by Jenn Polish
Before I process where my wings are taking me, Mom and I are directly in front of the Controller. A breeze makes her light cloak stir along with her flowing locks, and I refuse to speak. She knows that she promised to release my family if her first Slicing proceeds without further interference.
“I could argue that the little riot against my Hands last week constitutes interference with the Slicing,” the Controller says with false levity in heavily accented Grovian faeric.
I just stare. Mom flies even closer to Evelyn. “Let them go, Controller, or I swear, last week’s uprising will look like—”
“You don’t want to finish that sentence,” the Controller deadpans before inclining her chin toward the cage, her eyes locking into mine. I hold her gaze—which is hard and blazing with an emotion and intensity I can’t identify or explain—until a small body slams into my side. Aon’s arms are all over my torso, and I wrench my eyes away to greet quer, laughing at quer’s warmth and fervor. I grin crookedly as Mama kisses Mom with deep ferocity, both of their hands everywhere at once. Lerian whinnies loudly and suggestively behind me, and I laugh as Mom and Mama startle apart in response. Aon doesn’t look so sure that que knows what’s funny, but que joins in the laughter until que starts to cry.
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
LUNAMEZ IS FINALLY upon us.
I haven’t even seen Kashat except during labor, where he doesn’t waste any energy communicating. The past few sunups, he’s been up all night, every night, leading his learning pod in preparation. The floating candles they put up around the Gathering earlier in the season have been replaced floating lanterns, the candles having burned so long they’re now down to their charred cores. The lanterns, in their stead, rotate the colors they fluoresce into the nights. I think Kashat is trying to recreate the effect of dragon bulbs hanging from Lunavad trees. And he’s succeeding.
The Lunamez buzz is all around us, seasonal songs rising up irrepressibly, at unexpected intervals.
Even during labor. We adjust the slamming of our axes to fit the tunes of our songs giving thanks to Lunav, to Lunara.
Even the Forest’s fireflies are preparing, often blinking in time with our melodies.
With the cold season that marked Evelyn’s arrival in the Grove almost passed, Aon is already the age-mate of a twelve- or thirteen-harvest-old non—and already causing that much trouble.
I grimace into the buzzing Lunamez songs around us as Zaylam flaps her wings over the bright blue bruise on my side. Jorbam rumbles softly under my sore back as I hang my head backwards off her branches.
“You’d think you’d want to leave the beating to the Hands, huh?” I cough, and Zaylam’s snout twitches back and forth slightly.
“We’re really sorry, Sadie! We didn’t see you there!” Blaze is calling up from way below, quer little hooves shifting back and forth on the parched ground of the Plains, as Aon hovers around my shoulder, his hands braced on a branch to help keep pressure off of his wings.
“Can we do anything, Sade?”
I wink at Zaylam, but Aon’s too distressed to notice. “Yeah, it hurts real bad. Maybe you can go get Mom, ask her to come take a look at me?”
I bite my lip so I don’t break out laughing as Aon starts to sweat, his half-webbed, brown fingers gripping at Jorbam tighter. “Uh, well, maybe Jax? Or maybe I can try to Heal you? And Zaylam, her wing wind helps, right? Mom’s really stressed, you know, with those elders getting shipped off to the Pits, and that news about all those faye dying in that explosion in the Izlanian mines. And I heard on the way here that they executed another near in the Samp because she was just swimming home from her Learning Pod alone, so Mom’s bound to be busy comforting Mama about that, right? So we probably shouldn’t—”
“You’re seriously using the ‘people are going to prison and getting killed’ excuse so I won’t get you in trouble with Mom?” I ask him, sitting up with disbelief, all the amusement gone from my face.
“Uh, well, you seem to be feeling better, hm, so I’m just gonna—”
“Aon!” I call, but he’s already gone, Blaze galloping away underneath his flight path. Zaylam hooks a talon over my waist to keep me where I am. I sigh heavily and go back to lying down with my head dangling from Jor’s branches.
“Were we like that, Zay? Are we like that?”
