by Jenn Polish
A solitary tear tracks out of her open eyes. “She made me promise to date again. When you saved Iema that night, I thought… ”
I feel a grin tugging on my lips. Evelyn must notice, because she laughs wryly.
“I was so angry when I saw you in the Gathering with your wings out. The first person to make me smile since Fi, and it was all a lie—”
“But my wings are pretty great, huh?”
“Hush.” But her eyes fall to my wing tips and I reach one out for her, using my body to give her my meaning.
“Would you like to touch?”
Her eyes fly wide open.
“Is that all right?”
I flutter my wings insistently, and she gets the meaning. “Go ahead.”
My breath hitches when her fingertips meet my wingtips. She bites her bottom lip as she shudders slightly, and that shudder echoes back to me at her fingers on the part of me that is most connected to the Energies. Heat swoops down my core, and when I speak, my voice is several registers lower than it usually is.
“Evelyn.”
She jump slightly and moved her hand away.
“Sorry.” Her voice is a whisper.
“No.”
We take deep breaths in sync with each other, and I recover first.
“So is that why you locked up Mama and Aon? You were angry?”
“No!” She looks offended, and I droop slightly. “Artem told me he’d seen you in front of several of my Hands. You haven’t the slightest clue how difficult it was for me to convince them not to kill all four of you on the spot.”
I shiver.
“I should have fought even harder. Aon was so tiny—”
“He survived.” The words feel strange on my lips. Just by being here with her, like this, I’m betraying my whole people.
Evelyn’s eyes are cloudy. She’s betraying her people too. “I’ve done evil things, Sadie.”
A tiny flare of rage shoots up in me until I look at her eyes. I think of labor and all the times I could have refused to murder the trees. The Hands couldn’t kill us all. And if they did, when did we get to decide that our lives are worth more than the trees’?
Evil.
If love is the root of grief, I wonder what the root of evil is.
“Me too,” I tell her.
“I want to make it right.”
“Me too.”
My wings still at being the object of such an intense gaze. All of her attention, usually split between so many things, is focused on me. I wait and try not to wilt.
“I haven’t the faintest idea how to proceed,” she admits in a voice so low I have to lean in to hear her better.
Her breath is laced with Grovian mint and the tang of skyflower fruit. My heart refuses to beat in a controlled tempo. Her eyes challenge mine.
“But I have some ideas.”
We stare at each other. “Come to the Plains with me. Meet the people the king is so eager to kill.”
“Will your friends trust me with that?” The fire pops loudly behind us. She means Lerian.
My heart lurches, but I lean in even closer, and I can’t tell whose breath hitches first. “Give them a reason to.” I breathe her breath a little longer before she pulls back, wiping residue from recent tear tracks off her rounded cheeks.
“Tomorrow, then. Just before sundown. One more sunup in isolation… my absence will be unnoticed.”
“That’ll work. Faeries aren’t usually in the Plains right after labor. But do we have time for that? You said an attack—”
“The rumors Iema’s reporting to me suggest next week. And it’s almost sunup; we can’t very well assemble your people in the middle of the day, hm?”
I nod and she chews on her bottom lip again. I swallow with difficulty, something I’m pretty sure she notes with pleasure.
“Tomorrow, all right. Meet me by the eastern steam pools. The one you took me to, when you arrested me.”
She glares at that, and I smirk full on for the first time since…
Blaze.
She catches the flicker of sadness on my face and lowers her eyes, shaking her shoulders back and forth tentatively. I rise, push in her desk chair meticulously, and fly out of her window and straight up into the night.
Chapter Twenty-One
NO ONE EVER sneaks up on me.
Well, maybe sometimes Os can, or Auth when I land near her web. Aon sometimes, when he really tries. But nons? No.
Tonight, though, Evelyn does.
I’m tense, remembering Lerian’s scalding words, her at once concerned and infuriated face today at labor, when I actually showed up for the first time since Blaze died and all she had to say was, “Looks like someone finally realized she’s not the only one who’s mourning.”
