Matthew blinked, as if only mildly puzzled by what he saw. “Shall I go now?” he asked. He would do anything I wanted. Anything.
“No.” The word came out low, and hoarse, and it made my chest ache. I wanted so badly to keep him safe. “No, Matthew.” I let him go, feeling something fall slack between us as I stood. “It’s not up to me.”
Matthew shuddered back into himself, eyes focusing, breath speeding up. I smelled fear on him once more, and I turned away, ashamed. At the horizon, dawn was growing, streaking the sky pink, but the birds had fallen silent.
“Fragile things are precious, Liza.” Karin’s voice sounded very far away. “Never forget that. You can break a thing by holding it too close as easily as by casting it aside.”
“Well, I’ll try not to be too fragile.” Matthew laughed uneasily as he stood. I felt his arms wrap around me, and I knew this was one more thing I didn’t deserve. “I won’t leave you, Liza, not if I have a choice. Not like the last time you faced powerful magic. Maybe there’s something I can do. If not, at least I can watch. You need a watcher, someone focused on something other than the magic. I don’t want to survive this knowing I left you alone.”
I trembled in his hold. “I wish you would go.” It was all I could do to keep the glamour from my voice.
“I know you do,” Matthew said.
The murmuring River fell as silent as the birds had. I looked to the horizon, but the dawn light was gone, replaced by the darkness of the crumbling, rolling over the water like black storm clouds shot through with faint silver threads. Karin made a low sound.
Allie came running through the forest. “Nys says we need to leave now.”
“Yes.” Karin stumbled, and Matthew pulled away to catch her. “The River—something’s tearing, letting the Realm and its crumbling through. I can hear the land—my dying land—I cannot stay here.” Karin reached for me, and I grabbed her hand. She drew me into a swift, fierce hug. “You do your teacher honor, too. Never doubt it. If we do not meet again here, perhaps we’ll meet beyond the gray. If you see Elianna—” She shook her head, dismissing whatever she’d meant to say.
Allie took her arm. The healer gave us both a thin smile, and then she and Karin headed into the forest.
Matthew took my hand, his fingers brushing the sensitive place where stone met skin. “Ready?” he asked, and some part of me was glad he would be with me after all. I smelled his fear still, but he reached out and took my face in his hands. “Just so you know,” he whispered. “This is me.” His eyes clear and focused, he leaned down and pressed his lips against mine. I pressed mine back, inhaling wolf and sweat and boy and, beneath it all, the staleness of the crumbling, growing stronger. I pulled away, knowing we had little time.
“Later,” Matthew whispered, like a promise: that there would be a later, and that in it, we would find a way to cope with glamour, just like we’d find a way to cope with everything else. I wasn’t sure I believed those things, so I let him believe for me, just as once I’d believed in spring for him. Holding his hand once more, I looked into the Arch.
Show me Faerie. It took several heartbeats, but at last I saw—
Elin, pulling a struggling Tolven away from roots he clung to like a stubborn child and dragging him down a tunnel whose glowing stones flickered out, one by one—
Dust. Endless gray dust, turning standing stone and tree stumps to shadow—
I stepped into that dust, Matthew at my side.
Chapter 19
I choked on the smell of dry, musty air. Cold air, so much colder than before. Elin and Tolven stared at us, breathing hard, gray ash dusting their shoulders and hair. It clearly hadn’t been easy for Elin to drag Tolven to the surface. Dust was everywhere, a gray haze that blocked the thin morning light. That light ended after only a couple dozen paces in any direction, giving way to icy darkness.
Rhianne’s tree remained, a few yards away, but the other stumps were gone, save for Tolven’s full-grown quia tree, whose bright green leaves cast the only true color here. Faint silver threads shone through the dark around us, casting an eerie glow over the air, as if Faerie itself were a magic that someone was trying to work.
Elin laughed. “Trust Liza to show up in time for the end of the world. Too bad we can’t join you, but we were just leaving.”