Are you asking about the part
Where he and Blaze fly and gallop into
Everything and everyone
All the time
Or the part where
He made use of death
To get out of a small bit
Of trouble?
I lock eyes with her. “The second one.”
She lets a lot of air out of her snout, fully retracted now, blowing my head and hair back.
He doesn’t Dream,
And neither do his young friends.
I sigh again. “But we did a lot of that first one, huh?”
Zaylam’s snout elongates, and I grin too. “Remember when we flew into Gimla and knocked him right out of the air?”
Whoever knew that we could
Be so powerful?
Jorbam’s trunk rumbles hard, and she produces some sap for us. Zaylam’s tongue, longer than almost my whole leg, worms across my body to taste it. I scoop my finger through the sap and lick it thoughtfully. I feel what Jorbam’s saying in the textures and tangs of the thick liquid.
I trace her bark with my fingers, smiling. “We were just always really careful not to fly into you, Jor. It’s not because you’re not special! It’s on account of we love you!”
Zaylam flaps her wings in assent. Jorbam ruffles her leaves, satisfied.
“You know, I’ve been thinking—”
I’m interrupted by two short screams. They sound an awful lot like Aon and Blaze, just outside the barrier.
Bruise be damned, I take off at top speed, pulling up short just before bursting through the barrier, because what I see makes me need to vomit. Urgently.
Aon is hovering in front of Blaze, who’s staring up at Richard, the Controller’s second-in-command, and a short scruffy Hand whose name I don’t know. Or care about.
And Richard is putting his bow into Aon’s pudgy hands, muttering to him about how to load an arrow, how to find your target. How to shoot.
How to hunt.
And Aon looks fascinated, his sunset red wings curled at the tips in eagerness.
“See,” Scruffy is saying, “I told you we didn’t want to hurt you. We’re not the bad guys here. Don’t you want to learn how to get your own food?”
“Growers give us all the food we need,” Blaze protests, but quer Flowing green eyes too, are wide and fixated on the bow. Quer beige, poker-straight tail swishes in anticipation, and quer objection is halfhearted.
“But think of the power you could have by getting your own food. What if you didn’t have to rely on an elite of growers?” Richard says to them. Then he mutters to Scruffy as he takes an arrow from his quiver and helps Aon fit it into the bow, “This is why they need us here, see? Even those related to the basically human one need our help.”
I grind my teeth and Zaylam, hovering above, looks down at me, her snout retracted so hard it must hurt.
“But what would we shoot? Rabbits? They’re not food, they’re people.”
My stomach churns, thinking of Osley. Aon rotates on his right foot with the loaded bow, taller than his whole body. His arms shake with the effort, and the non men hold in the laughter Aon can’t see, wouldn’t understand. My little brother is looking for prey, but the Hands have already found theirs.
“Aon!” I call out, about to fly through the barrier and reveal myself.
But Zaylam’s talons loop around me, holding me back, because another voice has called out too. Iema.
“Richard, sir! Why are you giving these young ones weapons?”
Aon squeals and drops the bow and arrow, which flies forward a little before clattering listlessly onto the plant-s
oftened ground. He takes off, Blaze galloping as well as que can through the underbrush to keep up with him. I linger only long enough to hear Iema scoff at Richard’s angry explanation that he was just having a little fun, that she has no right to interfere with a superior’s entertainment, before I tear off after Blaze and Aon, dipping into the Forest as soon as I’m out of sight of the shouting Hands.
When Blaze crashes onto an old Way path, Aon swoops down and half flies, his wings pumping while he holds onto quer shoulders. Even though Aon’s a few shades darker than me and Blaze is a few shades lighter and with different undertones than Lerian, they remind me forcibly of Ler and me when we were young ones. I breathe roughly as I fly behind them too speechless to want to reveal myself yet.
They tumble out of the Forest onto the beach by the eastern steam pools, and, as one creature, careen into someone’s stomach.
That someone is none other than Evelyn.
“Of course,” I mutter under my breath. I slip sideways behind a tree I don’t know, asking permission with my fingertips to stay there for a while. The tree rumbles—even without tasting his sap, I know he’s amused. He seems willing to let me stay.
