Skylark (31 page)

Oren was silent. He turned his head a little, watching me out of the corner of his eye. “I’m not so sure there is such a thing as normal. At least not as you’d like it to be,” he said. “To me, this is normal. Until you came along, at any rate.” “Sorry about that.”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

I glanced at him, found him watching me, and hurried to drop my gaze. More and more, I found I couldn’t look at him for very long, the fierceness of his eyes overlaid with a new softness I couldn’t quite withstand.

He straightened, leaning away from me again; the cold air rushed in in his absence, and I shivered. “Let’s go,” he said. “We should reach it in a few days if we keep moving.” He got to his feet, dusting off his pants.

We reached the bottom of the mountain and set off across the plain, following the river he’d pointed out to me. Unlike the quick-rushing torrent on the other side of the mountain, this river was slow and lazy, a wide brown swath across the fields. As we drew closer to the Iron Wood, it vanished from sight. Without the advantage of height, the dense gray patch of dead trees was hidden by the healthy forest spreading between us. Though it was hidden, its presence was never very far from our thoughts.

Oren grew increasingly agitated, checking and doublechecking our trail, covering our tracks with a single-mindedness that verged on obsessive. At night he built fires so tiny they scarcely warmed, and as far as I could tell, he slept only in snatches when his head drooped while standing guard. Often I would wake in the night, visions of gray faces and white eyes hovering in my mind, and look for him, only to see him standing some feet away, watching me. He never said anything, just looked at me long enough to see that I’d woken from my nightmare, and returned to scanning the surroundings.

I thought he would relax a little when we reached the edge of the forest, and we finally had cover after the long exposure of the plains. Instead he grew worse, rarely sleeping and investigating every tiny sound.

I found myself more on edge as well, but for different reasons. I had expected to start hearing the buzz of magic ahead. Surely a city, or whatever it was, full of Renewables would be clearly audible, even from a distance. Instead a strange, muffled quiet descended over me, as if some background white noise I’d never noticed before had vanished without warning. My mind rang with the silence. Nix huddled closer and closer to my neck. Now I knew what to look for, I could feel it leeching the energy away from me, slowly and steadily. Despite the silence, the heavy pit that had been growing in my stomach grew lighter with every step. Finally, I would find others like me. Finally, I could go home. With a pang, I realized I missed more the feeling of belonging than I missed my actual family—I had never realized that even as the odd one out, I was still a part of a greater whole.

On the evening of the third day since leaving the mountains, we reached the edge of the Wood.

Oren, traveling some distance ahead of me, stopped—my first warning that something had changed. He never stopped but for meals, and those came regularly as clockwork. It was some hours past mid-afternoon rations, but not time yet to make camp. He stood at the edge of it, toes not six inches from the start of the dead trees. They stood like ashen copies of life, every detail of bark and leaf etched in gray. High above, gray blossoms still clung to the branches. Nix perched on a high branch, every bit as fascinated as I was.

I stepped up beside Oren, my fears dropping away for the briefest of moments as I stared, transfixed. “It’s actually
iron
,” I whispered, the meager light from the forest canopy gleaming off the dull metal.

Oren didn’t answer. I looked over at him, to see his jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out like cables. His whole body was tense, the blue eyes no longer fierce but fearful. “Come on,” I said, softly. “You’ve gotten this far.”

“I can’t,” he said, not moving so much as a hair’s breadth from where he stood except to close his eyes against the metal forest in front of him. “Lark, I can’t.”

I took his hand, for once scarcely noticing the current that ran between us. “Just one step,” I said, my voice low. I remembered his voice, the comfort of it, as he coaxed me out of the rain, and tightened my hand around his. “I’m right here.”

He shook his head, resisting the pull on his hand. “I can’t. I can feel it; you don’t understand. It’s death for me.”

“Please, Oren. Don’t leave me alone.” It was a lower blow than I thought I was capable of delivering. I bit at my lip, cursing myself. But I couldn’t bear the thought of him turning and walking away.

His eyes opened again. His hand turned, seeking mine and enveloping it. It felt as though sparks were leaping up my arm from where our skin touched. “Then don’t go in. Stay out here with me.”

Just days ago I wanted nothing more than him to ask me to stay. But that was before the attack, before I’d killed a child, before I knew the line between right and wrong out here was as thin as a magic shell.

“I can’t live out here,” I said, hollow all the way through. “You know that as well as I do. I’m not designed for it. I can’t bring myself to eat meat or kill or scavenge, and I’m frightened every moment, and—”

“I’d keep you safe,” he said tightly, his voice fierce. “I’ve kept you safe since you spent that first night in the city ruins. I brought you food; I pulled you out of the swamp. I kept you safe then; I’ve kept you safe since, I can keep doing it.”

“That’s not the point, Oren!” I said, frustration bubbling up and bursting forth. “I don’t want to be kept
safe
! I don’t want to have someone constantly trying to keep me from tripping on my own incompetence. I want to live in a world where I know the rules, where people are just people. Not one where they keep trying to eat me. That’s the reason I left the city in the first place. I don’t want to be
kept
, not by anyone.”

His jaw clenched again. His grip on my hand was so tight I feared I’d hear the cracking of bones at any moment. “I could teach you.” He was quiet now. For the first time I saw how young he was, my own confusion and uncertainty reflected in his face.

Speech was growing harder, trying to form words around the lump in my throat. “Just come with me.”

“I don’t belong in there. I can’t live among people.”

My eyes burned, but I refused to blink it away. “I could teach you,” I whispered.

