Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (14 page)

His words washed over me like cold river water.
Shadow. Allie had no shadow. Caleb couldn’t heal anyone without a shadow.

Only a summoner could call shadows back from the dead.

I slumped in his hold. Caleb returned his hands to my shoulders and back. Healing cold flowed through my wounds. Matthew leaned his head on my leg with a sigh. I dug my fingers into his ruff. There were orange leaves in his fur and a long scratch down one side of his nose.

Elin remained by Allie. Behind them, the first hints of gray touched the sky. “She killed the owl,” the weaver said. “To save you.”

There’s only two times it’s okay to kill with healing magic. When someone is in pain and when someone’s causing it
. Allie had used her magic on the owl, the magic that had already made her so ill. She’d pushed too hard at last, and she’d—

No. Caleb wouldn’t have spoken of calling her back if there wasn’t hope of saving her. His healing magic flared with a final icy gust and was gone, leaving me gasping. I released Matthew and crawled over to Allie. Her arms were spread wide, and there was a small smile on her face. I touched her brow. It was warm, as if her body didn’t know her shadow was gone. Matthew looked up at me, sorrow in his wolf’s eyes.

I wasn’t helpless, not now. My magic could yet set this right.

“Careful, Liza.” Caleb’s voice was stretched taut. “Do nothing you cannot do safely.”

“Allie!”
I
would
set this right. I would protect her like I’d promised.
“Allison! Come here!”

No answer. I called on all my magic, all my power.
“Allison! Come back!”
My voice rang through the growing dawn.

Some memory of shadow flickered beside her, like a wick reluctant to catch.
“Allison!”

Something stirred deep within me.
“Come here,”
the River called to me in turn.
“Seek sleep, seek darkness, seek rest.”
Its voice urged me toward the depths and the gray. The seeds in my pocket fought that pull once more, urging me to the surface, toward sun and growth and light.

If I moved toward the light, I would lose her.
“Allison!”
The flickering shadow gained strength, took on shape: a gray girl in a loose nightgown, looking down at her physical body as if it were strange to her.

“Go to her,”
the River said.

Of course I wanted to go to her. I reached for Allie’s shadow hand with my flesh one. Her hand passed right through mine, and ice knifed up my arm. Allie drew
back from me like a wary cat. I reached for her with my stone hand, but her shadow passed through that as well.

I’d held shadows before. What had I done when I’d held them?

I looked down at my hands. I had a shadow, too. I just couldn’t see it. A healer couldn’t heal herself, and a summoner couldn’t see or command her own shadow. Not anymore—but once, long ago, Rhianne had sent her shadow far beyond her body.

I didn’t need to go as far as Rhianne had. I needed only to go the very slightest distance beyond my own skin. I unfocused my gaze the way Karin taught me when I first learned to see shadows, and I stared down at my own hands.

I saw flesh and stone, nothing more. I closed my eyes, remembering the life I’d felt within my stone hand when Nys touched it, life I could not see. I reached for the tingling warmth of his touch, fighting the sick feeling it churned up, focusing on the stirring of life—of shadow—within stone.
“Allison.”
Something shuddered awake within my hand. I reached out with that something, reached out and touched Allie’s hand. My stone fingers, dead no longer, wrapped around hers. Allie’s hand was cold, but the cold didn’t trouble me now.

“Liza!” Caleb’s voice seemed very far away. A faint musty smell drifted toward me.

“So you see,”
the River said.
“It is not so hard as it seems.”

I felt a shiver of fear at that voice, even as Allie pulled on my hand, trying to get away from me.

I didn’t let go. “Allie. It’s all right. It’s me, Liza.
Come here
.”

“You can’t,” Allie whispered. “You can’t follow me, or it will all have been for nothing.”

What did she mean, follow her? I opened my eyes. Allie looked up at me. She was as solid and real as I was, only drained of all color, hair and nightgown and boots cast in shades of gray, despair and anger mixed in her colorless eyes. I looked down at our linked hands. No stone weighed me down now, but my living hands and all the rest of me were the same shades of gray as Allie. I hadn’t called her back. I’d slipped into shadow with her instead. We stood together on a dead, gray plain. I knew this place. It was the place things went when they died. I’d been here before.

There were no clouds, no bright moon. Silence weighed on me, urging me to my knees, strong as any glamour, but the seeds I held spoke to something deeper within me, reminding me of color and light. I remained standing.

Allie kept trying to pull away. “Let me
go
.” Her voice was at the edge of hearing, as if sound had no more place here than color.

I braced against the gray ash at our feet. She’d begged me to let her go with Nys once, too.

“You don’t understand.” Allie twisted in my hold, kicking up a cloud of stale dust. “I have to go, but you have a choice. I saved you, only you won’t let yourself be saved. Please, Liza. There are people who need you back there.” Her seed must have been speaking to something in her, too, if she could fight me. I’d never been able to fight anything in the gray place before.

Ashes drifted back to the ground. Allie sagged in my hold, then abruptly aimed a kick at my shin. Her foot connected. The pain was muted, as if we fought wrapped in feathers, but its weight knocked me back. Allie broke free, and she ran.

I chased her over the empty plain, knowing she ran toward sleep, toward death.
“Allison. Stop.”
The gray softened my command as surely as it had softened Allie’s kick, but she skidded to a halt. I grabbed her, and she went limp in my arms. I turned back the way we’d come—the way I thought we’d come. The gray looked the same in every direction, and I saw no way out.

