Seven Trees of Stone

by Leo Hunt

  “But how could those things get in here?” Holiday’s asking me again. “I thought your house was protected? Can those people out there get in? Shouldn’t we try and go somewhere else?”

  “Elza must’ve invited them,” I say. “They can come in if Elza lets them, because she made the hazel charms. She already knew Margaux. I guess she just didn’t think about it. But no, the crowd outside now can’t get in here. If they could, they would’ve already.”

  “Where is Elza?” Holiday says.

  “She’s, uh, reading the Book. I don’t know how long that might take.”

  “Didn’t you say it does weird things to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  I lead them upstairs, to my bedroom. The candle’s still burning. Elza is still frozen, staring into the Book of Eight’s endless pages. Her mouth moves soundlessly. She turns another wafer-thin page.

  “This is . . .” Kirk starts to say.

  “It looks worse than it is,” I tell him, without believing it myself.

  “I thought you were going to do this?” Holiday asks me.

  “I was. She didn’t want me to. I left her alone with the thing for a moment and —”

  I’m surprised to catch myself crying. This is the thing that took me over the edge? After everything?

  Holiday folds me in a hug, and then Kirk does, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “sorry —”

  “It’s not your fault,” Holiday tells me.

  “This is all my fault.”

  “Mate, don’t talk bollocks,” Kirk snaps. “How’s it your fault? She chose this, man. Lotta other people doing bad stuff tonight. Don’t put everything on your back, you know?”

  “Elza’s going to be fine,” Holiday says.

  “It should be me,” I say.

  “Honestly, man,” Kirk says, “I’m glad it’s not, ’cause if I had to spend a couple days cooped up in here with her, waiting for you to wake up, I’d go mental, man. No offense, I know she’s your girl and all. We just don’t click.”

  I do laugh at that. “Well, I feel much better now.”

  “Seriously, mate. She’ll snap out of there. You did, right?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “So will she,” Holiday says. They release me. I take a deep breath.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Sorry. I don’t know —”

  “Look,” Holiday says, “are we safe here? That’s the main thing right now. Are we safe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if they come back?” she asks. “Margaux, this thing, it knows we’re here. If it lets the rest of them in, that are waiting out there . . .”

  “Not without being invited,” I assure her again. “They can’t come back in.”

  “But you’re sure?”

  “They shouldn’t be able to break the wards. And where else can we go? Unless you want to take Mark and Elza out, somehow get them through the people in the snow, back to Elza’s house . . .”

  “No,” Holiday says, “there’s no way. We can’t.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “So, we’re stuck here. We’ve just got to keep alert and wait for Elza to snap out of this.”

  “All right,” Kirk says. “So we wait.”

  It could be hours or days. Snow and fog swirl outside, and cold leaks in through the broken window. We sit with Mark by the fire, wrapped in our coats, with Bea snuggled against our feet. We eat stuff from the fridge: leftover Christmas food, cold lentil soup that Darren cooked before we went to his place, however long ago that was now. I play cards with Kirk. Holiday reads some of Mum’s spirituality paperbacks. Sometimes Mark turns over in his sleep and whimpers. At times I pace the dark halls of my house, witch blade in hand, making sure there’s nothing else that crept in here from outside. There are flashes of light outside, in the sky, irregular pulses of blue and green. The candle in my room where Elza sits burns down, going out completely. I replace it with a fresh candle and sit with her for a long time.

  I think at some point I must fall asleep on the beanbag chair beside my bed, with my head resting against Elza’s leg, because the next thing I know, she wakes me with a start, her legs kicking and spasming. She’s back from wherever the Book of Eight took her. I leap to my feet.

  Elza coughs and heaves, and I think she’s going to throw up, but nothing comes out. Her hands clutch at the bedspread. The Book of Eight has fallen to the floor and lies there, its green covers spread, pages facedown.

  “Are you all right?” I ask her quietly.

  She swallows.

  “I feel like I grew a new brain,” Elza says. “I feel like I got shot in the head and survived. How did you do this twice?”

  “Why did you do this at all?” I ask.

  “You know why,” she says.

  “I can’t believe — How could you do that?”

  “I wasn’t about to let you go in there a third time. No way.”

  “I can’t believe you did that! How could you leave me?” I feel angrier than I have in a long time, and it surprises me.

  “You’re not the only one who gets to take risks!” she snaps. “Now you know what it feels like! It’s not nice, is it?”

  I look back at her. She’s pale and trembling, sweat dampening her forehead.

  “No,” I say. “It’s not.”

  “Please, let’s not fight about this now,” she says softly.

  “How did you . . . I didn’t even think it would work for you.”

  “I had the sigil. I remembered the sequence, the start of it anyway. I was the one who read it out to you the first time. Why wouldn’t it work for me?”

  She blinks, looking into the candle.

  “Can you still see them?” I ask, remembering the first time I came out of the trance, the way the sigils and symbols crawled over everything.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Your face was made out of . . . something. I don’t know. I felt like I could see through you. Like I could see right through everything.”

  “Did you find what we need to know?” I ask.

  “I did.”