“Not leaving!” Tolven screeched. He ran sharp nails along his sleeves, but they couldn’t pierce the fabric. “The tree is green. I stay with the tree.”
Elin grabbed his arm. “You cannot stay here. No one can stay here.”
“She can.” Tolven tilted his head at me. “You carry green, too.” Something in his gaze slid into focus. He reached for the seed in my pocket, stopped himself. “Liza, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It is good to see you again.” Tolven bowed respectfully. “You know, don’t you? That this is not over yet. I need to stay with the tree, to make sure it doesn’t die. The tree is needed. Tell Elin. She doesn’t understand.”
Elin’s grip tightened around Tolven’s wrist. “What I don’t understand,” she said softly, “is how your words are suddenly clear.”
Tolven gave her a sweet, sad smile. “I fear it will not last. I fear all the green will be needed, by the end.”
I looked to Tolven’s quia tree. It had distracted Karin, letting us get her free, but if it had any power to stop the crumbling, I didn’t know of it.
There was so little of Faerie left. If I failed this time, surely there would be no escaping its ending. “You don’t want to stay here, Toby. Not for this.”
“The tree says to stay.” Tolven sounded very sure.
Something stiffened about Elin’s jaw. I realized she would no more leave Tolven than Matthew would leave me, and that there was a reason Tolven had asked for her when we’d first met. I knew less about Elin and her life here than I thought.
I couldn’t make their decisions for them, any more than I could anyone else’s. With Matthew’s hand wrapped around mine, I walked to Rhianne’s tree.
“You take care of the magic,” Matthew said. “I’ll stand watch over the rest.”
I wanted to draw him to me again, but if I did, I might send him away after all. I released his hand to stand before the tree.
“We shall all keep watch,” Elin said. “Over whatever scheme it is that has brought you back here. After all, if the rest of you are to stay, I cannot have it said that I alone lack courage.”
“Your mother wants—” Karin hadn’t said what she wanted, but I could guess easily enough. “She wants you to return to her, if you can.”
Elin brushed her hands over her cloak, making it shimmer. “It has been a long time since my mother dictated my actions.”
I swallowed, tasting staleness at the back of my throat. Karin had saved me, but she hadn’t saved Elin. “It’s much the same with my mother,” I said. Mom, who had saved the other Afters but not me, and who I wanted to get home to just the same.
Elin bowed her head. “I am sorry for that.”
I was sorry, too, but there was nothing I could do to change it. What I could do was lift my head to the shadow branches that rose from the First Tree’s stump.
“Rhianne!” I threw all my strength, all my magic, into that call. “Come here, Rhianne!” The air grew colder. My breath came out in frosty puffs. Branches creaked far above, like a tree in an ice storm.
A voice inside me whispered, “Liza. Come here.” Rhianne’s voice, a low hiss that shuddered through my bones. My shadow slid from my body, as easily as a bean from its pod.
“Liza!” Matthew caught my body as it toppled, but his call held no magic.
“Come.” It was Rhianne’s call that pulled my shadow slowly and surely toward the tree, into the tree. The threads of the world flared bright around me, and in that brightness I saw—
A faerie woman with a long twisting braid, kneeling before the First Tree, a silver quia leaf hanging from her neck. “You will speak with me now, Mother.” A ston
e knife flashed in the air. “We will speak indeed—”
Brightness and visions drained away like a bad dream, leaving me standing on a gray featureless plain. Before me, shadows swirled around the First Tree’s roots, roots taller than I was. Beside me, green life whispered from the quia seed Karin had given me. Farther away, I saw a second tree, but otherwise there was nothing but gray shadow.
Liza, I thought. I am Liza. I would not know it if not for the seed. Cold filled me, the cold and the darkness that lay at the heart of us all.
I looked to the First Tree’s roots and the hollows among them, which swirled with the shadows of the dead. I would have to push the summoner away after all. “Go, Rhianne!”
