Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (17 page)

“That’s not what Caleb thought.” Allie’s voice was strangely calm, as if she’d yelled herself out. “He never believed we were worth less because we were human.” She reached into Caleb’s pocket and drew out the quia seed he’d taken from me. I saw no shadow in the seed, felt no green life within it, though the seeds in my pocket and Allie’s still lived.

“Dead.” Allie flung the empty seed away. She bent over Caleb, tangled hair hiding her face. “If you have to be trapped,” she whispered to him, “I hope you at least get to keep your name.”

Matthew blew on the fire again, but this time no light came to the coals. I shivered. Caleb would be trapped by Rhianne’s tree as surely as we had been. Wherever he was supposed to go next, he would no more be able to get there than Allie had.

“I would never have woven your shadows back into this world,” Elin whispered, “had I known it would come to this.”

Was that what Elin had done? The thought was a distant one. Matthew stirred the fire with a dead branch, but the coals remained dead. How could a fire die so fast? Matthew stopped stirring abruptly as I caught a scent beneath that of the smoke, the scent of something stagnant and old. Matthew lifted the branch, and half of it crumbled away, back into the fire. He dropped the wood. It wasn’t burning that had put this fire out.

The crickets had fallen silent. We both took a few steps back, toward Elin and Allie and Caleb. The stagnant scent came from behind us, too. Up above, the black sky held no stars. It was too dark; I couldn’t tell how near the crumbling was. I could only smell it. The wind shifted, and I caught it from a third direction, too. “We need light.”

“You truly cannot see.” Elin turned in a slow circle. “Your people have always seen less well than mine. Let me make it easy for you, then. We are surrounded. There is no way out.”

Chapter 15

I
strained to see into the dark. Were there fewer trees at the edge of the clearing than before? I couldn’t tell. I slammed my flesh fist into my stone one, breaking skin. Allie shuddered as I held out my stinging knuckles. “Can you heal this?”

She finally met my eyes. “Don’t you ever do that again.” Anger burned in her gaze, and I knew she knew why I asked. She pressed her fingers to mine. There was a shimmer of silver light, too dim to show anything but Allie’s face and both our hands, and then it and the stinging were both gone.

“I could have told you it wouldn’t be enough light to see by.” Allie bent back over Caleb. “I never want to hurt anyone if I can help it. You ought to know that by now.”

Matthew had found a branch untouched by the fire and its crumbling. He knelt as he shredded its bark into tinder.
“Go away,”
I whispered into the dark, but it remained as thick as before. I scanned it for any hint of light.

Silver flickered at the corners of my sight, like some faint magic. When I turned to it, it was gone.

I turned away again, unfocusing my gaze, willing the flicker to return. I saw faint silver fibers, shining through the emptiness, the same shimmering threads I’d seen between Elin and me when I’d returned from the gray, thin as nylon thread.

Nylon thread was stronger than it seemed. Still not looking at the threads directly, I called,
“Come here.”

The fibers flared brighter, shivered, and flowed toward me. By their light, I saw the darkness and dust that hovered all around us, the dead fire and Caleb’s backpack half swallowed by it, no gap large enough for us to get through. I grabbed the silver strands into my outstretched hand, as if carding light out of the dark. So cold that light—I gasped as I swiftly wrapped the bright fibers around my stone fist, which couldn’t feel the cold, wrapped them around it as surely as a weaver wrapped unspun wool around a distaff.

I wasn’t a weaver. I held my hand out to Elin.

“The threads of the world.” Her voice was so strange
I didn’t at first recognize what I heard in it: wonder. “You feel them, too.”

I didn’t feel them, not as I felt the life in trees and people and shadows. But I saw, in the pulsing fibers, something more alive than simple light, something with a spirit of its own.

Matthew had stopped shredding the bark. He and Allie both stared at us. Elin kept staring, too.

“Can you use this?” I looked at Elin, at the crumbling all around us. “Against the dark?”

Elin’s eyes grew wide. Then, in a voice like a slow smile, “I can indeed.” She thrust her hands into the light I held, running her fingers through it, aligning fibers to pull them together into thicker strands. Cold brushed my face, and my breath came out in icy puffs. Elin drew the bright strands from my stone hand, which was rimed with frost, and she kept running her hands through that light, like a shuttle through a loom. Light stretched and grew, as a weaving on a frame, into a rectangle of bright silver light. I caught the faint winter scent of the sky before snow as Elin walked to the edge of the darkness. That darkness gathered and bunched, retreating from the light she held. She set it down, like a shining doorway, and then she plunged her hands into it once more, pushing threads aside, leaving the doorway open into the night. Through it, I heard the faint chirr of crickets.

Elin was shivering, but she didn’t seem to notice. A wry smile tugged at her face. “That should do well enough.” By the silver light, everything about her seemed to glow.

Matthew got to his feet. “I don’t know what the two of you did. But that was—amazing.” He tried to pull Allie to her feet as well.

Allie remained crouched by Caleb’s side. “We can’t leave him here.”

He wasn’t here, not anymore. Surely Allie knew that as well as me. Before I could argue, though, Matthew crouched to lift Caleb’s body over his shoulders. He walked through the doorway, and after a moment Allie followed. I went next. The stars on the other side shone so brightly, after the dark.

Elin went last, stopping on the other side to plunge her hand into the threads.
“Return to the world from which you came,”
she whispered, and the doorway gave way to shimmering fibers that dissolved into the night. She laughed softly, bitterly. “So you see, Grandmother. My power is not so small after all.”

