Foxfire in the Snow

by J. S. Fields

  CRACKKK!

  A fast exhale of breath, as if someone had been punched in the gut.

  Another flare of heat magic.

  A cry of pain from Mother.

  How long had it been? A minute? Less? I opened my eyes and looked up, but our small opening had closed. Darkness surrounded us, the sounds of the outside muffled. I saw glints of light in a few places, perhaps where the earth had failed to come together properly, the legs of insects scratched my face, and hyphae tickled my arms.

  “You’ll be a great woodcutter someday, Sameer.” It seemed right to say because I had no doubt he would make an excellent woodcutter. And because I hadn’t really apologized, had I, for being an ass to him on the glacier.

  Sameer snorted but squeezed my hand. “You’re not a great alchemist, Sorin.”

  I wasn’t certain if the comment was meant to sting or not, but I laughed anyway. “You’re right. I’m a terrible alchemist. But I think I might be a decent bastard chemist.”

  “You won’t be able to file the paperwork to change your title before we are crushed to death here.”

  There was a lightness in Sameer’s words, and though the conks were now pressing on my chest, I felt light too. Maybe the borders of the three countries would fall apart, through loss of the guilds, industrial revolutions, or queen treachery. But I had a brother, and for the first time, maybe a mother, though there was some room for debate on that. I had chemistry, and it was something different, but not new. I hadn’t had to make it up, just find it. Thinking about that seemed to loosen and cool my skin. The scars were still there on my arms, never forgotten, but they didn’t itch, even with the hyphae curling around them.

  The ripping sound began again. Except this time, it was louder and accompanied by screams and thunderous claps of dirt. Particulate rained down into my eyes and mouth, and I curled tighter against Sameer, coughing and gasping. Chunks of fungus slammed into my spine, my legs, my head. A bright light shone behind my eyelids, and the world spun. The screaming became louder. I brought my hands up to cover my ears and…and I could lift my arms all the way up.

  I coughed again, then sucked in clean air. The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I heard Sameer sit up and try to clear his own airways.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “I’ll live,” he responded sourly.

  I rubbed at my eyes, then opened them. All around Sameer and me were clumps of burnt conk, pierced by delicate, hook-ended crystals. The conks had turned brittle and were shiny in places. The air smelled of brick, and although the area was bathed in an apple-colored glow from the crystals, the ground was scorched black from magic. Another reaction, perhaps, between my crystals and Mother’s magic.

  “Do you see them?” I asked Sameer. Everywhere was just earth and smoke and fungus. He and I could have been the only living things in the entire forest.

  Sameer stood, pivoted, then pointed. “Over there. Come on.”

  We walked only a few steps, and then I helped him lift an oblong slab of baked red belt fungus off of two intertwined bodies. The queen was curled in on herself like a bug. Mother wrapped around her, clasping the desiccated woman to her chest.

  We tossed the conk and dropped to our knees. Both of them were still alive, but when I tried to unwind Mother’s arms from the queen’s shoulders, I saw they were speared together by tiny fragments of red crystal.

  “Kept her against the mound,” Mother wheezed. “Your pigments amplify the heat residue. Hope I didn’t bake you.” She didn’t open her eyes, and I wanted, so badly, to look at her just then. To have her see me, and to really, truly, see her for the first time. I wanted to demand explanations, to vent the rage that still burned in my throat, but I held back. Again. “Thought…to get the crystals into the mound. Save you. So sorry, Sorin, the tattoo. Sameer. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve destroyed Sorpsi.” The queen’s voice was barely more than a whisper as she struggled to draw in breath. Just like the mice in my experiments, she was calm and did not thrash. But in the last moments of life, her eyes flew wide open and she managed to glare at me. Her eyes stayed that way, too, as she choked, and hissed, and finally, exhaled.

  I started to shake. “We have to get them separated. We need a solvent. Something to dissolve the crystals.”

  Sameer tried to pry at the conjoined areas of skin but pulled back sharply when Mother cried out in pain. “Do you have any more of the ethanol?”

