair beside him. I clasped my hands in my lap. “How—how do you feel?”

“The way I must look,” he said, and laughed under his breath. It turned into a cough, and I saw flecks of blood on the blanket as he bent over it.

“Jonn—”

“It’s fine.” He straightened, still gasping for air, wheezing as he sucked life into his lungs and blew it out again. “They won’t tell me anything yet. How are you and Ivy? How is Adam? The village? How is everyone adjusting to the liberation? What’s happened since I’ve been out?”

I thought of the letter I had hidden in the bureau drawer. I flinched.

Jonn raised his eyebrows.

“We’re fine,” I said. “Worried about you, of course, but keeping busy. Everything is different now, and no one knows exactly how to take it. There’s been a great deal of disagreement already.”

“I can imagine.” He brought his hands up from under the quilts and rested them over his chest, folded, corpse-like. I averted my gaze from them, looking instead at his eyes. His pupils were constricted and veins bulged around the irises.

“They demanded that Ann and the Mayor—the former Mayor, I mean, well, Ann’s father—leave the village.”

“What? Leave? Where are they now?”

“Staying at our farm.” I paused. “But I’m worried about them. It isn’t a permanent solution. Then there’s the matter of Echlos and the PLD. We saw Korr and Gabe days ago, and I handed it over to them, but I don’t feel—” I stopped. “Is this all right? Am I exhausting you?”

He moved his fingers in a gesture that perhaps was meant to be reassuring, but it looked like a cat clawing for a bird. “I’m all right. I want to know what’s happening. I’ll go insane if I don’t.”

“Adam is leaving.” I said it quietly, my head lowered.

“What?”

“He’s been ordered to join Korr and Gabe in Aeralis. The Trio wants it.”

He exhaled heavily. One hand plucked at the quilt. “And you?”

“I’m to stay here and help the villagers, Adam says. Keep them from killing each other.” My voice betrayed the defeat I felt.

Jonn raised his eyebrows. “I thought you were no longer under Adam’s authority,” he said, with a hint of his old spark. “I thought he said he was going to let you continue leading here as you’d been doing. Doesn’t that mean you’re no longer bound to do what he says if you disagree?”

“I’m still a member of the Thorns. I still get orders from the Trio. Besides, I have no desire to go to Aeralis and work for Korr.” I hesitated. “I don’t want him to leave, though.”

Jonn absorbed this information. “Who’s fighting? What’s wrong in the village?” he asked.

“People are worried,” I said, speaking carefully now. I didn’t want to alarm him. “There are disputes about quota, about sharing what we have with the newcomers among us. Some are talking about illness. They don’t know that the Sickness has come again, but they’re worried. Some are blaming the Aeralians in our midst. They want them gone in case more become infected.”

“It hasn’t come again,” Jonn said. “Not like that. Besides, it wasn’t the fugitives’ fault.”

“But how did you contract it? It must have come from somewhere.” I stopped.
It wasn’t the fugitives’ fault
, he’d said, as if he knew the real source. “Whose fault is it?”

Jonn cleared his throat. “Mine. I contracted the disease on...on purpose.”

I rose from the chair. “What are you talking about?”

“I read it in one of our father’s notebooks. Those who contracted the disease but didn’t die—they were stronger, better. They recovered from disease and injury. They were new again. Whole. No longer crippled.”

My throat was dry. My tongue stuck to my teeth as horror filled me. “What are you saying?”

“The package I asked you to bring me from Borde.” He traced one finger in slow circles over the quilt across his chest. “It was a dead mouse, infected with the Sickness. I handled it, allowed myself to become sick. But no one else will. I burned the corpse, and I’ve been quarantined.”

I was shaking. Shaking with horror and rage. “How could you do this? To Ivy? To me? To all of us!”

He just looked at me, and I read the anguish in his eyes.

“Everiss is dead, Lia. I have a wasted leg, I get sick often, I have seizures. I’m weak. There’s no place for me in this world.”

“That isn’t true!”

“I’m weak,” he insisted. “Too weak.”

“So you decided to kill yourself?”