I’m tense with the knowledge that I am, without a doubt, betraying my people. By trusting a girl who had my best friend shot, who gives labor orders every sunup, who locked up my family, arrested me twice, had Mara and Leece arrested and beaten. A girl who gave a dying young one a music box and looks at me like I could be worth something.
I’m tense thinking of Evelyn, with the idea that she’ll be with me tonight, crossing into the Plains at my side. My stomach is knotted with guilt over how much I’m looking forward to that, even though I can’t stop replaying the memory of her head in my lap while I cried, her voice, singing, her fingers on the underside of my wrist.
We’re going to have to repeat that touch, tonight, to get her through the barrier—something I’d neglected to warn her about. My stomach churns with more guilt.
But I had, at least, warned my friends in the Plains. I told Jorbam about our conversation and had her spread the word to the other Lunavad trees. Jorbam says most of them only said yes when she told them that Evelyn only burns already fallen branches. Zaylam had just sang unhelpful songs about young romance, which made me swipe at her wings and promptly fall out of Jorbam’s branches.
I finger the small cut on my forearm from the fall as I wait for her. I stare out at the beach, my toes burying themselves aimlessly in the sand.
A jolt shakes through my body when I feel someone’s heat immediately behind me. It’s a different kind of heat than the type that’s coming from the steam pool next to me. That heat is sun-warmed, built up by long days and trapped in by reflective rocks. The new heat is from the core of someone’s stomach, not trapped at all but exuding from the curves under a thin layer of clothing. It sends powerful tingles through my core, and I spin around, facing the source. Facing her.
I wonder for one wild moment what it would be like to always fly around ensconced in the radiant shell of her warmth, to always be by her side. I shake my head roughly, remembering Fiora. I raise my eyebrows at her. “Ready to go?”
She gestures out in front of her. “Lead the way.”
Our journey through the Forest is slow and silent. I walk for her benefit, and hold branches for her so they won’t snap back and hit her. Each time I do, she offers me an almost shy smile. Maybe she’s remembering when she did the same for me, except back then my hands were chained behind my back. This time, our hands brush each other on occasion, and my blood sizzles.
It’s a long trip on foot, and I can’t walk quickly or without pain. She never seems impatient when I have to stop to massage and stretch my foot, and she even offers to walk while I fly. I choose to limp instead, being sure to always offer my hand when she’s hiking up her skirt to climb over some fallen tree or other. She always chuckles and shrugs away my hand, never taking it. I offer it anyway.
I wonder if she’s as relieved as I am to be focusing on something other than Blaze’s death.
I pause when we reach the invisible barrier of the Plains.
“I’ll need your hand. We’ll, uh… We need to be touching so you can get in. If that’s all right.” My face burns.
“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows are raised, but the corners of her mouth are twitching. “Did you orchestrate this whole excursion because you couldn’t find a
smoother way to ask if you could hold my hand? We were alone in my dwelling last night. Surely there were simpler methods you could have tried, Sadie.” Her eyes dance.
I sputter. She laughs, then, a soft, rich sound like bathing in a stream on a hot morning, and takes my hand without warning. She laces our fingers together, and I swallow with difficulty. Her eyes are steady now, and the ghosts of guilt for laughing when Blaze is dead flicker in her eyes.
“I saw you give quer and Aon candy once. I think que would have liked seeing you like this more. Relaxed and not so Controller-y.”
“Controller-y.” The corners of her lips twitch, but her eyes are dark with my mention of Blaze.
“Listen.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No, it’s fine. It’s strange for me. Talking with you about quer. All of this. I’m betraying my people.” Her eyes are fixed on the spot where our fingers are interwoven.
“So am I.”
She says nothing, and I can’t think of anything else to say, so I limp forward with her, through the Barrier that separates the Plains from the rest of the Forest. As we walk through, her eyes squeeze shut, unaccustomed as she is to the tight pull of the Energies that going into the barrier puts you through. I look at her as we emerge into the Plains, my heart pounding hard.
