by Rene Sears
My name is Javier. I—
Something yanked at me, and I stumbled back. Hawthorn held my shoulder, her face white as paper. "Are you well?" she asked urgently. "You looked like you were under some kind of spell..." She looked over my shoulder towards the dragon. It was moving off, circling higher.
We will speak again, small one, the alien voice said in my mind. I shivered.
"Let's get going before anything else happens," Morgan muttered.
Hawthorn released my shoulder, still watching the sky as the dragon retreated. She scanned my eyes again, her own violet and worried—worried about me, not just our mission. "If you feel anything strange, anything at all, Javier, you must tell us immediately."
"I will," I said. Now that it was gone, I wondered if I had imagined it. It seemed impossible. But no. When I thought of the strange feeling of another mind in my own—a mind so different from my own—I didn't really doubt it. At the same time it was surprisingly hard to say it. "I think it talked to me." It seemed presumptuous to think I could hear it when no one else could, not even Hawthorn or Rose, who lived here. Unless maybe they had. "Have you or Rose ever talked to one before?"
Hawthorn was staring at me as though I had sprouted another head. "It...talked to you?" She glanced back at the sky, but the dragon had vanished. "They're sentient?"
"It was like when Lunn talks to me," I said awkwardly. "Or..." I looked at Morgan.
"The questing beast." She looked at me thoughtfully.
"It...it wasn't talking to me exactly. Not words like we use. But I understood it."
"And it understood you?" Morgan's brow wrinkled.
"I think so. It responded to what I was thinking." It hadn't felt invasive at the time, but now the thought made me shudder. I hadn't been trying to talk to it, after all. "It's gone now."
They both nodded, Hawthorn decisively and Morgan wearily, and we all turned to the hole in the tree.
It was huge, like everything else about the tree, twice as tall as me at least. It was flattish, at least as far as I could see, and the ground was covered with a lurid moss so green it looked fake. The interior was dim, getting darker as it went further into the tree.
"I put lights in the packs," Hawthorn said, and I dug around in my backpack until I found a flashlight. I had sort of been expecting some kind of floating ball of light or a torch or something, but the concentration of magic out here would probably have incinerated any normal spell. Flashlights it was.
It was cooler inside the tree. Our lights picked out a narrow trail between jagged spikes of wood. I kept looking for movement, thinking of bugs again, but it seemed still. Patches of moss and lichen coated the floor and walls, and everything smelled faintly of rot. The ground angled very slightly downward as we walked on, and was progressively wetter and slimier the further in we went.
"This is a shortcut?" Morgan's voice echoed faintly.
"We're almost there," Hawthorn said.
The path ended in a pool of water. Our flashlights glinted off the water, picking out strange colors on the surface, like oil had been spilled on it. It was as saturated with magic as everything else here, but this didn't feel like the torrents outside. It felt—tamed was too strong a word. Bent to a purpose by some hand, maybe.
"This is it," Hawthorn said. "The way to the roots of the Tree."
"Oh," Morgan said. "We get to go in the pool. Yay."
Hawthorn clicked her flashlight off and then on again. "These wouldn't survive a soaking, but the packs are waterproof. Go ahead and put yours away and seal them, and I'll do mine last. Then we hold hands and all walk in together."
The cave was much dimmer with only one flashlight, and the oily colors on the water more intense. I rolled and sealed my pack top and then stood next to Morgan at the water's edge. Her hand on mine was firm and cool. "Here we go," Hawthorn said, and when her light went out we were plunged into darkness. My pulse thudded, and I was afraid Morgan could feel it in my hand, but as we waited, listening to Hawthorn fumble with her pack in the darkness, my eyes adjusted enough for me to see that the moss on the cavern walls was glowing faintly, just enough to highlight glints of color on the water. Morgan's hand tightened on mine.
"Ready," Hawthorn said on Morgan's other side. I took a deep breath and we stepped forward into the pool.
