Foxfire in the Snow

by J. S. Fields

  Sameer released me and sprinted ahead, leaping a small creek. I followed, although with considerably more difficulty. “I met a journey carpenter on the way out of town, who asked me to stay over and consult on some furniture. The town is filled with guilders, Sorin.”

  “More?” It was hard to speak and run, and I was falling more behind. “Are they all right?”

  Sameer turned back briefly. “What do you think? The ones from Puget and Eastgate apparently received invitations to attend the treaty talks, but suddenly find themselves unable to measure, or blow glass, or weave, or whatever. And then I find out you went missing, Magda is out of her mind with worry, and when I set off to find you, Amada and a master of witchcraft accost me and haul me here. What the hell is going on, Sorin?”

  “Just…just hold on, and I’ll try to explain.” I put on a burst of speed, thinking I would catch up, but in that same moment, Sameer fell back as if he’d run face first into a wall. He cursed and scrambled to his knees, his nose dripping blood.

  “Keep running if you can,” he yelled. “Don’t stop.”

  “Leave you to witches? I think you’re an ass, Sameer, but you don’t deserve that.” I slowed to a walk, my hands held out in front of me. I’d thought my growing warmth was from the heat of exertion, but now that I’d stopped, it was clear even the air around us was warm. The snow had begun to drip from boughs, the ground was turning soggy under my boots, and the edges of the forest seemed to blur.

  My hands met firmness between two trees where nothing but air hung. “You don’t have a sword, do you?” I asked. “Bow? Arrows? Dagger? Broken bobbin?”

  Sameer pulled himself up on the trunk of a tamarack and blinked incredulously. “You want me to challenge our witch mother with a bobbin? You’re the one with the magical-alchemical-whatever powders. You’re also the one she is less likely to kill outright.”

  “I hadn’t planned on killing anyone.” Mother stepped from…from nowhere, from the other side of the wall we couldn’t see. The queen appeared behind her, her steps gliding as if she were on polished marble, not damp leaves.

  I’d thought to stand my ground, to face Mother and maybe, for once, not back down. But Sameer pulled me to him, to the comfort of the tamarack.

  “I take back every moment of jealousy I had toward you,” he whispered. “You can have all this creepiness.”

  The queen came toward us. Mother stepped ahead of her, refusing to look at me. I missed nothing about her—the wrinkles on her forehead, the way her lips pursed and slid along each other. It looked almost like she’d been storing emotions her entire life, and here they were, all coming forth now.

  “Step away from Sameer, Sorin. I have work to do.” She took two amulets from her pocket, one oval and of oak, the other circular maple. Her eyes flicked to mine, once, before her mouth set, and she stared at Sameer.

  Sameer drew a thin knife from his belt.

  I grabbed for the oval amulet, but Mother stepped back, and I batted at empty air. Still, she refused to meet my eyes. “Mother! He’s your son! Our lives aren’t a game, and we are not your toys! Mother, what are you doing?”

  Damn it, Mother actually looked hurt. I didn’t care. Not anymore.

  “Why aren’t you looking at me?!”

  “Because Amada has known for a very long time what a skill like yours means to me, Sorin.” The queen’s voice lowered to a girlish whisper, and Mother turned away to stare into the forest.

  “Leave Sorin, Maja. Sorin is a woodcutter by right of that tattoo. It was chosen.”

  I touched the scabbed flesh. The skin tingled with a dull throb of pain. I was no more woodcutter than alchemist, and Mother’s insistence seemed out of place.

  “I think not. Let us be done with that lie.” Leaves circled the queen’s feet, and from her pocket she pulled a cinched satchel that almost certainly contained alchemical powders. “Will you try to run from your place at my side, Sorin, as your mother always has? Will you fight me into futility? Or will you finally take what belongs to you? The guilds. The secrets. Magda.”

  In her other hand, she held a square amulet. “I’m asking because I believe you have a great deal left to discover. But I will take what you have now and leave it at that if I must. I can always start a new alchemist, with your knowledge as a base.”

  “My life belongs to no one but myself.” I said the words back at her as my heart rammed in my chest. It was a challenge. The queen knew it.