He lifted the hand that wasn’t currently tangled through mine. Very softly, he touched my cheek, brushing my skin with the backs of his fingers. His skin was rough and callused, but achingly gentle.

“I would have kept you safe,” he said.

I closed my eyes, forcing the tears down my cheek to break against the dam of his fingers. “I know.”

His hand released mine, and his fingers fell away. I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes, knowing that the sight of his face would undo my resolve. When I finally did, he was gone—vanished, without a sound, without a footstep, without so much as a whisper of wind to tell he’d ever been there.

Part of me longed to run blindly back through the forest, shouting for him. I knew he would not have gone far—he never went far from me—and if I called for him, he would come. I stayed where I was with a monumental effort.

I stood at the edge of the Iron Wood for a time, staring into its frozen gray depths, straining for some movement, some sign of life. There was only crystalline stillness, not a leaf stirring in the breeze. Only the normal rustling of the leaves at my back and the faint noise of Nix’s mechanisms pierced the silence as it darted back and forth.

Just go
. I stretched out a hand across the visible threshold between nature and iron. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but I felt nothing but the cool air on my skin, the tingle of imagined effect.

It’s just a thing in the world. Like any other.

I closed my eyes and stepped into the Iron Wood.

The sensation of muffling fell so heavily that I almost turned around and marched back out. Nix’s ever-present magical hum was reduced to the tiniest flicker, despite being inches from my ear. Though my footsteps rang as loudly as ever—perhaps more so now that the background sound had vanished—I felt as though I were tiptoeing through a graveyard.

“What is this place? It’s so—quiet.”

“Iron,”
Nix mimicked my soft voice.
“It’s an insulator. It’s cutting out the background magic.”

I had known that, of course. In the city, iron was rare. It was difficult to use because it was impossible to magic. Iron was the only substance completely impervious to it. The most skilled metalworkers were employed by the Institute to coat glass wires in the stuff, as insulation to prevent magic from leaking.

“I never knew how much of what I was hearing before was magic,” I said, touching the cold, hard trunk of a tree as I passed. “I’m not sure I could ever get used to this.”

Nix gave a spirited little whir of its mechanisms.
“But it would be the perfect place for magic-users to hide.”

“But you can’t magic iron,” I whispered back. “If anything happened to them in here, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with magic to stop it.”

We continued through the Wood, moving quietly through the silence. Despite the frightening stillness, there was a strange beauty about the frozen forest. It was as though the iron had caught every season at once. One tree was covered in frozen blossoms while the next was forever trapped with its buds beginning to open. Still others had round iron fruits clinging to their branches.

As we walked, I noticed that the trees stood in rows. They were lined up so uniformly that I knew their placement could not be natural. My skin prickled, on edge.

Up ahead I caught a flash of something. It had been so brief that I hadn’t been able to detect anything other than color and movement, but I froze and stared.

From somewhere above and behind me, an unimaginable sound rang through the iron trees. For a wild, joy-filled moment I thought,
Oren!
But it was not the lark’s birdcall. I whirled around, straining to catch sight of the source. A second call, this time from somewhere to the east, sounded—as if in answer. And then, the entire forest was alive with birdsong.

Disoriented and breathless, I spun, trying to understand what was happening. Then, just as quickly, the songs all cut out. A figure dropped down out of the branches, landing in a soundless crouch. My first thought was of the shadow people.

As the figure stood, I saw that it was a girl not much older than I. She wore ash-gray clothing that hung in tatters all over, and her face and hair were similarly stained with ash, but underneath she was human. She melted into the forest, even standing directly in front of me.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“What?” All around me, other figures were dropping out of the trees, surrounding me. After such silence and solitude I struggled to keep up. “Yes!”

“How did you find us?” she snapped, her eyes fierce.

“What—I—” I spluttered. Surrounded by people after so long in the quiet, I was at a loss for words. “A Renewable. In my city. She told me—told me where.”

The fierce girl was half-crouched, clearly expecting me to run or attack. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “If that were true, she would’ve given you the words.”

“The—words?” I stared at her, the bottom falling out of my stomach. “Like a password?”

“I don’t care who you are,” spat the girl, “if you’re a spy or not. You don’t belong here. Either leave, or die.”

“She didn’t
give
me a password!” I cried. “I can’t leave; I have nowhere to go. She didn’t have time to say much; she barely gave me directions. She just told me to find the others in the Iron Wood, and to follow the birds.”

Around me, the circle shifted, postures relaxing, only noticeable because everyone relaxed simultaneously.

“Why didn’t you say that at the beginning?” said the fierce girl, straightening up out of her crouch. “What, you thought you were
actually
supposed to follow birds?” I must have looked dumbfounded. “Tell me, how far did
that
instruction get you out there?”

I stood still, not quite understanding yet. The girl withdrew a slender rod from her boot. It was a glass rod—not unlike the glass wires I had run from in the city. “Stay still,” she said, coming toward me.

As far as I could tell it wasn’t sharp, but I tensed nonetheless, my legs bent and ready to flee.

“Shh,” said the girl. “I’m not going to hurt you; I just have to check something.” She stretched out the rod and touched the skin of my wrist with it. A familiar jolt coursed through it. The rod glowed with a barely perceptible violet light and then subsided again.

The girl frowned at it for a few moments and then looked up. She smiled at me, the expression lighting her face like sunlight. “I’m not really sure
what
you are,” she said, “but you’re not one of Them, which is good enough for me. My name’s Tansy. Come on, I’ll show you around. Welcome to the Iron Wood.”