I adjusted the pack on my shoulders. “Let’s hope no one needs saving this time.” I wanted to go home, and hold those I cared for close, and know they were all safe. I wanted to no longer fear, deep down, that that was too much to ever hope for.
We set out, Karin and Allie, Matthew and me, into the morning chill. High clouds streaked the predawn gray, promising more rain in a day or so. Karin swept the path in front of us with her staff as she walked; her other hand lay lightly on Allie’s arm. Oak and maple leaves grew along the staff’s length, along with tendrils of wild grape that stretched on ahead, warning of rises and falls and rocks in the trail. Karin wasn’t wholly blind. Her plant-speaking magic still saw the shadows within all plants. Before dawn, those shadows weren’t strongly bound within stem and leaf. When a length of kudzu sent its shadow snaking out onto the trail, Karin’s gaze focused on it. “Day comes. Seek rest.” At her quiet words, the shadow hastily retreated.
As we left the town behind and the path wound deeper into the forest, I released Matthew’s hand and slipped in front of Allie and Karin, while Matthew remained behind them. We kept watch as we walked on.
An elm shadow swiped at us from above. “Go away!” I said. The elm’s shadow obeyed me almost as swiftly as the kudzu had obeyed Karin. As a summoner, I could command the shadows in all living things, but with less subtlety than Karin’s deeper control of plants. There were only plant shadows in the forest today, though. We were not close enough to winter for shadows of the dead to roam these woods.
The gray sky lightened, and the tree shadows settled more firmly within bark and leaf. Living vines and branches still grabbed at us, because no plant was wholly tame since the War, but so long as we kept to the center of the path, those were easy enough to avoid. Color seeped into the world, revealing a green forest broken by patches of fiery red and orange. Autumn. This year autumn was coming on its own, a slow change that needed no command from me. I only hoped spring would do the same.
As the sun rose, Matthew and I switched places, because we had less need for my summoning to protect us by day and because even as a human, Matthew had something of his wolf’s sense of sight and smell. His ponytail flopped over the top of the pack Samuel had loaned him. Karin slowed a little as the path became more uneven, and for the first time in months, I heard her faint footsteps as she made her way along it.
Allie reached for the sky, as if she could touch it. “I’m not stupid like a year ago, when I ran away to follow you guys. I know how dangerous things can get, but I don’t want to ever live only behind the Wall again. I love this world. I do.”
Karin used her staff to push a stone from the path. “This world is a good thing to love,” she said soberly.
I loved the world better when I could keep an eye on it. I continued watching and listening as we walked on.
Karin slowed her steps. “Ahead of us.”
Matthew came to an abrupt halt. “This one wasn’t there before.” His voice tightened around the words. A squirrel lay by the side of the path, its fluffy tail twitching, its head pillowed on a pile of gray dust.
Just a dying squirrel, I thought, and then I saw what was missing. Its front and back paws. The tip of its nose. Only the thing’s shadow was whole. As I moved to Matthew’s side, I smelled the same stale scent I had from the leaf, stronger now. My good hand reached for the hilt of the knife I wore, though I saw nothing to fight here.
“It’s awful!” Allie’s voice rose. “It’s—it’s not dead. It should be, but it’s not!”
Karin gripped her staff. “Tell me what you see.”
“A squirrel.” I forced my voice to stay steadier than Allie’s as I described it to Karin. Matthew knelt beside the creature, carefully not touching it. There was no blood, just that stale gray dust.
The squirrel’s tail kept twitching. All at once Allie darted forward and pressed her hands to its side. There was a flash of silver light. The squirrel’s shadow flickered and went out, and its fluffy tail fell still.
“Allie!” I grabbed the back of her shirt one-handed to pull her away. Matthew scrambled to his feet, reaching for Allie’s shoulders, looking her over.
Tears streamed down her face. “I had to! It was hurting so much.”
“Kaylen has surely taught you not to throw yourself into any healing without first determining you can do so safely.” Karin extended her staff toward the squirrel, and a green tendril snaked into the dust. The color began to drain from it. Karin made a harsh sound, and the tendril fell, half green, half gray, from her staff. The gray half crumbled into more dust. “This one is newer than Matthew’s leaf, I think.”