  “Can you walk?” I ask. “We should go down where it’s warmer.”

  “We should,” Elza says faintly. She tries to stand and nearly falls. I catch hold of her, press her body against mine. She breathes in and out. “Give me a moment . . .”

  “If you need to lie down —”

  “No,” she says. “No. I want to walk. Let me walk.”

  “All right, all right.”

  We make our way across the room, leaving the candle burning in its dish, and across the landing, downstairs, stumble into the living room. Holiday and Kirk stand up as we come in.

  “Is she —”

  “I’m OK,” Elza says. “Just a bit weak.”

  She slumps down into the armchair Holiday was sitting in. Her eyes are unfocused. She chews on one finger, not seeming to know she’s doing it.

  “Elza,” I say, “are you really —”

  “I’m fine! Stop fussing over me!”

  “You just don’t seem that well,” I say.

  “Nothing we can do about that,” she replies.

  We stand in awkward silence. None of us seems sure what to do. Elza doesn’t look at anyone, instead devotes a solid minute to looking at her forefinger. Dad’s sigil is still on her hand. I reach down to take it from her, and she jerks her hand away.

  “We’re in bad trouble,” Elza says after another moment.

  Nobody replies.

  “Very bad trouble. This thing . . .”

  “The Tree,” I say. “The Barrenwhite Tree?”

  “Yes,” Elza says. “It’s . . . it’s from the Beginning. Before the worlds were broken.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Before there was life and death. The spirit world was all there was. Everything was one. The split happened so long ago, almost nothing exists that remembers how things were before. But the Tree does.”

  “OK,” I say. “So what does it want?”

/>   “It reaches out and makes things how they were before. Living and dead are one. The worlds collapse into each other. But it isn’t allowed. It can only do these things certain nights, in certain seconds, when the Winter Star is here and the old year becomes new.”

  “The Winter Star?” Holiday says.

  “The comet,” Elza replies. “Every eight centuries. It comes back. It comes back and then the stars are right and the Tree’s Apostles can open the gateway.”

  “Margaux —” I say.

  “We helped her,” Elza says.

  “What?” I say.

  “We opened the gateway. The Devil’s Footsteps. We broke it open, and the Tree came through. We helped her.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Is this what we don’t remember? The gateway opening — we helped Margaux. Why? I try to remember what I was thinking, but I can’t. All I remember is stars, frost, Margaux’s tattooed hands. White swans flying backward.

  “You did this?” Kirk asks me.

  “I don’t know why we’d want to,” I say, holding my hands up. “Trust me, man.”

  “You did this to us?” he barks.

  “The Apostles made us,” Elza says, wheezing. “They drugged us or something. We couldn’t protect ourselves.”

  “How did we get away?” I ask her.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So the gateway is open,” I say. “Haven’t we opened it before?”

  “Not properly. The stones . . . they’re locks. It could only open a crack. The real circle . . . I don’t know. But we broke the locks. The standing stones are gone.”

  “And that’s how the Tree came through?”

  “It grows there,” she says. “While the Tree is still there, the gateway is fully open, like a dam burst. Deadside has spilled out into Liveside, covered the whole of Dunbarrow. That’s what it does. In the moment the New Year is waiting to be born, that’s its chance.”

  “What does it want?”

  “Dunbarrow. The people here. They’ll be stuck here, in this moment, worshipping the Tree, until the next time the stars are right. And then it’ll choose somewhere else, take that town into Deadside instead. This is how it feeds.”

  I think about the gray people surrounding the house, the roots growing from their faces and bodies.

  “That’s what’s happening to everyone?”

  “Yes. They’ll be stuck here, being eaten away to nothing, for eight hundred years. And we’ll be stuck here, too. The night will never end.”

  “But what can we do?” I ask.

  “We have to close the gateway. We have to place the standing stones again.”

  “What do you mean, place the standing stones? What happened to the Devil’s Footsteps?”

  “In our mouths,” she says.

  I don’t understand for a moment, and then I run my tongue over the flinty new tooth in the back of my mouth, and I do.

  “The stones are . . . but that’s impossible.”

  Elza laughs.

  “Everything that’s happened to us, and you can’t understand how a standing stone could become a tooth?”

  “That’s crazy,” I say, but I know she’s right. I can feel the shape of it with my tongue: the flattest stone, the one like an angled table. That’s the one I have stuck in my gums.

  “I have another,” Elza says. She opens her mouth wide, so we can all see the dark stone stuck in her gums, right at the back on the left. Hers is the second-largest one.

  “So who has the third Footstep?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. One of the Apostles, maybe.”

  “Margaux.”

  “What happened to her?” Elza asks.

  “We messed her up,” Kirk says. “Then she got away.”

  “. . . All right,” Elza says weakly.

  “Margaux went back to the Tree,” I say. “I’m sure of that. If the third stone is in her mouth . . . we’ll have to go find her and get it out.”

  “It won’t be easy, Luke,” Elza says. “The Barrenwhite Tree . . . it’s powerful. So powerful.”