I peer around the trunk tentatively, holding my breath and waiting for Evelyn to arrest Blaze, to send Aon back to the cage that made him incapable of flying steadily on his own in the first place.
Aon and Blaze have both frozen, only their heaving chests and rigid spines testifying to their alertness. They back away from the Controller, trembling with heads nodded into a partial bow and muttering apologies in all the languages they’ve studied in their learning pods so far. The tips of Blaze’s ears are growing redder by the moment.
Evelyn’s hand is on her stomach, and she’s doubled over slightly, clearly winded and in pain from their impact. I know what that feels like; my own bruise throbs.
Aon starts to shake as the Controller raises her head enough to look at them. Her other hand lifts, extends toward them, like she’s either going to hit them or embrace them. I flex my fingers.
“Please Controller ma’am,” Blaze stammers in Highlander non, “we were just excited, and Aon can’t fly too good, his wings—”
Evelyn stops her with a furrowed brow. “His?” she says in Underlander. “You’ve made your Choosing, then?” she asks Aon in Grovian faeric.
He nods in the human fashion. “I’m a boy,” he says in a small voice. He’s still shaking—this woman imprisoned him—but I can’t help grinning at his simple declaration, and neither, it seems, can Evelyn.
The Controller nods like she’s in the palace and she’s acknowledging a young dignitary. “A fine choice,” she says. Her eyes glisten as they dart across the deserted beach around them. I pull my head back behind the tree and make sure my wings are pulled in tight to my body.
“Shouldn’t you two be in your learning pods?” she whispers conspiratorially, still in a Grovian tongue.
“It’s boring today. We want to learn how to be soul keepers, not the history of the whole Grove! They don’t even give Aon spell impressions, so he can’t learn how to twist the Energies yet!”
I run a frustrated hand over my face at Blaze’s response. Evelyn’s leaning forward so she’s at eye level with them, her hands bracing her upper body on her thighs. The bodice of her white dress runs dangerously low across her chest, and heat swirls in my belly. Face. Her face. I focus on her face. Which looks thoughtful, her full lips puckering in consideration.
“Soul keeping isn’t something you can teach with spell impressions or Energy twistings,” she tells them like it’s her turn to instruct a learning pod. Blaze looks rapt, and Aon’s even stopped shaking a little. “You have to be born with the ability. But, you can’t go around talking to other Hands about soul keeping, all right? You’ll get yourselves in more trouble than you could already have from, how do I say it, a certain bruise I’m sure I’ll have,” she teases, her fingers caressing her rounded stomach again.
I tilt my head, wondering when her Grovian languages got so good. I can’t figure it out, nor why she’s not locking the young ones up for recklessness or something. Worse, watching them is making my heart warm instead of making my skin crawl.
Aon flies backward at that, but Evelyn laughs, shaking her head. “Don’t worry, little one. It was a joke. A bad one. But I’m not going to hurt you, all right?” He hovers where he is, looking wary. Blaze shifts so she’s standing between them, and I find myself admiring the young one.
Evelyn and Aon just stare at each other for a long while. The Controller’s eyes get misty for a moment before she reaches into a hidden pocket in her dress. “Here,” she says, holding her hand out in front of her. “Grown candy.” Aon and Blaze approach slowly, cautiously.
“Go on, take it. For Lunamez.” They snatch the grown candy from her hand, their relatively tiny fingers quick and sticky, and dash off in the opposite direction, along the beach toward the Underland.
She watches them go, shaking her head. A small, sad smile lingers on her face.
I fly away, back into the depths of the Forest, toward the Plains, before she realizes there was a witness to that strange affair.
BACK IN THE Plains, I let my eyes droop closed, soaking in the sounds of Lunamez approaching, only a few sunups away now. The dragons too are harmonizing with our hymns, and Jorbam rumbles in time beneath me.
A cool twilight breeze is growing, and out of nowhere, I have no wings.
