by J. A. White
But Safi was not listening to her father. She leaned across the table, her green eyes centered on Kara.
“Villages will burn,” Safi said. “People will die. The World will be covered in darkness. And it will all be because of you.”
After dinner, Safi was ushered into her room, where she quickly fell asleep.
“Do not disturb her,” said Breem. “She is frail and needs her rest.”
“She didn’t seem so frail at—” started Taff, but Kara nudged him into silence.
“I didn’t mean to upset her,” Kara said.
Breem studied her face for a long moment.
“I believe you,” he said. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t leave you alone with my daughter. Not for a heartbeat.”
“You’re leaving?” asked Kara.
Nodding, Breem picked up a small satchel that looked almost silly in his huge hand; he had the type of body meant to hold sacks of grain and long axes. Breem slung the satchel over his shoulder, producing a clinking sound that was probably made by something as innocuous as tools but nonetheless reminded her of Mary.
“The original plan was for me to play host until your stay at Kala Malta ended, but that has changed. My presence is requested at—” Breem paused here, catching his words. “There is a problem that needs to be remedied.”
“What sort of problem?” Taff asked.
Ignoring his question, Breem turned to Kara. “What Safi said about you—I wouldn’t put much faith in it.”
“Has she had these visions before?” Kara asked.
“Her whole life.”
“And have any of them come true?”
Breem scratched his beard. “I’ll be back by morning,” he said, and slipped into the night.
Kara and Taff took a seat at the circular table. She traced a finger along its ridges.
“We need to talk,” Kara said.
She had wanted to tell her brother what happened with Rygoth for hours now, but this was the first time they had been alone since her descent into the cave. Although Kara liked Breem, she did not feel as though they could speak freely in front of him. He was still their captor and would no doubt give Sordyr a full report of anything she said.
“I know why Sordyr can’t leave the island,” she said, and told Taff about the web and the roots, keeping her voice low in case one of the Devoted was stationed just outside the hut. Taff listened in silent amazement, gasping only when Kara told him how her attempt to make a bridge had backfired and Rygoth had ended up inside her head.
“This one sounds scarier than Sordyr,” Taff said.
“She just wanted to make sure she could trust me,” Kara said. “If she was going to hurt me, she could have done it anytime. I was trapped in her web.”
“So she’s a giant spider.”
“I think so. I never saw her clearly.”
“How do you not see a giant spider clearly?”
“Just listen to the rest,” Kara said. “It’s important. Sordyr can’t be killed, not in the traditional ways. That’s why Rygoth created a creature called Niersook that . . .”
“. . . could take away his magic,” Taff said. He shrugged. “Mary told us this story. Niersook’s dead.”
“But its bones are still here.”
“In the Thickety?”
Kara nodded. “Rygoth’s not exactly sure where, but she told me that in its body a few drops of the venom still remain. If we can find Niersook and get the venom . . .”
“We can take Sordyr’s powers away!” Taff broke into a toothy grin. “I love this plan! When do we do it?”
“We don’t.”
Taff looked at her, confused.
“I wanted to tell you what happened,” Kara said, “because you deserve to know. But nothing has changed. Just consider our two choices. One—I try to overpower Rygoth and get her to release Sordyr. Difficult and dangerous to be sure, but possible—I think she’s a lot weaker than she seems. Our second choice is to somehow sneak to another part of the island without Sordyr noticing, find Niersook and this venom that may or may not still work, and then somehow—and this is my favorite part—get said poison into Sordyr’s body.” She shook her head. “That’s not even a choice at all. It’s insanity.”
“You can’t free Sordyr,” said Taff. “That isn’t a choice at all.”
He’s right. But what if I fail? What if I can’t get the venom?
This thought terrified her more than anything else, because she wouldn’t be the one who got punished if they were caught. Sordyr needed Kara. He would hurt Taff instead to teach her a lesson.
