Shula wore jeans and a T-shirt under her jacket.
“When do I get to wear normal clothes?” Madeline asked.
Shula grinned. “In twenty-eight days or so. Though plenty of humans wear local clothes even once their month is up. Easier to blend in.” She slipped on a thin pair of leather gloves and pulled the door open. They made their way down the stairs and out the front door.
“Should we tell Mrs. Raymond we’re leaving?”
“We’re not prisoners, Madeline. We can come and go whenever we like.”
Then why wasn’t she allowed to see Jason?
There was no carriage waiting. Shula shrugged and said maybe Hanali was meeting them at the storyteller’s. “Not a big deal. It’s not far to walk.”
They made their way toward the city center. Madeline couldn’t get over the sights and sounds of the place. They walked through a market full of silk, strange fruits, and food cooking over coals in metal troughs. The different types of people amazed her also. She saw what she could only assume were more Elenil, dressed in elaborate clothes that covered them almost completely. They were all tall and painfully thin.
She saw guards and soldiers walking along the cobbled street. They had swords on their belts. Most of them were human. Apparently there were only a handful of Elenil soldiers.
“There are no street signs,” Madeline said.
Shula nodded. “The Elenil don’t have a written language.”
“They’re illiterate?”
“Most of them, yeah. Why would you need to write when you can just speak your message to a bird and have it delivered? Most everything we accomplish through reading, they do with magic, and without all the trouble of learning to read.”
Madeline felt a small disappointment at that. She had hoped to read some Elenil fiction. She wondered what magical people would write about, and what their fantastical stories would hold. Then again, she was on her way to a storyteller, wasn’t she? And no doubt she could scavenge the occasional book this year or ask Hanali for some. The humans must have some hidden away.
All colors and sizes of people moved in and out of the shops. Short, hairy men and women with dark, almost grey, skin wove through the crowd. She saw one man wrapped in a series of cloths so that only his eyes could be seen—eyes which seemed to glow from within the shade of the cloths. She even saw a woman whose skin appeared to be blue darting beneath the shadows of a rounded trellis. The blue woman stopped to talk to two human guards.
“Are all these people Elenil?”
Shula laughed. “Those shorter people, those are the Maegrom. Did you see the man wrapped in cloths?”
“With the glowing eyes?”
“Kakri. Desert people. They love stories even more than the Elenil. For the Elenil, stories are almost sacred. For the Kakri, they are life. They use story as a form of currency. The greatest storytellers are considered the wealthiest among them.”
“What about the blue woman?”
Shula stopped in her tracks. “Oh, probably an Aluvorean. Where?”
Madeline scanned the crowd. “Over by the trellis there. Talking to the two guards.”
The two human guards waved to Shula, and one of them called her over.
Shula sighed. “Stay here for a second. Technically I shouldn’t introduce you until you’ve met a storyteller. I’m sure it’s just a quick bit of business.” She stripped off her coat. “Hold this, please.”
Shula strode into the crowd toward the guards and the blue woman. The four of them had an animated conversation. Shula clearly was unhappy with the guards. One of them gave a shrill whistle, and a small bird darted down to rest on his finger. He spoke to it. The bird tweeted twice, then zipped into the air and sped past Madeline, toward the city center.
Madeline watched the bird go, reminded of the hummingbird she and Jason had followed into the Sunlit Lands and the birds Hanali had released when they arrived. She studied the square, dazzled by the riot of colors, the sounds of the people calling out about their wares, and the sweet smells coming from the food stalls.
A hummingbird whirred by. Madeline watched it as it flew through the crowd, flitting around, hovering by a Maegrom here, an Elenil there, and then finally zipping across the crowded square to linger beside an old, bent woman in a straw hat festooned in flowers, standing in what appeared to be a tiny garden built into the side of a building. The Garden Lady. Her back was to Madeline. The hummingbird hovered by the lady for a moment, then burst off in a straight line along the main avenue.
