I’d held shadows before. What had I done when I’d held them?
I looked down at my hands. I had a shadow, too. I just couldn’t see it. A healer couldn’t heal herself, and a summoner couldn’t see or command her own shadow. Not anymore—but once, long ago, Rhianne had sent her shadow far beyond her body.
I didn’t need to go as far as Rhianne had. I needed only to go the very slightest distance beyond my own skin. I unfocused my gaze the way Karin taught me when I first learned to see shadows, and I stared down at my own hands.
I saw flesh and stone, nothing more. I closed my eyes, remembering the life I’d felt within my stone hand when Nys touched it, life I could not see. I reached for the tingling warmth of his touch, fighting the sick feeling it churned up, focusing on the stirring of life—of shadow—within stone. “Allison.” Something shuddered awake within my hand. I reached out with that something, reached out and touched Allie’s hand. My stone fingers, dead no longer, wrapped around hers. Allie’s hand was cold, but the cold didn’t trouble me now.
“Liza!” Caleb’s voice seemed very far away. A faint musty smell drifted toward me.
“So you see,” the River said. “It is not so hard as it seems.”
I felt a shiver of fear at that voice, even as Allie pulled on my hand, trying to get away from me.
I didn’t let go. “Allie. It’s all right. It’s me, Liza. Come here.”
“You can’t,” Allie whispered. “You can’t follow me, or it will all have been for nothing.”
What did she mean, follow her? I opened my eyes. Allie looked up at me. She was as solid and real as I was, only drained of all color, hair and nightgown and boots cast in shades of gray, despair and anger mixed in her colorless eyes. I looked down at our linked hands. No stone weighed me down now, but my living hands and all the rest of me were the same shades of gray as Allie. I hadn’t called her back. I’d slipped into shadow with her instead. We stood together on a dead, gray plain. I knew this place. It was the place things went when they died. I’d been here before.
There were no clouds, no bright moon. Silence weighed on me, urging me to my knees, strong as any glamour, but the seeds I held spoke to something deeper within me, reminding me of color and light. I remained standing.
Allie kept trying to pull away. “Let me go.” Her voice was at the edge of hearing, as if sound had no more place here than color.
I braced against the gray ash at our feet. She’d begged me to let her go with Nys once, too.
“You don’t understand.” Allie twisted in my hold, kicking up a cloud of stale dust. “I have to go, but you have a choice. I saved you, only you won’t let yourself be saved. Please, Liza. There are people who need you back there.” Her seed must have been speaking to something in her, too, if she could fight me. I’d never been able to fight anything in the gray place before.
Ashes drifted back to the ground. Allie sagged in my hold, then abruptly aimed a kick at my shin. Her foot connected. The pain was muted, as if we fought wrapped in feathers, but its weight knocked me back. Allie broke free, and she ran.
I chased her over the empty plain, knowing she ran toward sleep, toward death. “Allison. Stop.” The gray softened my command as surely as it had softened Allie’s kick, but she skidded to a halt. I grabbed her, and she went limp in my arms. I turned back the way we’d come—the way I thought we’d come. The gray looked the same in every direction, and I saw no way out.
“Liza. Please.” Allie voice caught. “It hurts not to answer the call. Let me go.”
Healing did hurt sometimes—I didn’t know how to heal. I only knew how to call things to me, to send them away. I only knew how to hold on.
That’s what I would do, then. I set Allie down, grabbing her hand as I did. “All right. Show me where we need to go.”
She began pulling against me again, pulling hard. The stale smell grew stronger, taking on a sickly sweetness.
I wouldn’t leave her alone in the dark. I was the one who stopped fighting to follow where she led, deeper into the gray.
Chapter 12
“Liza, no.” Allie’s feet crunched softly over the ash.
I matched her steady pace. Whatever call she answered, I did not feel it. “I won’t try to stop you, if this is what you need to do. But I won’t leave you, either.”
Allie sighed, the nearest thing to wind in this dead place. “What did I ever bother healing you for if you were only going to do this?”
