A Dying Land

by K. Ferrin

  His eyes were open, rolling alarmingly in their sockets.

  “Mercer,” she said to him softly. “I’m going to help you, okay? Look at me.” She propped his head up gently, looking into his eyes. “I’m going to clean up your wrist. Okay? Watch me, watch me.”

  With an effort, he focused his eyes on her. He didn’t speak, but she took his focus as permission. She lifted his hand and pulled the filthy rag away from his wrist. He had sliced right through the arteries and tendons. He needed a healer if he ever wanted to use that hand again. All she could do was make sure he didn’t bleed to death or die of infection. She couldn’t even be sure he wouldn’t still lose the hand.

  She washed the cut with hot water, cleaning away as much of the grime as she could. There was a lot of it. She wondered how long it had been since the man had taken a proper bath. She pinched the skin together and tied it closed using the fishhook and line and wrapped the entire thing up with strips she’d torn from the sheets on her bed.

  He was silent, watching her as she worked. Watching her, not her hands, a fact that made her nervous. By the time she’d finished, the fog had cleared from his eyes, and he seemed steady once again. She sat back and returned his gaze.

  “Coffee?” she asked, holding out a mug. He took it, but didn’t drink.

  “I’ve never heard of them going after anyone like that before. Ever. They wanted you specifically. Why?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that question. It was like they had somehow sensed the magic in her and wanted it. But not even the warlocks had been able to do that. Even Fariss was only interested in me because…, she paused in her thoughts as she made the connection. Because of Alyssum. Alyssum had sensed something about her. The Mari must be more sensitive to such things, and those creatures were the empty husks of Mari. At least some of them were.

  But she couldn’t tell Mercer what she was. He was no friend of the warlocks, but she couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t turn her over anyway in hope of some reward. His boat was a hulking ruin, and coin would help resolve that problem. And buy a lot of liquor.

  She looked down, away from the intensity in his gaze. “Thank you for saving me. I owe you a debt I cannot repay.”

  “You can repay me with the truth. What are you?”

  What, he’d said. Not who.

  “Why are you here?” he finished.

  She looked back at him and saw something in his gaze that surprised her. Empathy. Back home his questions would have come with openly hostile suspicion. But Mercer’s response was much like the grimoire told her Dreskin’s had been.

  “I…I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. Not exactly.” She wanted to stop the flow of words, but they rushed out of her the way water rushes around a blockage during flood season. “There was a warlock. He’s why I’m here. I’m looking for him so he can…” She paused, uncertain how to continue. She couldn’t tell him the truth. She could hardly bear it herself. “So he can teach me.”

  He stared at her. “You…you are Mari?”

  The question surprised her. “No. I’m not Mari. Though I met one, once. On the way over. I’m—wait, are the Mari made by warlocks?”

  His eyes opened wide in shock. “What? No, of course not. But you must be mistaken about meeting one. The Mari are dead. Fariss—”

  “They’re not dead. At least, not all of them. I met one. She was tall and covered in yellow scales, with long black hair that fell in ropes down her back.”

  “That’s…that’s not possible.” His voice was rough, low. As if the energy required for speech were beyond him. He scratched at his greasy hair.

  “Her name is Alyssum. Do you know her?” she asked.

  She’d thought him a drunk when she’d first seen him. Then a thief. But she saw something quite different when she looked at him now. He’d been awake for days. He’d risked his own life to meet the commitment he’d made to her. He’d sliced his wrist open, done some crazy form of blood magic to save her from…those things that had attacked them last night. The Forsaken, he’d called them, according to the grimoire. He might be a drunk and a thief, but she felt certain he had been something quite different once. Before Fariss, before the breach, before his wife and son had been taken from him.

  “She was Mari. Your wife.”

  His eyes settled on hers for a minute, more alert than she’d ever seen them.

  “She was. And I’d thought she was the last. But if what you say is true…” He grabbed the salt pork and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing barely enough to avoid choking before he swallowed. He climbed to his feet and began readying the boat. “We need to get moving. We need to get you well out of here before dusk, because I won’t be able to save you again if they come after you. And I need to get back. If we leave now, we should be out of here late today and at the Salt Caves by evening.”

  She watched him for a while, but his focus was absolute as he rushed about the boat. She lay back on the deck and stared up at the clear blue sky, trying to focus on where she was going and what she would do when she got there. She felt lighter now, having shared her burden with another. He’d barely blinked an eye at realizing she was magic. How different from the people of Brielle. Maybe she wasn’t as alone as she’d thought when she’d closed the pages of the grimoire this morning.

  She climbed to her feet and headed to the bow. The haze of green ahead didn’t look any closer, but she fancied she could smell the light scent of fresh air, green trees, and cool, clean water. She was sick of the tepid, stale stuff they had been drinking since entering this twisted, tortured landscape. She lay down again, on her belly this time, resting her chin on cupped hands as she watched the wall of green inch its way closer.