  “There are hundreds of old amulets at the camp. It will take hours, though, with the ethanol. We need bone oil. There are vats of it in the cauldrons.”

  “Treaty talks?” Mother’s words were garbled now, and I had to lean in to hear her.

  “I’m sure Magda has it under control, Mother.” I stood. “Sameer, you stay here with her. I’ll go back for the solvent. Hopefully—”

  “Sorin.”

  “Damn it, Sameer, it’s the only option we have. Just hold on. I’ll be five minutes.” Mother would be fine, I was certain. Mother was always fine.

  “Sorin, Amada is dead.”

  Everything stopped, even the nuthatches. I looked down as tears collected in my eyes, at the queen’s blank glare, and Mother’s half-closed lids. They were both dead. As dead as my laboratory mice, as dead as the false guards. The queen was dead, leaving hundreds of guilder skills trapped within amulets. And Mother…with a reconciliation, perhaps a reckoning, that we’d never get to have.

  Still, I didn’t move. I searched for the next steps, for there had to be something proper to do when a queen died, or your mother died, but I could think of nothing. The ground around me was burned, my pouches empty. What was I supposed to do? Move? Maybe. It was cold without Mother’s magic, and a thin layer of frost was forming over the bodies. Breathe? Yes, breathing helped clear my mental fog.

  “Should we bury them?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

  At the very end of my words, fungi began to poke through the ground in a halo around Mother and the queen. Sameer jumped back and yelled in surprise, and I, too, leapt away. Of the palest white, the mushrooms also glowed green despite the daylight, reflecting off the crystal fragments, the colors mingling together.

  Now, with the crystals and the fungi and the frost, both women looked like they’d been purposefully placed in a glass coffin. In enchanted woods, they were a pair of fairy queens, and that seemed right, somehow, after all this. The ground might thaw and decay might take its course, but it might not, with the magic. Stories might grow, of magic and fairies and elves and foxfire, and of a queen and a woodcutter, and some powerful, unearthly force that had overwhelmed them.

  “I think we should leave them.”

  “We can’t just leave her here, Sameer. She’s our mother.”

  “She was a terrible mother.”

  I wiped my hands over my face. She hadn’t been terrible, not really. Or maybe really. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. I was still allowed to mourn, wasn’t I? To dream of taking her back to Thuja and burying her next to her parents in the soft soil behind our longhouse? Maybe to erect a spirit house for her, as they did in Puget, so that her soul could come and watch over me as it always had when she was alive.

  Thick, wet snow began to fall. The flakes coalesced quickly, and I watched, without blinking, as they coated Mother and the queen in downy white.

  “We have no way to get them back, not stuck together as they are. You have to let her go, Sorin. Your life is yours now. No one else’s.”

  I kept my eyes on the snow-covered bodies, the red glint of the crystals slowly drowning in silver. “My life was always my own. I just chose to put other people first.”

  Sameer snorted, but I didn’t look back at him. Instead, I turned to the heap of amulets to my left, dropped by the queen and Mother, the ground haloed brown around them. I gathered all three and tucked them into my pockets.

  “You really want to take those?” Sameer asked, surprised.

  “You expect Magda to believe us witho
ut evidence? We could try to collect an alchemist or two, take them back to Celtis. But without the authority of the queen, I doubt we’d get out alive. We need Magda, and in order to get her, we need a few amulets.”

  And I want to leave. I have to leave. It hit me all at once. The absurdity that had kept me distant melted into reality. Mother was dead. The Queen of Sorpsi was dead. The guilds were dead, and if Sameer and I didn’t get to Magda soon, Sorpsi would be dead as well. I rubbed at my arms, hard enough to peel the fresh scabs.

  “We have to go. Now.” My voice was dead of emotion, my sleeves damp and slowly turning crimson. Magda. Magda was who we needed. Magda would be the one who could straighten everything out. The royal daughter, Magda. Queen Magda.

  “We’re going to have to break into those treaty talks. It’d be easier if we rounded up the masters first. Even shaken, they’ll make a strong statement.”

