Faerie Winter (21 page)

Something stirred inside me at that. I drew back,
memory bubbling to the surface.
To do no harm
. I was Liza, and Liza had spoken words—human words. Something about those words was important. They were a promise; that was it. I couldn’t break my promises. Yet it didn’t feel like harm, this flexing of strength, this drawing of blood. It felt like what I was made for.

Mom’s other arm slammed into me, knocking me aside with startling force. She leaped to her feet and ran. She’d run from me before; I remembered that. The Lady released Elin’s hand to step toward me—and fell, a remarkably graceless motion. Her dress had tangled around her legs, and its fabric bound her arms to her sides.
Weaver work
. Arianna struggled to her feet. “Kill Tara, my cat! Kill her!”

The words
hurt
as they clawed through my skin. I whirled and ran after Mom. That I was Liza, that I’d made promises—both were less important than that I was the Lady’s cat and needed to please her.

Mom wheeled around a trunk and ran back toward me. I bounded past, unable to slow down fast enough. By the moon’s light I saw the glint of steel in Mom’s hand once more. She leaped at the Lady in her tangled dress, and Arianna fell back to the ground beneath her. Elin pressed her hand to the Lady’s shoulder, holding her down, eyes brimming as the cloth of her grandmother’s dress wrapped tighter and tighter around her.

They were hurting the Lady. Why were they hurting her? I leaped at Mom’s back.

Arianna’s hand tore through a bound sleeve to grab my paw. “You and your mother shall suffer yet,” she hissed.

I felt my skin and bones burning, melting,
shifting
. I turned from a cat into a wild dog as the Lady’s magic poured through me, from a dog into an eagle, from an eagle into a slithering snake. I roared and howled, shrieked and hissed, as faster and faster I changed. Mom crawled out from underneath me. I struggled to get closer to Arianna and the pain she commanded. Mom tried to pull me away, but I fought her. For an instant I was human once more, kneeling naked in the mud and clinging to the Lady’s hand as an icy wind raked my skin, and then I was changing once more, slowly changing to immovable stone. The Lady’s gaze met mine, and in her eyes I saw winter unending and the knowledge that spring was nothing more than a story. “All things must end,” she whispered, and fell still.

Glamour rolled off me, and all at once my thoughts were my own. I was alone—alone and human and very small—my hand clutching the Lady’s. She stared at the sky, her dress wrapped around her, binding her legs, constricting her throat. Mom’s knife was plunged through her heart.

She wasn’t breathing. The magic she’d poured into me had been her last.

“I’m sorry,” Elin whispered to her, kneeling beside us. “But you shouldn’t have hurt my mother.”

“Nor my daughter, either.” Mom’s voice was grim. Mud streaked her face, and her arm bled freely through her sleeve.

Horror filled me at what I’d nearly done. I tried to pull away from the Lady, but my left hand was strange and heavy in her grasp. I looked down at our clasped hands.

My hand was gray stone past the wrist, and the Lady’s fingers were wrapped around it. Mom crouched beside me and uncurled those dead fingers from mine, one by one.

I drew my hand to my face. My stone fingers were curled halfway into a fist. Matthew’s leather hair tie was wrapped around my arm just past the place where stone gave way to skin. My stomach churned, and I had to look away. My hand fell to my side, and its weight sent more pain through my shoulder.

I looked to where the Lady lay. Her eyes were dull as tarnished steel, and I could almost see the gray bones beneath her pale skin. As I watched, the fireflies in her hair flickered out, one by one.

“Liza?” There was a question in Mom’s voice.

I couldn’t look at her. I stumbled to my feet and turned away, ashamed. The cold mud hurt my bare feet, the cold air my bare skin.

Mom wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Don’t you
dare
sacrifice yourself to save me, Liza. Not ever again. Enough of this. It ends here.” Her voice was scraped raw.

I hadn’t saved her. I’d nearly killed her. I would have torn out her throat without a second thought. I shook like a leaf in the wind. I was so, so cold.