Allie backed away from the squirrel. We all did. I thought of the gray leaf caught in Matthew’s fur, and I shivered. I scanned forest and trail but saw nothing that could have caused this.
Karin turned back to the path. “I suggest we keep walking.”
A mile on I found a half-crumbled sycamore leaf by the side of the trail. It didn’t affect Karin’s staff when she poked at it, so she moved to the sycamore tree beside it, putting her hands to the furrowed brown bark. “This tree remembers cold. A time when the midday sun wasn’t strong enough to warm its leaves. It would rather not remember.”
We didn’t speak much after that. Matthew found a pile of gray dust where the sapling he’d seen had been, and we all found more crumbling leaves. Always, Karin poked the dust with her staff before questioning the trees around it. Their answers were no clearer than the sycamore’s.
“There’s more to this than we can see.” Karin’s staff met a rock, and she stepped around it. “There are hints of it in the air, too, very faint. I’ve been catching some of them as the wind shifts.”
I didn’t feel any wind. “You said you smelled this after the War. What did it mean? Was there dust then?”
“With so much burned to ash, who can say?” The ivy vine poked out from beneath Karin’s sleeve, retreated again. “But Faerie was sorely wounded, in ways I do not wholly understand. Every root and branch and stone, every person and every animal, felt that wound, which ran deeper than the burning of the fires the humans sent, felt it and cried out even as they died. No plant or animal speaker could hear those cries and remain sane for long. I’m told the very land cried out, though none but my mother could hear it.” Something wild flashed across Karin’s face and was gone. “That was all some time ago. This may not be the same thing. We must watch, and listen, and not leap to fear too soon.”
As the sun neared midday, the air grew warm. I rolled up my sleeves, fumbling as I hooked stone fingers—my left hand was frozen halfway into a fist—under the wool to get my right sleeve up. Matthew offered to help, but I shook my head. I’d been practicing this, just as I’d been practicing shooting with bow and arrow, every day. If I was making more progress with my clothing than my hunting, I would nonetheless keep at both until I regained the skill I’d lost.
We took dried meat from our packs, remaining watchful as we ate on the trail. The boots Matthew had seen were gone to dust, too, save for a silver buckle that shone in the afternoon sun. A common pattern—perhaps it had belonged to one of the traders who’d begun visiting my town, now that we didn’t turn all strangers away.
Dust and crumbling leaves grew less frequent as the sun slid toward the horizon. A cricket chirped, but it held no danger. Crickets remained one insect that preferred to prey on plants, not people. We took a side trail to loop around my town, because Karin wanted to visit the tree I’d called before we went on to Franklin Falls.
The hillside where it stood blazed with color in the evening sun. The tree—a quia tree, cinnamon-barked and red-leafed—rose above orange and yellow brambles of blackberry and sumac. Its leaves were perfectly round, its shadow clearer and sharper than those of the bushes around it. As far as we knew, it was the only quia tree ever to grow outside of Faerie.
Calling spring to the quia tree had nearly sent me forever into a gray place where only dead shadows lived. I’d feared this crum
bling and death might somehow also be tied to the tree, and so my fault—but I felt only green life pulling on me as we reached the hillside, green that longed to grow even as the tree prepared for winter’s sleep.
Karin’s face held that listening look again.
“Do you feel it?” I asked her.
“Oh yes.” Karin thrust her staff into the brambles, and they moved aside, opening a path for us. I followed her to the tree, Matthew and Allie trailing behind me.
Karin leaned the staff against it and put her hands to the bark. The tree’s branches rustled, as if catching a breeze. “This tree speaks of the gray, and of the green beyond the gray, and of … Liza. Hold out your hand.”
I did as Karin said. A branch reached down and cool leaves brushed my palm. Something dropped into my hand: six perfectly round brown seeds.
It was the green life within them that I’d felt. I saw the small curled shadow in each seed from which that life came. “They want to be planted,” I said.
Karin smiled at that. “As all seeds do.” She reached toward me. “May I?”
