Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (12 page)

Karin, on her knees in the ashes of Faerie, tunic stained with blood, silver eyes dull as tarnished steel.
“This madness is welcome indeed,” she whispered as she fell forward. Only then Caleb was behind her, pulling her to her feet. She fought him, hissing like some wild creature as she bent his wrist at an unnatural angle, but his fingers grabbed her wrist in turn, and in a flash of silver light she fell limp to the ground. “I’m sorry, Eldest Sister, but neither of us gets to escape all we’ve done so easily. You will survive this War, as will I.” Caleb hefted her over his shoulders, walked toward a burning lake, and disappeared within it—

Too far. This was too far in the past. “Show me the present,” I whispered, as I’d practiced with Karin so many times. The scene shifted slowly, as if the present were something my visions were reluctant to reveal, until I saw—

Matthew and Caleb running side by side, on four legs and two, running along broken black stone roads, through forests whose green was giving way to red, yellow, gold—and gray, patches of crumbling gray dust, made more dead by the bright colors around them. The wind was wild, and lightning flashed beneath a storm-tossed sky. Branches grabbed at them by day, tree shadows by night. They kept running, toward a crossroads that looked down on a mirrored silver Arch, its top hundreds of feet high, its legs hundreds of feet apart—

I stepped forward, Allie’s hand on my arm. Stone and darkness closed in around me, squeezing the air from my chest. I fought for breath as my heart slowed, stopped for a beat—

—and then I staggered free, into a cold, spitting rain. Elin waited beneath one leg of the silver Arch, which was bright in spite of the thick yellow-gray clouds above. I glanced at that mirror, but no visions sought to draw me into its surface. I’d never been able to look at the Arch without visions before.

“I’d forgotten how big it was.” Allie’s eyes traveled up the mirror’s curve. It stood on a white stone platform that had been soaked by the rain. Autumn was further along here than at home, but the yellow and orange leaves of the trees beyond the platform were broken by patches of gray, just like in my vision. Beyond the trees to the west, bluffs rose toward the sky. To the east, the broad River—which maps called the Mississippi—lapped at the platform and stretched to the far horizon.

“Are humans always so slow?” Elin asked us.

Neither Allie nor I bothered answering that. Allie looked from the Arch to me. “Do we wait here?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to risk letting Caleb and Matthew get this close. “They’ll come to the crossroads.” I’d seen that in my vision, though I didn’t
recognize all the paths they took to get there. “We’ll wait there. Just to be safe.” I looked to the River. Its muddy water held a dank, mildewy scent I didn’t like at all.

Allie followed my gaze to the water. “Oh. Right.” Her voice was small. The River would be a problem.

“You feel it, too,” Elin said. It wasn’t a question. “It is worse than when I last came to your world. I can almost see the unraveling threads that flow between its banks, this world’s own threads, crumbling to dust.”

Her words sent ice down my spine. I’d felt death enough flowing south, when I last was here. “What has the crumbling to do with the River?”

“It is your river. You would know better than me. To me it feels like a seam whose threads are giving way to the gray to which we all must soon return. My own world has been giving way to that same gray since the Uprising. If something is not done, it will fall before yours. Do you wonder, then, that I sought my mother’s help to mend this?”

Raindrops trickled down my neck and beneath my sweater. Allie looked uphill along the short path to the crossroads, which we both knew from our last journey together. She reached for my good hand. “You won’t let go?”

“I—” I couldn’t say I hadn’t let go so far. I’d let Nys take her, more than once. “Not if I can help it.”

Allie laced her fingers through mine. Rain spattered her nightgown and cloak. “I won’t let you go, either,” she said.

Together we crossed the stone platform. Elin followed at Allie’s other side.

“Stay away from the water,” I told her. “No matter what it says to you.”

“Do you think me a fool, who would go willingly to my death?” Elin asked. Rain beaded off her cloak, leaving it dry.

“Liza.”
The River whispered my name as my bare feet touched the muddy forest floor.
“You return at last, as all things must. Come here. Seek sleep. Come.”

That call pulled on some thread deep inside me, urging me toward the water. I pressed my toes into the mud, resisting as I had once before. The seeds in my pocket helped, their green tugging on that same thread, reminding me I wasn’t ready to sleep, not yet. Allie’s steps didn’t seek the River, either, not like last time. Perhaps her seed protected her after all, from this at least.

The wind blew on. The rain fell harder as we walked through the mud, soaking my sweater and leather pants. We had no rain gear, no means of making a fire. If the rain continued for long, we’d be in a fair amount of trouble.

The trees scarcely seemed to notice either us or the rain. They bent toward the River, as if anything else were
of little concern. A clump of damp gray dust fell like late-winter snow from a branch. There was an empty patch in the forest beyond it, nothing but wet gray soil. We walked swiftly around it.

“Too long have you fought death’s current,”
the River whispered to me.
“You cannot save yourself. You cannot save those you care for. Seek rest, Liza. Seek darkness. Seek peace.”

“I can save them.” I ignored the icy raindrops that hit my face, focusing on fighting the River’s call, on holding Allie’s hand, on walking around another patch of gray. “I will save them.”

The clouds darkened. We came to a broken path among the trees—asphalt, those born Before called the black stone—and the River’s voice faded as we followed it uphill, making our way between yellow-leafed ginkgoes and poplars.

At the top of the hill, the path met another road, forming a huge crossroads filled with slabs of cracked black stone. “Well done,” I told Allie as we reached the crossroads’ center.

She fell to her knees and threw up.

I crouched by her side and handed her the wine skin. Allie swirled the liquid in her mouth, spit it up, and drank some more. Rain dripped from her hair and mine.

