by Jenn Polish
But it’s not my consciousness that floods into my brain, into my body.
The me that is Sadie recedes into a fine, tiny point of light somewhere in the distance, and I become a different I, an I that is awake somewhere in Lunav. I am damp and slippery. I am crouched, curled into my powerful hind legs, my rubbery flesh blending in with the greenery around me. A mass of skin dangles down from my throat and fills with air, expanding bubble-like with every breath before contracting. It is my only movement.
I am waiting.
My heavy eyelids are rounded on top of my head, and some small part of me is dimly aware that that’s not where I—she—Sadie—is used to having her eyes. A low buzzing from my right, and my tongue shoots out from the front of my mouth. I don’t think about it—I don’t have to—and then I am pulling a tiny fly back into my mouth and tossing it down my throat with my retreating tongue.
Two short croaks that are coarse and deep, a little like the horns the faeries use to call to each other, ring out a few leaps behind me. Without warning to anyone watching me, I launch myself into the brackish water, twisting my body away from the origin of that croak. I don’t understand why the faeries and the rushes like to gather in such large groups; I’d prefer to distance myself from my fellow frogs, most of the time.
More croaking surrounds me, higher pitched this time. It’s strange, sounding like a garden snake at first, and then bleeding into the sharper, staccato sounds of a crane.
Sss. Aay. Dee. Sss. Aay. Dee.
“Sadie. Sadie!”
She—I—I wake abruptly, trying to sit up at the urgency in my mom’s tone. Instead, I catapult myself headlong into Jorbam’s canopy, losing my coordination in her branches, her spiny leaves stinging my face.
“Sorry, Jorb,” I croak as I try to untangle myself. I realized a little too late that in Dreaming that bullfrog, I’d contorted my body to be sitting on my own haunches, so that when I woke, my body wasn’t lying as it was when I fell asleep. Trying to sit up was not such a great plan.
I blink a few times, struggling to switch my thoughts from the remnants of Sampian bullfrog languages to Grovian faeric. Jorbam rumbles her own apologies into my outstretched hand as Zaylam watches me intently. Mom runs her hands all over my body, checking for injuries like she always does when I toss myself around.
I squirm out of her way. “I’m fine,” I snap, and she pulls her hands away like I’ve hit her. Jorbam rumbles harshly.
“Sadie,” is all my hatchling tree’s vibrations need to say. Zaylam’s snout retreats all the way into the back of her face.
I sigh, hard. “I’m sorry.” Mom just stares at me, cocks her eyebrow in a perfect imitation of Mama. I sigh again, softer this time. I let my body do my talking, because my spoken words are coming out all irritable. “I’m sorry, Mom. Really. What’s going on? You were calling me.” I really mean to say, You woke me up from Dreaming while I’m in the one place left I can Dream safely, but I hope she doesn’t get that from my body language. One look at her face tells me she does.
“It’s sunup, Sadie. Labor.”
She slips her hand away from my knee and carefully slips the shiny, soft blue scarf she sleeps in away from her hair. She lets it hang loose over her shoulder as she starts undoing the twists in her hair, looking away from me, down across the Plains. “You might want to improve that mood before you traipse around the Forest with an axe.”
I mutter a nonresponse and jump when the cannon that signals the final call for early morning labor booms in the distance. I shudder, then groan.
I hate when we have missions at night when the next day isn’t a rest day. I try to drag sleep out of my eyes. It doesn’t work. I let my head fall onto Zaylam’s wing, groaning louder for good measure. Mom rolls her eyes and rubs my short hair before flying off.
“Make sure she gets to labor on time, Zaylam,” she singsongs over her shoulder as she flies away under her hatchling dragon Gimla’s shadow, hands checking her hair midflight.
Zaylam coos, and I glare halfheartedly, tugging on a fresh tunic from my little space between Jorbam’s branches.
“Sadie!” A whinny from way below, near Jorbam’s roots, jars me out of my depression.
“What are you doing up there, faerie? Didn’t you hear the boom boom?”
I grin up into Zaylam’s wide face and put my forehead gingerly against Jorbam’s trunk. “Duty calls.”