“Liza. Please.” Allie voice caught. “It
hurts
not to answer the call. Let me go.”

Healing did hurt sometimes—I didn’t know how to heal. I only knew how to call things to me, to send them away. I only knew how to hold on.

That’s what I would do, then. I set Allie down, grabbing her hand as I did. “All right. Show me where we need to go.”

She began pulling against me again, pulling hard. The stale smell grew stronger, taking on a sickly sweetness.

I wouldn’t leave her alone in the dark. I was the one who stopped fighting to follow where she led, deeper into the gray.

Chapter 12

“L
iza, no.” Allie’s feet crunched softly over the ash.

I matched her steady pace. Whatever call she answered, I did not feel it. “I won’t try to stop you, if this is what you need to do. But I won’t leave you, either.”

Allie sighed, the nearest thing to wind in this dead place. “What did I ever bother healing you for if you were only going to do this?”

“I always was a terrible patient.” I managed a strangled laugh.

“Liza! That’s not funny.” But Allie laughed, too, a laugh that caught on something like a hiccup. “What about Matthew? He’ll never forgive you for this.”

He would, though. That was the worst part. Matthew understood risking oneself for others as well as I did. Allie, too, I realized. Struggling to save what we
could, it was what we all
did
. If I didn’t come back, Matthew would only regret that he couldn’t save me in turn.

I wasn’t giving up on saving myself or Allie just yet. I scanned the empty land as I followed her, looking for any change, any hint of a way out. Gray weighed at my steps. A breath of cold brushed my ankle, and a shapeless shadow floated past. Something in that shadow called to me and my magic, longing to be laid to rest.

Even here? I’d thought this was where shadows found rest when I sent them away.

The seeds I carried still called to me, too. I drew one into my free hand. Its husk seemed faint, not as real as the shadow within it. It had been a seed found in the gray that had shown me the way out the first time I was here. That seed had become my quia tree. Could this seed, which came from my tree in turn, also show us a way out?

“Grow.”
My voice—my magic—came out as a whisper.
“Seek sun, seek sky, seek life.”

The seed’s shadow began to unfurl. A flash of green filled my sight.

“Stop!”
A woman’s voice echoed around us.
“Seek silence, seek stillness, seek sleep!”
Allie and I staggered beneath the power in her command. The seed shuddered, and its shadow curled back up. Just like that.

The voice had come from the direction Allie was
walking. A summoner’s voice, one with more power than mine. I slowed my steps as I returned the seed to the others, forcing Allie to slow as well. “Show yourself,” I said. The gray swallowed my words, leaving behind the barest of whispers.

Laughter rustled over the land, like wind through fallen leaves, no joy in it. “That is one thing I cannot do.” Whoever this summoner was, the gray didn’t mute her voice. “You must come to me, as all who walk here do, soon or late.”

I shivered, not from cold. Allie pulled me on, toward the voice. At least this enemy—if she was an enemy—was not at our backs. More shadows drifted past, as if on some unfelt wind. I sensed longing from them all; if they sought sleep, they were not finding it. So many. My eyes stung, but when I brought my arm to my face, it was dry, as if tears had no place in the gray.

The shadows thickened into a chill tide. Some held hints of their former shapes: a grasping hand, an outstretched paw, a leafy branch. It wasn’t only humans whose shadows came here when they died.

Something dark loomed out of the gray. A tree’s thick roots, taller than I was, disappearing into the ashes below me, merging into a thick trunk that stretched out of view far above. Shadows drifted toward the roots
from all directions, swirling around them with a soupy thickness. The air grew heavy, as it did before a storm, but my throat felt dry as a summer without rain.

“No!” Allie jerked to a stop less than an arm’s length from the tree. She pounded at a root, but her hand went right through it, as if the tree were more real than she was. “No no no no
no
.” This tree wasn’t a shadow. It
had
a shadow, deep within it, as Allie and I did not.

“It isn’t
fair
.” Allie looked up past the roots, to the tree’s broad trunk. “I need to leave, but there’s nowhere to go.” She tugged at my hand, more desperately. “Why?”

“You could release the seeds you carry.” The woman’s voice came from the tree, gentler this time. “It would be easier for you if you did.”

I looked more closely at the tree’s shadow and saw hints of legs within its roots, hints of a woman’s body within its trunk. Woman and tree, tangled together as surely as wolf and boy were tangled in Matthew. I knew her then, knew her as the same woman whose arms were tangled within this tree’s shadow branches in Faerie. The First Tree’s roots truly had gone deep.

“Rhianne,” I said.

“Indeed.” Somewhere up out of sight, wind rattled dry branches, but I did not feel it. “How do you come to be here, little summoner, knowing my true name while
holding your own name close, carrying green life to the heart of death itself? You feel familiar. You have been here before.”

“We didn’t mean to be here,” I said. “We’d gladly leave, if only you’d show us the way.”

“You so lightly seek what those around you cannot have? A return to light and life?”

“Not me. I know it’s over for me.” Allie took her own seed in her hand. “If I let go of this, will I be free?” The longing in her eyes felt colder than any gray. It was the same longing I sensed from the drifting shadows all around us.

“No,” Rhianne said, sorrow in her voice. “You will not be free. But you will no longer know it, for when you let the seed go, you let your name go as well. There will be an end to pain, to the knowledge of suffering.”