Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [4]
I’d tried calling the winter crops as I’d called the seed. They hadn’t listened. I’d tried to call acorns and maple seeds, remembering how I’d once sensed the green at the heart of all seeds yearning to grow. I’d felt nothing but a shadowy gray silence. I’d had no better luck calling leaves from the bare branches of the quia tree itself. The days were as long as the nights now, and winter still hadn’t released its hold on the land. I could fight a willow’s strangling roots, or a hawk’s poisoned talons, but I didn’t know how to fight a world that didn’t want to grow.
We left the fields behind, walking past the ruins of splintered houses half-buried in tangles of dead ragweed and wild grape. At the edge of the ruins, a once-abandoned house awaited painting. Beyond it we came to the row of whitewashed homes that was our town. As Matthew and I followed the path alongside them, I saw Jayce—the town blacksmith—walking toward us, limping from his old hunting injury. As he waved, I pulled my fur hat more firmly down over my ears and made sure my hair was tucked into my collar. My magic was no longer a secret—nor was anyone else’s—but the clear streaks in my hair were more reminder of it than most folks were comfortable with.
“Liza.” Jayce’s hand gripped his cane, his skin scarred from years spent working in the forge. His gaze flicked to the wolf at my side. “Matthew.” Matthew’s walking through town as a wolf was more reminder of magic than many were comfortable with, too, but Matthew didn’t try to hide, not since the meeting at which we’d told the town that all its children either had magic or one day would. That meeting had gone better than I’d feared: only two adults had drawn their knives, and while one of the children had caused earth tremors with his magic, he’d stopped them before it became clear he was the cause. Until then, our town had cast out all magic for fear of the harm it could do—of the harm it had done, during the War. Once the townsfolk learned that every child born after the War was touched by magic, however, they had little choice. They couldn’t cast us all out, though there were those who wanted to try. Jayce wasn’t one of them. He’d had enough of dead children, too.
“Find anything out there?” The blacksmith’s gaze remained on me, not Matthew.
“A boy.” I rubbed Matthew’s ears. “Young, no more than three.”
“And you took care of him?”
I stared at the condensation frozen in Jayce’s bushy beard and brows. “Not just a shadow. We found a body as well.” I told him all that we’d seen. Sun lit the thin streaks of high clouds. If the cold didn’t break, in a day or two there’d be more snow.
The blacksmith ran a hand over his bald head, which bore more scars. “Council meets tonight. I’ll tell them. If there’s time, maybe we can send someone to bury him—only once the snow melts, we’ll all need to be out planting.” If he feared that the spring crops wouldn’t grow, he gave no sign. Adults believed, somewhere deep inside, that spring would come, for all that they were careful of our rations. Some part of them couldn’t imagine that green wouldn’t return to the world, as if green was something we were born to. I did not understand it. Deep inside I felt as if this gray had surely gone on forever and the forests I’d fought all my life had been merely illusions.
Jayce blew a puff of frost into the air. “It can’t be an easy thing, walking with ghosts. You’re a good girl, Liza. I always told your father so. I think he’d be proud of you, if only …” He shook his head. Surely he knew that Father wouldn’t be proud of me if he saw me using my magic so openly, no matter that I used it to protect my town. Father would have killed me for that magic if he could have, just as he’d killed my baby sister, even though I was too old simply to be left out on a hillside to die. He’d have drawn his knife across