Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [67]
“The Lady doesn’t know everything,” Mom said.
“Careful, human.” Elin’s bleakness was tinged with disdain.
Mom laughed, a wild sound. “I’m through fearing your people, Elianna. None can do worse to me than your grandmother has already done.”
I kept my hand pressed to the quia tree. In the darkness, its shadow seemed more real than its bark and branches.
“Spring has been late before,” Mom said.
Would the other trees follow the quia into spring, as they had followed it into winter? “I don’t know how much time the others have. Would you keep me safe and lose them all?”
Mom didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. I looked down, ashamed. Wasn’t that what I’d wished of her before this all began? That she could have stayed with me, kept me safe instead of protecting others?
“Do what you need to.” Mom rubbed at the arm I’d bitten. “I don’t know as much about magic as Karinna and Kaylen, but I’ll keep watch as best I can.”
I swallowed hard. “Thanks, Mom.” My breath puffed in front of me. The ground would freeze again soon.
Mom looked at Elin. “Promise you’ll not harm my daughter should she fail.”
Elin laughed bitterly. “Why should I make any promises to humans?”
“Because Liza won’t do this thing unless you do.”
I would do this thing no matter what—but I didn’t say so. I couldn’t lie, but my mother could. “Promise,” I said to Elin, “that you won’t harm me or Mom or anyone from my town.”
Elin stalked to Karin’s tree and leaned her head against it. “I do this for you, not them. I do not understand why you care for these humans so. I will never understand it. I will never understand why you did not take me with you when you went away to fight.” If Karin heard, she gave no sign. She’d drawn her shadow arms around herself, and her head was bowed once more.
Elin turned back to us. She’d been crying again. “You have my word.”
The moon was higher now, but I could still see the pinpricks of stars, like light through old nylon. I rubbed at the leather around my wrist, feeling stone and skin to either side of it. Matthew and Kyle were both out in that darkness. Even now I chose who to save.
I returned my good hand to the quia’s trunk, shivering as my skin touched the tree’s cold shadow. All this long winter I’d been cold. I wasn’t sure I remembered what spring felt like, let alone how to call it.
My dead hand weighed me down. I focused on the quia’s shadow and the restlessness that slept within the tree. “Grow,” I whispered to it. “Seek air, seek sun, seek life!”
The quia’s shadow pulled at me, urging me toward the same uneasy sleep in which it already rested. I pressed my feet firmly into the mud and felt again the way the quia’s shadow stretched beyond its roots, deep into some other place—into Faerie? Did Karin’s world remember the green my world had forgotten? The Lady had said nothing grew there, but perhaps some thin thread of spring remained. “Wake!” I called to the shadow’s roots—to that place beyond its roots. “Grow! Seek air, seek sun, seek light!”
I called again, and again. I couldn’t call my mother to me, nor Matthew, either, not always. I couldn’t call Johnny back, or the others I’d lost, even before this long winter. But I could do this. I could call spring. “Grow!” I saw, somewhere beyond sight, the way the quia’s shadow twisted into a dark rope reaching down out of this world. I saw the thinnest thread of green snaking through the darkness, answering my call. I reached for that thread with my magic, pulling it toward me. “Grow!”
Something pulled back, something gray and dying that also answered my call and chased after the green. I held to that thin thread, but the harder I held on, the harder the grayness pulled me in turn, urging me deep into the earth, beyond the earth.
Light drained from the world around me, moon and stars fading to dead gray coals. This wasn’t Faerie. Even the desolate Realm the War had left behind held more color and life than this.
Yet I’d been here before. I’d called Caleb back from this dead land where nothing grew. I’d thought I’d escaped it and brought him and the quia