  Instead of looking away, the queen cupped my chin and tilted my head up. There was a smugness there, on her face, that sank my heart.

  “Are you done with Magda, then?”

  Sameer pushed from behind me and lunged with his knife.

  It sliced through layers of fabric, but I couldn’t tell if it hit flesh. The queen spun back, opened her satchel, and scattered a fistful of white powder into the air. The particulate hung above all of us—Sameer coiling for another lunge, Mother with her arms wrapped around herself, glaring at the trees—before the dust swelled into long, thin filaments that precipitated, or fell, or violated some other basic law, hit the strip of earth that separated Sameer and me from the queen and Mother, and absorbed into the ground.

  “Both of you, come here!” Mother grabbed my arm just as a flurry of white stalagmites pushed from the earth in a circle around Sameer and me. A column sprouted centimeters from my face, and in it, I could see thousands, millions, of mycelial strands weaving around one another, congealing, into some woody fruiting form that would trap us in minutes.

  Sameer’s hand caught mine, and he pulled me back toward him. I tried to step, but another stalagmite burst up just under my right foot. I lost Sameer’s hand and fell forward.

  “Damn it, Sorin!” Sameer yelled as a column shot between us, widened into a fan, then began to shade brown and orange. It was red belt conk—some horrible, mutated, alchemist’s version of a benign forest rot. No wonder Master Rahad had been so interested in my fungal pigments. I might have been the first to extract and make powders from pigmenting fungi, but I definitely wasn’t the first to realize how a fungus’s inherent properties could be extrapolated.

  “Sorin!” Another tug from Mother and I was on my feet, tripping over the conk mounds as they split apart the dirt. Mother lost her grip as a mound came up fast between us and pushed her back. Again, I landed next to Sameer and, still, the pillars rose, meter by meter, penning us in.

  “Maja, stop!”

  “Sameer has no part in this!” I yelled in tandem with Mother, who could be impaled on a stalagmite for all I cared at the moment.

  “Enough, both of you!” It was the first time I’d heard the queen raise her voice. Beneath the honey, I recognized Magda’s strength and rigidness, and it raised the hair on my neck. I looked at her, over the rising mounds, and the queen met my eyes, unblinking.

  I couldn’t look away either. Her eyes stripped away my clothes and left me feeling nude despite layers upon layers of fabric. It was as if I had failed some grand test and was being dissected. But her plan was vile. She would rake the flesh of Sorpsi and boil the marrow of the bones into a cauldron of caustic bone oil distillate, poisoning anyone who crossed her.

  “Sit on a sword hilt,” I swore at her. “You’re a poison to Sorpsi and a disgrace to Queen Iana.”

  A rigid calmness settled over the queen. Her face blanked, smoothing some of the wrinkles. “And you are a waste of talent, Sorin.” Her eyes flicked to the mounds steadily growing around Sameer and me. “Encase.”

  The stalagmites pushed together and began to arch overhead, forming a golden-red dome speckled in torn roots and displaced insects. Sameer jabbed his knife into the woody forms and tried to slice, but they had already dried, and the blade caught. I ran at the mounds with my shoulder, but I merely bounced off. Sameer swore. I swore.

  “Don’t suppose you’re secretly a witch?” I asked him as I again threw my shoulder at the wall.

  Sameer looked up at the closing gap, and then at the spaces betw
een the quickly shrinking conks. “No, I’m a weaver.” He pulled a handful of loose roots from where they stuck out from the earth and, in five passes, braided a sort of bulging strut. He grabbed another set of roots and, in three quick twists of his hand, had a wide, round base to stick the strut into.

  “And you wanted to be a woodcutter.”

  “Shut up, Sorin.” He snorted, but his voice held humor. “I can shore the spaces, but I don’t know for how long.” He connected the strut to the base, then shoved it into one of the smaller gaps like a pillar. The stalagmite conk tried to push it in, but the woven roots held, sending soft bits of fruiting body and loose tree roots slopping to the ground. The air took on the musty smell of decay.

  “You could help any time—unless you want this dome to be our coffin. I don’t give a damn whether you are a woodcutter or not, but it’d be great right now if you could be an alchemist.”