I poured the seeds into her palm, but the green in them kept pulling on me. Karin held the seeds as gently as one might hold a newborn child. “These seeds know you, Liza, much as their tree does. And they are strong, for all that they are young.” A few ivy leaves poked out from beneath Karin’s sleeve, and she rubbed them thoughtfully. “The only seeds I’ve known before with such strength and will to life came from the Realm’s First Tree, and that tree has only seeded twice that we know of. The first time was early in our history. I must tell you that story, and soon.”
“I already know it,” Allie said. In her town, children memorized stories, because they considered storytelling a skill as important as sowing a field or wielding a bow.
“What’s the second time they seeded?” I asked, though I feared I already knew.
A wind picked up as the sun touched the horizon. Karin tilted her head, as if it carried some message only she could hear.
“Just before the War,” she said.
Chapter 2
Karin kept the seeds so she could study them further. Her staff she left by the quia tree, because while as a plant speaker she could control the staff’s growth easily enough, my town wouldn’t want any greenery near where we lived and slept. We’d seen too many killed by the swift-growing plants the War had left behind, plants that too often sought human flesh and blood.
Seeds were easier to hide, though, and Karin hadn’t wanted to leave them behind. I felt the green in them all the remaining way into Franklin Falls, a gentle tug that wasn’t unpleasant but that never quite went away. Should I plant them? But Karin said that if the seeds were here, they must be here for a reason, and we should first try to puzzle out what it was.
Matthew lived right at the edge of town. We neared his house as the sun dipped beneath the horizon. I saw Mom on the porch talking with Matthew’s grandmother, Kate, and with animal speaker Kyle, who’d turned six while I was away. Their hands and faces were streaked with dirt, no doubt from a day spent bringing in the harvest.
Mom turned at the sound of our steps. She looked well, dark hair tied back, the gauntness gone from her face, her belly large with the child she carried. Kyle retreated behind Kate as I shrugged off my pack and climbed the stairs to wrap my arms around her, clinging as if I were a child as well.
“Lizzy.” Mom held me close as she stroked my hair. “I’ve missed you so much.”
My body pressed up against her belly. “You’re all right?” Of course she was all right. Matthew had said as much, but it hadn’t always been true, and I hadn’t known until then how badly I’d needed to see it for myself.
“I’m fine,” Mom said as she pulled away. A silver-plated leaf hung from a chain over her stretched-tight sweater. Caleb’s quia leaf, from Faerie’s First Tree, which held some piece of Caleb’s being deep inside it. “The baby’s fine, too.” Mom’s gaze flickered over my stone hand, flickered too quickly away. “You?”
I thought of how she’d nearly died in Faerie, of how the fire—the radiation—in the air there had seeped into her skin and bone. But that was over. For a few heartbeats I allowed myself to believe I truly had saved her, and Matthew, and all those I held dear.
Pieces of the forest were crumbling away. None of us were safe. I forced that thought aside. “I’m good, too,” I said, because right here and right now, it was true. I looked at Mom’s shadow and saw, faintly, the baby’s shadow tangled within it. I touched her stomach gently, wonderingly. The baby hadn’t had its own shadow when I’d left. A small shadow fist reached toward me. For an instant, our hands seemed to touch.
I’d keep the baby safe, too, once she was born. I would.
Caleb stepped out of the house, his clear hair falling to his shoulders, his steps silent as he crossed the porch to us. A silver coin hung from his neck, a gift from Mom, though there was no magic in it. “I’ll be surprised if she waits more than another couple weeks to join us. She’s getting restless in there.” I’d never seen Caleb smile like he did when he said that, a smile that reached his silver eyes and held nothing of sorrow in it. He couldn’t see shadows, but as a healer, he had his own ways of feeling the life within his daughter.
Allie flung herself at him. “I missed you,” she told her teacher.
I turned to Kyle, meaning to hug him as well. The boy turned his back to me. I laughed a little and walked around to face him. “Hey, Kyle.”
Kyle stalked past me, small shoulders stiff, past Karin, Kate, and Matthew and down the stairs. I’d saved Kyle as well, but he wasn’t acting like I’d saved him.