Elin touched the Lady’s dress, and fibers flowed away from Arianna to wrap around Elin’s own bare skin, brown wool sheathing her chest and legs, leaving the weaver in a sleeveless dress and the Lady in a shroud as thin as gauze from Before. Elin stalked to the oak tree—to Karin—and put one hand to the rough bark. Her other arm hung, bruised and scabbed over, by her side.

She was crying. Karin’s clothes were scattered around the tree’s base, the silver butterfly’s wings trembling among them. In the mud and leaf litter between oak and quia, I saw Kyle’s footprints disappearing over the hillside, and Matthew’s wolf prints as well. I remembered the dead look in Matthew’s eyes. I had to find him.

My pants and sweater and wool underwear lay on the ground. I tried to dress myself against the cold, but I couldn’t do it with my dead hand and injured shoulder.
Mom helped me. I avoided her eyes as she used her left hand to ease my undershirt and sweater over my head and held out my underwear and pants for me to step into. Her right wrist hung wrong—it was surely broken—and above it, the arm I’d bitten still bled.

“You should have run.” I managed to get my boots buckled myself. “You should have run and kept the leaf safe.”
Kept yourself safe
.

“You should have known better than to expect me to.” Mom handed me my coat. I stepped away from her to put it on.

A hand snaked around from behind me. I felt a knife at my throat once more as the coat fell from my grasp.

“Call her back, Summoner.” Elin’s voice had a feral edge. “Do it of your own free will or do it under glamour, it matters not. Waste no more time. Do it.”

Mom stepped toward us, and Elin stiffened. She was frightened, I realized, frightened of us small, glamourless humans. Her voice thickened into a syrupy sweetness. “Do it now. Call my mother back.”

“Stop!” I said while my thoughts remained my own. “Of course I want to call Karin back. I’d do more than that for her.”

“Why would you?” Elin demanded, the glamour gone from her words. “Why should a human care for my people at all?”

“I don’t know your people. But I do know your mother.” Karin, with her kindness and her teaching. I didn’t know who the plant mage had been Before. I only knew who she was now. “You have my word, Elianna. I’ll do all I can to save her. But I can’t do anything until you take the knife away.”

Elin drew back, taking the knife—one of Karin’s knives, with a dark stone blade—with her. “I will kill you if she dies. Do not doubt it.”

I ignored her and walked to the oak tree. Deep scores ran down the bark, and sap flowed slowly out of them. I’d done that, too. I forced the thought aside as I softened my gaze. I saw Karin’s shadow within the tree—head between her knees, hands pressed to the ground. I felt the spark of life that was Karin, fainter and colder now. She was still there. I put my good hand to the rough bark.

The shadow looked up and shook her head—no.

As a tree she will die, as all trees must in this dying land, and it will not be without pain
. The Lady’s words, but Karin had said as much when we’d found the townsfolk changed.

“What do you wait for?” Elin demanded. The butterfly was in her hair once more, but the wings had ceased their flapping at last.

“I wait because I fear calling will kill her.” A loop of
ivy hung from one of the oak’s lower branches. Its leaves were already brown, without Karin to keep them awake. One drifted to the ground, and Karin’s shadow shrank a little. I thought of the leaves I’d called from the sleeping maple seed, of how quickly they’d withered and died. I thought of the townsfolk in their trees, dying of winter as well. Winter would kill us all in the end, one way or another.

I turned to the quia tree. The shadow that clung to it seemed sharper, more clear than both Karin’s shadow and the shadows of the townsfolk. It slept more lightly than the other trees, too, as if tossing in troubled dreams. I felt cold magic stretch between us once more. I hadn’t imagined it—this tree knew me. It remembered me.

As I put my hand to the quia’s smooth bark, I felt something more—the sense that this tree’s shadow didn’t end with its roots but reached far deeper, looking to someplace beyond the human world to remember how to grow.

I didn’t know if I’d been right or wrong to plant the quia seed and, in doing so, call winter into this world. I only knew that I had. “This is my responsibility.”

“Liza,” Mom said. “Not everything is your fault.”