“Stop, Liza! There will be no more of your summoning here!” Rhianne’s words snapped like breaking wood, her voice both within me and without, now that I stood in the gray. My own words froze in my throat. I moved my lips, trying to force my magic free, but I couldn’t. My chest tightened, and my vision swam, though I shouldn’t need air, not here. I was bound, as surely as when Nys had pressed my hand to the stone. Just like that, I had failed after all.
I stopped trying to use my magic, and my body—my shadow—relaxed, though I still felt Rhianne’s magic around me like an icy, shimmering net. I hadn’t failed with Nys in the end. I remained alert for anything I could do, as surely as I had in a stone room with no visible way out.
“That’s better. I grow weary of you and your power, Liza. Now, let go the seed you carry.” Rhianne’s words weren’t a command, not yet. “You may do it of your own will, or else I will do all I can to compel you. The time for kindness is past. You will endanger my people no longer.”
“Your people flee the results of your protection.” Without magic in them, the words left my lips easily enough. “Faerie crumbles away.”
“You say this, yet my people live, those the burning and other misfortune did not take. I’ll not believe the world gone while my people remain.”
“They won’t remain long,” I said. “Your people flee from Faerie into my world, but the crumbling moves to my world as well. Nowhere is safe so long as you keep holding on to the gray. This has to end. Nothing lasts forever.” As soon as I said it, I felt the truth of it. Nothing, faerie or human, could hold for all time. Cities fell. Stones crumbled. Plants gave way to mold and dirt. People fell, and the roots of trees ate them and grew strong. The world had always been winding down, even Before.
Why save anything, then? I thought of all I’d left behind in my world, all those I cared for, every forest path I’d walked, every field I’d tilled, and I found I wanted to save them all the more fiercely knowing they would die. Besides, things grew from mold and from dirt, too.
Fragile things are precious, Liza. “Your people are dying, Rhianne, just like mine. Let them go, before both our worlds crumble away.” I thought of Allie, pulling on my hand before this very tree, begging me to let go. I hadn’t listened, either.
“You lie, Summoner, though I do not know how. Until my daughter walks here, I’ll not believe the world is gone.”
“Will you believe it now, then?” A woman’s arch voice, rich as velvet. I turned to see a shadow striding toward us, a shadow with a long braid and eyes that held a hint of silver sharpness. The woman from my visions, holding a round seed cupped in one hand.
Ice crept into the air. “You should not be here.” The ground trembled at Rhianne’s quiet, jagged words. “You should be safe.”
I knew who Rhianne most wished to keep safe. “But that’s impossible,” I said, knowing I couldn’t fight them both.
The woman gave me a measuring look, as if she heard more than my words. Her mouth quirked into a wry smile. “What is impossible, Summoner?”
“You’re Mirinda.” Rhianne’s daughter, the speaker for whom Rhianne had sent her roots into the gray.
“Indeed.” She followed my gaze to the seed she carried. “You are not the only one who can hold to a seed, Liza. I have kept this one for many years. But I owe you an apology. I should have come far sooner. As soon as the crumbling became apparent, I began making my way home, but that journey took some time, for your world has become more perilous since the War. I believe we shared the last part of that journey.”
“It was you following us.” But she was supposed to be dead, ages and ages ago. In time Mirinda passed from the Realm. That wasn’t the same as being dead. Rhianne had told me Mirinda wasn’t in the gray. She’d known, even if her people had forgotten. But was Mirinda here to stop the crumbling, or to help her mother hold on to it?
“I will send you back,” Rhianne said.
“I do not think so. I have lived long enough to know the ways of dying quickly.” Pain flashed across Mirinda’s face. “My body grows cold back in the Realm. A dramatic gesture, and one I fear has upset Liza’s companions, but you would not listen when I sought to speak with you from the living world. You have never listened, not when I first told you these gifts were not right, not when I return this day to tell you again.”
A gust rippled through the gray. “It is your presence here that is not right,” Rhianne said.