“If we set Sordyr free he’ll just—go somewhere else,” Kara said weakly, wanting the words to be true. “The World is a big place. We’ll never see him again. We can be safe. I’ll return Father to the way he was and the three of us—”
“We can’t let him leave the island,” Taff said. “Remember what Safi said? ‘The World will be covered in darkness.’ It’ll be our fault if we don’t do anything to stop it.”
“Why should we believe her?”
“Because I’ve never been wrong before,” said a small voice behind them. They turned to see Safi, doll dangling from one hand. “If you free him, you will destroy the World. I’ve seen the people screaming. I’ve felt their terror.”
“Tell us what you saw,” Kara said.
Safi hesitated, as if wondering if she had said too much already.
“Maybe it was just a bad dream,” suggested Taff.
“I don’t have bad dreams,” said Safi. “Only real ones.”
Taff turned to his sister. “It was probably a bad dream.”
“It was not!” exclaimed Safi, stomping one foot on the ground. “And I can prove it. Come with me now and I’ll show you exactly how the World is going to end.”
After creeping through the sleeping village and a thicket of tightly spaced trees, they entered a small clearing. Six buildings loomed in the darkness. Five were small, with huge metal rings affixed to their roofs, but the last building was larger than all the others combined. Its right end was completely open to the night. This allowed a row of freshly downed trees, stripped of leaves and branches, to stretch inside the building.
“Are those Fenroots?” Taff asked.
Kara nodded. Even in the darkness she recognized the singular color of the tree, considered holy and untouchable by the Children of the Fold. The people of De’Noran had built their entire village around a Fenroot in order to respect it, yet here the tree was being treated like common lumber.
Several chimneys belched black smoke. A sickly sweet smell like burning sugar filled the air.
“What are they doing here?” Kara asked.
“Shh,” Safi said, her voice quick and anxious. Kara wondered if this was the first time she had ever broken a rule. “No one but Binders are supposed to see this. I could get in a lot of trouble.” She shook her head. “I should have never brought you here.”
“What are Binders?” asked Taff.
“People who bind. Like my father.”
“Bind what?” asked Kara.
“You’ll see.”
Past the buildings, shadowy branch arms wound together into the Divide. With their heads bent forward in false repose, the people trapped in the fence looked like grotesque scarecrows.
Taff took a step forward and Safi yanked him back.
“Stay out of sight!” she exclaimed. “If one of the Divide sees us, they’ll sound the alarm.”
As though registering Safi’s voice, a head lifted slightly from the fence but quickly returned to its resting state.
“This way,” Safi said.
They crawled through tall grass past the open end of the main structure, rising only when they reached the opposite side. The building was ravaged with holes and cracks through which dim light and snatches of movement could be seen. Some of the wooden boards were charred black, perhaps from a quickly extinguished fire. The entire building looks like it’s been through a battle, Kara thought
. What are they doing in this place?
The sweet smell emanating from the chimneys was almost unbearably strong here. Kara could feel it on her teeth, as though she had eaten too much rock candy.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing toward the plumes of smoke.
“The sap from the Fenroot trees,” Safi said. “They burn it along with the leaves. It’s not part of the process.”
Though she would never again be a Child of the Fold, Kara winced at the thought of the holy tree being treated with such casual disregard.
“What are they doing with the Fenroots, then?” Kara asked.
“It’s easier if you see for yourself,” said Safi.
She gestured toward the nearest hole. Kara knelt before it and peered into the building.
The interior bustled with activity, lit by row upon row of candles. At one long worktable, several burly men shaved the bark from the Fenroot trunks that extended a third of the way into the open building, then sawed them into smaller sections. These were transported to the next table. Here, workers chopped the dark wood into tiny pieces that were gathered in wheelbarrows and rolled across the dirt floor to the water-filled trough running across the center of the building. Women with long paddles and blank expressions stirred the water.
“What are they doing?” asked Taff.