Madeline stole a quick glance at Shula, who didn’t seem any closer to ending her conversation. Shula had told her to stay put, but it wasn’t that far to walk over to the Garden Lady. Madeline would keep an eye out for Shula and come back as soon as she was done with her business.
The Garden Lady, still in the small garden built along the city path, stood talking to a woman whose skin was a slightly green color, like someone who was standing under a sunlit canopy of trees. In fact, on closer inspection, her skin was multiple shades of green, as if a pattern of leaves was cast upon it, and the darker spots moved, like leaves in a breeze. Her hair was thick, short, and deep green, like a healthy moss, and she wore a nut-brown robe with silver trim.
The two women stood in front of a wall thick with ivy. Madeline came closer, feeling foolish for not knowing the Garden Lady’s name. She didn’t know how to call out to her. She moved closer. She came around so she could see the Garden Lady’s face and gasped. It wasn’t her. She had a gourd instead of a head, berries for eyes, and a mouth made of trailing ivy.
Madeline stumbled backward, trying to put distance between herself and the strange scarecrow version of the Garden Lady, but green fingers wrapped around her bicep. They felt almost sticky, like a plant with tiny barbs on it. They didn’t hurt, just felt like they would cling if she pulled away.
“I am sorry,” the green woman whispered. She came barely to Madeline’s shoulder. “We did not know how else to get you away from them.”
Madeline cast a hurried look at Shula. She still hadn’t noticed that Madeline had wandered off. Which was . . . good? She wasn’t sure now. She didn’t want Shula to know she had immediately disobeyed her, but she also felt nervous that Shula didn’t know where she was.
“Away from who? From my friends?”
“Yes. And from the Elenil,” the woman said. “My sister is distracting them for a moment, but soon they will see. My people need your help.”
“My help? I just got here.”
The woman’s teeth were white as birch bark. “Which is why you are wearing the white, we know. But there is trouble in Aluvorea and—it is tangled—but the Eldest believes you are the one we must grow alongside.”
Madeline’s head swam. “Who told you that? How can I help when I have to serve the Elenil for the next year? And what does ‘grow alongside’ even mean?”
The woman’s grip tightened. “It is a simple question—will you help my people?”
Madeline could barely help herself. She was obligated to the Elenil for a year, and then she needed to go home. She couldn’t stay here forever in this fantasyland, even though it was something she had always dreamed of. But the idea of a quest, a goal, a good deed to be done, rang in her like a bell.
Tears formed in the woman’s eyes and slipped down her green cheeks. “Please.”
Madeline took both the woman’s hands in her own. “Of course I will,” she said.
“It is a promise then,” the woman said, with a desperate intensity. Her eyes widened, looking at something over Madeline’s shoulder.
She turned around to see the Garden Lady—the real one—pushing her way through the crowd, still a good distance away but headed straight toward them, her face flushed, her eyebrows low, her jaw jutting out, and a monstrous frown on her face.
“I must go,” the green woman said.
At the same moment the Garden Lady bellowed, “Make a dummy of me, will you, child? And a gourd for my head? Oh, you and I w
ill have words, yes we will!” Humans and Elenil pushed to get out of her way. A Maegrom scurried from under her feet, and every eye in the square was turned toward her.
Madeline looked at Shula, whose eyes moved from the Garden Lady toward the object of the old woman’s wrath. When Shula saw Madeline, her eyebrows rose as if to say, That is not where I left you.
“Our time is at an end,” the Aluvorean woman said. She held up her hand. “For you.” In her tiny palm was a flower, bright red, as red as a spot of blood on a handkerchief. It was the size of a fifty-cent piece, delicate and lovely.
“Thank you,” Madeline said and reached for it, moved by the woman’s generosity and kindness.
Green tendrils unfolded from beneath the flower and grasped hold of Madeline’s hand, climbing onto her and settling on her right wrist. “Don’t be startled,” the woman said. “It’s a stone flower. They grow on the stumps of dead trees, only in Aluvorea. They glow in the dark. It likes the warmth of your arm, that’s why it’s wrapping onto you.”