  “We’ve got the Book of Eight,” I say. “We’ve got a sigil. We’ve got two witch blades —”

  “It won’t be — I don’t know if that’s enough,” she says. “This thing, Luke, what we’ll be able to see of it, is just a tiny fraction of the spirit. It’s like something reaching down into a rock pool, and we’re the fish. I don’t know how we’d go up against something like that.”

  “It’s either that or we’re trapped in this house in a snowstorm for eight centuries. I mean, I know which option I prefer.”

  “I know,” she says. “I just don’t . . . I don’t know if we’re coming back from this one.”

  “We have to try,” I say.

  She nods. “We need to close the gateway,” she says. “That’s where we have to go. Back to the Footsteps. We need to go soon,” Elza says. “The Barrenwhite Tree will find a way to break through the hazel charms. They were never meant to stand against something so strong.”

  “We need a better plan than this,” Holiday says. “I mean, how are we even going to get out of the house, for starters? Did you forget all the awful people out there? How do we get past them? Is Luke going to do magic at them?”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I don’t have a Host. I’m a necromancer — we take power from our Host. Without one —”

  “So your magic ring won’t work?” Holiday says.

  “Basically.”

  “I mean, don’t you think you should have a Host? If we’re going up against Margaux? And this Tree thing?”

  “Well, they’re not just lying around,” I say. “I don’t know nearly all the spells to find the right spirits. I just used my dad’s.”

  “Why not use mine?” Holiday asks.

  “What?”

  “My spirit? I mean, we all have one, right?”

  “Because you’re alive,” Elza says, running her fingers through her hair.

  “So it has to be a ghost?” Holiday says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did explain all of this. A Host is eight dead servants and one living master.”

  “Well,” Elza says, “everything’s upside down right now.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Midnight never ends. We’re stuck between the old year dying and the new year being born. Dunbarrow’s been taken into the world of the dead, but we’re all still alive. Kirk cut into that spirit with a normal sword.”

  Kirk nods with pleasure.

  “Mashed its leg up,” he says.

  “Right,” Elza says, agreeing with Kirk for maybe the first time in history. “‘Mashed’ is a good word. The two worlds have been mashed together. In a way, there is no life or death now, or not as we normally see it. It’s like it was before the worlds were split.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe Holiday’s right. She does have a spirit. Maybe right now, that’s all it would take to put some power into your sigil.”

  “You really think?” I ask them.

  “It might be worth a try,” Elza says to Holiday. “You’re putting your life in his hands, though. Like, a necromancer can destroy his Host completely if he wants to.”

  “I’m already trusting you with everything,” Holiday says. “If this would help us stop whatever’s happening tonight —”

  “It’s not going to work,” I say. “Nothing will happen if I try and do this. It’s not how my sigil works.”

  “OK,” Holiday says. “So if it doesn’t work, then nothing happens. We lose nothing. But if you were going to try this, what would you do?”

  I look around us. Elza and Holiday and Kirk wait for me to speak. I have to try something. Elza and Holiday are right: if this doesn’t work, then we’re only as bad off as we are now. But if it does work . . .

  “Well, you’d be my Shepherd, I suppose,” I say. “The first member of a Host. That’s like the leader.”

  “OK,” Holiday says
, grinning slightly for the first time in a while. “I like organizing stuff. I’ll be a Shepherd.”

  Maybe this isn’t the stupidest idea in the world. Holiday does like arranging things, taking charge. Maybe she’s not the weirdest choice for being the Shepherd.

  “So you have to accept that name,” I say. “This is the easy version, when you’re willing to become part of the Host.”

  “All right,” she says.

  Elza pulls the sigil ring from her finger and hands it to me. I turn it over in my palms, examining it in the firelight. Silver band, eight-sided black stone, reflecting no light. I put it onto my ring finger for the first time since last Easter and feel the cold embrace of the sigil. Elza’s hands are far smaller than mine, but it fits me just as well as it fit her.

  I motion for Holiday to stand in front of me. I stand up too, and Elza and Kirk stay sitting, watching us. I feel like we’re about to start playing a game, charades or something.

  “Honorable leader,” I say, raising the sigil, keeping my eyes locked on Holiday’s. “Beloved left hand. Speaker for the dead. I name you Shepherd.”

  “Your voice has gone all weird,” Holiday says.

  “No,” I say, lowering the sigil, “then you say, ‘I accept this name in turn. I bind my soul to the Manchett Host, now and for eternity.’ All right?”

  “Got it,” Holiday says.

  “Honorable leader. Beloved left hand. Speaker for the dead. I name you Shepherd.”

  “I accept this name in turn,” Holiday says. “I bind my soul to the Manchett Host, now and for eternity.”

  Nothing happens. I stand for a moment longer, sigil raised. On a whim I move my hand forward and down, resting the ring on Holiday’s head.

  “Hey —” she starts to say, and there’s a rush of heat, like someone lit a fire inside my hand. I snatch it away from her, try to tear the sigil ring from my finger, feeling like it must be searing into my flesh, but there’s nothing wrong with my skin or the ring, just this crazy heat boring into my hand, spreading down my arm, like I replaced my blood with gasoline and someone held a match to my veins —