I am human. I look down at my hands. He is—I am—covered in chain mail armor. My ears are full of dozens of thundering centaurs trotting across a beach all at once. I look down again. The man I am Dreaming is not surrounded by centaurs;he is surrounded by horses, and by human soldiers riding them. His—my—heart is racing, and I become aware, as his memories sync into mine, of this being his first assignment out of the Highlands. My chest aches, my lower back stiff from riding so long, and I wonder what will happen to my joiner back at home if this first assignment is my last.
I grip the reins too tightly, and the horse I am commanding grunts angrily.
“Relax, kid, this’ll be a breeze. The centaurs don’t have magic. We’ll take them by surprise, and anyway, the Grovian Controller’s apparently something to look at.” My fellow soldier, riding alongside me, nudges me with the backside of his sharpened axe, the symbol of the Mach clearly visible on the handle, matching the design on his helmet. I try to grin my thanks at him, but my own metal helmet covers most of my face. I grunt instead.
“Maybe if you fight well enough you can earn a private audience with her, huh?” The Mach soldier laughs at his own words and makes a lewd gesture with his hands and hips, carelessly jostling the horse he’s riding. I don’t mention my joiner. I force a chuckle and reposition the axe in my belt.
I feel the sweat dripping down his face like it’s my own.
My own. This is not my reality.
I jerk awake, and I am choking.
“Zaylam!” I shout.
She swoops down from the clouds and lands with her face on my level. She grasps her talons around her usual spot to keep herself in place without blowing me over with her wing wind.
I look around wildly, fly forward slightly, and whisper directly into her ear. No one can hear how I know what I know. What I’ve seen.
“I just Dreamed…” I try to call moisture into my dry mouth. “I just Dreamed a soldier, a Mach soldier, the Mach, the king’s special kill unit, they were—they’re going—right now—Lerian!—Zay, are my growns with Jax?—Zay, we have to warn them—”
I flail upwards and start flying, but she expands her wings and blocks my way.
Sadie,
You need to breathe
And tell me what—
“The Mach are about to invade the Underland, Zay.”
She stares at me, her snout pulled so deeply into her face it looks like she’s got a hole in it.
And then she wails into the evening sky, letting the other dragons and trees know, without mentioning my Dre
am, of course. As the message spreads, she doesn’t hesitate or heed the fact that her wound from the massacre only recently stopped spontaneously bleeding. She ignores the dangers of a dragon traveling out of the Plains, alone and unallowed. Not when they’re about to attack the same place where so many fought to save her life.
She flies instead. We both do.
We soar as one creature. I dart through the myriad obstacles beneath the Forest understory, and Zaylam, way too big for that, flies high above the treetops. We don’t need to speak or sing to each other. We are perfectly in sync. When I rise to avoid a bramble, I feel Zaylam rise higher above the trees. When I swerve to swoop beside an errant branch, Zaylam loops in the sky above me. When she darts down lower to avoid being spotted by a Hand, my toes skim the Forest ground, often hitching on a branch, on a bush, forcing my wings to course correct as I yell apologies over my shoulder. When I do, she waits above me.
I’m about to break out of the Forest and fly down the Dropoff into the Underland. I feel Zaylam’s shadow coming over me. Beneath us, heading into the Underland along the Flowing’s beach, is a massive deployment of Mach soldiers—one of whose lives I’ve just been Dreaming—marching and riding horses in military formation.
I have no plan, but I hear other faeries flying above me, exclaiming about Zaylam, about the Mach—apparently the news of the invasion has already spread.
And then everything vanishes. There’s a very vague but very loud thump on the side of my head as someone, something, slams into my skull. My wings seize up. I free fall off the Dropoff. I remember nothing else.
Chapter Fifteen
ZAYLAM’S QUICK. THAT’S my first groggy thought upon waking. I’m sprawled out on her smooth scaled, hickory-patterned wing, like a vast magenta blanket curled around me protectively. She must have caught me. The tip of her massive tailfin is stroking my legs—I’m glad to know I can feel them—but the rest of her body is stock-still. With tension.