  “I never meant for them to be weapons!” I yelled, though I wasn’t angry at him, just at this looming, crushing, fungus cage. I pulled my belt off and unfastened the pouches, sorting them by weight. I had no yellow pigment left. The red had maybe a thimbleful. Maybe. The blue-green was full.

  “Maja!” Mother’s voice.

  I looked up at Mother’s voice to see parts of her through one of the windows Sameer had made. She looked…like some intangible thing inside her had snapped. Her eyes were wide and wild, her fists clenched in a rage she seldom showed.

  “This isn’t what we agreed, Maja!” she said. “For five years, we have had a deal. Five years I have studied magic for you, broken guild law for you. I have killed for you. Let them go! Keep your end of our bargain!”

  “Damn it,” Sameer muttered as the first of his columns was crushed. He had four more still in place, but there were no more openings in which to place new ones, and the arched “ceiling” was a lot closer than it had been moments ago.

  “You broke guild law well enough on your own, with your choice of heirs,” the queen said icily. Her hands went back to her pockets, and I could see them forming into fists beneath the cloth. “That is what began this in the first place. Do not forget. Besides, you’re conveniently forgetting your own interventions in this, Amada. The tattoo Sorin has is illegal, both by my and guild standards. It doesn’t count as a choice. The marks must be freely chosen.”

  A choice? I’d been meant to choose? I’d chosen neither.

  “Sorin chose woodcutting!” Mother screamed. “You promised if woodcutting was chosen, you would leave Sorin be! That it wouldn’t matter who Sorin was. It took five years, but my heir has made a choice.” Mother looked gray, as if she were about to vomit.

  A sick feeling crept into my stomach as well. I counted back the years. I counted back the years from my present age—seventeen. Five years ago, I’d found alchemy, and Master Rahad’s workshop, but that couldn’t have been the only catalyst. What else? Five years ago…

  Five years ago, my body had begun a journey without my consent.

  Five years ago, we’d halted our visits to the palace.

  Five years ago, for the first time, we’d stopped pretending I was a girl, but I’d never stopped being Mother’s heir. She should have fostered me out in that moment of declaration. I had no right to inheritance, not by guild law, and not by Queen Iana’s law. Only daughters could inherit. Not sons, not…whatever I was. Mother had kept me, and no one had ever argued that decision. Not the Thujan villagers, not the woodcutting guild, not the queen.

  The tattoo on my neck felt heavy, suddenly, like it might pull me down into the cracked earth. All the sheltering, all the hiding, the refusal to discuss alchemy, or to let me visit Magda, the cursed whispering on the glacier from Walerian, and this tainted tattoo—it was all because…because Mother had known what the queen was, what the queen wanted. She’d seen this future, and she’d wanted to keep me from it.

  I fell to my knees. I stared at the sorrel and dirt beneath me.

  I felt hollow. I was a chrysalis with a pupa that would never emerge. I was a sapling grown on a cliff that fell to the ravine before it could make a deep enough root system.

  I wanted to cry, or maybe scream, but there was nothing left inside me.

  “Sorin!” Sameer yelled. Another two columns collapsed. The ceiling had closed above us and was now creeping down. Severed roots swished above my head. One opening remained, and the root braid groaned under the pressure.

  Sameer tossed his knife into the ground and sat. “I’m out of tricks. Don’t suppose you have one of those amulets? Old or new, who cares? Maybe it has some magic in it? Maybe you can get a reaction? Sorin? Sorin!”

  I tore my eyes from the sorrel to my brother, who clearly still wanted to live. He deserved to live, if only long enough to tell our mother what he thought of her.

  I shook my head. “A reaction between the two could kill us just as easily as free us.”

  Sameer threw up his hands in exasperation. “We’re going to die anyway! Be an alchemist! Be a witch, for all I care. Just use those damn things strapped to your belt.”

  Crashing noises came from outside our dome, and the temperature flared. The ceiling dropped again, which brought tree roots smacking against my head. I brushed them away and hunched closer to the ground, my mind spinning. I didn’t know how to feel. Could you hate someone and love them at the same time? Did you have to make a choice about that too? Wasn’t there a third option?

  “Sorin!” Sameer yelled.