It isn’t until this moment that I fully realize the change in Evelyn’s attire from her usual uniform dress. The moonlight shines down on her body, highlighting the pleated top that layers down her chest in sky blue waves, curving down her ample stomach into a fitted skirt with material that flows perfectly with her body. It clings to her curves but is slit all the way up to her thighs.
I stop breathing.
One of Jorbam’s far extended roots shuffles teasingly beneath my feet and jerks me out of my stupor. Thankfully, Evelyn hasn’t noticed my distraction. She’s too busy taking in the Plains.
Dragon bulbs are hanging from the lowest canopy branches of a few trees. There are fewer now than there used to be, but there are still some, including the surviving one on Aon’s hatchling tree, Banion. They’re glowing, and different hues of purples and greens are reflecting in her eyes. The air is tingling with dragon songs, and Evelyn shivers.
I wait in silence. For her, so used to the calls and songs of birds in her ears, to adjust to the calls and songs of dragons, with their shadows swooping over us in intricate patterns, all their different colors and forms daring her to look away.
The sun is just disappearing over the northernmost section of the Plains, and since we’ve come in from the south, the fire oranges and passion reds glow in her eyes. Her lips are open slightly, and for a moment, I forget the beauty of the sunset making the few remaining dragon bulbs glow. I notice only the way that the glowing is interacting with the dying sunlight in Evelyn’s eyes.
When they realize we’re here, the dragon songs drop off gradually, and a wordless hum falls over the Plains. Zaylam slips into view, unwreathing herself from Jorbam’s branches, and flies toward us hesitantly. By unsung agreement, everyone else stays back. Taking flight, Gimla beats his wings steadily, staring at Zaylam. Harlenikal’s golden back spikes—so much like the short, spiny leaves that coat her hatchling tree’s canopy—are all erect, at attention. Ready. But she remains still, hovering. Watching. Waiting.
I leave the warmth of Evelyn’s side and fly up into the ritual embrace of Zaylam’s wings. I slip up her body, from tail to neck, with the tips of my fingers, my feet, taking special care to skim gently over her scar. In response, she wraps her wide wings around me, enveloping me in what have always reminded me of stained glass windows in the growing moonlight, and unfurls her tailfin, its massive expanse keeping us afloat as she spins with me one, two, three, four times. Zaylam spins a bit more than is quite traditional, even knowing it tends to make me dizzy, and I grin into her embrace; she’s showing off.
When she releases me, I fly back down to Evelyn, whose hands are clasped in front of her like an excited young one, eyes wide, almost reverent, the ghosts of death for once gone from her face.
“I don’t think you two have been properly introduced,” I say, and Zay coos, her snout twitching into expansion. “Zaylam tozo,” I tell Evelyn, the introduction of a newcomer to a faerie’s hatchling mates. Evelyn is still just staring, her eyes now soft and timid under Zaylam’s gaze, in a way I’ve never seen them before. “She’s my hatchling mate,” I stumble. “We’ve been—”
“Bonded since before birth, yes,” Evelyn interrupts me quietly, eyes still on Zaylam’s. “How do you do?”
Zaylam purrs in bemused delight. “You will see,” she sings in her best approximation of Highlander non. Harlenikal emits a low groan of displeasure that Zay is singing directly to a non. Gimla sings a reprimanding scale so high I doubt Evelyn can hear it; his green, maple leaf-patterned underbelly is quivering with the effort of holding such a powerful note. I close my eyes and grimace at the frequency.
Evelyn, oblivious to the sound and focused just on Zaylam, shakes her head in the non way and speaks in excellent Grovian faeric. “You don’t need to talk to me in a language in which you have little practice. I’m familiar with—”
“Are you saying my Highlander is unworthy?” Zaylam sings, still in an approximation of Highlander, eyes glistening playfully and with a bit of a challenge. “Is this what you want to say, human young one?”