  Sameer seemed immune to any emotion. That should have made me angry, but it didn’t. The wind that consistently blew strands of hair across my face should have chilled me, but it didn’t. I turned away from Mother and began to walk south. If I lingered, I would come apart, and I couldn’t do that yet. Not with so many guilders to rescue. Not with Magda waiting for us, and Sorpsi’s autonomy hanging in the balance. I’d wanted to be free of Mother for so long, and now all I could think of was how little time we had truly spent together, and that she was dead, and that I was leaving her here, chained to her keeper until the spring thaw when fungi would consume their bodies.

  “Let’s get the masters first, as many as we can find,” I said into the wind. “Then, we find Magda and see if there is any part of Sorpsi left to save.”

  Twenty-Eight: Mercury, Salt, and Sulfur

  “You have to let us in! We have the guilders!” Again, I tried to rush past the guards who blocked the wooden door to the inner assembly hall of the Puget Palace. Again, they pushed me back and returned to their stiff poses.

  “Let us in!” Sameer came up beside me and yelled. Behind him were some twenty masters and grandmasters, the most we had been able to find without wasting too much time in every little inn. Simple men and women in cottons, leathers, and silks, but they stood awkwardly, shifting on unsteady feet. Their hands rubbed over every surface, trying to make sense of materials they had once worked. They could talk, and understand, and had memories of their lives, but even with Sameer and I urging them on, urging them to action, they wandered. Watched. Mourned the part of themselves encased in transmuted wood, swinging from needled branches in the Puget forests.

  “You may see Her Highness, the Royal Daughter of Sorpsi, at the conclusion of today’s talks,” the guard on the right said. “Until then, she cannot be disturbed.”

  I tugged at my hair in frustration. “But I have news about the Queen of Sorpsi! I have everyone’s missing masters right here! Please!” When the guards neither moved nor spoke, I tried the only option left. If it ended with the entire palace coming out to gawk at me, so be it.

  “Magda!” I screamed her name loud enough that I fell into a fit of coughing at the end. “Magda!”

  No curious heads popped around corners, but it was enough to wake the guards from their rigid stances. They moved to either side of me, each taking an arm, and began to pull me into the east hall. Sameer ran forward and punched one of the guards, who fell back. I jerked against the hold of the other, dragging my feet as loudly as possible against the polished marble floor. “Magda!” I continued to yell. “It’s Sorin! Sorin!”

  The door burst open. The sound of it hitting the wall and rebounding back was loud enough that we all froze, Sameer in mid-punch and the guard on the floor ready to draw his sword.

  “Sorin?” Magda’s eyes were wide with confusion but heavy, too, with fatigue. Beyond her, thick furs of white and brown covered the floor, and stained glass and wood made up the walls. She held a hand up, and the guards fell back.

  “I have news,” I said, breathless. I pointed to the guilders.

  “You…guilders? Masters?”

  “And the queen,” Sameer added smugly. “Though that will take some explaining.”

  “Royal Daughter?” A man’s voice called to Magda from inside the room. “Is everything all right?”

  The confusion on Magda’s face gave way to a tight formality. “Come inside, both of you.”

  Sameer held up his hands and strode over to the guilders. “No way. I don’t do politics. Besides, I don’t want these ones wandering off, looking for lost looms and whatnot.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Go talk to your girlfriend.”

  I rolled my eyes but let Magda lead me into a deep room of purples and reds, to a circle of chairs in upholstered leather, the backs of brown oak. Woven tapestries of sedges and bamboo covered the walls—a testament to the rangelands Puget was known for. A formal dining area was tucked into a far corner, the chairs there upholstered with hide and the table runner a stunning display of dark, handwoven silk.

  We stopped in the center of the circle of chairs. In front of us sat two men, both with yellow hair and pale skin. They wore thin silk shirts and knee-high leather boots, and the sides of their pants were ruffled. The one on the left looked much older, with gray at his temples and a number of silver rings on his fingers. The chair to the right of the younger one was empty, and next to that sat a man, a woman, and a person of indeterminate gender. All had hair the same color as the brown oak chairs, but their facial features and skin tones ranged wildly.