“Yet here I am.” Mirinda looked up the length of Rhianne’s roots, toward her trunk, then shook her head, as if the story written there were too difficult to read. “Will you listen now, if I tell you the grief your gifts have caused? Of how they made our Realm pull apart from the larger world, and drained power from that world as well—drained away the magic that belongs to every living person by right? Of how they caused our people to forget that any but us had ever held magic, and so led us to use our power to control all those we met from that larger world?”
Mirinda no more approved of her mother’s gifts than humans did. Could she make Rhianne let go, where I could not? My mother had so rarely listened to me. “I could not stop all the ways our people misused power,” Mirinda said, “and you would not stop them, so I left the Realm at last, determined at least not to aid them. But meetings of our Realm and the World continued to bring pain, until at last the War came, and we all paid the price of your gifts.”
“Our worlds were once the same,” I said. “Our people were the same.”
“Yes.” Mirinda bowed her head, as if the thought brought sorrow.
“Your people,” I whispered. “My people.” All my life, I’d been raised to know how different they were.
“Liza’s people were not blameless during the burning,” Rhianne said.
“No,” Mirinda agreed. “I have traveled their world long enough to know they are quite capable of starting wars even without us. But the price of this War is too high. It has to end, before nothing remains of World or Realm.”
“I saved you.” Rhianne’s voice was a whisper of wind. “You were the one thing I saved, after all the ways in which I failed.”
“It was not rescue I sought,” Mirinda whispered, just as soft. “It was never to have lost you. I accepted long ago that I could not have that wish. So now you cannot have yours, either.” She looked to the shadows drifting around us. “This is over. It has been over a very long time. Let them go.”
“It is not over,” Rhianne said, and I heard in her the same pride I heard in all her folk. “If you choose to squander the gifts I have offered, others may yet make use of them. So long as our people live beneath the sun, I will keep death from them.”
“I’ll not allow you to condemn us, Mother.” Mirinda’s voice turned softer still. “Go, Rhianne. Seek sleep, seek comfort, seek rest.” The gray shuddered, letting a flash of green through.
The shadows of the dead brushed against me like trickles of snowmelt. “You have less power than you think,” Rhianne said. “Come here, Mirinda.” I felt Rhianne’s magic release me as she turned it to calling her daughter.
Mirinda took a step toward her mother. Stopped. Tension crackled in the air between them, like river ice in spring. Green flickered in and out. We needed the green. We had always needed the green.
Rhianne and Mirinda kep
t calling to each other, calling with their magic, neither moving the other. Rhianne wasn’t paying any attention to me, not now. I slipped among the First Tree’s roots, into the hollows where the dead’s shadows were thickest, knowing moving away from the tree would draw more attention, knowing from a lifetime of practice how much depended on not being seen. I crouched and took my seed in my hands. Rhianne had stopped me from calling a seed once before. Maybe that meant there was power in calling one.
“Grow!” The seed shuddered, and a crack broke its surface. A thin gray sprout pushed through that crack. Gray was not enough. “Grow!”
“Liza! Silence!”
My voice froze inside me, and I choked on my longing for the green.
A hand gripped my shoulder, warm as nothing here was. I looked up. Mirinda looked down at me. Her smile was sadder now. Something flowed from her to me, something that shimmered green-gold in this land without color, filling me with power as rain fills dry earth.
“Go on, Summoner. Make this right.”
Magic. Mirinda was lending me her magic, adding it to my own. There was no time to wonder at so great a gift. With all that power behind me, I was stronger than Rhianne after all, strong enough to force my voice out into the gray. “Grow!” Something in the seed sparked and caught. “Seek sky, seek sun, seek life!” The gray in the seedling gave way to spring green.
“Stop! Seek silence, seek stillness, seek sleep!” Rhianne’s anger shook the land, but the seed grew on. The sprout hit a root, and it began branching, sending seeking green threads to wrap around that root, then another, and another, forming a web of green growth.
“Go away, Mirinda!” Rhianne screamed. “Disturb my work here no more!”
“And where shall I go, Mother?” With her magic gone, Mirinda’s voice was a small thing, no power in it. “You cannot send me back to life. You can only let me pass beyond the gray. Will you?”
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