  I tried to focus. Magic and alchemy were out there, fighting each other like they weren’t just separated by semantics. I had both in here, with me, between my pigments and the amulet in my pocket. But it was old. Devoid of magic. All that was left was its structure, and the ethanol solvent it was still leaking from its pores. What else then? Reactions? Extractions? Alchemy without the magic part was…what?

  It was solvents. It was chemicals.

  That was what I’d been doing all along, wasn’t it?

  Chemistry.

  It wasn’t between magic and alchemy at all. It had parts of both, but it was a different field entirely. If magic and alchemy were either ends of a line, chemistry made that line a triangle.

  It wasn’t choosing between two ends; it was…it was an entirely different option. One that had always been there but…but that no one really cared about. It didn’t break any rules; it was just used so little people forgot about it. It was a cult. A rumor. A bastardization. And it fit.

  I pulled apart the pouch of elf’s cup pigment, scooped the damp amulet from my pocket, and dumped it inside. Chemistry. Elf’s cup was a poison, but it had to be carried in something. Dissolved in something that could penetrate human skin. I might not be able to break out of our prison, but I might be able to stop the person responsible.

  The roof dropped again, bending the conks in half and forcing us onto our knees. I cinched the pouch closed and rubbed the leather between my hands, hoping, praying, that I might speed the movement of the ethanol into the pigment, and the pigment granules into the pores of the amulet.

  The air inside our fungus grave had become heavy with respiration. My rubbing turned frantic. How long was long enough? With bone oil, it was near instantaneous, but ethanol was a poor solvent. A few seconds? A few minutes?

  “Our agreement!” I heard Mother scream at the queen.

  “As dead as your children.”

  “Sorin!”

  At Sameer’s plea, I took the amulet from the pouch. It sat heavier in my hand than when I’d put it in, and I could feel no blue-green residue in the lined leather. Thank the gods.

  Chemistry.

  I pulled off my pouch of red pigment and dropped the amulet inside just as twirling strands of fungal hyphae began to tickle my nose. I waited until the first popping of the red crystals and the telltale sound of ripping leather. I pushed myself against the wall of conk, stuck my hand through the opening, and threw the entire thing as hard as I could at the side of the queen’s royal head.

  Twenty-Seve
n: Chemistry

  The queen didn’t die. Not at first. Elf’s cup was a subtle poison and had to work its way from the blood to the heart and brain before it could shut systems down. It also worked a lot faster if it was ingested than absorbed into the skin, but I hadn’t had a lot of choices. She was going to die, and that was a comfort, even as the hyphae from the queen’s magical fungus licked my cheeks and the smell of breakfast on Sameer’s breath filled what little air we had left.

  All we could do from our shrinking enclosure was watch. Just as the pouch hit the queen, jagged red crystals pierced the leather, then shredded it. The crystals cracked the amulet wide open, and the contents, a thin, blue-green liquid, slopped onto the queen’s neck. Some ran down under her clothes, but most soaked into her hair and cape, and from there, I assumed, to her skin. Ethanol was great at penetrating skin. One drop was enough to kill a mouse, so an amulet the size of my hand was certainly enough for a human.

  There was stillness then, for a few moments, as the queen clawed at her clothes and skin, desperate to be rid of the unknown damp compound. It was when the first bit of red crystal pierced the queen’s hand that she jolted up and ran toward us, her eyes wide and angry, while bits of red crystal built and spun off of her.

  “Down! Mother, the crystals!” I grabbed a fistful of Sameer’s hair and pushed his face to the dirt. I didn’t know if Mother could hear me through the thick walls of red and gold fungus, or if she had paid enough attention to my pigments to know what the red could do, but if she had, if she had truly done of all this to protect me, then she might be able to help.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering the explosion of Mother’s house, and the bite of nails, knowing there wasn’t enough of the red pigment to explode the mound, but there was plenty to rip into my flesh if any of those crystals got close enough.

  I could hear the sounds of clothes tearing. The queen shrieking. Mother’s grunt of surprise. The mound shook; the ground shook. Sameer reached out for my hand, and I held his, counting breaths, and heartbeats, and hoping, praying, that my pigments would be enough.