“I—well, no, it’s actually quite good, I—”
You didn’t tell the girl
That dragon humor
Is the best humor,
Did you,
Tiny faerie?
Zaylam sings loudly to me before flying off. I shake my head in the human fashion and motion for Evelyn to follow. Harlenikal flies low, cutting off my path, with a swarm of disapproving dragons in formation behind her.
Has anyone informed
The human near that her people
Are destroying dragonkind by
Destroying the fayes’
Dreaming?
As other dragons harmonize their agreement, Zaylam interjects her own melody, Gimla on her tailfin.
Has anyone informed
The overly judgmental dragon
That the human near put her tiny body
Between this dragon and
An entire army,
Protecting this dragon and this dragon’s
Hatchling faye,
Not to mention the entire
Underland
From the fire and the
Sword?
There’s a hum of approval at that, and Harlenikal’s snout retreats into her face as even she can’t argue with that. She speeds off in a huff, the others behind her.
I sigh and start flying too, then stop and turn around.
“This ground is hard on your feet.” I hold my hand out to a hesitating Evelyn.
She glances down at her own body after tearing her gaze away from the dragons. “I don’t think you can lift me.” Her voice is full of promise.
I scoff and flex my arm muscles, truly happy for the first time that I spend most of my days swinging an axe. I grin as she puckers her lips in amusement and shakes her head with a soft, tinkling chuckle. I memorize the sound. And the heady look in her eyes.
I flutter my wings at her. “And these are stronger than they look.”
I beckon to her again. “Come.” She takes my hand.
We rise. Toward the mushroom canopy of Jorbam’s branches. Toward the sky.
She’s right. She is heavy. And I revel in it. My wings strain slightly against my solid back and my forearms bulge as they grasp her soft hands. We rise higher and higher. The stars are coming out, and we are soaring.
All attention is on us. Her eyes seek only mine.
“I’m flying,” she breaths, her open mouth curved into a shocked smile. She looks beneath us and pulls me closer to her, grasping my hands tighter. The wind our flight is creating billows her skirt out, and it flows away from her body. Her exposed legs flutter kick softly, a
bsently.
“I’m flying,” she keeps whispering.
“You’re flying,” I confirm, wondering if the starlight has ever lit up anyone’s face the way it’s lighting up hers.
I almost kiss her, then, almost bend at the elbows to propel her into my arms. But I’m not sure it’s what she wants. We fly on.
Her weight pulls strongly on even my arms and wings, but I know enchantments for flying that most nons—I guess I should say most humans—don’t. I blow softly toward her so that our hands can stop grasping each other quite so tightly, the enchanted wind from my lungs twisting the Energies beneath her, lifting us higher.
Laughter bubbles from deep in her chest the more we rise, and the more we rise, the more my cheeks burn from all the smiling. More confident with each new height we reach—and soon even the tallest Lunavad trees are beneath us, and even Harlenikal looks small—Evelyn rotates her hips and spins me around, tossing her head back toward the growing starlight, the growing moonlight. She laughs with a delight that dances with the fireflies that have risen to witness this curiosity of human and human-faye holding hands and soaring together above the Plains. A brave soul lands on Evelyn’s bare forearm and lights up; Evelyn laughs again, and the fireflies look like tiny stars. Their flickering lights frame her face, her hair, her body. Her lips slightly parted, her awed smile.
I know in that moment that Kashat and Lerian are right.
I know in that moment that I love her.
Still spinning us around and around, Evelyn pulls her arms in toward her waist, bringing the rest of me with them so I am flush against her body. Her eyes sparkle with the brightest stars just barely above our heads. I breathe in her breath.
She glances down at my lips, her radiant, young-one-like smile now one of soft, intimate pleasure. Her eyes shift rapidly between both of mine.
“Evelyn,” I breathe. I swallow hard, which makes her smile deeper. “Would it make you happy if I kissed you?” I ask in what little Izlanian language that I know. I let my eyes tell her how much I want to.