“Thank you,” Madeline said again. It was beautiful and like nothing she had seen before, though the crawling tendrils reminded her unpleasantly of spider’s legs.
“Come to us in Aluvorea,” the green woman said, then gave a yelp at the sight of the Garden Lady barreling ever closer, and turned and ran straight into the wall of ivy. There was a shaking and rattling of leaves, and the woman disappeared completely. The blue woman came sprinting from a different direction, running full speed into the wall of ivy and, like her sister, disappearing somehow into the leaves.
The Garden Lady huffed up to the wall, studied it for a moment, then paused to look at Madeline. “So you made it,” she said, “and not a moment too soon.”
“I don’t even know your name,” Madeline said, blurting out the first thing she thought.
“Well, child, that was never part of the bargain, was it? What did those two want with you?”
“She asked me to come to Aluvorea and help her people.”
The Garden Lady turned her head, as if trying to see Madeline in a different light or at a different angle. “Interesting,” she said. “Interesting, yes. But not any time soon, dear.” She shook her head. “No, no, it will be too late by then. You have adventures and duties to perform for the Elenil first.”
“But what should I—”
The lady held her palm up toward Madeline. “I gave you free advice once already, dear, and not another word until you’ve heeded the first.” She paused. “Now what’s that on your wrist, child? Did those two give you that flower?”
The flower’s petals moved on their own, as if an unseen breeze ruffled them. “Yes.”
“Of all the addlepated—why, those little—didn’t they think for a minute—” The old woman’s scowl deepened, and her face turned nearly scarlet. “I’ll pull them up by the roots,” she snapped, and without another word she put one arm in front of her and pushed through the ivy, grumbling as she went.
Madeline put her hands into the ivy and pushed as well, but there was a stone wall behind the vines. Nowhere to go, no way to follow.
Shula made her way over to Madeline. “Who was that green woman?”
“I don’t know. An Aluvorean. She asked me to come to Aluvorea.”
“That’s strange,” Shula said. “There aren’t many Aluvoreans in the city, but one was just telling those guards she had heard a Scim plotting to sneak in.”
“She said that was her sister,” Madeline said. “They both ran as soon as they saw the Garden Lady.”
Shula gave her a quizzical look. “The who?”
“The old lady I was talking to . . . I don’t know her name. I call her the Garden Lady.”
Shula gave her the sort of look you give a confused child. “I didn’t see her. We sent word for one of the Elenil to come look into the supposed Scim invasion, but the woman slipped away while we were waiting. Ah! Here’s Rondelo now.”
An Elenil on a white stag came bounding through the crowd, the alarm bird tweeting and flitting around his head. The Elenil dismounted in an easy leap to the ground. He moved like a dancer—smooth and graceful and precise. There was never a person so beautiful in all of human memory, Madeline thought.
“This is Rondelo,” Shula said. “He’s a . . . well, it’s hard to explain before you know how things work.”
“A captain of the guard,” Rondelo said, and he smiled, like a sunrise on a cold morning.
Madeline couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She wanted to tell him all about the Garden Lady, the Aluvoreans, her journey to the Sunlit Lands, her friend Jason, Hanali’s crazy fashion sense, Darius. She blushed, remembering that she sort of had a boyfriend. She opened her mouth, not sure what was about to come out. “I’m holding Shula’s jacket,” she said.
“I was going to say ‘prince,’” Shula said, grinning. “I forgot what an effect you have on people when they first meet you, Rondelo.”
“She asked me to hold it,” Madeline said. Her face felt even hotter.
Rondelo grinned. The lopsided smile made him even more charming. He looked more human than the other Elenil. He looked like a statue breathed to life. “Miss Madeline, welcome to the Sunlit Lands. This is my companion, Evernu.” The white stag inclined its head, its antlers tilting toward the ground.
“A pleasure to meet you,” she said. The surreal experience of greeting a stag broke her out of Rondelo’s spell.