“I know that.” The War wasn’t my fault, nor any of the things Mom, Caleb, and Karin had done during it. And maybe spring would still come on its own, just as it
had Before, as the trees found the ancient pathways my people said they’d always followed to wake themselves.

But every moment I waited, the chances that there would be enough life left in Karin’s tree to call her out grew fainter. Karin said trees died slowly, but I could
see
the shadow in her tree shrinking. I could wait on spring no longer.

“I have to call it back,” I said.

“N
o one can stop the worlds from winding down.” So much despair in Elin’s voice. She held her hurt arm close. “Grandmother said so, when we came to your world and found it as dead as ours.”

“The Lady doesn’t know everything,” Mom said.

“Careful, human.” Elin’s bleakness was tinged with disdain.

Mom laughed, a wild sound. “I’m through fearing your people, Elianna. None can do worse to me than your grandmother has already done.”

I kept my hand pressed to the quia tree. In the darkness, its shadow seemed more real than its bark and branches.

“Spring has been late before,” Mom said.

Would the other trees follow the quia into spring, as
they had followed it into winter? “I don’t know how much time the others have. Would you keep me safe and lose them all?”

Mom didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. I looked down, ashamed. Wasn’t that what I’d wished of her before this all began? That she could have stayed with me, kept me safe instead of protecting others?

“Do what you need to.” Mom rubbed at the arm I’d bitten. “I don’t know as much about magic as Karinna and Kaylen, but I’ll keep watch as best I can.”

I swallowed hard. “Thanks, Mom.” My breath puffed in front of me. The ground would freeze again soon.

Mom looked at Elin. “Promise you’ll not harm my daughter should she fail.”

Elin laughed bitterly. “Why should I make any promises to humans?”

“Because Liza won’t do this thing unless you do.”

I would do this thing no matter what—but I didn’t say so. I couldn’t lie, but my mother could. “Promise,” I said to Elin, “that you won’t harm me or Mom or anyone from my town.”

Elin stalked to Karin’s tree and leaned her head against it. “I do this for you, not them. I do not understand why you care for these humans so. I will never understand it. I will never understand why you did not take me with you when you went away to fight.” If Karin
heard, she gave no sign. She’d drawn her shadow arms around herself, and her head was bowed once more.

Elin turned back to us. She’d been crying again. “You have my word.”

The moon was higher now, but I could still see the pinpricks of stars, like light through old nylon. I rubbed at the leather around my wrist, feeling stone and skin to either side of it. Matthew and Kyle were both out in that darkness. Even now I chose who to save.

I returned my good hand to the quia’s trunk, shivering as my skin touched the tree’s cold shadow. All this long winter I’d been cold. I wasn’t sure I remembered what spring felt like, let alone how to call it.

My dead hand weighed me down. I focused on the quia’s shadow and the restlessness that slept within the tree.
“Grow,”
I whispered to it.
“Seek air, seek sun, seek life!”

The quia’s shadow pulled at me, urging me toward the same uneasy sleep in which it already rested. I pressed my feet firmly into the mud and felt again the way the quia’s shadow stretched beyond its roots, deep into some other place—into Faerie? Did Karin’s world remember the green my world had forgotten? The Lady had said nothing grew there, but perhaps some thin thread of spring remained.
“Wake!”
I called to the shadow’s roots—to that place beyond its roots.
“Grow! Seek air, seek sun, seek light!”

I called again, and again. I couldn’t call my mother to me, nor Matthew, either, not always. I couldn’t call Johnny back, or the others I’d lost, even before this long winter. But I could do this. I could call spring.
“Grow!”
I saw, somewhere beyond sight, the way the quia’s shadow twisted into a dark rope reaching down out of this world. I saw the thinnest thread of green snaking through the darkness, answering my call. I reached for that thread with my magic, pulling it toward me.
“Grow!”

Something pulled back, something gray and dying that also answered my call and chased after the green. I held to that thin thread, but the harder I held on, the harder the grayness pulled me in turn, urging me deep into the earth, beyond the earth.