“I always was a terrible patient.” I managed a strangled laugh.
“Liza! That’s not funny.” But Allie laughed, too, a laugh that caught on something like a hiccup. “What about Matthew? He’ll never forgive you for this.”
He would, though. That was the worst part. Matthew understood risking oneself for others as well as I did. Allie, too, I realized. Struggling to save what we could, it was what we all did. If I didn’t come back, Matthew would only regret that he couldn’t save me in turn.
I wasn’t giving up on saving myself or Allie just yet. I scanned the empty land as I followed her, looking for any change, any hint of a way out. Gray weighed at my steps. A breath of cold brushed my ankle, and a shapeless shadow floated past. Something in that shadow called to me and my magic, longing to be laid to rest.
Even here? I’d thought this was where shadows found rest when I sent them away.
The seeds I carried still called to me, too. I drew one into my free hand. Its husk seemed faint, not as real as the shadow within it. It had been a seed found in the gray that had shown me the way out the first time I was here. That seed had become my quia tree. Could this seed, which came from my tree in turn, also show us a way out?
“Grow.” My voice—my magic—came out as a whisper. “Seek sun, seek sky, seek life.”
The seed’s shadow began to unfurl. A flash of green filled my sight.
“Stop!” A woman’s voice echoed around us. “Seek silence, seek stillness, seek sleep!” Allie and I staggered beneath the power in her command. The seed shuddered, and its shadow curled back up. Just like that.
The voice had come from the direction Allie was walking. A summoner’s voice, one with more power than mine. I slowed my steps as I returned the seed to the others, forcing Allie to slow as well. “Show yourself,” I said. The gray swallowed my words, leaving behind the barest of whispers.
Laughter rustled over the land, like wind through fallen leaves, no joy in it. “That is one thing I cannot do.” Whoever this summoner was, the gray didn’t mute her voice. “You must come to me, as all who walk here do, soon or late.”
I shivered, not from cold. Allie pulled me on, toward the voice. At least this enemy—if she was an enemy—was not at our backs. More shadows drifted past, as if on some unfelt wind. I sensed longing from them all; if they sought sleep, they were not finding it. So many. My eyes stung, but when I brought my arm to my face, it was dry, as if tears had no place in the gray.
The shadows thickened into a chill tide. Some held hints of their former shapes: a grasping hand, an outstretched paw, a leafy branch. It wasn’t only humans whose shadows came here when they died.
Something dark loomed out of the gray. A tree’s thick roots, taller than I was, disappearing into the ashes below me, merging into a thick trunk that stretched out of view far above. Shadows drifted toward the roots from all directions, swirling around them with a soupy thickness. The air grew heavy, as it did before a storm, but my throat felt dry as a summer without rain.
“No!” Allie jerked to a stop less than an arm’s length from the tree. She pounded at a root, but her hand went right through it, as if the tree were more real than she was. “No no no no no.” This tree wasn’t a shadow. It had a shadow, deep within it, as Allie and I did not.
“It isn’t fair.” Allie looked up past the roots, to the tree’s broad trunk. “I need to leave, but there’s nowhere to go.” She tugged at my hand, more desperately. “Why?”
“You could release the seeds you carry.”
The woman’s voice came from the tree, gentler this time. “It would be easier for you if you did.”
I looked more closely at the tree’s shadow and saw hints of legs within its roots, hints of a woman’s body within its trunk. Woman and tree, tangled together as surely as wolf and boy were tangled in Matthew. I knew her then, knew her as the same woman whose arms were tangled within this tree’s shadow branches in Faerie. The First Tree’s roots truly had gone deep.
“Rhianne,” I said.
“Indeed.” Somewhere up out of sight, wind rattled dry branches, but I did not feel it. “How do you come to be here, little summoner, knowing my true name while holding your own name close, carrying green life to the heart of death itself? You feel familiar. You have been here before.”
“We didn’t mean to be here,” I said. “We’d gladly leave, if only you’d show us the way.”
“You so lightly seek what those around you cannot have? A return to light and life?”