“Where is this Aluvorean?” Rondelo asked.
“My apologies,” Shula said. “She slipped away. I thought it would be best to call for you when she said she had heard some Scim plotting a way into the city, though.”
“You did the right and responsible thing,” Rondelo said. “I have heard rumors of the Black Skulls trying to find a shadow entrance to the city.”
Shula spit on the ground. “Those three. They’re not the sort to sneak around, it seems to me.”
“They’re after something,” Rondelo said. “And their battle tactics lately are . . . different. New.”
“Nothing we can’t handle for a few hours each dusk,” Shula said.
“Still, it troubles me that the Aluvorean would appear and then slip away so quickly. As if trying to distract us, almost. I should get back,” Rondelo said, swinging onto Evernu’s bare back. “Ah. What’s this?”
Madeline followed his gaze. “Oh.” She lifted her hand. “It’s a stone flower. Another Aluvorean gave it to me.”
Shula stepped back, a look of horror on her face. “Don’t move, Madeline.”
“It’s just a flower.”
The tendrils tightened on her arm. “Don’t! Move!”
Madeline froze.
“It’s triggered,” Rondelo said.
“You’re fast,” Shula said to Rondelo. “You can do it.”
“It’s triggered,” he repeated. “She has to do it herself. It’s no longer about speed but precision.”
“Okay,” Shula said. “Madeline. Stone flowers are . . . they’re poisonous.”
Madeline relaxed. She wasn’t going to eat it.
“Not poisonous,” Rondelo said. “Venomous.”
Shula shook her head. “They sting. Like a bee. They’re carnivorous. If it stings you, you’re going to be paralyzed. In Aluvorea, they swarm you and they . . . Well, there’s only one, so you’ll just be paralyzed. But there’s no cure. They’re called stone flowers because people who are stung are frozen, like statues.” She snapped her fingers, and Madeline looked back up from the flower to Shula. “The stinger, it’s on the bottom, between the tendrils. It extends the stinger by lifting its petals. So long as those petals stay flat, you’re safe. If you put your finger slowly in the center so it can’t close its petals, it can’t sting. Then we can pull it off.”
“Like grabbing a snake behind the head.”
“Exactly. Only slow, Madeline.”
Why would that green woman try to hurt her? It didn’t make any sense. Madeline realized with a distant disappointment tha
t she had forgotten to ask for her name, too. But now she needed to focus. There was a venomous plant on her wrist.
Being careful not to move the arm with her deadly corsage, Madeline took one finger and reached slowly across. The flower tensed, like a spider getting ready to leap. She paused, waiting for it to relax, but it didn’t. The petals quivered, then started to close.
No way would her finger get there in time if she stuck with the “slow and steady” plan. One sharp breath in. Here she was, day two in fantasyland, about to be stung by a flower and put out of commission. She would be able to breathe but not move . . . No more running or walking or health. She wasn’t about to let that happen. She exhaled, hard, and at the same instant struck like a snake for the center of the flower.
Her finger wedged partway in, but the petals closed halfway. She pressed down until she managed to pry the petals apart. The tendrils of the flower gyrated crazily, slapping at her free hand. It snagged hold of her left hand, released her right wrist, and swung to her other arm. She shook, but it didn’t come off. It tightened down hard, and before she could get her finger in, the petals snapped closed and a monstrous cracking sound echoed from her wrist.
The plant shuddered, and the tendrils loosened. The bright red flower faded and fell to the ground. Madeline examined her wrist. A pinprick of blood stood out precisely in the center of the bracelet’s glowing face beneath her skin.
Rondelo’s gloved hands were on Madeline’s arm. He pushed her sleeve up. “Apologies,” he said. “The Majestic One protect her. The stinger implanted.”
Shula stabbed the flower through the center with a sword. Bending down beside it, she said, “It’s spent, Rondelo. Dead.”
Madeline felt the whole market fall away from her. She could only see the tiny mark where the flower had struck. “What happens now?” she asked.
The Crescent Stone Page 10