“They’re making pulp,” said Safi, “for paper.”
“That’s your big secret?” Taff asked. “Paper?”
Safi motioned for them to continue. Remaining in a crouch, Kara followed her along the side of the building. She stopped to glance through another hole and saw five villagers standing at a table, mixing white pulp with their gloved hands like bakers kneading dough. One man paused and tilted a half-filled beaker over the mixture. Three drops of a thick crimson fluid fell into the pulp.
“What’s that stuff?” Kara asked.
Safi shook her head. Either she didn’t know—or didn’t want to say.
At the next table sat a dozen workers, each holding a wooden frame enclosing a rectangular screen of wire mesh. Kara watched one tired-looking woman take two handfuls of pulp from the wooden buckets stationed in the center of the table and spread it evenly over the screen. When she had pressed all the liquid out, the woman flipped the frame, and a thin rectangle of pulp fell onto waxed paper. A different worker took this to the adjoining room, where Kara assumed it would be left to dry. The woman shook out her frame and reached into the bucket, starting the process anew.
“There’s plenty of other trees in the Thickety,” Kara said. “If you want to make paper, why use Fenroots?”
“And why are they doing all this in the middle of the night?” asked Taff.
Safi shrugged. “That’s the way it’s always been done. Bind at dark. Use Fenroots for the pulp. It won’t work otherwise.”
“What won’t work?”
“This way,” said Safi.
They followed her to the far end of the building. Shifting from foot to foot, Safi pointed at a horizontal crack long enough for both Kara and Taff to look through at the same time.
“There,” she said.
This section of the building felt completely different than the others. There was none of the soft conversation Kara had heard at the other tables, idle workplace chatter characteristic of any job, even one as strange as this. The villagers seated before her—at desks, not tables—worked in complete silence, focused on the task at hand.
One of them was Breem.
On his desk was a stack of paper. He fanned the pages and, with a well-practiced movement, hit the stack against the desk until the edges of the paper fell perfectly in line. Once Breem was satisfied, he placed the straightened stack in a wooden frame nailed to the side of his desk, then twisted a handle that squeezed the pages together like a vise.
Reaching beneath his desk, Breem withdrew a single spool of what looked like thread. He passed it through the eye of a needle and pulled it taut. Kara heard a thrumming noise. Slowly and steadily, Breem pulled the needle through a premade hole in the stack and began binding the pages together, pausing only once to wipe a glistening sheen of sweat from his forehead. Kara watched, mesmerized by his skill.
Why did Safi feel the need to show us this? This isn’t dangerous! It’s wonderful!
It was only as the binding drew to a close that everything changed.
Blue rays of light burst from the book’s spine. Breem calmly leaned out of the light’s path, squinting at the sudden brightness and twisting the vise tighter. He continued to sew with steady hands. The light sliced through a ceiling beam, raining ash onto his shoulders. Safi gasped. Breem looked up, just for a moment, and light nicked his forehead, puckering the skin there to a blackened welt. He shook his head at his own foolishness and continued sewing, faster now. The vise rattled as the pages of the book struggled against their captor. Even the thread offered resistance, vibrating fast enough to slicken Breem’s fingers with blood. Safi’s father never hesitated, however, stopping only after he had pulled the knot tight and cut the thread with a hooked knife.
As though a flame had been extinguished, the rays of light vanished.
“This one’s ready!” Breem exclaimed.
An old woman with a hunched back slunk into the room. Breem handed her the neat stack of bound pages. Over the woman’s left arm hung a rectangular cut of unusual black leather. Kara recognized the material immediately. It looked wet, but would be dry to the touch.
“But you can’t just make one,” she said. “That’s not possible!”
But of course it’s possible, Kara thought. Everything comes from something else. Everything has an origin.
Even grimoires.
Kara grabbed Safi by the shoulders. The girl’s eyes widened in terror, but Kara didn’t care about that right now. There was something she needed to know.