  About halfway through the day she could see details emerging from the distance. The wall of green began to take on the individual shape of actual trees. But there must have been some trick to the lighting because everything appeared wrong. It looked like the trees were upside down, their roots reaching to the sky instead of planted firmly in the earth as they should be, their branches brushing the dirt below. Others appeared to be on their sides or blasted into bits. By mid-afternoon she realized it was no illusion.

  Much like the barren red and orange land they had just left behind, there were signs of destruction here. Some of the trees that floated with their roots stretching into the sky were green and thriving, as if they were unaware they had been uprooted and were even now dying. Others were already brown and dead. But most appeared to have been violently destroyed by a force Ling couldn’t imagine. The trees were not the only corpses either. Puffs of feathers floated here and there. Meaty chunks, some still glistening wetly, could be seen scattered through the wooden debris. Something truly terrible had happened here.

  She glanced at Mercer to find his face grim. He stood at the rail, arms crossed tightly over his chest. As she watched, he reached out and pulled a large chunk of wood close. He studied it before opening his hand and watching as it floated slowly away.

  “What happened here?” Ling asked.

  Mercer shook his head before moving back to the wheel. “I don’t know. This is how it happened before, too, but I have no idea what causes it. Somehow it’s an effect of the breach. Soon this land will look just like that,” he said, motioning back to the barrenness they had just left behind. He left unsaid that the Forsaken, those things that had tried to take her yesterday, would follow soon after.

  The Mincon continued moving forward without regard for the change in landscape. They plowed straight into the chaos, the debris floating gently aside as the boat pushed through. The metallic legs ground any low floating items into dust beneath their wide feet. They left a clear path behind them, and Ling wondered how long it would take for everything to float back into the gap.

  About an hour later, they began seeing wildlife again, though this brought no comfort. What wildlife had not been destroyed by whatever had annihilated the trees faced a slow death from starvation. Long legged birds wandere
d aimlessly across the blasted landscape as if lost. Cat-sized, furry creatures with large wings flitted from one demolished root system to the next, seemingly unsure of what to do or where to go now that their homes had been smashed to bits. They paused to stare, wide-eyed, as the ship walked by.

  An hour after that, they came to the shore of a deep river. The current was sluggish, the surface barely moving. But it moved enough for Ling to realize it flowed uphill, up into the mountains at the very center of the island. Somewhere up in those hills was Grag. Or so she hoped.

  The Mincon walked straight into the sluggish current and lowered itself into the water with a fanfare of loud screeching, sharp bangs, and a last gasp of black smoke before the loud hum of the engine fell silent. Goosebumps rose on her arms as a sudden quiet rushed in. She’d expected buzzing insects, twittering birds, the soft creak of trees bending in a breeze, but there was nothing beyond the sound of water slapping against the hull. It was far too similar to the barren lands of the day before for her taste.

  The remainder of the day passed in an agony of slowness. The ship seemed to fight the current even as they moved with the flow of water. Their progress, already a crawl, slowed even more. The sun began to set as they climbed steadily into the mountains of the Colli Terra. Her anxiety rose along with the ship. She had no idea what she would do once she reached the Salt Caves. Possible scenarios ran through her mind on a loop. Grag, smiling and friendly, gladly unmaking her. Grag surly, angry, and refusing her request. Her sweet talking. Her threatening. She even imagined having to fight him in order to force his hand. The one thing she refused to consider was the possibility of him not being there. He had to be there. He just had to.

  When she’d exhausted every possible scenario, she turned her mind to imagining her parents’ reaction when they saw Evelyn again. It wasn’t hard for her to picture it. In her memory, they had seen her just yesterday. They had been happy just yesterday. They would laugh and cry and crush her tightly between them, eyes lit with wonder and delight. Evelyn would be confused, having no idea that five years of agony had passed for everyone but her. She wouldn’t believe any of it, Ling knew. But just as she couldn’t deny the words in the book, Evelyn wouldn’t be able to deny the changes in the people around her.

  Would they still curse her, Ling, the changeling, once they had Evelyn back? Would they wonder what had happened to her, how she had met her end, or would they just feel joy that she had gone? She hoped for the former. The part of her that remembered her parents as her parents still desperately wanted to believe they felt some sort of affection for her. But she knew it would be the latter. They would simply rejoice that she was gone and that Evelyn was back. There was no doubt that the stories they told Evelyn about Ling would be as monstrous as the stories they told about the warlocks and the Mari.

  She wondered how long their happiness would last in the end. The destruction she and Mercer moved through would spread. How long before the loss of magic began affecting the other lands, before it began tearing apart nations and families and left nothing but devastation behind? What would the end look like for Evelyn, for her parents, for Rudy?

  She pushed those thoughts aside. She couldn’t solve that problem. If the warlocks and the Mari had failed at sealing the breach there was nothing more she could do about it. She would give her parents and Evelyn as much time together as she could; the rest was out of her hands.

  As the sun slowly slipped behind the mountains, Ling looked up to see a long pier jutting into the river a short distance ahead. Mercer pulled them up to the pier smoothly, tying them off with an expert toss of a rope. He’d always been competent on the boat, but now he moved with an efficiency that surprised her. The surly, barely sober man she’d started this journey with seemed to have vanished with the realization that the Mari were not all dead. This, too, surprised her. She had begun to think all the humans were against the Mari, but clearly the situation was murkier than she’d thought.

