Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [3]
As Matthew and I dug the snow away, Ben’s cold hand emerged, clenched against his chest as if he still held his toy. His sweater was a mess of charred fibers that crumbled at my touch. Beneath them—I fought not to look away.
Matthew whined. Beneath Ben’s sweater, the flesh was melted, wool fused to blackened skin and frozen blisters. I was glad of the cold, which kept the odor at bay. I was glad I’d not yet eaten. Matthew’s ears drooped, and I put my arms around him, squeezing hard, breathing the frosty smell of his fur. If there’d been a fire nearby, he should have caught some scent of it. How far had Ben fled after he’d been burned, and why?
I laid him to rest. There was nothing more we could do. I piled snow over Ben once more. Matthew took the toy dinosaur in his teeth and placed it carefully atop the grave. We headed for home as the moon slipped below the horizon and a faint band of gray lit the eastern sky.
In the distance, an owl hooted sleepily. An owl’s talons could tear a person open easily enough—but when I heard the sound again, it was farther off. The deer and rabbits and mice were going hungry with the trees asleep, and that meant the owls and hawks and wild dogs were hungry, too. When they attacked, they were harder to scare off, but there’d been fewer of them as winter had worn on. We’d have been suffering more from the lack of game in town, too, if not for the emergency provisions we’d been able to lay in the past few years.
Pale yellow light smudged the horizon by the time Matthew and I reached the fields outside our town, Franklin Falls. A brown ragweed vine swung sleepily back and forth across our path. I cut the thing free and flung it into the forest. It could do little harm now, but when spring came, such vines would once again seek our blood.
If spring came. My gaze strayed to the fields beside the path. They were white with new snow, only a few dead grasses poking through. The shivering green leaves of winter potatoes and turnips and beets should have long since broken the frozen soil, but this year they hadn’t grown at all. My hand moved to Matthew’s back, and he edged closer to me. We relied on those root vegetables to help us through the spring while we waited for corn and beans and squash to grow.
The adults said that these dead fields had been normal Before, that there’d been no winter crops and spring had always come just the same. Yet even they’d grown uneasy when the pines and firs had gone brown and dropped their needles. Why trees dropping needles should be more unsettling than trees dropping leaves, I didn’t know, but after that, the Council agreed that we should go on short rations until the spring crops came in—just to be safe, they said.
“What if it’s all my fault?” I asked Matthew as my boots and his paws left prints in the snow behind us. Last week patches of brown earth had shown through, but two days ago new snow had covered them again.
Matthew gave my knee a sharp nudge. We’d had this discussion before: Matthew insisted that I wasn’t to blame, that there was no way I could have known what would happen, and that spring would likely still come.
I thought of a hillside thick with blackberry and sumac, all dead now; of the cinnamon-barked quia tree that stood among the brambles. I’d called that faerie tree into the human world, though only a few people knew it. Magic flowed in two directions; the same power that allowed me to command shadows to rest allowed me to command—to call—seeds to grow. But the quia seed had come from a dead land beyond both my world and Faerie, and now I feared I’d called death into my world as well.
I hadn’t thought so at first. I’d laughed with the others to see the leaves burst into fiery colors and fall from the trees, and thought only of how much easier winter would be if the trees slept and we could walk through the forest unafraid. That had been nearly a half year ago, though. The leaves had since turned