Mom sighed as Matthew and Kate took our packs, set them down on the porch, and headed inside; as Allie let Caleb go, and Karin and Caleb talked quietly. “Kyle missed you, that’s all,” Mom said.
He didn’t look like he missed me. “I came back. Just like I promised.” I’d promised Kyle so many things: that I would look after him. That I’d teach him about his magic. But I’d needed to learn more about my own magic first, and Mom had said she’d help me take care of him, freeing me to go with Karin.
Mom leaned against the porch railing. “He didn’t understand how long it would be. Five months is forever to a child. He’ll be okay. He just needs to be sure of you again.”
A yellow kitten padded over to Kyle and nudged his boot. It was the great-grandkitty of my first cat. Kyle knelt beside it and made a low mewling sound, speaking to it as he wouldn’t speak to me. “Sorry, Kyle,” I whispered. If Kyle heard, he gave no sign. The kitten made a questioning sound, and Kyle picked it up to hug it tightly. When we moved inside, Kyle followed, holding the kitten close.
Kate’s living room held a faint purple glow from the lit stones that lay positioned around it, the work of one of the children in our town, who was a stone shaper. There were a couple of orange stones, too, giving heat without smoke. Not everyone in my town was as willing to use magic for light and heat as Kate and Mom were. My town wasn’t near as easy with magic as Karin’s.
Kate’s mirror was nowhere in sight. Matthew had said that while she hadn’t been willing to shatter it, she had taken it from the house to store it facedown in the shed, weighed down with rocks so that none could step through it. Somewhere beyond that mirror, did Karin’s daughter wonder whether her mother was well, too? It was to save Karin that Elin had helped kill the Lady at last, but before that Elin had destroyed a human town, and afterward she’d fled back to Faerie through the glass rather than talk with her mother. Karin had scarcely spoken of her daughter since.
Other Afters—children born since the War, and so with magic—found their way to Kate’s house: object caller Seth with his little sister and brothers; wood shaper Charlotte, holding her cane with one hand and the scarred hand of fire speaker Ethan—whose town it was Elin had destroyed—with the other, though they’d not been a couple when I’d left; wind speaker Hope, with her husband and sister, her own newborn baby held close in a sling.
The baby’s shadow was dark and healthy within him. As I took him in my arms, he stared up at me through bright silver eyes. I stared back and ran my hand over his fluff of clear hair. “There hasn’t been … trouble?” My sister had died for showing such obvious signs of magic.
Hope laughed, shaking the tiny carved acorns at the ends of her braids. In winter Hope wore real acorns, but in summer true seeds could too easily sprout and try to take root in her skin. “Of course there’s been trouble. But this baby and me agree on something. We’re not going anywhere.” She glanced at Mom. “No offense, Tara, but we can’t all leave, can we? Where would the younger ones and their magic be then?”
“Leave?” I looked at Mom. She and Caleb and the baby were staying here. They’d decided that before I’d left. “What do you mean, leave?”
Mom looked away. Had she changed her mind while I was gone? I handed the baby back to Hope, and he fussed in his mother’s arms.
Hope adjusted her sweater to feed him. “You haven’t already told her?”
“Told me what?” I’d thought Mom was done keeping secrets from me.
Her hand went to the leaf she wore. “We’ll talk later,” she said softly.
The kitten stalked away from Matthew and Kyle to sniff at one of the glowing stones. Its nose touched the orange light, and it bolted from the sudden heat, though surely it had met such before. Matthew moved to my side to rub my left shoulder. I sighed and leaned toward him. My shoulder grew tired by day’s end from my stone hand’s weight. Matthew had taken to rubbing the soreness away.
People kept drifting into Kate’s house, Afters and adults both, crowding the living room, full of questions about the journey and about Karin and Caleb’s town, Washville. I saw small changes in them as they all spoke: a broken finger, once healed at a bad angle, now grown straight; a child’s lost hearing restored; the town blacksmith, walking without a cane. Caleb’s work—I wondered what my townsfolk made of that magic. Some stole glances at my dead hand when they thought I wasn’t looking. Once, I’d covered my hair to hide the clear streaks there, but now, I was too strongly touched by magic to have any chance of hiding.