Jorbam rumbles, Zaylam hums, and I swoop down to an impatient Lerian, who’s already strapped into her labor gear and holding out my faye-glass axe, handle first. “Come on, come on, do you see any other faeries left in the Plains?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “What, no? Just dragons and trees? How could that be? What? Everyone’s already left for labor? Really? Wow! How incredible!”
She’s hit a gallop now, and I fly above her. I hold my breath as we pass through the barrier out into the Forest. “Good sunup to you too, Ler.”
She cranes her neck up and grins at me broadly, even though she’s already starting to sweat from the rough brown skin straps across her non-like shoulders, harnessing her deeply tanned, reddish body to the massive cart behind her.
Lerian will be hauling dead bodies all day. I’ll be the one killing them.
At least the King’s Registry lets us be labor partners. I don’t know how I’d survive otherwise. Though I might not if we’re much later than we already are.
We speed up, tearing across the Way, one of this season’s centauric paths through the Forest, the fastest way to the Gathering to get today’s assignment.
Lerian skids to a stop as soon as we reach the massive clearing between the Lunavic River and the Dropoff, where the Forest dips into the Underland. Where faeric life and centauric life are most connected. The Gathering is always a center of activity; it’s lined around the edges with Growers’ spaces, artist stages, learning pod clusters, Jax and Mom’s infirmary, all hovering on magicked platforms just above the ground, so they don’t kill the short layer of grass that coats the entire expanse. When I was a young one, the grass was taller than me, and the platforms only came close to the ground when they had to pick up centaurs or faeries that can’t fly.
The non government cut the grass short the same night they cut Idrisim’s life short.
Lerian stops so abruptly that my dangling legs almost slam into the back of her head. She swears audibly, but once people look and realize I’m with her, they turn right back around and act like we don’t exist. Except to shift away from us.
I take in the sight before me and mirror her curse. The King’s Registry—those faeric traitors who partner so willingly with the non government—always give us our labor assignments and grown lunch sacks in the Gathering, every sunup. It’s always just a couple lines—one for the harvesters and one for the loggers, an informal kind of affair. To make sure we know what segment of the Forest we have to destroy that day.
But today? Today it seems like King Xavier’s entire army has assembled to give us our daily orders. There are still lines. There are still murmured conversations and sunup greetings. There are still the beginning stirrings of preparations for Lunamez, our biggest Grovian holiday, always celebrated at the end of the frozen season.
But the Gathering is also crammed with the king’s Hands, ones we’ve never seen before. Not the ones from Sachin’s team of soldiers—a new deployment. With a lot more weapons.
“Forty-eight Hands. Looks like they’ve sent us a new Controller,” a soft voice chimes somewhere a few flutters under my dangling feet.
Jax.
I fly lower to meet him on eye level. His angular jaw is jutted to the left slightly, like it always does when he’s thinking hard. I put my forehead to his in greeting, and he takes his calloused hand off the wheel of his chair to touch the crook of my elbow. “I hear you weren’t the most pleasant to your mother this morning,” he says evenly.
I grunt and Lerian chuckles. “By which I mean to ask,” his smooth voice continues, his eyes everywhere but my fa
ce as he keeps track of the movements of every single Hand in the Gathering, “are you feeling all right?”
“Always the healer,” I tease him, flying sideways into his shoulder firmly enough to nudge him, but gently enough to avoid upsetting his chair. The silver merperson markings that swivel delicately up his neck, down his back, and across his broad chest glimmer, like they’re dancing, the intricate, swirling patterns gleaming on his tawny skin. His flared nose twitches, but his mild gaze is serious when he looks at me briefly.
“I like to remind myself that life goes on, even when you’re surrounded by soldiers,” he muses in that rich, understated tone he gets when he doesn’t want to be overheard.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s a response to last night’s sabotage mission, but keep wary, Sadie. The more you try to keep your feelings about last night in, the harder it’ll actually be to conceal your role in events if they’re discovered.” He’s barely moving his lips, and our eyes don’t meet as we both take in the invaded Gathering.