Water lapped against my feet, cold as snowmelt, soaking my socks and the canvas of my shoes, plastering my jeans to my ankles. My toes tingled, going numb. The smudges of color on the surface rippled as we walked through them. After three or four steps, the wood below us suddenly dropped and we all held onto each other as we stumbled. Freezing water sloshed over my knees.
"Hawthorn, I—" Morgan's voice cut off as magic wrapped around us, strong and all-encompassing. I was reminded—again—that my body was a fragile thing. Magic whipped around us in a violent torrent, and the sensation of falling flipped my stomach. Morgan's hand was nearly imperceptible in mine, but I gripped it hard regardless.
The magic slowed, and we all stumbled forward. I could feel Morgan's hand again, and the icy water. I squinted. The silvery light was dimmer here, shaded by the vast bulk of the tree, but it was enough to see by.
"—don't know about this," Morgan finished, and she stumbled hard against me. "Sorry."
"It's all right," I said. We were here. But where was here?
I turned and looked up. The tree stretched above us, on and on. We were standing on a moss-covered root, on a broad knot in the grain.
I pulled energy from the cork in my pocket and sent a thread out to the frog I'd given Igraine. "They're..." I closed my eyes and tried to pick the thread out of the crash and ebb of the magic around us. It might have been a little calmer than the magic around Strangehold, but not much. We were much, much closer than we had been—how far had we traveled in the pool of water? And who had left the pool of water there for us to travel through? I shook off the distraction of my questions and "looked" for the frog.
"This way," I said. "I think we're close, but it's hard to tell."
"Just keep going," Hawthorn said. "We'll follow you."
It was no surprise that the roots of the unfathomably big tree were also unfathomably big. The pool of water had dumped us out on top of one of the roots. It stretched ahead of us like a road, thick with moss halfway up to my knees. We were headed toward the tree. When I stopped and looked behind us, the roots seemed to stretch out into infinity, vanishing in the silver horizon. My stomach flopped in a slow roll as I looked at it, so I turned away, and kept walking.
The tree drew closer faster than I expected. The root we were on widened and angled upward, so that we had to half-crawl, half scramble over parts of it. We were nearly to the wall of the trunk when I pulled myself up a knot in the root that was as tall as I was. Over the edge there was a dip that formed a hollow, and there they were. Igraine and Iliesa, reaching toward each other, not quite touching, and Rowan, sprawled as though he'd been trying to reach them when whatever had happened, happened.
I gasped, and as Hawthorn helped Morgan up the hollow, Hawthorn cursed and Morgan said, "Oh no, no..."
At first glance it looked like they could have been sleeping—a restless, uncomfortable sleep plagued with pain or nightmares, but a closer looked showed tiny vines like filaments wrapped over them, going into them, intertwining with their hair, their skin.
"Is it trying to eat them?" My voice broke as it hadn't in over a year, but no one was paying any attention.
Morgan dropped to her knees beside her nieces and frantically brushed at the vines, yanking at them when that had no effect. Iliesa groaned, and a few drops of blood sprang up around the vines, but none of them moved even a fraction of an inch.
"Stop it," Hawthorn snapped. "Look with your other eyes, Morgan. It's not just infiltrating their bodies—it's wrapped around their magic."
I let my eyes unfocus and called up my spellsight, and squinted against the brightness. She was right. The silver magic of this place was wrapped around the
fainter network of their bodies. Worse, it was leaching their magic out, and the brighter magic was washing in. Was it was consuming them or transforming them? Horror weakened my knees.
Morgan dug frantically in her pack and pulled out a few things. They were sources, I realized, as she assembled objects on the bark at her knees: a glass snowglobe, a silver moon necklace, a copper ring. She drew from them and, I realized a second later, from her tattoos, the uninjured ones, as I watched energy swell up from all the items. She sent her magic into the network of vines and her nieces, trying to pull them apart from the forces twined through them. I drew on the cork and joined her, adding my strength to hers.