“Not me. I know it’s over for me.” Allie took her own seed in her hand. “If I let go of this, will I be free?” The longing in her eyes felt colder than any gray. It was the same longing I sensed from the drifting shadows all around us.
“No,” Rhianne said, sorrow in her voice. “You will not be free. But you will no longer know it, for when you let the seed go, you let your name go as well. There will be an end to pain, to the knowledge of suffering.”
“But not to the suffering itself?” Allie kept staring at the seed.
“All things lose their names when they come here,” Rhianne said. “Some gradually, as they cling to matters left unfinished in the living world, some swiftly, if their work in that world is done. But by the time they reach this tree, they’ve let the memory of who they are go. All except you.”
“It hurts.” Allie looked small and forlorn as a figure seen through falling snow. “Like a hole, deep inside me.”
I tightened my grip on her. “Let us out of here, and we won’t trouble you anymore. You have my word.”
More laughter, even as Rhianne asked, “What is your name?”
Almost, my lips parted at her command. Almost, I answered her question. “She’s a summoner,” I reminded Allie. Rhianne would have power over us if we gave her our names.
“This is wrong.” Allie’s gaze swept over the shadows flowing around Rhianne’s tree. “They shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens next—and no one knows what happens next, not even healers—it isn’t supposed to be this.”
“My roots hold them here,” Rhianne said.
“So uproot them,” Allie said.
“Would you condemn all my children up above?” An edge crept into Rhianne’s voice, reminding me of Nys when we’d asked him to set Tolven free. “Though many perished in the burning, some live on in the bright world, safe from death. My own daughter is among them.”
Her daughter? “Mirinda’s dead,” I said. Elin had said so. In time Mirinda passed from the Realm.
A sharp crack, like lightning splitting a tree, echoed somewhere deep inside me. I stumbled, almost lost my hold on Allie.
“My daughter is not here.” The ice in Rhianne’s voice made Nys seem kind after all. “I would know if she were. Yet she’ll not remain safe long if my roots release their hold on the gray. The seeds my people ate will lose their power without my roots and my magic behind them. Only this tree stands between the living world and the unknown dark beyond this place. If I let go, within a few short years all my people will slip into that dark. If protecting them from death means holding on to those shadows that do come here, I accept that price.”
“I don’t accept it!” Allie stamped her foot, but it made no sound. “We’re supposed to slip into the unknown. That’s what happens when we die.”
“For those of lesser power, perhaps. But if my magic has strength enough to keep my people safe, I will use it.”
“Is it only your people’s shadows who are trapped here?” As soon as I asked, I knew it wasn’t true. Allie wouldn’t have been drawn to this tree if it was. I looked to the endless gray beyond trunk and roots. The shadows thinned, and somewhere past them a smaller tree stood, nothing human about it.
I thought of all my dead. My first sister. My cat. Kyle’s older brother. Ethan’s younger one. Strangers who’d died during the War or after it. I’d thought I’d laid their shadows to rest, but they weren’t resting. They were drifting, nameless and lost, among the roots of this tree. My people paid the price of the faerie folks’ long life, too, and we gained nothing from it.
The musty scent was stronger, so close to Rhianne’s tree, the smell of gray dust. Did the crumbling come from here? The cost of Rhianne’s gifts might be higher than we knew. “Faerie and my world both crumble away,” I told Rhianne. “Is that part of the price you choose to pay, too?”
“Since the burning, the strain on the world is greater than it once was, it is true,” Rhianne said. “Many shadows have flooded this place in a short time. I can handle that strain. For my people’s sake I’ll hold on, so that they can endure as long as they may.”
“You don’t understand!” Allie said, and I realized it was true. Two worlds were crumbling because Rhianne and her roots stood here holding back death, and she only wanted to hold on harder. I couldn’t let her do that.
I knew her name. Could I make her roots let the gray go and so set all the shadows free? Would that be enough to make the crumbling stop as well? Allie was staring at her seed again. I wasn’t sure I could both save her and make Rhianne let go.