He raises his voice to a more typical volume now, his thick eyebrow arching at me. “And apologize to your mother after labor, would you? She’s much harder to work with when she’s taking out her anger at you on me.” I strain my eyes toward the floating, open infirmary tent. Mom is bending over a patient, and her eyes catch mine. She grimaces at me and then gestures for Jax to come back to the platform. He nods and touches my arm and Lerian’s flank.
“Don’t enrage anyone too much today, if you can help it,” he smirks as he spins his chair around and starts pushing himself toward the lowering infirmary platform.
“We make no promises, Jax,” Lerian calls after him, and his deep, resonate chuckle makes me smile.
I look up at Lerian as I fly back to my preferred height, so my feet can dangle well above the ground.
“So I guess we’ve got a new Controller,” she says like she’s commenting on the weather. I grunt, and we shift to the end of the logger line. A path clears for us; it always does. I roll my eyes.
Lerian nudges me and jerks her head in the direction of the thickest cluster of Hands. I follow her gaze and almost fall out of the sky.
The new Controller is clearly recognizable in the typical pearly white uniform with the thick red stripe down both sides, with the palace-issued silver-tipped bow slung over the shoulder.
The new Controller is… I snap my mouth shut when I realize it’s hanging open. Standing there in that dreaded white uniform is the girl from last night. The non who’d assumed I was one of her people, who asked me out because I saved her friend’s life.
The new Controller is Evelyn.
Chapter Four
EVELYN’S GAZE IS skating around the Gathering as she nods passively, listening to the Hands chirping in both sides of her ears.
And then her stare falls to me.
Her lips purse in a delicately contained rage, and her eyes dart rapidly between my face and my wings. Like she’s convincing herself that yes, I’m the one who saved her friend last night…and I’m a faerie. I watch the exquisite anger flit across her rounded features as she puts the pieces together and realizes, surely, that every breath I took in front of her had been a lie.
I almost fly down to her, ask to take her arm, pull her aside, desperately try to explain.
But the knuckles of her fully functioning hand are a shade lighter than the rest of her skin, they’re gripping her sheathed sword so hard. And the amber ring in her eyes is almost fully golden, like her healing magic. Like she’s summoning it all within herself.
Whether to calm herself or to kill me, I can’t tell. Could be both.
I wrench my eyes away from her and fly down to Lerian’s eye level. She nudges me in the ribs with her elbow and tilts her head Evelyn’s way, muttering to me conspiratorially out of the side of her mouth.
“A girl! And looks like our age-mate too. And an Izlanian, what? Who’d’ve thought? I guess they’re trying to get more Izlanians into the government now, with Xavier marrying one and all, huh? Conquer and mmphff,” she makes a lewd gesture with her flank, “seems like the new strategy.” She glances back at her, and my insides burn as I steal another peek myself, but Evelyn—no, the Controller, the Controller, her name can’t matter anymore—is striding over to Tacon, the faeric Registrar and head of the King’s Registry.
“Wonder how brutal she is to sweep this gig from under Sachin’s feet, huh? An Izlanian near girl, Controller.” Lerian says it like she’s mulling it over, and she barks out a cruel laugh.
I grunt noncommittally. That’s not too unusual. Lerian knows I don’t much like crowds of faeries. They tend to part for me way too easily, and it always makes me want to hit something.
But today is not the day for me to randomly hit something. Evel—the new Controller—will probably latch onto any excuse to chuck me into the Pits.
“Next!”
That would be us. Lerian and I shift forward to the Hand who’d barked out the command. He’s gazing over the shoulder of one of the Registry faeric traitors, onto the strip of dead tree flesh that holds today’s labor assignments.
“You’ve both got the edge of the Forest today, near the eastern steam pools. You know the drill.” He glances at me. “Chop quickly.” He switches his bored gaze to Lerian. “Clear quickly. To the deposit slot where the river meets the Flowing.” His cold stare swivel to Rada, a centauric elder, a grower with a shrewd eye and permanently melted skin on her right arm from the fires the night of the attack.