“With any luck, I’ll recover and be stronger. Healed...”

“Jonn, you’re dying.”

His head snapped up, and he stared at me. His mouth opened and closed. A stream of emotions crossed his face. He didn’t speak.

“It didn’t work,” I said. “Whatever stupid plan you had, it didn’t work. You didn’t recover stronger. You aren’t going to recover at all.” I paused, the words choking me. “How could you do this?”

He didn’t have an answer.

I left. I didn’t speak to the others in the hall. In the bedroom, I washed and changed out of my nightclothes before grabbing a cloak and heading for the stairs. I needed to be in the clear, cold air of the Frost.

FOUR

WIND BLEW THE scent of snow blossoms across my face as I ducked beneath tree branches and skirted fallen limbs. It was good to be out and moving. It helped me think.

I reached the place I sought and paused to catch my breath. Ahead, the outline of Borde’s ruined lab shimmered at the edge of the forest. I shook the snow from my boots, and slipped down the hill to the hidden path that led to the front door.

The floorboards creaked with my every step as I slipped inside. I hadn’t been back since we’d overthrown the Farthers and driven them from the Frost, and I didn’t know what drew me back now. I walked through the rooms slowly, running my fingers over the ruined furniture and the dust-covered devices that lay forgotten and rusted now, feeling the grimy metal and aged wood and remembering the nights I’d spent there. I stopped in the center of the room and shut my eyes. Perhaps if I concentrated, I could recall everything Borde had told me about the Sickness, about the search for the cure. Had he mentioned anything offhand that might help my brother?

But I could think of nothing new.

As I stepped toward the kitchen, one of the floorboards clattered beneath the heel of my boot.

I paused.

The floorboard was warped, perhaps, or simply loose. I studied the ground below my feet. The board I’d stepped on sat a little higher than the rest of them. Maybe...?

I crouched down, gripped it with both hands, and yanked. The board came up easily, and beneath it was a narrow space stuffed with papers. A hiding place? I dipped my hand inside and shuffled through the papers. Most were unintelligible to me—diagrams, lists, other things that made little sense to me. Then my fingers brushed leather, and my heart skipped a beat. I reached deeper and withdrew a book. A journal.

My heart thudded. My throat tightened. With shaking fingers, I opened the book to the first page and saw the sign of the Thorns.

This was the journal Doctor Borde had showed me five hundred years in the past. The one that had held my family’s riddle.

I turned the pages slowly. Some were filled with the scrawl of a shaking hand, unreadable passages of frantic words. Others held rows of deliberate, neat words, the shape of the letters dark from some pressing hand. I flipped faster. Here was the riddle—
What woven secret will keep you warm
? Here was the sketch of me, or someone who looked just like me. I touched the face of the girl as goose bumps rippled over my flesh.

I tucked the journal back in the space where I’d found it, replaced the board, and stood. My whole body felt wrung out, shaken. This journal, this ruin—these things were like ghosts from the past, haunting me. I didn’t want them.

I stood for a moment in the stillness of the ruined lab, taking one last look around the room. Then I slipped out the door and headed for Iceliss.

~

The rustle of trees made me pause along the path to the village. The wall of vegetation parted, and a man emerged. I recognized him at once.

“Stone,” I said.

The Wanderer nodded at me in greeting. “Lia Weaver.”

It was strange to see him here in my world, standing among our snow blossoms and pines instead of on his wind-swept ice plain. But then again, in a way, nothing was strange anymore.

I searched for something to say, something pleasant to this once captor, now ally whose people shared the Frost with us in exchange for their assistance in overthrowing our oppressors.

“How are your people?” I finally asked. The people who called themselves the Wanderers had made a new camp near the village, close enough to trade for goods when they needed them, but far enough that we did not see each other without purposing to do so.

He considered his words before replying. “They are adjusting slowly. It is different now, to have access to this place. We are not used to seeing walls and houses of stone.”

I nodded. They’d been in the village a few times, and they always moved like deer, furtive and easily startled by anything that moved too suddenly or made too loud a noise.