Skylark (43 page)

All around me I could hear bodies dropping. The shock of having the power stolen away in a vacuum that sucked at your soul must have been overwhelming. I was doing to them what had been done to me—and yet, once begun, I couldn’t stop.

The light in the world around me flickered, draining. People fell to the ground, twitching, then going still. I tried to stop, my whole body screaming in pain, but the rush of power was so intense that I couldn’t turn away.

The world outside me was silent. All the clockwork was still now and the people just as quiet. The power screamed in my ears; now that I had taken it into myself the world hummed with energy, so blinding and deafening that I was certain I would be left in silent darkness forever when it was done. Overhead clouds of roiling green and violet rushed in, singing with power and lapping at the Wood with tongues of brilliant energy. A magical storm.

All was heat, and noise, and pain. My body was nothing but a vessel, bursting with magic. At any moment my skin would crack and spill energy instead of blood, leaving me to burn in a vortex of smoke and steam.

Something collided with me, knocking me to the ground and snapping my head on the earth.

The power exploded. The vessel was left empty—and for a blessed instant, everything went black.

Chapter 31

I opened my eyes to see a face leaning over me, a muffled voice calling my name. I blinked, trying to clear the fuzziness from my vision.

“Tansy?” My voice was unrecognizable even to me, but it drew such a smile from the girl leaning over me that she must have understood.

“Lark,” she replied, panting. Her face was as flushed as if she’d been running. As she lifted her hand to run the back of it across her brow, I saw that the palms of her hands were scorched.

“What? How?” All around us, the field of machines and people, equally still and silent, bore the evidence of what had transpired. Tansy alone was alive. I stared at the aftermath of what I’d done, unable to understand.

“I don’t know,” she gasped. “Maybe because it’s not raining, it didn’t hurt me.”

I rolled onto my back. Above me the sky was wheeling, blurry and shimmering in eyes that had not quite remembered yet how to work properly. The dark green sky of the magical storm I’d summoned had vanished. Beyond, the spun-sugar clouds marking the dawn had lightened, pale pink and yellow against the deepening blue sky. Through the path torn away by the machines I could see that the sun had barely cleared the mountains to the east.

Struggling onto my elbows, I looked toward the village. Something shimmered through my vision that I dismissed as an artifact of my stunned sight. It drew my eye, however, to the trees—trees that would have been familiar had they been gray and cold. . . .

The whole of the Wood had changed. I could see pale blossoms and red apples spotting the branches, bobbing in the breeze that had picked up across the plain. And just there, at its edge, what I had dismissed as my eyes playing tricks on me: something shimmering and wavering.

It was not like the tarnished pewter of the outside of the city’s Wall—it was not even like the violet shimmer of the magical pockets. It glinted in the sun, mostly invisible, only a waver in the air to tell it was there. I could see the other scouts and villagers behind it, the shimmering curtain standing between them and the city’s machines.

“I think it’s a barrier,” said Tansy, seeing me staring. “You made it.”

“I’ve done it once before.” The force that had knocked the shadow child away from Oren, enclosing us both in that shimmering barrier of protection—but it had felt nothing like this. And had not cost nearly so much. I felt hollow, empty, all the power I’d absorbed gone in that blinding instant when Tansy had knocked me to the ground.

Nearby a red-coated architect stirred, first twitching a hand and then groaning. My heart leapt. All around us people began to stir, and a band of panic eased around my chest. On the other side of the barrier, the villagers of the Iron Wood were moving as well. I took a shaky breath. “I didn’t kill them,” I whispered. Dizzying relief washed over me.

“They’re fine,” Tansy said firmly, almost as if trying to convince herself as well. She looked nearly as shaken as I was.

“They wouldn’t be if you hadn’t stopped me,” I said as I sat up with difficulty, lifting myself on shaking arms. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” she replied. “A bit—wobbly. I’ve never had my power taken like that. Are
you
okay?”

“I think I am.” As the shock ebbed, I shut my eyes. I was no better than the city that drove me away. Despite the sick dread in the pit of my stomach, I felt a strange thrill. It had been so easy to reach out and let all the power flow into me. It’d be easy to do it again.

“Thank you,” Tansy said softly.

“I had no choice,” I said, shaking my head. “I brought them here.”

“You could’ve run,” she argued. “You had a choice. That you thought you didn’t, though, is oddly comforting. Thank you, anyway.”

I got to my feet, finding my legs steadier than I expected. Tansy rose too, but slowly, like a woman many times her age. She moved painfully.

I turned to look across the field of dead machines and feebly stirring architects. While I watched, one tried to crawl forward through the barrier, only to be repelled by its energy. A few scouts ventured beyond the barrier’s protection and back again, testing its limits. For now, the Iron Wood was safe.

As though she could read my thoughts, Tansy said tentatively, “You—could stay. Dorian would help you learn to control . . . whatever this is.”