I couldn’t let this stand just to protect Allie and me. Some part of me wanted to, though.
Best to act swiftly, then, before I could change my mind. “Rhianne! Go away!” With all my magic behind the words, I forced them past a whisper, into a squeaking command. The roots trembled. “Go away, go away, go away!”
The ground lurched, an earthquake that threw me from my feet. I clutched Allie’s hand as we fell, though she fought to pull free once more. Shadows blurred, and something in the gray air seemed to give, like rope gone slack, letting a flash of green through.
“How dare you!” The shadows snapped back into focus with a sound like ripping cloth, and the green was gone. “Your name, Summoner.” There was power in Rhianne’s words, too, harsh power that coiled around me, with none of glamour’s illusions.
“Liza.” The name slid too easily from my lips. I tried to draw breath, to take it back, but I couldn’t.
“Go, Liza!” Rhianne’s call rippled through my shadow and my thoughts, reminding me how fragile they were. “Distract me from my work here no longer, lest you hasten that which you seek to prevent. Go!” My vision dimmed. “Take your name back to the world with you. Return to me in your own time, when your body and shadow fail, when your name and your power are lost. Go!” My shadow frayed like old yarn as the darkness took me, the very fibers of my being pulling, pulling apart, my hold on Allie weakening as they did. Silver flashed at the edges of my sight, but it was too far. My shadow was unraveling, letting emptiness through.
I felt an uncomfortable tug, and then something gathered up the fraying threads of my being. With a gasp I shuddered into skin and bone, while the something wove the threads back together—too tight. I screamed, blinking to see silver eyes staring down at me, wide, startled. Elin. She crouched across from me beneath a blue sky, on the other side of Allie’s body, one hand resting on Allie’s chest, the other touching my shoulder.
For just a moment the shivering air between us seemed made, not of air and sky, but of shimmering silver fibers. “What I felt—what I wove—no one can weave—” Elin shuddered and toppled to the ground.
Allie lurched upright, looked at me, and began to cry.
Chapter 13
Matthew was at Elin’s side, human now, pressing his fingers against her neck. He must have found a pulse, because he let out a long sigh. Caleb knelt before Allie, grasping her trembling shoulders. Silver threads flowed from his hands and wove
themselves into a web. The web disappeared beneath Allie’s skin, but her shaking didn’t ease. “The radiation sickness wasn’t as advanced as I’d feared,” Caleb said gravely.
Elin stirred. Matthew looked at me as he helped her sit up.
I was trembling, too. My skin felt thin as paper from Before. “I’m all right.” My fingers—my stone fingers—were wrapped around Allie’s. She tried to pull free, but the stone held tight. Caleb pried her fingers loose, one by one, a strange look on his face. I glanced down at my hand. It was clenched in a tighter fist than before, tight enough to have held Allie’s smaller hand. When my shadow had moved, the stone had moved as well.
Elin pressed her hands up to her face. “I can see them. In the air, all around us—the threads of the world. I’ve always felt them, but I could not see them. No weaver can see them.” She shivered in the cloak that was again wrapped around her, its edges now trimmed with owl feathers. I remembered the shimmer of silver fibers. I felt something of that still, a shiver in the air that echoed beneath my skin.
Allie kept crying. She was here. I’d brought her back, and Caleb had healed her. Those were the important things. Matthew moved to my side, and I wrapped my arms around him, burying my face against his shoulder, smelling the wolf in his hair, feeling my stone hand weighing me down once more.
Matthew rubbed my back. “You were gone so long.”
“How long?” I drew away and ran my finger down Matthew’s cheek, where a long cut was clotted with dried blood.
“A day and a half.” He wore Caleb’s quia leaf over his sweater. That leaf would protect Matthew from glamour, but if it was hurt in any way, Caleb would be hurt, too.
It hadn’t seemed a day and a half in the gray. Yet the sky was clear, the sun just beginning its descent. I saw the remains of a fire—Elin’s glowing stone must have run out—beside a woodpile and a few cracked bones that were all that remained of the owl.