We followed the path downhill, toward Karin and the Arch, eager to put distance between ourselves and the crossroads. Elin led the way, and we let her, knowing she could see better than we could.

Knowing she had just saved our lives.

The crumbling was thicker than when we’d climbed up, and we had to wind our way on and off the path, around larger and larger patches of it. The living trees we ventured among held dangers of their own, but I kept their shadows away from us with my magic.

To our right, the River flowed steadily south.
“Liza,”
it whispered,
“you will not escape the dark for long. We shall meet again, and soon.”
The water’s voice held hints of another voice, Rhianne’s voice, as if the River were a tear in the very world, one that let gray death through. Its pull was gentle now, easy enough to resist.

Allie pressed her lips together as she walked on; I couldn’t tell if the River spoke to her or not. She was back to not looking at me. Matthew hunched a little under Caleb’s weight. Where did we think we were taking him?

“We have no way to bury him.” Anger darkened my words: at Allie for not wanting to be saved, at Caleb for saving her, at myself for not saving her sooner, so that none of this need have happened.

“Why would we bury him?” Allie lifted her chin. “Do they bury people in your town? Never mind—I know they do. But Caleb’s not from your town, is he? We need to return him to the forest. That’s what we do in
my
town.”

“It is what my people do as well,” Elin said quietly.
“Return him to the earth and the trees so that his body can become a part of life and growth once more.”

“Exactly,” Allie said.

I shivered as the path ended. From here there was only forest between us and the Arch. In my town we buried the dead, in hopes of keeping them from the grasping roots of the trees for as long as possible.

I looked to Matthew. Like me, he’d helped bury enough of those dead through the years. He just shrugged uneasily and said, “Would here do?”

Allie nodded, and she and Matthew followed Elin a few paces into the forest. I followed them in turn, continuing to keep the tree shadows at bay as I did. Matthew set Caleb down within a stand of river birches. Birches liked liquid, blood or water, it mattered little. We’d never leave anyone alone in such a place in our town, living or dead. I helped Matthew fold Caleb’s hands over his heart. His skin was clammy and cold, like plastic drawn from a winter river.

I saw a chain disappearing beneath his sweater and took it from around his neck. The coin Mom had gifted him long ago hung there. I traced the Arch that was engraved upon it. The coin was a human thing and held no magic, but it endured where Caleb’s leaf had not. I hung it around my own neck. Mom would want it.

Allie set something gently down beside Caleb: the
owl’s skull. “Not the owl’s fault it wanted to eat,” she said.

A root broke through the earth and reached for Caleb’s arm.
“Go
—” The word caught in my throat. The trees would take him soon enough. What was I trying to save?
“Go away!”
The root retreated into the earth.

Elin started to sing, a wordless song filled with the sounds of wild things: wind through weeds, rain on parched earth, a crow’s beating wings, a running deer’s feet as they hit the ground. Allie turned to her, eyes moist, and then she added a low hum of harmony to Elin’s song. Elin blinked as if startled, but sang on.

Matthew and I exchanged a glance. We didn’t know this song in our town. We had prayers, words about ashes and dust, but those were about death, and this song was about living things, growing things. It wasn’t a human song—but Caleb and Karin must have thought it so, because who else could have taught it to Allie?

Abruptly Matthew raised his head, as if he smelled something. I didn’t smell it, but Elin stopped singing. “I suggest we leave now,” she said.

Dust trickled down one of the birches to land on Caleb’s boot. In the faint starlight, I saw the boot begin crumbling away. We moved swiftly away through the trees, leaving Caleb behind. Matthew grabbed Allie’s hand when she stopped to look back, pulling her on.

A whisper of stale air followed us all the way to the Arch. We moved to its base, as if it could provide protection. The stars were bright, a thin yellow moon just beginning to rise.

Matthew went very still. Elin’s bright gaze fixed on him, and she drew her knife. “Don’t move,” she said. The stale scent came from right behind Matthew now. Elin stepped around him, cautious as a cat, to grab the top of his ponytail and slice the blade through it. Matthew stepped quickly forward, his remaining hair falling loose to brush his ears, as Elin dropped the hair she’d cut.

The moonlight was growing brighter. I saw clearly enough as Matthew’s ponytail crumbled to dust. I pulled him into my arms. I was trembling, as if I’d been the one in danger of crumbling away.

“I didn’t feel it. If I hadn’t smelled it—” Matthew looked to Elin. “Thank you.”

Elin turned away, as if uncomfortable, and gazed up the curve of the Arch instead. “You all remain pledged to help my mother?”

“You know we do,” I said. We’d lost Caleb. I didn’t intend to lose Karin, too, not if I could help it. We’d go back for her first, and then I’d figure out how to go after Rhianne again. Maybe Karin could help me try to stop her. “Elin told you all that happened?” I asked Matthew.

“When she told Caleb, yes.” Matthew rubbed the back of his bare neck. “We had time.”

“With time enough left over for Kaylen and Matthew to tell me just how great a fool I was,” Elin said. “In considerable detail. They appeared to be under the misapprehension that I did not understand this already.”

“The trees are supposed to remember him.” Allie stared out into the night, as if none of us were there. “If they’ve all crumbled away, who will remember?”

“We’ll have to do the remembering,” I said. It seemed a small thing, and a great burden as well. I reached for Allie with my good hand, and this time, she let me take it.