  They were at the base of a towering mountain. It loomed over them, with rocks the size of houses littering its slopes. She could just make out the jagged pattern of a winding path crawling up its side to the peak far above.

  “This is it,” Mercer said. His face was clean, she noted. A marked change from his previous level of filth. It was another sign of his improved spirits. He nodded his head toward the winding path. “The Salt Caves are about two days of walking. You can’t get lost—just follow the trail.” He dropped a bulging pack at her feet. “This’ll get you there and back. I recommend you wait until morning. The Forsaken don’t normally come this far in, but with you…I just don’t know. Besides, there’s still plenty of other things out there that aren’t friendly.”

  She had assumed the boat would take her all the way. She’d never considered that she would have to walk for days, alone, to get there. She felt deflated, but she pushed the feeling back. She squared her shoulders and nodded at him.

  “I’ll wait here for four days. Two to get up there, one to explore, one to get back down. Any longer than that and you’re on your own.”

  She nodded. She had no intention of coming back, but she didn’t want him to know that. He was a good man, and that was becoming even more apparent now that the facade of filth and drunkenness was beginning to crack. He might make it hard for her if she told him she wasn’t coming back.

  He studied her for the space of two breaths, his expression unreadable in the fading light. “Good luck,” he said. “And thank you. You’ve…changed everything, for me.”

  Ling was touched by the sincerity in his eyes. She stepped up to him, wrapping him in a hug. He wrapped his arms around her as well, briefly, before turning away from her and vanishing into the ship.

  She turned and looked up the narrow twisting trail, thin as a thread, darting in between the massive rocks littering the mountainside. Two days, she thought. She’d traveled so far, and it had taken her so long. Two days felt both incredibly brief and like an eternity. She itched to start now, but forced herself to take a deep breath. Tomorrow was soon enough.

  She swung the pack up onto her shoulders and turned to duck into her cabin, but stopped at the sight of a large dragonfly perched on the rail beside her. It was monstrous, similar in size to the one she had seen on the Courser that first night, based on what she’d read in the grimoire. It rested quietly on the rail of the ship, its multifaceted eyes seeming to look right at her, its iridescent blue body glinting in the fading light. The book hadn’t noted what color the first one was, and she wondered if this was the same one. It lingered, wings buzzing loudly every few seconds, before it leapt into the air and vanished into the night.

  Ling suppressed a shiver at its size. Dragonflies were predators. She wondered what one that big would eat, whether she might be on the menu. She walked into her cabin and closed the door tightly behind her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ling left the remainder of what she owed Mercer in a pile in the center of the bed before heading out onto the deck. She’d committed to paying him the remainder when they got back to Malach, but if everything went according to plan, she wouldn’t be coming back this way. The grimoire said that she’d originally intended to stiff him the remainder, but she couldn’t do that now. Not after what he’d done for her. In another life, in another place, she would call him a friend.

  She slung the pack he’d given her over one shoulder, shifting the bag holding the grimoire slightly so the two rested easily against her side and back. She wrapped her hand around the coin pocket hanging from her neck, the remainder of Witch’s coins nestled within.

  Mercer had hidden himself away, and she stepped off the Mincon without trying to find him. It felt awkward to her, like leaving without saying goodbye, though she knew they’d said their farewells the night before. It was strange, living your life based not on what you remembered, but on what you read out of a book every morning.

  The mountain air smelled delicious, and she wondered what it must have really felt like
to travel for days through the rotten smell of the barrens. She’d sketched it roughly in the grimoire, but she didn’t have the colors to flesh it out into a true likeness. She’d snuffed at her clothes, trying to catch a trace of the lingering scent of the place, but she could smell nothing more than the stale smell of the bedding she’d slept in.

  The early morning air was cool against her skin, and she set out at a fast clip. Grag could be at the top of that climb; she wanted to get there as quickly as possible.

  After an hour of climbing, she was breathing hard, a fine illusion. She stopped, turned, and looked back at the Mincon, already a toy far in the distance. The sails were still stowed, and she wondered if Mercer was up and about or if he slumbered still. She had learned as much from him as she had from Drake, and despite having no real memories of either, she somehow missed them both dearly. She was certain of her path, but she wished fervently that she had one of them at her side.

  She was high enough that she could even see the brilliant hues of the barrens in the far distance, and it was breathtaking. It was hard to imagine the horrors there or what it had felt like to have the Forsaken hunting them every step of the way. It was strange how such beauty could hide such terror.

  She turned back toward the winding path, climbing steadily. She wanted to cover as much distance as possible today. The less she had to walk tomorrow, the better. After another hour, she thought she saw movements off to her left. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to draw her eye. Whatever it was had vanished by the time she turned. She watched, looking for the movements of a bird or some animal, but nothing revealed itself.

  She kept moving, but unease began tensing her shoulders. Mercer had told her that there were things out here that were not friendly. Whether that meant toward mortals or toward her, she didn’t know, but she also didn’t particularly want to find out.