“Only give ’em the basics,” the new Hand is telling her now, his Highlander non language cutting in comparison with our Grovian faeric vocabulary. “They’re not working too hard today.”
Rada tosses her thin brown hair off her neck and swishes her matching tail irritably. “I’m not sure how it works in the Highlands.” My heart leaps nervously as she responds to him in Grovian faeric. She interrupts herself to lean down off the platform and squint at the Hand’s ranking stripe. I suppress a laugh. There’s nothing wrong with her eyesight. “Sir Underling,” she emphasizes his low rank with barely disguised glee, “but in the Grove, when growing girls don’t have enough to eat and spend all day chopping down trees and hauling their body parts around, they need more than just the basics to eat.”
The Hand gulps visibly. His orders, probably, are to get us all to labor on time and without incident. Fighting with Rada would cause an incident. Not fighting with her could also cause an incident.
It strikes me that this nameless Hand isn’t much older than me.
His eyes swivel to me and travel up and down my body. It’s not lewd, just curious.
He’s not the first non soldier to ever look at me like that. The first was covered in soot, sweat, and the blood of his joiner.
I WAS A young one, the age-mate of maybe a ten-harvest-old non. It was the night the Hands attacked the Forest, trying to break into the barrier around the Plains, just after Jax’s screams had slammed into my bones even harder than the smoke of it all infiltrated my lungs. I’d watched as Tacon murdered Idrisim, Jax’s joiner in the battle; as Jax broke and my growns had to protect both of us from Hand after Hand. There were two soldiers, though, who didn’t try to attack us. One was holding the other, dragging his burned and bleeding body, cradling him in his arms as he begged us to save his friend, or maybe his joiner, in barely intelligible Grovian faeric.
Mom had gone to work healing the dying one immediately, and when she told Jax she needed his help, he’d nearly refused, red-eyed and shell-shocked. I can still hear the unwavering way she told him that you don’t leave people to die. Jax’s joiner was dead, and so were his eyes; but something about Mom saying that convinced Jax to help her save that non’s life.
I think about that now, about not leaving people to die even if their people are trying to kill yours. I wonder if the Hand in charge of distributing our food is thinking something similar as he looks at me, so much like that Hand had during the attack when I’d spoken to him in Highlander, my wing
s not matching the shape of my face or the twang of my accent. Like he was curious, shocked, and thinking, maybe, that it was the first time he’d looked at a faerie and seen himself.
Before Mom and I fled the Highlands, I’d known that half faeries weren’t terribly uncommon. But we were scorned, never quite belonging anywhere. This non, though? He just looked like I was some sort of strange miracle.
AND MAYBE I am. A half non, half faerie, living in the Grove. The only others like me I’ve ever met are in the Highlands. Not here. Not amongst the faeries. Not amongst the faeries to be looked at as a traitor by the faeries and a curious experiment by the nons.
Like the young non soldier, now, is looking at me. Somewhat bewildered by my human eyes and faeric wings, my human legs and faeric flight. Bewildered, but not repulsed.
I hold his gaze evenly, keeping my face deliberately mild. I know he’s considered Rada’s request to give us more food, and my calmness, or lack of it, can be the difference between being hungry all day and being able to feed the others.
Our daily supply of grown food—food that only growers can magick from the Energies, so we don’t have to eat flesh—is strictly regulated by the type of labor we’re assigned each sunup. And by how irritated the non Hands and Registry faeries happen to be at you.
Strictly, that is, if you lack a good relationship with growers. And Rada, one of the rare centauric growers, certainly has a good relationship with us.
The young Hand jerks his head at her granting her permission to give us extra food. He doesn’t know we’ll distribute it to those who are rationed less than we are, but Rada does.
So she winks at Lerian and me after nodding obediently to the Hand. She presses two steaming bowls of sunup stew into our hands and loops our bags of midday meals into my belt while I drink eagerly. I almost tilt over from the weight of the meal bags, and a ghost of a smile slips past Rada’s lips. Her tail swishes softly as she paws at her low-hovering growing platform, where she twists the Energies all night, each night, preparing for the sunup distribution of grown rations.