It wasn't enough, I could see as soon as we started. The power here was too strong, and its hooks were too far into them. We didn't have the strength to pull them free. Morgan had to have known as well, but we both kept trying. It was like trying to build a sandcastle from dry sand. Every time we got a tower stacked, the base would trickle away and the whole thing would collapse. All too soon, my little source was drained dry, and for all that she had more of them, Morgan was not much longer.
"No," she rasped, and grabbed directly for the magic of the source itself.
"No, Morgan—" But it was too late, and she wasn't listening. For an instant, she had control of the raw power, but before she could do anything with it, it slid out of her grasp. She convulsed like she'd been electrocuted. Morgan toppled to the side and Hawthorn ran to her, catching her and checking for her pulse.
I hesitated. I had a monumentally stupid idea. I wasn't egotist enough to think that I could accomplish what Morgan, with decades of experience more than mine, could not. And Hawthorn wouldn't be able to carry both Morgan and me back to Strangehold if I messed this up. But we wouldn't be able to get the twins or Rowan loose at all unless we did something.
What I was about to do would have appalled my father, but I wasn't him.
I cast my senses out on the currents of magic, riding the torrents of energy rather than trying to use them, and called out to the emptiness around me. Dragon, are you there? I need help.
Its voice felt faint and distant, but it answered me immediately. Again? Are you always so frequently in need of rescue?
It's not for me this time. I pictured the girls and Rowan as clearly as I could, and the vines growing into them and through them.
Ah, the dragon said. I see. But are these not the creatures who restrained you?
Only one of them, and I want her back anyway. I wanted all of them back. Hawthorn's voice was a faint, panicky murmur in my ears. Please.
I will help, the dragon said. But I have no interest in them. What will you give me for my aid?
What do you want? Every cautionary tale I'd ever heard about making deals with the fae came back to me, but I didn't see I had any choice but to bargain.
Nothing so very much. Only to give you a little piece of me and take a little piece of you in turn.
A piece? You mean, like, a lock of hair? A toe?
Disdain washed over me, metallic and sour. What would I want with that? No. I want a fragment of your soulstuff to carry with me. I have never spoken to anything like you before. In return you will take a piece of me wherever you go.
Bargaining for my soul sounded awfully dire, but the picture it showed me was of a strand of silver inside my body.
My magic. It wanted a piece of my magic.
All right. It's a deal.
Satisfaction flooded me, warm and bright, and not my own. Before I could react, its magic flooded me, mingling with my own. It was invasive—an alien mind within mine, alien power within mine—but at the same time, it was illuminating. By clawing its way within me, it showed me how it worked with magic this strong, magic this wild. It wasn't only brute strength; it was knowing how to leverage it. It would lend its strength to mine. Where I didn't have its strength, I had my own will, and the knowledge of what I had to do.
"Thank you," I said. Morgan's and Hawthorn's voices buzzed like mosquitoes in my ears—a small part of me registered relief at hearing Morgan talk—but the shadow dragon and I had work to do, so I ignored them. The bodies in front of me were a tapestry of silver, but I could see now which threads were warp and which were weft. I was aware, in a distant way, that my hands felt like they were on fire, that my spellsight was blindingly bright, that my caster's senses were burning like a bonfire. It didn't matter. I could see what I had to do. All I had to do was do it.
I pulled warp from weft, separated vines from human—and fae—until I held pure magic and mortal in my hands. Saying it that way makes it sound easy, but the magic of the source had been infiltrating its way into my friends and leaching something out of them—if the dragon knew why, it wasn't telling me—and it wasn't easy to sort them out. But the longer I delayed, the more of them slipped away. I was reminded of sand castles crumbling again. Even in the instant it took to have that thought more of them drifted from my grasp, and I panicked.
I took what was obviously Rowan, and shoved it as his body. I was vaguely aware of Morgan catching it—catching him—but I had no time to worry about it.
The twins were harder; because they were twins and closer to each other? Or because they were so much newer than Rowan, and less used to being themselves? I was too scared of losing them to care about why. Their threads were floating loose. I am here, said the dragon, more curious than worried.
