Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (15 page)

“But not to the suffering itself?” Allie kept staring at the seed.

“All things lose their names when they come here,” Rhianne said. “Some gradually, as they cling to matters left unfinished in the living world, some swiftly, if their work in that world is done. But by the time they reach this tree, they’ve let the memory of who they are go. All except you.”

“It hurts.” Allie looked small and forlorn as a figure seen through falling snow. “Like a hole, deep inside me.”

I tightened my grip on her. “Let us out of here, and we won’t trouble you anymore. You have my word.”

More laughter, even as Rhianne asked,
“What is your name?”

Almost, my lips parted at her command. Almost, I answered her question. “She’s a summoner,” I reminded Allie. Rhianne would have power over us if we gave her our names.

“This is wrong.” Allie’s gaze swept over the shadows flowing around Rhianne’s tree. “They shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens next—and no one knows what happens next, not even healers—it isn’t supposed to be this.”

“My roots hold them here,” Rhianne said.

“So uproot them,” Allie said.

“Would you condemn all my children up above?” An edge crept into Rhianne’s voice, reminding me of Nys when we’d asked him to set Tolven free. “Though many perished in the burning, some live on in the bright world, safe from death. My own daughter is among them.”

Her daughter? “Mirinda’s dead,” I said. Elin had said so.
In time Mirinda passed from the Realm
.

A sharp crack, like lightning splitting a tree, echoed somewhere deep inside me. I stumbled, almost lost my hold on Allie.

“My daughter is not here.” The ice in Rhianne’s
voice made Nys seem kind after all. “I would know if she were. Yet she’ll not remain safe long if my roots release their hold on the gray. The seeds my people ate will lose their power without my roots and my magic behind them. Only this tree stands between the living world and the unknown dark beyond this place. If I let go, within a few short years all my people will slip into that dark. If protecting them from death means holding on to those shadows that do come here, I accept that price.”

“I don’t accept it!” Allie stamped her foot, but it made no sound. “We’re
supposed
to slip into the unknown. That’s what happens when we die.”

“For those of lesser power, perhaps. But if my magic has strength enough to keep my people safe, I will use it.”

“Is it only your people’s shadows who are trapped here?” As soon as I asked, I knew it wasn’t true. Allie wouldn’t have been drawn to this tree if it was. I looked to the endless gray beyond trunk and roots. The shadows thinned, and somewhere past them a smaller tree stood, nothing human about it.

I thought of all my dead. My first sister. My cat. Kyle’s older brother. Ethan’s younger one. Strangers who’d died during the War or after it. I’d thought I’d laid their shadows to rest, but they weren’t resting. They were drifting, nameless and lost, among the roots of this tree. My
people paid the price of the faerie folks’ long life, too, and we gained nothing from it.

The musty scent was stronger, so close to Rhianne’s tree, the smell of gray dust. Did the crumbling come from here? The cost of Rhianne’s gifts might be higher than we knew. “Faerie and my world both crumble away,” I told Rhianne. “Is that part of the price you choose to pay, too?”

“Since the burning, the strain on the world is greater than it once was, it is true,” Rhianne said. “Many shadows have flooded this place in a short time. I can handle that strain. For my people’s sake I’ll hold on, so that they can endure as long as they may.”

“You don’t understand!” Allie said, and I realized it was true. Two worlds were crumbling because Rhianne and her roots stood here holding back death, and she only wanted to hold on harder. I couldn’t let her do that.

I knew her name. Could I make her roots let the gray go and so set all the shadows free? Would that be enough to make the crumbling stop as well? Allie was staring at her seed again. I wasn’t sure I could both save her and make Rhianne let go.

I couldn’t let this stand just to protect Allie and me. Some part of me wanted to, though.

Best to act swiftly, then, before I could change my
mind.
“Rhianne! Go away!”
With all my magic behind the words, I forced them past a whisper, into a squeaking command. The roots trembled.
“Go away, go away, go away!”

The ground lurched, an earthquake that threw me from my feet. I clutched Allie’s hand as we fell, though she fought to pull free once more. Shadows blurred, and something in the gray air seemed to give, like rope gone slack, letting a flash of green through.

“How dare you!”
The shadows snapped back into focus with a sound like ripping cloth, and the green was gone.
“Your name, Summoner.”
There was power in Rhianne’s words, too, harsh power that coiled around me, with none of glamour’s illusions.

“Liza.” The name slid too easily from my lips. I tried to draw breath, to take it back, but I couldn’t.

“Go, Liza!”
Rhianne’s call rippled through my shadow and my thoughts, reminding me how fragile they were.
“Distract me from my work here no longer, lest you hasten that which you seek to prevent. Go!”
My vision dimmed.
“Take your name back to the world with you. Return to me in your own time, when your body and shadow fail, when your name and your power are lost. Go!”
My shadow frayed like old yarn as the darkness took me, the very fibers of my being pulling, pulling apart, my hold on Allie weakening as they did.
Silver flashed at the edges of my sight, but it was too far. My shadow was unraveling, letting emptiness through.

I felt an uncomfortable
tug
, and then something gathered up the fraying threads of my being. With a gasp I shuddered into skin and bone, while the something wove the threads back together—too tight. I screamed, blinking to see silver eyes staring down at me, wide, startled. Elin. She crouched across from me beneath a blue sky, on the other side of Allie’s body, one hand resting on Allie’s chest, the other touching my shoulder.

For just a moment the shivering air between us seemed made, not of air and sky, but of shimmering silver fibers. “What I felt—what I wove—no one can weave—” Elin shuddered and toppled to the ground.