I looked back at her. She hid it well, but I could see the faintest flicker of fear in her gaze as she met mine. I swallowed and shook my head. “I have to find answers,” I said. “What I am. What I can do. It’s not safe.”

The words were like knives—this was the only place I’d felt at home in years. But I’d nearly killed everyone in the village.

Tansy didn’t argue. She only hid her burned hands in her sleeves and looked away. “Where will you go?”

“North, I think,” I whispered. “Can you ask—will Dorian give them enough energy to get home?” I gestured to the architects. “They’re not bad, not all of them. Most of them are just trying to do what they can to save their people.”

I thought of Kris. I thought I could see, some distance away, a familiar head of wavy brown hair.

“I don’t think Dorian would condemn them to die,” said Tansy. “Even them. If nothing else we can’t afford this many new shadow people to contend with.”

I fell silent, closing my eyes. The smell of apple blossoms had made its way over to us, newly living trees quivering in the morning breeze. I remembered Dorian’s plea—
you could destroy them all
—and the desperation behind it.

“I could come with you.”

I opened my eyes again. Tansy wasn’t looking at me but rather back at her home, at the newly created barrier surrounding it. The villagers were beginning to pick themselves up, get shakily to their feet, explore the new wall protecting them from the outside.

More than anything I wanted to say yes. She knew the wilderness, how to stay alive, how to find food and fight off the shadows. More than that, she was my friend. I’d done this for her as much as anything. But she had magic. Even now I could feel it stirring in her, and as if what I’d done had awakened something within me, I hungered for it. The desire to touch her as I had Tomas flickered inside me, and I turned away.

“I’ll miss you, Tansy.”

I half-expected her to hug me again, or take my hand. But in the end she just moved silently away. After a few moments I turned to watch her step through the new barrier, which let her pass without resistance to help her fellow scouts get to their feet.

I slipped my hand into my pocket, where my brother’s paper bird and core of magic nestled next to Oren’s lighter. I shaded my eyes against the sun and looked to the east, my eyes automatically finding the pass through which Oren and I had come. Somewhere up there was the summer lake, and beyond it, a world of ancient bees and flowers and hungry trees and ghosts. There was no telling what the lands to the north held, except for a boy who would follow me until he died—or until he turned and killed me. And perhaps, a man I used to call brother.

A sudden loneliness swept over me as I picked my way through the rubble of the machines, weaving through the bodies beginning to stir. I had faced the wild beyond the edge of the world I had known but I hadn’t done it alone. Now, it seemed I had never heard such quiet.

A tiny clank caught my ear and my heart gave a sick lurch. There was a machine still functioning—and somewhere nearby. I sought for some scrap of power with which to destroy it, but there was nothing—I was so spent I couldn’t find the other sight that had shown me what to do.

There was another clank, a rattle, and then a sudden hum as whatever it was whirred to life. Something bright dashed in front of my eyes, reflecting the sun and blinding me momentarily.

“Took you long enough,”
said a familiar voice. A weight settled onto my shoulder.
“Planning to leave me decommissioned forever, I guess?”

“Nix!” I felt like the tiny weight might be enough to knock me over. “How—how? How are you here? How are you
alive
?”

“Kris had me in his carriage. As for the second question: They designed me to exist out here,”
said the pixie, rustling its wings in my ear.
“It appears I’m unusually well shielded against having my power drained away. Besides, you power me.”

“But I have nothing left! My power is all gone, I have nothing for you to steal.”

“That is interesting,”
it said, sounding significantly unalarmed.
“Perhaps you have something left after all. Perhaps it’s not the energy about you, but something else entirely.”

“That’s impossible,” I breathed, though something in my chest had clenched and thrummed to the idea. If it was me, and not what the Institute had given me, that was powering Nix . . . I thought of Oren, and that last fierce moment in which he looked at me before he disappeared into the shadows.

“Lark,”
said the pixie, in its flat and tinny voice,
“who are you even talking to? I’m a machine with a sense of self-preservation who’s decided to ignore programming and wander off on a—on a lark. Don’t talk to me about impossible.”

I laughed, and Nix responded by launching itself from my shoulder and turning midair into a copper bird, singing songs it had learned from the birds in the apple orchard, and swooping in aerial displays.

North
, I thought, inhaling. There was a tang in the air, a sharpness that stung my nose. Winter was coming. I was heading for a world of ice and snow and bitter cold, but at least I wasn’t alone.

We left the field of metallic corpses behind and walked on across the valley, beneath the vast and terrible beauty of the dawn.

acknowledgments

I once heard a writer say that acknowledgments were annoying and pointless because at the end of the day, a book is made only by the writer, sitting alone in a room, typing at the keyboard. My heart goes out to that person, because I never could have made this book alone—and I never would have wanted to. The journey’s involved more people than I can count, and I am grateful for every single one of them.