“How many?” she asked. “How many has he made?”
Safi’s eyes shifted toward the smaller buildings behind them. In light of this new development, Kara recognized them for what they were immediately.
Storehouses.
She sprinted toward the nearest one and opened the door. It was unlocked. Kara supposed that made sense. The hundreds of books piled inside were useless to anyone except witches.
Grimoires.
Kara entered the storehouse, following a narrow path that wove between the carefully stacked piles. Most of the covers were black, but not all: one was the dark green of a long-extinct reptile, another the red of a dying sun. Another grimoire, leaning open on its side, had a splotch of fur still attached to its binding. The tanner was careless with this one, Kara thought, and as she touched the cover a sibilant voice squirmed into her head.
YES, WEXARI! USE ME! WE CAN CREATE SUCH TEMPTING SPELLS TOGETHER AND DRAW THE OTHER WITCHES LIKE MAGGOTS TO . . .
Kara withdrew her finger.
The voice sickened her, but even worse was the small part of her that wanted to hold a grimoire again.
The temptation is still there. It always will be.
“Be careful,” Safi said, catching up. “These books have magic in them.”
Taff gasped. “Wait? These are all grimoires!” He eyed the stacks of books. “That’s not good.”
Kara bit her lower lip as a disturbing thought occurred to her. “Are there any witches in Kala Malta?”
“No,” Safi said, quickly shaking her head. “Definitely not. Sordyr tests us when we’re very young. The girls, that is.”
“How does he test you?” Kara asked.
Safi shrugged. “When we turn six he asks us if we see anything in the book. I guess if you’re a witch you see a spell or something.”
“No witches,” Kara said, pondering the books before her. “Why does he need all these grimoires, then?”
“He’s going to bring them to the World,” said Safi, “and find witches to use them. That’s what I saw in my vision.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “A girl speaks words from a book and the village below her shakes in
to dust. Another woman speaks words that pluck the dead from their graves like weeds. More women, more books. Too fast to see. Raging wind. Black clouds that blot out the sun.”
Safi opened her eyes.
“The scariest part of my vision,” she said, “is when all the images stop. Like there’s nothing to see anymore.”
They stood in silence. Wind whistled through the gaps in the Divide, muffling the rhythmic sawing sounds coming from the large building.
“Please don’t think ill of Father,” Safi said. “It’s not like he wants to help Sordyr. He doesn’t have a choice.” She trailed her fingers across the nearest grimoire, its cover as white as a blinding snowstorm. “My father says these books are the most dangerous things in the world.”
Kara pulled Safi’s hand away from the grimoire.
“Your father’s right,” she said.
Kara woke early the next morning, eager to make the journey deep beneath the Thickety. She needed to tell Rygoth about the grimoires. Sordyr’s oldest enemy would surely know what he was planning. She might even know how to stop him.
During the ride to the shaft, however, a steady rain began to fall. Though it was a balmy morning the drops were frigid ice picks against Kara’s neck and hands. Within minutes the drops began to fall harder, turning the ground into a sloshy quagmire. Kara’s hair flattened against her skull.
“This isn’t going to happen today,” said Breem. “We’re going back to the village.” The burn mark on his forehead sheened red, and a fresh wound sheared through his thick beard. The newborn grimoires had not been kind to him last night.
“A little rain doesn’t bother me,” Kara said.
“That shaft is unstable to begin with!” Breem shouted. “Add water and it gets even worse. We send the cage down there and the mud might come loose, trap you in that cave forever. Does that bother you?”
Though Breem’s tone was sharp, she thought she heard the slightest hint of concern in his voice. He is not a bad man, she thought. He is simply trapped here. Like me.
When they returned to the hut, Kara climbed beneath her blanket and fell instantly asleep. Though the past few months had taught her many things about magic, quite a few practical lessons had been imparted as well. Not the least of these was the value of sleeping when the opportunity presented itself.