“Sorry. It’s just … the things the River said.”

“Like last time?” The River’s voice hadn’t made her throw up last time.

Allie shook her head. “I don’t want to say. Not yet.”

“Indeed.” Elin’s face was pale, and I wondered what the River had told her. “The light dims,” she said. “If we are to build shelter for the night, we must do it soon.”

To the west, thunder rumbled. We had little means of shelter. “We’ll gather dead wood,” I said. “Search for dead grasses to lash it together.” I scanned the forest around us. The crossroads was wide enough that no tree shadows should be able to reach us if we stayed near its center.

“A poor plan,” Elin said. “Allow me to suggest a better one.” She spread her cloak on the stones. It was still dry, as was her dress. “I am but a weaver, yet my power may be of some use here.” She moved her hands over the cloak. The fabric shimmered and flowed, turning as liquid beneath Elin’s touch as stone had beneath Nys’s. When the light faded, Elin’s cloak had grown thin as old paper with none of the brittleness, a square of cloth fifteen feet or more across.

I reached out to touch it. It felt like well-woven wool, but the rain continued to roll off as if it were nylon from Before. I looked up at Elin, not hiding my admiration.

A ghost of a smile played across her lips. “I trust you can find wood enough to fashion this into our shelter?”

“I can,” I said, and headed into the forest to do so. Allie and I found some long straight branches, and Elin used them and more weaving to shape her cloak into a tent, with two rough walls to block the wind and a roof just high enough for us to sit beneath.

We huddled under it, Allie and me in our sodden clothes, Elin in her dry ones. The rain was quite heavy by then, and Allie had begun to shiver. Elin took two stones from her belt pouches and tapped them together. The larger began to glow with warm orange light. Allie and I took turns holding it, warming our wet skin and doing what we could to dry our clothes. We’d chosen as flat a spot as we could find, but rain trickled in along cracks in the rock beneath us.

“I cannot help with food,” Elin said. “The forest will have to provide that once the storm passes. I’ll not take food from my people for you. We struggle enough as it is. Toby—” She turned abruptly away to stare at the curtain of rain that fell from the edge of our shelter. It was full dark, and the flashes of lightning made the rain seem the edge of the world. I wondered who Tolven was to Elin, and how she would react if she knew he’d rescued us. I wondered if her people had truly gone as hungry as mine had since the War.

Allie’s shivering eased. She yawned as she cupped Elin’s stone in her hands. “Think you can take first watch, Liza? I’m kind of tired. I’ve healed so much. I know I need rest.”

Elin turned back to us. “I can watch, if you trust me to do so.”

I didn’t trust her, but if she’d wanted to kill us, she could have left us to the weather and stayed safe and dry in her cloak. “All right,” I said. I didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for Matthew and Caleb, and I had to sleep sometime.

Allie and I huddled together beneath Allie’s cloak, which was only damp now. I was more tired than I thought. In spite of the cold and the wet and the knowledge that the land around us could crumble without warning any time, I slept.

When I woke, the wind had died and Elin sat watching the rain’s steady fall. Allie tossed restlessly in her sleep, as if at some bad dream. She’d rolled away from me. As I reached out to wake her, my good hand brushed her neck.

It burned with fever, hot as faerie wind.

Chapter 10

A
llie blinked awake. “I don’t feel so good,” she whispered.

I wrapped the cloak around her as she sat up, fumbling to close it one-handed. She drained the last of the wine skin, and I held it to the dripping edge of Elin’s cloak to refill it with water. I drank, then handed the skin to Elin, who silently drank as well.

Allie shivered. “Liza, how long do you think it will take for Caleb to come?”

“I don’t know.” I offered her the orange stone as I crawled back to her side.

Her face went pale. She lunged for the edge of the overhang and threw up on the stones beyond it, into the rain.

I gave her the skin. Allie wiped her mouth on her
cloak and took a few small sips of water, then pushed it away. My own stomach did a little flip. This was more than some reaction to the River’s voice.
It’s the rain and the cold
, I told myself.
Or the food in Faerie
. Lots of things could make Allie sick.

The rain was letting up. Elin drew a dried root from another belt pouch and handed it to Allie. “Chew this. It will help calm the stormy stomach that fire fever brings.”

Ice trickled down my spine. “You don’t know that’s what she has.”

Elin’s expression was unreadable. “The healer knows it.”

Allie bit off a piece of the root. “Sorry, Liza. The River said—but if Caleb arrives in time, it won’t matter. Even a river can be wrong, can’t it? I can’t heal myself, but Caleb understands fire fever better than I do anyway.”

“What did the River say?” The River had said many things to us last time, not all of them true.

“It knew before I did.” Allie wouldn’t look at me. She chewed with slow deliberateness. “It said it didn’t need to call me, because it would have me soon enough. It said … I didn’t mean to push too far! You know I didn’t!”

“Fire fever is not like other illnesses.” Elin’s voice was
surprisingly gentle. “It is more subtle, almost as if it has a will of its own, one that is forever seeking a new way in. Our healers had much knowledge and many long seasons behind them, yet they all fell to it in the end. Nys told you nothing of this? No, of course not—and that I’d expect him to give you the same respect as our own healers shows that I grow soft indeed. My mother would be pleased.” Elin’s bitter laughter died on her lips. “Nys does not speak for our people, however dearly he might wish it. So long as my mother remains absent, that responsibility falls to me. Know then, Allie, that I will not forget the sacrifice you have made for our people. I will see that they do not forget it, either. It shall be remembered in our stories, for as long as we draw breath.”