Allie lurched upright, looked at me, and began to cry.

Chapter 13

M
atthew was at Elin’s side, human now, pressing his fingers against her neck. He must have found a pulse, because he let out a long sigh. Caleb knelt before Allie, grasping her trembling shoulders. Silver threads flowed from his hands and wove themselves into a web. The web disappeared beneath Allie’s skin, but her shaking didn’t ease. “The radiation sickness wasn’t as advanced as I’d feared,” Caleb said gravely.

Elin stirred. Matthew looked at me as he helped her sit up.

I was trembling, too. My skin felt thin as paper from Before. “I’m all right.” My fingers—my stone fingers—were wrapped around Allie’s. She tried to pull free, but the stone held tight. Caleb pried her fingers loose, one by one, a strange look on his face. I glanced down at
my hand. It was clenched in a tighter fist than before, tight enough to have held Allie’s smaller hand. When my shadow had moved, the stone had moved as well.

Elin pressed her hands up to her face. “I can see them. In the air, all around us—the threads of the world. I’ve always felt them, but I could not see them. No weaver can see them.” She shivered in the cloak that was again wrapped around her, its edges now trimmed with owl feathers. I remembered the shimmer of silver fibers. I felt something of that still, a shiver in the air that echoed beneath my skin.

Allie kept crying. She was here. I’d brought her back, and Caleb had healed her. Those were the important things. Matthew moved to my side, and I wrapped my arms around him, burying my face against his shoulder, smelling the wolf in his hair, feeling my stone hand weighing me down once more.

Matthew rubbed my back. “You were gone so long.”

“How long?” I drew away and ran my finger down Matthew’s cheek, where a long cut was clotted with dried blood.

“A day and a half.” He wore Caleb’s quia leaf over his sweater. That leaf would protect Matthew from glamour, but if it was hurt in any way, Caleb would be hurt, too.

It hadn’t seemed a day and a half in the gray. Yet the
sky was clear, the sun just beginning its descent. I saw the remains of a fire—Elin’s glowing stone must have run out—beside a woodpile and a few cracked bones that were all that remained of the owl.

“Someone had to eat it.” Matthew shrugged, as if embarrassed, but his expression went bleak. “You were still breathing. That’s the only reason we didn’t give up. But Allie wasn’t breathing, Liza, and her heart wasn’t beating. Caleb kept her body from decay, just in case, but none of us really believed—” Matthew grasped my wrist, where stone gave way to flesh. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He almost had lost me. If I’d sent Rhianne away and set the shadows free, he would have lost me. If Elin hadn’t done whatever it was she’d done, he’d have lost me even after I returned. I tucked a strand of hair back into his ponytail. Around us, I saw patches of gray forest that hadn’t been there before. Elin had surely warned Caleb about the border protections by now. The rest of us needed to get back to Karin.

A few evening crickets began to chirr. Matthew shoved a piece of dried deer meat into my hands. I chewed mechanically, barely tasting it. It was Rhianne we needed to get back to. We had to make her tree let go, or the crumbling would go on and on.

Elin continued staring at her hands. Allie kept crying.
Caleb made calming sounds as he ran his hands over her. I tried to meet Allie’s eyes; she flinched and turned away. “Sorry,” she whispered, to Caleb, not to me. “But it hurts so much.”

Caleb had healed Allie, hadn’t he? He glanced at me. “Liza. I need to know. How far did you go to find her?”

Beyond the crossroads, the setting sun lit the edges of the autumn leaves with fire. “To the tree.” I reached for Matthew with my good hand, drawing him close. I needed warmth, light, life. I needed to know I’d gone far enough to save her.

“Hurts.” Allie’s tears turned to shuddering sobs. I’d never seen her cry like this. “Make it— Can you make it stop, Caleb?” The fading light made her shadow seem too thin, as if some strand had been left out of its weaving.

“What tree?” Caleb asked me.

“Rhianne’s tree,” I said.

Elin dropped her hands into her lap. “That,” she said flatly, “is impossible. We’re not even sure the First Tree’s roots reach that far.”

“I think we’re sure now.” Caleb lifted a rock—more flint—and struck it against the ground. A chip of stone flaked away, and he sliced it across his thumb, drawing blood. “Heal this,” he told Allie.

Allie swallowed and reached for his hand. Their
fingers touched, and then she jerked back as if burned, burying her head in her hands. “I can’t. It’s gone.”

What was gone? Her magic? Magic couldn’t just be gone.

Caleb’s face was pale in the fading light. “That is where the pain comes from. You were too far into death when Liza found you. She brought as much of you back as she could, but she couldn’t bring back everything. Our magic and our names are the first things we lose.”

The night was growing cold. Matthew piled kindling for a fire. I should have helped him, but I kept staring at Caleb and Allie. Elin did the same.

“I knew it was too late. I knew, but Liza—” Allie looked at me, looked away.

I hadn’t been strong enough. I’d failed her after all.

“Can you fix it, Caleb?” Allie’s voice seemed as thin as her shadow.

Caleb’s silver gaze grew distant. “There is a thing that may help. But it is not an easy thing. And you will not thank me for it, not for a long time.”

“I’m not afraid of pain.” Allie’s eyes glistened in the dimness. “You know I’m not. I just need to know it won’t be forever, that’s all.”

“I can offer you sleep, to start with,” Caleb said. “If you will accept it.”

“Yes.” Allie nodded vigorously. “Please.”