  Magda inclined her head to the people sitting, and I curtsied. “My apologies for the interruption. May I introduce King Rodolf of Eastgate and his son, Prince Teodor.” We pivoted, and Magda again nodded. “The Triarchy of Puget—Lord Kamon, Lady Yiru, and Potentate Jun.”

  Magda stepped to my side and put her hand on my shoulder. It felt heavier than it should, and I shivered. “This is Sorin of Thuja, an…” She looked at me, then at my tattoo. Her eyes went wide, and she stuttered for words. “A…”

  “A guilder,” I finished for her. “My mother was a master woodcutter.”

  “Was?” King Rodolf raised a delicate blue teacup to his lips and sipped. Magda’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

  “Was,” I responded, simply.

  “And how might we address you?” Potentate Jun looked up and smiled. “Simply Sorin of Thuja?”

  “I…yes. I don’t know any other way.”

  Jun nodded. “As you like.”

  “Sorin? Why are you here? How did you find the masters?” Magda pushed me into the empty chair, then dragged another from a set with velvet covers over to the circle, and sat. Her words were as rigid as her back.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. With all that was going on, was she angry with me for running out? This was more important than an argument over body semantics, and yet… I took a moment to really look at her. Magda wore a long, formal gown made of chintz. I recognized the exotic cotton only from having been forced into it once when I had accompanied her to a formal tea at the palace. Her hair hung loose and well brushed, the tight curls falling about her shoulders and down her back. It was hard to clamp down on my surprise when I caught the glimmer of gold on the top of her head. Someone had given her a replacement crown to wear, and though her curls threatened to consume it, Magda looked, in that moment, like a near-exact replica of her mother. She looked like a queen.

  “I…” The words died in my mouth. All that distance we’d crossed together was gone, replaced by an ocean of floral-print cotton and velvet-covered furniture. “Your Highness,” I said instead, and bowed my head. “I apologize for the interruption.”

  Magda let her eyes close for a moment. “It’s all right, Sorin. The guilders. Where were they? How did you find them?”

  “They’re…your mother…you’re the queen.” I snapped my mouth shut as soon as I realized what I’d said. Heat flushed my face. I hadn’t meant the words to come out, and certainly not in a near-whisper. But there they were, hanging in the in
censed air, and I couldn’t take them back.

  Magda blinked, then stared at me, her mouth slightly open and her eyes searching mine as if she could bore into my skull and take the answer from me. I wanted to speak, but my lips would not pull apart. There was too much to explain, and I couldn’t do it to my queen. I needed Magda, not the defeated-looking woman in front of me stuffed into a childish floral-print dress that she clearly detested.

  The other rulers shifted in their chairs, silent but impatient.

  “The queen, my mother, is dead?” Magda asked finally.

  I nodded.

  “Your mother? You found her?”

  “Dead as well.”

  “The masters?” Her voice this time was a whisper.

  “I don’t know if they can…be repaired.” I shifted to my right hip and removed the amulets from my pocket. One of the triarchy gasped as I pushed the tea service to the edge of a gilded table and set the transmuted wood down. “It will take some time to explain. I’d like to confirm first, that the guilders across all three countries are missing? The census came back empty?”

  The king sat forward in his chair. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

  “You told them about the factories?” I asked Magda.

  “I did.”

  I pointed vaguely toward the hall. “Many are here, I think. In Celtis. And their skills—” I held up an amulet. “—are in these, and these are scattered about the northern forests. And there is no way to get the skills back out. At least not right now.” I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth, then slid them down.

  “You’re saying the three countries have no guilds, that our collective repository of skilled knowledge is locked away, and Sorpsi is to blame?” Lady Yiru asked. “We’re reliant on free traders to meet our export needs until—when? We find an alchemist or witch who can undo this work?”

  I looked to Magda for help as I was unsure how to respond, but her head was in her hands as she stared intently at the floor. In that moment I’d have given anything to have her hand back on my shoulder, tense or no. I didn’t belong with kings and queens and potentates. I didn’t belong in Thuja, either, but I was well out of my depth here.