Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [66]
“You should have run.” I managed to get my boots buckled myself. “You should have run and kept the leaf safe.” Kept yourself safe.
“You should have known better than to expect me to.” Mom handed me my coat. I stepped away from her to put it on.
A hand snaked around from behind me. I felt a knife at my throat once more as the coat fell from my grasp.
“Call her back, Summoner.” Elin’s voice had a feral edge. “Do it of your own free will or do it under glamour, it matters not. Waste no more time. Do it.”
Mom stepped toward us, and Elin stiffened. She was frightened, I realized, frightened of us small, glamourless humans. Her voice thickened into a syrupy sweetness. “Do it now. Call my mother back.”
“Stop!” I said while my thoughts remained my own. “Of course I want to call Karin back. I’d do more than that for her.”
“Why would you?” Elin demanded, the glamour gone from her words. “Why should a human care for my people at all?”
“I don’t know your people. But I do know your mother.” Karin, with her kindness and her teaching. I didn’t know who the plant mage had been Before. I only knew who she was now. “You have my word, Elianna. I’ll do all I can to save her. But I can’t do anything until you take the knife away.”
Elin drew back, taking the knife—one of Karin’s knives, with a dark stone blade—with her. “I will kill you if she dies. Do not doubt it.”
I ignored her and walked to the oak tree. Deep scores ran down the bark, and sap flowed slowly out of them. I’d done that, too. I forced the thought aside as I softened my gaze. I saw Karin’s shadow within the tree—head between her knees, hands pressed to the ground. I felt the spark of life that was Karin, fainter and colder now. She was still there. I put my good hand to the rough bark.
The shadow looked up and shook her head—no.
As a tree she will die, as all trees must in this dying land, and it will not be without pain. The Lady’s words, but Karin had said as much when we’d found the townsfolk changed.
“What do you wait for?” Elin demanded. The butterfly was in her hair once more, but the wings had ceased their flapping at last.
“I wait because I fear calling will kill her.” A loop of ivy hung from one of the oak’s lower branches. Its leaves were already brown, without Karin to keep them awake. One drifted to the ground, and Karin’s shadow shrank a little. I thought of the leaves I’d called from the sleeping maple seed, of how quickly they’d withered and died. I thought of the townsfolk in their trees, dying of winter as well. Winter would kill us all in the end, one way or another.
I turned to the quia tree. The shadow that clung to it seemed sharper, more clear than both Karin’s shadow and the shadows of the townsfolk. It slept more lightly than the other trees, too, as if tossing in troubled dreams. I felt cold magic stretch between us once more. I hadn’t imagined it—this tree knew me. It remembered me.
As I put my hand to the quia’s smooth bark, I felt something more—the sense that this tree’s shadow didn’t end with its roots but reached far deeper, looking to someplace beyond the human world to remember how to grow.
I didn’t know if I’d been right or wrong to plant the quia seed and, in doing so, call winter into this world. I only knew that I had. “This is my responsibility.”
“Liza,” Mom said. “Not everything is your fault.”
“I know that.” The War wasn’t my fault, nor any of the things Mom, Caleb, and Karin had done during it. And maybe spring would still come on its own, just as it had Before, as the trees found the ancient pathways my people said they’d always followed to wake themselves.
But every moment I waited, the chances that there would be enough life left in Karin’s tree to call her out grew fainter. Karin said trees died slowly, but I could see the shadow in her tree shrinking. I could wait on spring no longer.
“I have to call it back,” I said.
“No one can stop the worlds from winding down.” So much despair in Elin’s voice. She held her hurt arm close. “Grandmother said so, when we came to your world and found it as dead