I sent my own energy in a surge to what was there of Igraine and Iliesa, and opened myself up to them in a way I didn't know was possible until I did it. At the fronts of their minds were the things they desperately didn't want me to know—that Igraine had been here before, to the roots, over the summer, and not told even her twin. That Iliesa was still in contact with a fae friend and wasn't sure whether or not he had sent the queen after her; the uncertainty was breaking her heart. Deeper still were fears that Morgan would abandon them; deeper still the fresh hurt of seeing their mother as the Blade; deeper still the worry that their mother tortured or killed their father. Guilt over bringing us all here. Guilt over tricking me before.
And of course my own fears were an open book to them: that everyone would know I was a monster because of my father, that he had been wrong—that he had been right; the compassion for and resentment of my mother—she had denied me my family; she had been right to do so; had she even loved my father or had Teo and I been a chain that bound her to him; the fear that I had already messed it up with Teo and my mother's family; the resentment that they were so high-handed. The fear that I would never have anyone else like me.
You're not alone, one or both of them said, at the same time I reassured them that no one blamed them for anything, only wanted them safe again. We shared a moment of sardonic pleasure redefining safe. If only Rowan had not come with us, we thought, and Morgan and Hawthorn, and then we realized we didn’t know who was thinking. It was frightening but also reassuring to think as one. No, we thought. No! I thought.
"Stop," I muttered through dry and cracking lips. Through barely-open eyelids I saw the twins' lips were moving with mine and ice crept down my back. Morgan was crouched over Rowan, Hawthorn standing behind the two of them, staring at us.
You're doing well, the dragon said.
Its voice steadied me, and I turned back to my internal conversation with the twins. You want to go home. You want to see Morgan. You want to rescue your parents. Think about yourselves. Focus on what makes you you. I held their magic in my own, and it was all twisted about. The dragon was wrapped around us like a giant hand, but I at least had no fear that it would get mixed in too. I put the fear of the three of us remaining mixed up, one tri-part person in three bodies, out of my mind and set to the task of pulling us apart.
My mother had knit. Every so often a ball of yarn would get tangled and she would ask my help in unraveling it. We would trace back through the yarn, unknotting where it had gotten tangled when we could, occasionally cutting it where we could not. I didn't have the option of scissors her
e, but the patient untwisting of me from the twins from the magic vining through them reminded me of those times.
I don't know how long it took. I was aware of my body vaguely; my shoulders were tense and aching, sweat rolled down my forehead, my nails bit into my palms because my fists were clenched. But most of my awareness was purely mental, pulling strands of magic, strands of self, free from the tangle we had made. They helped separate themselves from each other, but though the dragon held and protected us, it was me to whom it had lent its help in holding the magic so the bulk of the work was mine; if they tried to touch the torrential magic of the source they'd hurt themselves.
I got Iliesa apart first, free of the source and wholly herself—I hoped. I pulled Igraine and myself free of Iliesa. "You're okay," I said, and only Igraine's lips moved with mine. Iliesa sat up, I spared enough attention to note, but then I turned back to the work I still had to do.
I'm sorry, Igraine said. We had pulled much of each other back where we were supposed to go, but there was still some of my consciousness with her, and some of hers with mine.
What for?
I came here before. I knew I shouldn't. It's why we got sent here, I'm sure of it. Images flashed in front of me of her coming here alone their previous visit, twice, and staying for hours reading. It had been a secret. She knew she shouldn’t but she was sad about her parents, and angry—at Morgan, at Rowan, at her sister, at herself—that no one had found them yet. She knew it was irrational, but that didn’t stop her feeling it. Part of her hoped something dreadful would happen to her while she was out here alone, even though she'd been relieved nothing had.
Understanding washed through me, and I knew she felt it. It wasn't your fault. The gate sent us somewhere else too. It might have been my spell that messed the gate up, or the weird spots in Faerie. My memory of the battle flashed into both our minds—the battle with her mother—and guilt washed over us so I nearly couldn't tell which originated with who.